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Old 10-17-2014, 04:18 PM
 
Location: Chicago - Logan Square
3,396 posts, read 7,172,166 times
Reputation: 3731

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Quote:
Originally Posted by Drover View Post
Reagan carried 49 states in '84 and came within 0.2 percentage points of carrying all 50. 'Nuff said.
True, but about 40% of Americans voted against him, so obviously not everyone was a fan.

 
Old 10-17-2014, 04:35 PM
 
Location: Shawnee-on-Delaware, PA
7,934 posts, read 7,280,404 times
Reputation: 16053
Quote:
Originally Posted by Attrill View Post
True, but about 40% of Americans voted against him, so obviously not everyone was a fan.
Nobody really believes "everyone" was a fan of Reagan, but winning an election 60%-40% is called a landslide. I think only FDR in 1936 won re-election by a bigger margin (60%-36%).
 
Old 10-17-2014, 06:08 PM
 
Location: LA, CA/ In This Time and Place
5,443 posts, read 4,647,546 times
Reputation: 5117
Quote:
Originally Posted by stellastar2345 View Post
do you know where i can watch the mini series by any chance?

"The 80s" - A Review of Another Incredible Decade, part 1 of 5!! - YouTube




"The 80s" - Review of Another Incredible Decade, part 2 of 5!! - YouTube

Here are parts 1 and 3. You can find the rest!
 
Old 10-17-2014, 06:28 PM
 
Location: Chicago
38,707 posts, read 102,705,069 times
Reputation: 29966
Quote:
Originally Posted by Attrill View Post
True, but about 40% of Americans voted against him, so obviously not everyone was a fan.
You must have me confused with someone else, as I never claimed anything close to "everyone was a fan."
 
Old 10-17-2014, 06:57 PM
 
4,277 posts, read 11,713,370 times
Reputation: 3931
I was on Usenet in the late 80s and the people who were were university affiliated or maybe the biggest tech or computer companies in USA or Western Europe. There was also e-mail among the same sort of folks, if you were sending something outside the institution you might have to type "IN%user@domain.xxx" where the IN would communicate to the local computer that you were sending over the Internet. The dorm connection was 9600 baud so seemed instantaneous. Kids were often on bulletin board systems (BBS's) that you had to dial up at 300 or for rich kids 1200 baud. The BBS was some kid in a basement in a metro suburb. If you weren't in the nearby metro suburb you usually weren't on the BBS after the first month. Long distance landline calls cost a lot of money, there were by the end of the decade some alternative companies where you would dial 10xxx before the phone number. Our town did not have touch tone service until the late 80s so there were phone dialer things that would convert tones into pulses for the access number then send tones to the next more modern phone switch.

Many homes had personal computers by the end of the decade. Parents were still buying college freshmen typewriters in 1989 though, I carried many upstairs as an orientation volunteer that year. Some of the typewriters had a four line screen and a floppy disk drive. I wonder how many were ever used.
 
Old 10-17-2014, 07:45 PM
 
Location: Chicago
38,707 posts, read 102,705,069 times
Reputation: 29966
Another major difference... by my reckoning, kids of the 80s were the last generation that didn't have to arrange "play dates" to play with other kids from their school or neighborhood. You just went outside and played, and all the other kids did the same thing, so there was always someone to play with outside. Kids as young as 5 or 6 had the run of the neighborhood as long as there were older kids with them, and as long as everyone was home by dark or by dinnertime. Play time didn't have to be structured and monitored by adults every minute (or really at all). Latchkey kids as young as 9 or 10 would go home to an empty house after school, make a sandwich for themselves, put on some cartoons, and go play with neighbor kids before their parents ever got home. And nobody gave it a second thought.

Nowadays if you tried to raise your kids the way we were raised, not only would there be nobody outside for them to play with but you'd probably have CPS called on you -- probably by someone who was raised exactly as described above, ironically. I have no idea what the hell happened in just one generation where kids went from basically free-range creatures whose play and creative time was largely self-directed to a situation where everything has to be planned, structured, and supervised by adults and you're considered negligent if you let kids any younger than teenagers out of your sight for any length of time.
 
Old 10-17-2014, 08:51 PM
 
Location: Minneapolis
1,617 posts, read 5,645,686 times
Reputation: 1215
Quote:
Originally Posted by VillageLife View Post
We just began using the cell phones. They were huge!


They were very expensive too. You paid per month AND per minute. You generally only had a cell phone if you had a serious business need. Almost nobody had one for personal use unless they were wealthy, and absolutely nobody had a cell phone as their only phone (neither the service nor the phones were reliable enough for that yet).

Many cell phones were permanently installed in a vehicle, with a wired handset and cradle mounted on the dashboard or console. Cars with a "car phone" installed had a telltale antenna about 12 inches tall with a kinky coil in the middle. If you saw a car with a car phone antenna being driven erratically, you knew why.
 
Old 10-17-2014, 08:54 PM
 
168 posts, read 197,767 times
Reputation: 287
Another thing was that Subway hadn't been invented yet but people ate submarine sandwiches constantly. I dare say, exclusively. People stopped eating most other foods for the majority of that decade. Heathcliff Huxtable ate so many of them he would have to hide them under the sofa cushion when his wife came into the living room. Lisa Bonet was the hottest woman around and Tony Hawk invented the skateboard.
 
Old 10-17-2014, 09:49 PM
 
Location: Myrtle Creek, Oregon
15,293 posts, read 17,565,356 times
Reputation: 25225
List of Billboard Hot 100 number-one singles of the 1980s - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
Old 10-17-2014, 10:13 PM
 
Location: Chicago
38,707 posts, read 102,705,069 times
Reputation: 29966
Quote:
Originally Posted by Chubsworth View Post
Another thing was that Subway hadn't been invented yet . . .
Sure it had, and there were already hundreds of 'em by then. Maybe they just hadn't reached your neighborhood yet.
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