What was life in the late 80's and early to mid 90's (1980s, origin)

[stan4]

I enjoyed that time immensely.
Dunno why, but people seem so much more bitter and snarky now.

[GraniteStater]

The pace of life was unbelievably slow in many parts of the country compared to now. The access to information and technology is by far the biggest difference between now and that period of time. Yes, the early 90s felt very much like the 1980s in many areas as well.

[belmont22]

Well I was born in 1990, so I can remember about 1993 onwards...

I guess I'd say it seemed more violent there was more crime, information traveled a bit slower. The USSR's breakup was a recent event and the world seemed a lot less globalized; people were only just starting to talk about the global economy at that time.

I was a bit young to remember grunge but there was a lot more to the pop culture of that time than just grunge. The fashion in general had a pretty "campy" look by today's standards, lots of fuzzy sweaters and I wore overalls a lot when I was a kid.

[Annuvin]

Originally Posted by eddie1278

Not in the 80s and 90s most tracks were good on an album. Today the music is so bad they don't have talent to make a whole album that sounds good. This is ofcorse my own opinion on things today.

I was 18 in 1989 and can assure you the reason I download today is because I was tired of buying albums that only had 1 or 2 good tracks on them and the rest being crappy filler.

[kguru]

I was in elementary school and junior high during that time period. I recall Ronald Reagan being president, but didn't know anything of his politics, other than he did something with the Berlin Wall and somehow weakened the USSR. Music was in transition during that period as many of the other posts mentioned. Grunge and rap were just getting started. The economy was pretty good most of the time. There was a small recession and I can recall there being some budget cuts impacting the school, though most cuts were very mild and were reversed a year later. Cars were beginning to become a bit more rounded than they had been in the 70s and early 80s where they were more boxy. Leaded gasoline was being phased out at gas stations. Gas was usually about $1; it was expensive at 1.39 a gallon. Kids watched cartoons on one of the major broadcast networks on Saturday mornings. There were some on Sundays as well, though they were less popular. If you were a nerd you watched Star Trek The Next Generation and SeaQuest DSV. Cable TV was starting to become common, but cable networks pretty much exclusively ran re-runs of older shows. Basic cable networks and broadcast networks had a lot more movies on tap. Movie theaters were smaller and not yet stadium style. Movie theaters did good business and a 1st run theater ticket usually cost about $3 or 4, with second theaters being about $1.

Answering machines were a new technology and allowed you to know if someone called. Pagers were also available as a mobile way of being able to be reached, but you still had to stop to use a payphone to communicate. There were car phones, but you had to be pretty wealthy to get one. Cars were simpler and could be fixed by a local mechanic, rather than requiring computer diagnostics at specialty service centers, though they did tend to break down a lot more often back then. Video game consoles were pretty popular and were commonly hooked up to TVs that were ranging from about 20-25 inches in size. A 35 inch TV set would have been considered huge. There were projection TVs that were about the size of today's TVs, but they were very expensive. Also, back in those days if your TV broke, you had someone come out to your house to fix it, rather than get a new one. Computers cost about $2,000 and you could only have a complete graphic user interface if you bought a Macintosh. Windows 3.1 came out during this period and began to slowly replace MS-DOS, but it was a slow transition. It was possible to use a modem to connect computers between each other and Prodigy and America Online existed, but had very few users. Postal services were cheaper, and you could mail a letter for 25 cents. Good sized apartments were also cheaper. I remember a friend living in a 2 bedroom apartment that was brand new near a golf course that rented for about $300 a month. I also remember the devastation caused by hurricane Andrew during this time period, and the large earthquake during the World Series in San Francisco, and one in Los Angeles at some point.

[Austin023]

There was an optimism at that time, which is just missing now. I think, or at least my take on is, that optimism died out around the late 90s or so, not with 9/11 (though that did help thrust us into a new world so to speak), but there was just this optimism still that seemed to disipate by the end of the decade...we had a more collective conscious too then, more or less...things were not quite so fragmented/politicized as now, either.

The first time I saw, in person, a cell phone (an actual cellular phone, not a car phone) was around 1988 or 89 and I had the opportunity to use it briefly (it belonged to a friend of my father's)....I knew then and there that was the future, no question about it. They are ubiquitous today, but in 1988 it could had been magic. You just didn't see them. The second time I had an opportunity to use a cell phone was probably not until around 1994 or 95 and even then they had hardly entered the mainstream. It really changed how we live out lives, that's for sure...in just a 25 year period.

The word "internet" might had well been a foreign word to most of America in say 1991: it existed, but it was still not just confined to a tiny sector of techies and some academics, but it barely looked like it does today: BBS dial-up boards, text-based commands for email, etc.....it still looked more like the internet of the 70s and 80s than of 1999. The world-wide web as we know it effectively did not exist yet (though it was in the early stages of development and growth in that era).
HUGE changes occurred during the mid-90s regarding the expansion, modernization and acceptance of Internet into the mainstream....most of that took place after 1994, but by 2000 it was settling in and looked closer to what we know today, albeit a bit cheesy and even clumsy perhaps...but it was phenomenal growth indeed.
Just to give you some idea of what kind of growth we're talking about:
In the summer of 1993 130 websites were enumerated...by January 1, 1996 100,000 websites were in existence. If that seems like a massive growth, compare that with: an estimated 20 million by January, 2001 and today (November 3, 2014) that number is estimated at over 150 million, a conservative one. In 1998 Google averaged only about 9,800 "searches" a day--a day----now its in the low billions.
[sources: http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/04/...-the-internet/
http://blog.dashburst.com/infographi...et-use-growth/ ]
Information of many sorts become much more readily accessible as opposed to the early 90s.

