Hi current teen here , wondering what the 80s and early 90s were like from the perspective of someone who has lived through them. I'm curious on anything you can remember , big or small.
one cannot describe it. we had the right amount of technology and the right amount of outdoor play. we had tons of friends and life had no worries... other than this it's pretty hard to generalize for every country but i think these were common points
A time when you left on your bike to go to your friend’s house your parents actually had no clue where you were. Miles from home, in the woods anywhere.
"Be home by sunset!" was the directive of the 80's :)
Yeah, and the world is safer now than it's ever been. Yet they all afraid to go out today
Exactly this.
It's not because we have more crime, it's because we see more crime. 24hr news networks, social media, etc. And crime gets the most views.
Just be home when the street lights come on
It's 11 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?
Jeeeeeez, the amount of people who felt the need to correct this... EDITED TO ADD THAT THE ACTUAL PSA SAID 10, NOT 11.
In hindsight holy shit what a crazy psa. 11:00 is so late
Always reminds me of this scene... https://youtu.be/jZybUKAtD40?si=Gy8ggaGc5qW-3-m0
Ahhh, The Simpsons. Yet another extremely important piece of the nostalgia.
Lmao. I think the real answer was for a lot of parents then was “no and I don’t care”.
They did care,just they were too exhausted from their jobs. Kids had to do their parts in keeping the home clean & yard cut.
Not even that, people were just different. The culture and viewpoints were different. Some ways good, some ways bad.
I call it benign neglect. Everyone had parents like this, it wasn’t abnormal. But my god, I feel like no one ever really cared about us. And I was ok with it. Pizza poppers were real
I've only ever seen it as 10pm. Which is only 1 hour after dark in the summer, so not exactly late to a teenager.
the actual time on those announcements was 'its 10 o'clock......'
In Texas, it was 10:00.
You get back home before the street lights go on.
I remember being 5 and expected to watch my brother who was 3. On weekends we'd play outside all day, return for lunch and then come back as it was getting dark. This was completely normal in the 80s. It was just a pack of elementary schoolers running wild through the neighborhood and nearby woods. It was so much fun.
Wild when I was that age a bit older because my sister is 3 years younger we stayed in the yard we had a big yard wood and all that. We definitely didn’t have adult supervision. My sister ran over her tricycle with my parent’s car when she was 3. Slipped that baby right out of gear and ran it over.
Was still very much like this in the early 2000s (for me)
Nice I graduated high school in 2005. I worked on a farm all though high school but ya i guess when i wasn’t working I rode my bike wherever
I think the cutoff was kids born somewhere around 97-98. My oldest daughter was born in 98 and I know by the time she was old enough, it was not the norm for kids to wander the neighborhood. Stranger danger was everywhere according to the media.
yup the early 2000s were still very 90s. It wasn't until the 2010s where I started to see the shift.
You had your friends' house phone numbers memorized.
A drawerful of a 100 local restaurant menus for when you want to order out
On top of the phone book
Ooo I can smell that book
Smell and memory are strongly linked!
and addresses! 😀
no need i was a kid and street names (other than mine) meat nothing to me, furthermore google maps didn't exist so i had nothing to "put them in" as my father the only road map we had in his car. phone numbers were enough then visual memory made the rest to get to their houses lol
ok ima blow your mind. we had these contraptions called “address books” 🤯
Also the rolodex with cards from every person or businesses that the family used for whatever, than the phone book and trying to guess the category the business you are looking for might be under in the yellow pages.
Yeah we didn’t ride around on our bikes on cell phones lol. That still looks so weird to me when I see that
That's amazing , love that for you guys!!
Yes…..we didn’t have cellphones or social media either to record all the dumb stuff we did
I feel really awful for teenagers growing up these days and this is one of the main reasons. They don’t have the luxury of pulling some dumb move over the weekend, denying it at school Monday and knowing it’ll blow over and be forgotten by Friday. For them, the stakes are always high.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom and the time of tomfoolery.
We were at the height of the world’s technological development so far and sensed the digital age coming…and Teddy Ruxpin, a teddy bear with a tape deck built in, felt amazingly futuristic.
Everything on TV and in the media was either innocent wholesomeness or it was GWAR. We were exposed to amazingly hardcore things (the fight between Kael and Madmartigan is bloodier and more intense than anything in “Excalibur”!)—and by the way, our cartoons stopped to remind us, has anyone told you that you need to look both ways before crossing the street? Well, now you know—and knowing is half the battle! See you next week, kids!
Everybody smoked like a chimney, often in public—at the time of the big fitness craze.
I may do a fuller, longer version of this in my own post sometime but for now it suffices to say: the late 80s and early 90s were a veritable whirl of self-contradictions.
Woah , I really enjoyed the way you described this. I will definitely be following for any future post you might make on the topic . Nowadays it doesn't seem like much is going on (other than the politics). No major cultural movements and NOTHING close to that era. That's amazing I am glad you got to experience what I couldn't
My grandmother saw the dawn of electricity, the telephone, refrigerators, cars, radio, television, air conditioning, the discovery of antibiotics, women winning the right to vote, and a man on the moon. I can’t even imagine how thrilling it was to be in her generation! To go from oil lamps and letter writing to be able to communicate to space flight. Though the downside is, she lived through a depression and two world wars.
I'm genX BUT my mom had me when she was older...40...so she was like this..as a child,.she lived in homes with no electricity (yet)... not because my grandfather could not afford it (he was a timber boss and they weren't rich but they weren't dirt poor either)...but because it simply had not been ran to their Community yet!!--( rural Appalachian area, so there was no infrastructure there yet for electricity) so she got to experience all of this as well. My mother was a force of nature, too. God I miss her wisdom.
Me too. My Mom is 89. I'm 51M. She had no running water or electricity growing up. Pick free raspberries in the summer and would get $.25 a basket to buy her school clothes with. They had a massive garden where most of their food came from. Her relatives cut huge blocks of ice out of the lakes in the winter and sold them folks to keep their icebox cold. Now, me growing up in the 80s was great. Spent a lot of time in the woods, riding bmx bike everywhere. Recorded my fav songs off the radio on cassette tape. And yes, everyone smoked cigs but smoking Pot was a big deal and not mainstream like it is today
My mother saw all that. I was born when she was 37.
The music was amazing. So many different genres and we all knew every song. Look at the movies today and how many of them have 80’s music in them. There were many “one hit wonders” in the music business.
The 80’s were a time of hope and messages of freedom. The Berlin Wall was a big event late 80’s and early 90’s. That even alone was pretty amazing.
Technology was moving quickly. We saw space shuttles in space. Cable TV took off. MTV actually was a cool thing to witness.
You need to include some of the bad things too, like Chernobyl, AIDS, the Challenger disaster, the hostages in iran, skin tight jeans with zippers at the ankles because they didnt stretch, teasing our hair and shellacking it with aquanet, the cola wars, no avocados, and peach wine coolers.
Aqua Net!!! And Marlboro Reds!
Someone mentioned this about television and media. Now with so many choices of the media you can consume even though we are more "connected" than ever we are more disconnected in particular ways.
No one comes into work anymore having conversations with anyone about the latest episode of a particular TV show that week. Yeah we all know the big pop stars now but so many others listen to extrmely fringe music with very small followings.
It was more so about the TV shows and Movies. That no one watches the same thing at the same time anymore. So no one has those conversations at work about television anymore. Your comment reminded me about it.
You’re right. There was no streaming so you HAD to be in front of the tv to watch the show or you missed it. Later on VCRs came and you could record it.
It’s mind blowing looking at Billboard charts from the early to mid 80’s. You’ll see Michael Jackson, Madonna, Journey, Def Leppard, Rick Springfield, The Police, Styx and Van Halen on the chart at the same time.
What you just said is how we felt then. We looked to the 60s and 70s as revolutionary moments (and some were) but we had our own moments looking back now. Grunge was our hippie movement. We felt so disconnected to capitalism and the pointlessness of it all. I know a lot of my friends ended up being teachers because they felt it was one of the few things to bring value to the world that didn’t take more from it. The difference I see now with those a little older than you is instead of seeing a problem and avoiding it they are going to law school and attacking it. I have hope for the future because of this activist generation. Get out there and fight with them. Roe v Wade being overturned will send some young adults now on a lifetime of working to restore women’s rights to their body and then defending them when that time comes.
People still believed in flying cars and imagined a brighter future where all things are possible and provided. Technology and media moved quick, and passed through several generations (vinyl, tape, CD, MP3, etc.). Web hosting was free on many sites as long as you kept a few ad banners up for them.
Right now we have climate change going on, the Hadron collider was invented only a handful of years ago, we’ve got unknown AI and virtual reality advancements starting to creep upon us, there’s a small culture war with occasional full-on riots in America, actual robots like in old sci-fi are coming soon, and Ukraine is getting the first full scale invasion (with a non-fancy, uncontroversial, and admitted-to-by-the-invaders use of that word) of one major country by another one since who knows when.
A lot’s going on, kiddo, it just all feels so much more homogenized now what with media being mostly relegated to a few popular TV channels and a small number of widely used streaming services and social media sites.
True there is a lot going on but I guess I just don't find interest in it since it's going on currently but also because i'm living in it so it isn't interesting to me , I'm more interested in other eras events for some reason , i think i just really enjoy learning about the culture of the 80s and onward till late 2000s
The early 90s could be…a little gonzo sometimes. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iF07mccxIWM&pp=ygUKQnViYmxldGFwZQ%3D%3D
If you have HBO Max CNN did a huge decades docuseries. From the 60s through the 2010s, each decade has it's own season and each episode it's own topics/theme. They're really neat. Then over on Hulu they have The Dark Side of the 90s. Two seasons, each episode a different topic, almost always a pop culture topic. They also have a season on the 2000s. Check them out! There was a bunch of stuff I had forgotten about and also seeing through the lens of someone else gives it a fun perspective.
The BLM and #MeToo movements literally just happened. The 90s didn’t have anything remotely close to that level of cultural movement. I don’t even know that the 80s did unless you count the world freaking out about AIDS and blaming gay dudes for it.
Even in the 90s, being called gay was the worst insult you could be called and it was not uncommon to hear someone use the n-word. It wasn’t “Jim Crowe era” use the n-word, it was more, “look how cool I am using this word” kind of use. It was still using the word though.
Gay people couldn’t get married and trans wasn’t even on anyone’s radar except as a punchline to make boys try harder in sports. MeToo and BLM have radically changed the culture in ways I’ve never before experienced. It’s maybe only on par with the sexual revolution of the 60s or women entering the work force in the 40s.
It’s common for people to idolize times when they get a certain distance from them. When I was a kid, it was the 60s. Ultimately, most decades are no different than other decades when you really get down to it.
I’ll give you that the internet became a thing in the 80s and 90s but you honestly didn’t truly experience it in full force until the 2000s.
I mean were in the dawns light of ai and robotics. Its pretty insane and the level that is going to change our world again will also be insane.
Everybody smoked like a chimney, often in public—at the time of the big fitness craze.