[Austin023]

Social changes, more than one might think at first, and some of this is tied right to the exponential growth of the Internet and online culture:
Because there was essentially no Internet (in the mainstream or as we know now) there was of course no online dating---that did, however come on the 'scene' as the internet growth exploded after 1995. But before then that was hardly an option...'normal' people (as many thought of it at the time) met girlfriends/boyfriends, husbands/wives in some physical setting, often thru a friend, at work, school, university, maybe a nightclub. When 'online dating' did first make a debut, circa 1995, it was really seen as taboo for a while. For those who it seemed finding a date in person was hopeless, there were the non-digital equivalent: personal ads in various print news/catalogs, etc.

Since school-shootings hadn't really entered either, schools were decidedly lax in their 'security'...problems of violence were still largely seen as inner-city problems. I recall none of the doors to our junior high school being locked nor monitored during school hours---no cameras either...it was pretty unthinkable in 1988 or so....since Caller ID didn't exist yet either you could still crank call someone and be fairly confident of not being discovered, especially if the call was under a few minutes. Several teachers had their names (more often under their husband actually) right in the phone book...even then, that was more a smaller town phenomenon of course.

I started college in the closing years of the 90s, but the feel was still present as it had been a few years before: since the internet had not become very widespread yet, students still congregated in the dorm lounges, student union in large numbers....there was much more of a collective conscious than one might see today at the same campuses. There is just not as much face to face socialization it seems on college campuses as there had been before. I am told that it has become quite common for schools now to remove those old lounge areas in dorms by converting them into other space, often more rooms...kids just seemed to be using them less and less during the 2000s.

When I re-visited a dorm I lived in back in the late 90s, in 2012 nearly the entire downstairs lounge had been renovated for use as offices, study rooms and a small snack area of sorts...students had just not been using it much for some years and the school felt it best to make better use of the space....14 years earlier, that would had been unthinkable! I recall the lounge being quite crowded many evenings, some watching television, playing games, talking, reading, etc. Not now.

It was also a time of much trouble in our inner cities, which had seen decades of decay and neglect left over from the 'white flight' of the 1940s-70s...inner city violent crime was at nearly its highest around 1990 as it had been in 1970. Much inner city real estate was cheap, though by the end of the 90s people, mainly young people, were just starting to take a renewed interest in larger city living again. So, there was good and bad of course.

[CAllenDoudna]

Several posters have commented how new the Internet was. I bought my first computer in 1992. It had a 40 kilobyte hardrive, which had been standard on computers for maybe 5-10 years. (before that computers had NO hardrive) A couple of years later computers began coming out with larger hardrives: 100 kb, 250 kb, 500 kb ect. It was about this time that Bill Gates made his two most famous blunders: "Why does anybody need a 500 kilobyte hardrive? You'd have to type all day long for a whole year and still not fill it up!" And he came out with Windows 95 with no particular provision for the Internet because he believed it was just a fad.

[Austin023]

Originally Posted by CAllenDoudna

Several posters have commented how new the Internet was. I bought my first computer in 1992. It had a 40 kilobyte hardrive, which had been standard on computers for maybe 5-10 years. (before that computers had NO hardrive) A couple of years later computers began coming out with larger hardrives: 100 kb, 250 kb, 500 kb ect. It was about this time that Bill Gates made his two most famous blunders: "Why does anybody need a 500 kilobyte hardrive? You'd have to type all day long for a whole year and still not fill it up!" And he came out with Windows 95 with no particular provision for the Internet because he believed it was just a fad.

I think why the topic of the Internet is mentioned often in this context (life in the late 80s/early 90s) is it is right before the Internet became mainstream and changed our way of life profoundly. People born in say 2002 have not lived in a world without an Internet being so common-place and they will look back with some amazement at how much it really changed things in a short period:

Few things, which have had a profound effect on society, became ubiquitous so quickly--the internet is one of course....I would equate it with our Interstate Highway system, which was started in earnest in 1957 and was already sweeping coast to coast by 1970 (though even today its technically incomplete, but by 1973 most of the major routes were completed and in use). It revolutionized how we traveled by land.
Things like electricity, the electric lamp, telephone, even modern sanitary plumbing, took decades (really more than a generation or two) at least to become to ubiquitous.
I had a PC around that time, an IBM AT (which was really vintage 1986 or 87, upgraded)...I think it eventually had 2MB ram, a 20 MB hard disk (originally), then a 100 MB replacement---a 1200 "baud" modem was added around 1991 or 92. By '93 I had a Mac, which was basically double the stats of the upgraded IBM. Still, a far cry from what was just around the corner.
Its just amazing how quickly the internet grew, evolved and was adopted...it will be looked back on many years hence as being a very, very important turning point in society.

[jdrtx]

No Starbucks.