Remember how most restaurants had a smoking section? Damn, I miss smoking.
Dude I look back at my home videos and my dad, mum, nans, and grandads, uncles and aunts, all have ciggies in their mouths. Chain smoking. Holding us in their arms, with every window and door shut in the house. No wonder I had so many respiratory issues growing up!
Icing on the cake? My gran got everyone smoking due to a doctor "prescribing" her cigarettes to help with her migraines... just imagine that for a sec... I still remmeevr my dad smoking on a plane. I started smoking weed at 14 and ciggies at 15. I guess weed is a gateway drug..
Yup! I was still hostessing at restaurants when I still had to ask “smoking or non?”. My Grandma started smoking from her doctor prescribing them for stress! I remember asking her why when I was little.
😄 smoking or non-smoking and it was just a little 6 inch tall piece or wood separating the two sections was wild. They were in compliance though. And speaking of smoking; kids could buy smokes for their parents all the time.
The smoking section was just one side of the restaurant not actually a different room. Ah the good old days
It's like having a peeing section in the pool.
Haha awesome analogy!
We smoked in the hospital after my son was born 😬
Don’t forget to keep those car windows rolled up tight whilst smoking with the fam in tow! 😂
Gran was following the science
Remember how most restaurants had a smoking section?
Don't forget McDonald's ash trays were a thing.
Ash trays in cars were a thing too! Lol
Forget restaurants…I remember how most planes had smoking sections.
other places i am now shocked we smoked: waiting rooms at hospitals; commercial buses; grocery stores; arcades…in fact i’m trying to think of places we couldn’t smoke. gas pumps (whatever); ICUs; theaters…
The ATC Center I worked at had ashtrays in the radar scopes. We also had a very tall ceiling that was yellow from all the smoke. I started in 1985 and it was a few years until there was a smoking ban inside. We didn't truly realize how absolutely foul the radar room was until we got a new one!
"Smoking or Non-smoking?"
.."non smoking, please"
Literally just separate sides of a fully open seating area with the entire restaurant filled with second hand smoke.
LOL. When non smokers got seated in the booth behind the non smoker in the "non-smoking section. 🤣
“…was either innocent wholesomeness or it was GWAR.”
THIS!! This is the most evocative phrase I have ever heard to describe the 80s/90s.
Well done, comrade. Well done.
Nah. It wasn’t the worst of times. It was just the best
I was born in 1978, so I don't really remember the early 80's, but my formative years were in the 90's. The 90's was an era of hope. Between 1989 and 1991, the Iron Curtain fell. The omnipresent threat from the USSR and the communist block had collapsed. Russia became friendly with the West and democracy was sweeping over eastern Europe.
Sure, there was the war in what was left of Yugoslavia, and a genocide in Rwanda - the middle east was still a tinder box, and China was still up-and-coming, but the big bad in the world was vanquished, and we looked forward to a new era of hope of world peace.
The 90's for me was a fun time that I really miss. This new thing called the Internet was just being born, and we all were amazed at the possibility of having the wealth of humanity's information available at our fingertips. The music was great - concert tickets to major bands were affordable to an average teenager. As kids, we spent our days outside, riding our bikes until sundown without our parents worrying. We could go somewhere and be completely disconnected because there were no cell phones yet.
It was an optimistic and wondrous time to grow up in.
Then 9/11 happened and brought everyone back to reality.
I’m older than you so also can remember the 1980’s. The 1980’s were very similar to how you are describing the 1990’s. And as far as music, let’s not forget that it was the age of MTV, back when MTV was actually focused on music.
Remember sitting with your tape recorder ready waiting for your favorite song to come on the radio?
Yep! I remember requesting a song and then waiting.
Yeah - like dialing the radio hotline over and over. Getting the busy signal. But keep going until finally you get an answer and it feels like you won the lottery!
I remember getting my first boombox. Sony. My parents nailed it that Christmas.
Casey Kasum top 50 count down on Saturdays!! (Apologies if I spelled his name wrong)
A year or row back, I heard him “counting down” on the radio as I pulled into Starbucks. Almost gave me a heart attack! Freaky Friday kinda vibe. I didn’t know they replayed old tapes of his shows. It was scary but then really cool to hear again.
Am I the only one here that didn’t realize Casey Kasum was the voiceover for “Shaggy”, in Scooby Doo?? I loved listening to Casey and tape recording my favorite songs. His voice was so soothing.
Yesss!!! 😁
Maybe it just slipped my mind 🤭🤫😂 Teeheehee
Oh, I was agreeing about his voice being soothing LOL! I did know that he was the voice of Shaggy but I feel like I only found that out in the last 20 years or so 🤣
The year end countdown was a gold mine for this!
There was a radio contest to see if you could name all of the places in the Kokomo song. Every time I hear Kokomo, I hear my bother yelling "I'm buzzed" right after they sang the one lyric, "...gives you a tropical contact high". I think we listened to it about a thousand times.
To piggy-back off this, tv at midnight would turn to static. There were no 24 hour stations. From I think midnight to 6am there was no tv.
God forbid someone you had a crush on called you/you called them bc ur parents or siblings were gonna hear the entire convo.
Satellite dishes were damn near the size of sheds and would have to rotate to get other channels, etc.
If OP wants to see something truly amazing, watch MTV Unplugged. The last era where musicians needed genuine talent to make music, without the entire song being produced on a computer + autotune
REM Unplugged 1991.
You’ve got me thinking about that one.
Pearl Jam’s Black
There you go. Grunge. The early 1990’s were all about grunge.
I remember when Kirt Cobain died. It was a huge deal.
And music really revolved around MTV.
And gangsta rap
I used to stay up late to watch head bangers ball. Only way you could see real heavy metal videos back then lol. That is until Metallica got popular off the One video. Heavy metal then became more mainstream.
I’m from the country in East Tennessee, born 78’, and I grew up on gangsta rap; first song I memorized was Boyz n the Hood.
And hip hop.
At least Aberdeen officially named the Kurt Cobain Bridge where that he lived under. I lived there during the 90's and 2000's. Went to harbor high alternative school.
My holy trinity of MTV Unplugged episodes were Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Alice In Chains. 30 years later and I’m still watching all of them on a regular basis.
AIC was transcendental.
and before autotune existed.
Ah yes I just got done studying that in history but i wish you guys would have done something to prevent the spread of the internet 😒 Could have saved us all!! Jk lol but i'm really glad you got to enjoy those times 🙌 Thanks for sharing!!
The early internet was pretty awesome and helpful. I think social media ruined it. The moment that people started to hedonistically upload photos we were doomed
FB being opened to everyone, after it was college students only, caused the down slide. It was helpful when it was first introduced, and then… now it’s madness.
Before the "Internet" and mainstream access through AOL and the like, there were BBS - 'Bulletin Board Systems "
Had chat, message boards, file sharing (ever seen a picture load block by block like it's being printed by a very, very slow printer?) and even games - mostly text based.
It felt like a secret hidden community where you could download the jolly Roger cookbook and learn to make fireworks and napalm, or a phreaking guide and learn how to strip the yellow and black wires of a payphone and cross them to make all the quarters inside them dump out.
It was an 'underground' oasis of ASCII and ANSI art before the Internet became a complete cesspool.
I've seen it referenced multiple times, but even though it was nearly 2 years into the next decade, many people consider 09/11/01 as the day the 1990s ended. I was a freshman in high school, and many friends my age can draw a definitive line as that day being the end of our childhoods. The world just seemed (and was) so different from that point forward. As an example, I don't think people realize how diffeent flying was pre and post 9/11.
Every time I've gone through security since then, I've thought, "This is how al-Qaeda won"
I don’t know. My dad was in the military and I was terrified he would die in Desert Storm. And then in high school the news constantly harped on gang crime, youth suicides, and school shooters. Lots of good but not all fun and games.
I was also born in 1978. Were you told you had to go to a 4-year college?
We are the same age, there was no racial shit like they are pushing now, there was a ton of Marijuana not good Marijuana but lots of it.
Driving back then was awesome 1.00 gallon gas was high so if you had a car you drove all the time
I agree it was a time where you felt anything was possible. I mean the President showed that . I also remember most of Gen x questioned why things were the way they were.
I remember everything. You had a bigwheel as a young 80s kid. At 7, remember watching the space shuddle blow up and reconsidered becoming an astronaut. Your favorite toy was probably a he-man figure or a GI Joe. Rocky 4 WAS your Cold War. You told your friend to "stop begging Ronald Reagan." At least one kid from your school could break dance, and you thought he was pretty cool. In school, you knew never to press the orange button on the computer.
Social interactions were WAY more normal back then. More so for dating.
I bet!!!! If you don't mind sharing , can you share what an average interaction was with a partner for you then?? Like what did you guys do for dates ??
Dates were often just driving around listening to music or an unauthorized bonfire in the woods somewhere
Yeah tween dates would be something like going roller skating or to the movies. Highschool would be a house/beach/woods party. Over 21 it was dinner, clubs and pubs. There was no tinder, you got our and asked people face to face.
Pay phones. When you went to the town centre with your friends you always kept 20p ready to call home on a pay phone with. Once you were out, you were out. Wherever you went and whoever you went with it was completely private. You felt like a star in your own private bubble. No one knew anything outside of their own friend groups so you had nothing to compare it to. It was more intimate and closed off but that made you feel free and special within it. In comparison to now you just have a much bigger world and more access so you’re likely to feel small in it. We had 4 tv channels to pick from and when they added a 5th everyone was exited. That was a big deal. We didn’t have many options and we made do but in turn we didn’t know any better so I never saw it as missing out.
You're certainly right , even now i compare myself to the replies and i feel like i am wasting my youth away!!! I feel very unaccomplished and I am blaming it on social media lol. But i could make a change. Thank you for sharing your perspective :) !!
No problem! You’re not alone with that. I promise you to your loved ones and friends you are a huge presence and are making a big positive impact. It’s very easy now to feel you’re not but you are. As long as you’re having fun and are generally happy, you’re not wasting your youth.
Ever use a payphone to text the number to your buddies pager with your assigned code attached in the front? Then, wait by it for 15 minutes, hoping for a call back, just so you can score a little weed? Lol, different times.
I know pay phones were push button but I have to say My kids couldn’t figure out a rotary dial until I showed them lol
We would wake up, eat, then call our fiends and hope they answer. If they didn't, you'd have to go look for them. Either way, we were usually gone from breakfast until dark or later. That was every day, unless there was school.
Also, fights. A lot of fist fights. That's how people solved problems.
When you called your friends, often their parents would answer and you had to ask, “is Katie there?” Which made it really awkward to call that boy you liked.
Until columbine happened and ruined everything
doesnt 9/11 changed everything?
It changed a bunch of things. But columbine started the no tolerance bullying and you couldn’t just get into a fist fight and the whole boys will be boys mantra disappeared.
The fist fights were that.. they settled a difference. Everyone would go home in 1 piece for the most part, and sometimes be closer friends after. Or the bullying would stop, either way it was a win.
Or they didn't settle anything and you just got the shit beat out of you at school. Again.
Among friends, though? That was a whole different thing.
My mom would make PB&J sandwiches and leave them on the counter for us to have after we ate breakfast, lol. The main rule was to be home before the streetlights came on. If my buddies didn't answer they were either in the woods or at the pool. We also had a park called Wet-N-Wild that was pretty popular too.
I'd love to experience this.
I feel very lucky to have been an 80s kid. (Born in 74). And lucky to have ended up in the neighborhood I did. Blue collar suburb with a lot of kids my age. A couple of which I’m still friends with today. While I fully appreciate everything that’s at my fingertips now, there’s def something charming about growing up in an analog world. Something as simple as getting a holiday catalog in the mail from whatever department store and circling things you wanted for Xmas was a yearly highlight. What I wouldn’t give to ride my bike to a neighborhood football or basketball game just one more time. It’s the little things.
The one stark difference I notice now vs then is independence. Kids now are so much smarter, so much more well informed yet so dependent. Maybe it’s because so many of us were latchkey kids. We had to fend for ourselves a lot. You had to get yourself places, feed yourself. I mean, in the summer everyone’s parents were gone by 8 or 9am and we were just on our own til 4 or 5pm. Kids today seem to have so much anxiety when tasked with anything that requires being independent. Anyway, it was an amazing time to be a kid. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Thank you for sharing!!
Man those Sears, Montgomery Wards and Toys R Us Christmas catalogs were like a drug. I'd take a pen and read through every page circling what I wanted. It brought so much joy and hope lol.
Wood paneling and brown shag carpet....
OMG yes! That hideous wood paneling. I got so sick of the shag I yanked it all up while mom was at work. We had nice wood floors underneath. She was quite shocked when she got home from work, but I had cleaned the wood floors and had dinner ready (including dessert!). She ended up very happy but it was an adjustment. I was 12/13 at the time and it was summer break so I was home ALL the time.
We had the multi shades of green high-low carpet. It was probably filthy from us wearing our shoes in the house, but you could never tell.
People back then were more approachable and it was easy to make friends
As a kid, you could make friends just by playing and never seeing them again. Like when we went to the drive-in, you could play on the swings during intermission and make a friend during that time, never to see them again once the lights started blinking and you had to go back to your car.
I was born in '82, so the 80s were mostly a blur, but the 90s were vivid. Literally. So many fluorescent colors. Neon orange, and pink, and green, and yellow were heavily used and popular. Especially in advertising and logos, it was those colors combined with hard-edged shapes with lots of triangles and blobs. It's one of the defining elements.
Beyond that, dial-up Internet. Computer (just one in your home) plugged into the phone line would dial a phone number to your Internet provider and, assuming nothing went wrong, make a bunch of horrifying noises to make a connection, and then you were online until you officially signed off of the Internet, which you would do when you were "done" using it (a concept it's hard to fathom) or you got kicked off by an incoming phone call. And it was slow. A web page would take easily 10-30 seconds or more to load. You'd have to be smart about changing pages, and that Back button was vital since the cached previous page was so much faster to load. Things like videos were viewed via either downloading them which could take hours to download a 1-2 minute movie trailer, or you could watch them in rather low quality on something called RealVideo which was this new thing that could stream video (with lots of buffering). Same company made RealAudio first, for streaming sound, which was also revolutionary, for listening to the equivalent of radio online. Eventually merged into RealPlayer for both, long before they became irrelevant.
And you'd still mostly rely on the phone for things. And by the phone, I mean calling and talking to people or listening. Want to order a pizza? Call and describe what you want to a person who would get it wrong. Want to see a movie? Either look in your newspaper for the schedule for the coming week, or call the theater and listen for five minutes as it reads out every movie and time to you, pick the time you want, and then go there and buy tickets in person and have no choice in your seat. Odds are you if you were ordering something, it was done by calling someone and giving them credit card info over the phone. That or physical catalog. You'd get a catalog in the mail with a bunch of stuff for sale, and an order form in the middle. You'd fill it out, completely with a check or credit card info, and mail it to them, and in 6-8 weeks the thing you ordered would arrive. And it would be just as disappointing as the thing you order now that arrives tomorrow, but was WAY harder to return.
You didn't know where people were. You couldn't reach them if they weren't home. You could call and hope to get them, or leave a message on their answering machine and hope they called you back. But if they weren't home, they were completely unreachable to you in that time. And you were fine with it.
You relied on your memory or physical maps to get anywhere. You might go to MapQuest to print directions to a place. You had no idea what traffic would be like to get there and had to plan much further ahead for it.
Everything was just way, way slower.
Although it sounds like a struggle and things digitially i GUESS are "better" now , Id still prefer that life or so i think i would . What about the music scene? What did you think about that. And social outings!! Were there lots of people constantly out and stuff
There's stuff I miss. Especially as someone with ADHD, the lack of constant stimulation had me focused more on books, and like the one video game I had at a time. That was pretty nice.
Music was definitely, for me, great. I was huge into alternative rock, and that scene was big and creative and fun. Grunge rock was hot too, and doing well. And there's absolutely something intoxicating about REAL MTV of the time. Turn on the TV, and just watch music videos. There was a vibe that was unbeatable and is lost now. It's weird to consider the lack of choice in what you listened to and watched a bonus, but it added something special.
Which circles me back to Nickelodeon, which combines well with all the colors. That was an incredible channel full of subversive content for kids and teens, and was just a blast to have on and see what was coming your way, and wait for, and look forward to.
That also answers the social outings thing. I was definitely a loner for the most part. So I was definitely not doing a ton of those. But they were definitely around. It was certainly way more necessary. It was just mostly separate from me.
Wow that's such a stretch from nowadays 😔. I keep rewatching concerts from the late 80s whether it's bon jovi or metallica and That's whay got me interested in other aspects of, i wish i could experience just a day in the 80s so this is the closest i can get , I appreciate your thought out and detailed responses!!
Thanks for asking. It's been on my mind more lately too. When you're in it, nothing about it seems special or unusual. It's just now. It's not until the world's changed a lot that you can pick out all the things that identified the time period as unique, and it becomes very, very clearly its own special place in time.
Nothing drove that home more than having grown up with Back to the Future, and him going to the '50s which was SO long ago and such a VASTLY different world, and now we're further from the '80s than he was from the '50s, and I can't wrap my brain around the '80s being as far removed as that. And yet it very, very much is.
Exactly but I can't see myself feeling that way about life now but we never know . My mother always complains about how she's getting older but you guys were truly blessed to live in such an artistic and raw era , even though it also had its problems , problems will be present in every era i would have preferred to live with the problems of then!!
Fuckin rad. I was born in 1980 and feel endlessly grateful that I knew a world pre-internet and social media. You know all those tropes about how we played outside until dark and our parents yelled our name, and how we just rode our bikes around and were very free range kids? It's actually very accurate. That was my childhood.
The 90s were also incredibly inspiring to me. There was a lot of political unrest and a lot of progressive movement around issues of race and sex and gender, and all of those things that we take for granted now as being a part of the collective psyche / conversation... it was really the early 90s that brought those things to the forefront of society's consciousness. Yes, the 60s were also a time of social progression but the early 90s was kind of like a significant extension and building upon of that. Don't get me wrong, we still had a boatload of work to do around those issues… I mean, we still do… But I do think that the early 90s was when a lot of these social issues started to have a more significant spotlight (filmmakers like John Singelton, Spike Lee.. we had the LA riots... MTV produced a ton of early reality / documentary style shows focusing on various issues, etc.)
The MUSIC. My god. It was all SO GOOD. Every genre just hit... and it was of substance.. Hip-hop music, especially, you had artists like public enemy, TUPAC 🙌🏼 etc and what was on the radio was very much about social issues and issues of racism and oppression… Like, that was popular music and the norm, whereas now music that's about real shit tends to be fringe alternative (exceptions like Kendrick sure)... and also so much fun to be had with the uprising of West Coast hip-hop with Dr. Dre and snoop and that whole world. Of course we had incredible alternative music, Nirvana... we had amazing R&B... and it just kept going on and on and morphing throughout the 90s and it stayed amazing the whole time, even though it evolved in different ways. I grew up in the Bay Area and mid 90s rave culture was... lol... let's just say I had so much fun and am glad I am alive.
Dating was also so much different and while people were assholes, it just was such a better time… There's such a paradox of choice happening now with dating apps and people just treating others like they're disposable and interacting behind screens… People used to just straight up approach you before. Like you see someone that you thought was attractive and you'd go talk to them and that was the norm. There was no phone in hand, nothing to distract yourself with in the same way that there is now.
I know that nostalgia always has a soft fuzzy glow around it, but it really was a wonderful time. I think the most significant difference was just that we were so much more connected, face-to-face in real life in real time because we didn't have the screens to be behind.. I could go on and on and on, but I won't and I hope that you enjoy this thread!
Early 90s I was under 10. Ninja Turtles was new and caught the world crazy. The Wiggles became huge when I was preschool age too. Our school play equipment would never be allowed today. We had a giant metal slide with no sides and if you wore anything parachute material (common attire back then) you'd fucking hit the end at warp speed! Kinder Surprise toys had like 20 different parts that would take you an hour to build. Pizza Hut had good pizza back then.. proper toppings with stringy mozzarella cheese.
And don't forget TLC, The Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, and N'SYNC! Lol oh and how about Are You Afraid of the Dark, Reading Rainbow, and Mister Roger's Neighborhood! Oh of course Rugrats, Nickelodeon which is a channel not a show it's a lot of different shows, the toy Bop It, Skip It, Furby, Lite Brite, EZ Bake Oven...lol
It felt like freedom. No one had instant access to you.
Kids weren't bubble wrapped like they seem to be now. I use to get on my bike and be told to get back when it got dark. We had cassette tapes and mixing a tape was the best present for someone ever. We watched shows like FRIENDS and SEINFELD, and comedy was ruthless. Teenagers would party in the park and most of us were latchkey kids. Housing prices were affordable. Nobody thought about the future though, it was very live in the moment. High school bands played in the basements of houses whose parents were away. It was a good time.
I have young teenagers and it blows my mind the amount of their friends whose parents won't even let them go to the mall with friends, much less walk two blocks to a 7-11.
They think kidnappers and pedophiles are hiding in every bush and around every corner. It's borderline mental illness. These kids will become adults with no sense of independence or autonomy, and continue the cycle of fear.
I mean, crime rates are WAAAY lower on the whole than the 70's-90s but I think the echo chamber of social media has conditioned (brain damaged) fear into a large majority.
Good point about the ruthless comedy of the 90s. So many comedians back then would have been "canceled" today.
😔😔I envy!!!!! But also there were lots of notorious serial killers emerging around the time so hmmmm
The chances of being murdered by a serial killer could be less than the chances of dying because of sitting around the house using the internet all the time and not getting as much exercise.
Car accidents. No matter what horrific things you think could happen, dying in a car accident is usually 1000x plus more likely.
That's the truth of it. But truth doesn't seem to form the basis of reality much these days.
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1mo
How sooo??
Born in 1980. A lot of long winded answers here. Best way to describe growing up then was we were free. There were no smartphones. NO Internet. No GPS. As a kid my parents had no idea where I was. Ever really. Rule most parents had was be home before dark. So street lights come on and you're not home or haven't called from your friends house or payphone or something.. youre in trouble. Back then most of us got spanked or beaten.
In some ways identity was more rigid. In other ways it was less. In the 80 rock and metal bands had men wearing long hair, eyeliner, and nail polish. No one ascribed their choices to sexuality.
But on the flip side I remember that there were some rules for men piercing their ears. One side was gay, the other was straight. And both had its own inconsistent rules. M
There was a lot more mass culture. There were certain tv shows and artists that everyone knew. Madonna, Janet, Prince, Michael Jackson - everyone had those albums. But even Duran Duran and Depeche mode had wide popularity. George Michael too.
Commercials had some catchy songs. And jingles. Same with tv shows. Theme songs were iconic.
Regions were super different; clothing, music, and culture. And it rarely traveled state lines.
Kids and teens were unattended a lot more. I was left to my own devices with my little sister in Vegas at age 8 or so. We went in the arcade. Ate our lunch at casino restaurants. And met our parents for dinner. This would be an entire weekend. We’d then get to play more games until bed time. Then we went to sleep and our parents kept gambling. Repeat the next day. And it was fine. In middle school I got dropped off at the mall or beach or boardwalk all day with my allowance. And thy parents would say we’ll pick you up at this corner at X time. And it might be from noon to 9pm if it was the boardwalk. Now that is child neglect.
There were no Ubers. And no cell phones. So if you went to out you had to bring change for the pay phone (and the bus). And small bills for a cabbie. But enough for your fare. They had no change. So you might stop and get a candy bar to break your bills. The reason Uber started in SF was because cans were harder to find than winning lottery tickets. We had all kinds of hacks like knowing where hotels were. Remember no smart phones. You had to either know or have map on you.
People were way more considerate of your time. People weren’t very late since there was no easy way to tell someone. You went places, agreed at a meeting spot and time. And people just came. And we knew they’d be there. Now you might get a text 10 minutes after the meeting time with a cancel and a shrug.
No one was expected to be reachable at all times. I miss that the most.
Anyway a few random thoughts. I am 45.
Live Aid bay bay!
Did you attend??!!
I wish! No, but I was 18 and my girlfriend (now wife) made a day of it. I still play it on YouTube in my advanced age of 56 ha ha.
Big hair (permanent curls). Sticky lip gloss. Shoulder pads. Part time jobs after school to earn money to buy records. Hang out with friends in park. Ride bicycle everywhere.
80’s rocked!! 🤘🤘
True story - when I was 11/12 we'd jump on a slow moving flatbed train and ride it right across town.
From a kids POV:
Stranger Danger. DARE (say NO to drugs!)
Public schools had much better dress codes, disciplinary rules, and community environments.
No cell phones. Some kids had little handheld games like electronic football, or electronic 20 Qs game, or tamagochis (sp?). Pokémon, Digimon, and marbles were allowed at recess. Once you learned it, all schoolwork with the exception of math was expected in cursive.
At least in our tax bracket, stay-at-home parents weren't really a thing. They might have taken a year or two off of full-time to raise you, but they always had a small side-hustle that a friend helped them into to supplement income.
Had better TV, music, and style. The mall was considered a form of entertainment and parking was still free. Movie theaters in malls. You could offer to do chores for your neighbors and they'd give you cash for it, even if you did a shitty job, because the thinking was that at least you were spending time trying to be helpful and doing something worthwhile in a safe environment, rather than running wild, getting into trouble and doing drugs...
...they were always worried about the strangers and the drugs...
I grew up very poor and neglected, so I'm not really sure my perspective matches most. TV was the primary tool to distract kids, fast food and Tupperware leftovers was the common meal, and correct opinions belonged to those with the most power.
In hindsight undiagnosed adhd would have probably done worse in an older time, but that certainly made me the odd one out but I was treated like i was normal, the issues is I shouldn't have been treated that way.
I went out plenty to other friends who had more interesting or sane lives.
Fine. No internet. Life was slower.
Mouthy winey assholes learned fast to keep their mouth shut or they would get punched out. Violence was always on the table.
A kid today would have their ass handed to them on the first day of school by another student.
People actually capitalized the word "I" because they knew otherwise it looked like a child wrote it
The world was smaller. You really only knew what was going on in your city/region and left to wonder about everywhere else. And ignorance was kinda bliss.
Honestly yeah , knowing too much isn't fun sometimes!!
The same as for you but the technology was different.
All the same emotions and problems. The same.
People weren't fat. You would have like 1 or 2 actual fat people and everyone else was thin or big boned.
In Slovakia, 90's are synonym to mafia. But at the same time, our country was finally free from Russia. ☺️. Can't tell you more since I was born in late 90's tho 😄. Oh, Czechoslovakia (we split in '93) was in '92 connected to the internet for a very first time. Fashion in Slovakia in the 90s
80s: There was no internet - mtv and the radio was how we got music - neon clothing ruled 90s: music got better - we partied and moshed - the internet was introduced ….
Hell yeah that's amazing omg!! How were the mosh pits then??!!!
Fucking amazing
I was a bit of a groupie. My boyfriend was a drummer, so I went to a lot of shows.
That's so sick whattt , i see many people now chasing the "rockstar girlfriend" persona but i feel like it really isn't the same now
Video game, and card game with others
It was weird. Everyone had a group. Like skaters and nerds and cow boys and stuff like that. We didn’t co mingle
It was weird. You had grandparents who remembered ww2, parents who lived through the 60s, and we were there trying to grow up with all the dysfunction this caused. There were programs like Beyond 2000 (or whatever it was called in other countries) that made you excited for what was to come. But then there were people who never left the 60s.
Loved the 90s though. Just before the www boom. Music was amazing. Women were really beginning to find their way.
I grew up in Perth, Western Australia, so it was also so boring. Beach, skating rink, pool, repeat.
I love it here now though.
Not great for women. Sexual assault was treated as if it was your fault, and if it was perpetrated by someone you know, even more so. If you were LGBTQ, your chances of encountering violence was high, and the police were institutionally homophobic. Also institutionally racist. Of course, if you were a straight, white male, the world helped you along. None of these issues have been fixed, but they were so much worse back then.
pepsi was CLEAR it was truly a magical time!
Imagine if you will, a magical time where everyone, regardless of economic background, would get together on our bikes on Saturday morning and just go until the street lights came on.
If you didn't have a bike, someone would piggy back you, or where I grew up, we'd find parts and build you one.
If you didn't have a ball glove; we'd find you one, or just share.
It was a time when disagreements would be settled with fists and feet, then when it was over, you were still friends; you had just established a bit of a temporary hierarchy.
We drank from everyone's water hoses, ate at anyone's house that would offer us a sandwich, and nobody knew where we were.
You could come home bloody, muddy, filthy, scraped, and scratched, and your parents didn't bat an eye, except to tell you that you stink, as long as you weren't limping.
Hanging out pretty much anywhere but home, lots of cruising, house parties,going out to the lake, lots of drinking and weed smoking, road trips, music concerts, and bonfires.
The biggest difference, by far, was no internet and no cell phones. I truly feel sorry for you and your peers. You can't make a mistake without 1,000 people knowing about it within seconds. If we screwed up, we simply hoped the situation would blow over, and it usually did. In your generation, you probably couldn't fart in class without someone reviewing your college application running across a full account of it years later.
I was born in 1978, so the 80s/early 90s covers my childhood quite well.
Things weren't *drastically* different, though there were a lot of notable differences. We weren't as interconnected, in that home PCs were still a relatively new thing and internet in the modern sense wasn't around. You could use your junky dial-up modems to access a BBS (bulletin board service), and I certainly did, but that was a real niche thing and not a major part of most people's lives, at least not the way the internet is.
We had cable TV, but streaming services didn't exist, and if the movie you wanted to see wasn't on TV, you had to get a rid to Blockbuster and rent a copy for a few days. Similarly, information wasn't at your fingertips; you needed an encyclopedia to look up basic facts and you couldn't do stuff like just find what other TV shows a guest star on a show you're watching starred in.
Cell phones were a very niche thing. Basically, we knew them as "car phones" and it was mostly the wealthy that had them, and largely when job-related. Luxury cars frequently had them build in; you can buy a 30 year old BMW or Bentley with a built-in "car phone" but it won't work anymore.
One thing we did have was a lot more personal freedom. From the time I was six or seven, I'd go outside, do stuff with my friends, and just be expected to come back at a certain time, usually for dinner. We'd range all around the area, would go down to the mall or hike through the woods or play wiffleball. You'd still need a parent or guardian to give you a ride if it was really far or to do stuff like bring you to little league, but the general inclination of the time was to raise kids to have a great deal of independence and learn to problem solve on their own. Kids would walk to school or home from the bus stop mostly by themselves, at least after the first couple days of the school year. Social services wasn't going to get involved.
Weirdly, the one thing that blows my mind is how chickenpox so quickly stopped becoming a standard event of childhood. For lots of generations, chickenpox was basically a rite of passage, so universal that in a lot of the children's books, you'd frequently see protagonists get chickenbox. I got a week off school and scored a Sega Genesis when I had chickenpox. They started universally vaccinating kids for chickenbox in 1995.
Everyone smoked everywhere all the time and no one hardly noticed.
Watch Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Breakfast Club, and a few episodes of 90210. Those are pretty spot-on.
90s were honestly the best. Not sure if it was because it was my childhood or because it was genuinely a better world.
Kids got punched in the face for talking shit. Marijuana was the devils lettuce, shotguns and rifles were allowed on school property in trucks. You rode your bike everywhere, you could buy cigs at gas stations or at cig machines. Tapes and walk-men. You could deliver news papers after school. The black kids in neighborhoods weren’t gangsters, you listened to the radio and MTV was everything. Swimming pools were full of kids swimming, roller rinks and arcades were everywhere. Nobody carried guns because most knew how to fight. People said hello and knew how to talk to each other. Gas was .79 a gallon, rent was 200 dollars and minimum wage was like 4.25 an hour. Levi Jean jackets, rolled pants. Metallica tshirts. Played baseball with neighborhood kids in the hockey rinks at grade school. And sometimes you could win a free 20oz soda under each cap. Marlboro miles could buy you a jacket. And a girl who liked hanging out with the boys and dressing like them was a tomboy.
The internet was the Wild West in the ‘90’s.
It was different. More innocent, but not.
Like there was more gratuitous nudity in movies, but way less porn available to kids.
More kids got in fights with their fists, but no one had to do ALICE drills or watch their classmates get gunned down.
My little guy mentioned his ALICE drill a few weeks ago and it broke my heart. He was so casual, it's just part of life now to practice hiding from people trying to kill you at school. I tried so hard not to cry, but he noticed and started asking questions. Why didn't you do the drills? Why weren't people shooting kids then? Why do they want to kill us? What did we do?
AIDS
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