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What were the 70s and 80s like for you?

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rousseau

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I was born in 86', and as such the 90s were the decade of my youth. The 90s and 00s are where I root most of my identity. Interestingly, the internet didn't become a thing in my life until about 95/96, so for a brief window I used the phone a lot, knew all of my friends phone numbers, and showing up at people's houses unannounced and knocking on the door was actually a thing.

That being said I've always been drawn to the 80s despite not knowing much about it, or what life was like during that decade. I enjoy 80s music, and I even like the aesthetic that was going on around that time.

So I'm curious how people feel about the 80s (and 70s). In 'Western' cultures was there a significant difference between that period and the 50s / 60s? Do you feel like the internet caused a major schism that differentiated everything pre-90s from everything post-90s?
 
To me, disco seemed a watershed.
The entire Magic Valley was split between, Country, Western, and Gospel venues, until one place tried to be disco two nights of the week.
I realize now that humans have probably always liked to split between US and THEM, but that was about the first time i'd seen such stark lines.
About the same time, sci fi was throwing out Star Wars, scifi fans were having conventions in my state, a few other things that made it seem like i'd gone from a weird misfit gleaning occasional nuggets out of a wateland to an actual minority with people sharing my interests somewhere out there.
None nearby, but it was nice to know they were out there.

70's was also Watergate. A major shift in how much of America was willing to trust the government, and who they were. Viet Nam on TV, Nixon on tape, don"t trust anyone over 30, don't trust anyone under 30....
Crazy time.

1980, i went to boot camp. My milage for that decade may likely be nonstandard..
 
I was just a dumb kid in the 70s. I graduated from high school in 1986.

My life involved attending private Christian school, not realizing how inadequate my education was until a decade later, and going to church a lot.

There was no World Wide Web, no DVRs, no streaming video. Bricks were the size of cell phones but you couldn't afford one anyway. Only hard-core nerds had computers, that they were constantly opening up to mess around with the innards or typing pages of code out of a magazine in order to play pong. If you want to play a game, you bought an Atari 2600 and plug it into your TV until your parents kick you off so that they can watch something else.

It would be easy to say the culture was more homogenous, but then how would you know? No doubt there were as many sub-cultures as there are today, but without the technology to easily find each other.

It was easier to ignore extremists and loonies.

The 80s were the Reagan years, when we collectively agreed that America was better than all the rest and if we want more oil we'll go get it, thank you very much. "Greed is good" as Gordon Gecko told us, and your riches were a validation of the means you employed to obtain those riches. Later, Rush Limbaugh would push back on that by arguing that charitable donations increased during the 80s--thus proving that wealth-generation is its own reward. But it was also the beginning of ramped-up privatization, when well-connected private firms could get exclusive access to public resources for personal gain. Which is better, to pay taxes to build a public road, or to be first in line to buy a toll booth?

Electronica and digital gimcrackery entered music in a big way.
 
My first thought is most of you missed the beginning of the nuclear age, the jet age, the television age, the lazar, and even the solid state circuit age. You got nothing to remember.

By the seventies pop music had been recaptured by the avenues, Tin Pan, Madison, etc. Phones were about to be revolutionized by becoming the main instrument of the internet. The browning of humanity was recognized as the trend in social systems throughout the world. And migration from drying zones of Asia and Africa became a political necessity and the harbinger of future revival of tribalism.

WYSIWYG and the mouse happened and the beginning of the bio-parts revolution was at hand. Systems engineering had become the thing and Total Quality Function Deployment was born. By the seventies it became clear that operating systems could not be updated indefinably. Corporate Silos also began to blowup. In computing tagging languages were introduced in the eighties in computer applications beyond printing and graphical reactive programming became popular in the nineties.

Nothing important happened in politics in the seventies and eighties beyond ossification of petro business; and self centered became a social thing starting in the eighties.
 
I think it matters not just whether one was alive for a decade, but how old one was and where one lived. I was growing up in the dairy-and-almond country of Central California all through the late 1980's, and have a clear memory of those times but from a child's perspective. Less pop culture, more... wood-paneled and carpetish furniture and decor, funny giant hairstyles on the adults, everything analog. Fraggle Rock was my favorite kids TV show, and I was obsessed with our taped VHS copy of the two direct-to-video Ewok Star Wars movies that no one seems to remember anymore. Despite the recent resurgence of the franchise, it's now very difficult to find a copy thereof, and even Disney appears to have disowned them. I adored the Ewoks though, and had a little stuffed Wicket throughout my childhood. I never saw the actual theater movie Return of the Jedi until years later.

I was well positioned to observe the slow changes wrought by the internet, as my parents were well-educated and keen to adopt new technologies but most people in my small town were not. I was already in college by the time high speed internet arrived in our little burg of Waterford. There was always high technology that existed in theory, even not so far away by literal miles, but functionally did not yet exist in most of rural America. In elementary school, later on toward the very tail end of the 80's, I was "on call" at the library, as one of the few kids who could sometimes fix the computer when it wasn't working. Yes, you heard right. The computer, and they needed a third grader to trouble shoot the thing :) It did have Oregon Trail on it, though. And later, the Encarta Encylopedia. My parents had a full set of actual encyclopedias at home though, inherited from my dad's parents and living on a dedicated bookshelf in the office. I could often be found on the office floor puring through the collection with vigor and interest. The original Simcity was released in 1989, and my mathemetician grandmother came by a bootleg copy that very year. It was so different from games that had come before, and seemed like a sign of things to come. It was. I started dreaming up the future existence of something like Google Maps while playing that game, and only had to wait sixteen years for it to appear for real.

The 90's were a more optimistic time, and I enjoyed them more. I don't always connect with the version of the 1980's one sees in nostalgic TV shows and the like, which seems much more fun and funky than anything I recall experiencing directly. CDs were another thing that are starting to really date my micro-generation; we adopted them late in my childhood, and they are all but extinct now. Social media was after my time, and I am curious how it will affect the generation that is growing up now. When I was young, social media consisted of the nightly news, and telephone calls to family members and friends. Yes, before there were cell phones, people actually called up their casual acquaintances on the kitchen telephone, which was attached to the wall by a curly cord.

My students often seem to assume I was there for the 70s, too. Must be the moustache? I'm getting older, but not that older. :D
 
The first half of the seventies were an extension of the sixties, at least for me. Political turmoil (Vietnam War still going on, Watergate and Nixon, Patty Hurst, etc.). Drugs, sex and Rock n’ Roll was still the mantra. I was living in Canada at the time, and have some strong memories and stories to tell about the Canadian reaction to US politics. Pierre Trudeau seemed like the hippest head of state imaginable, except I was living in BC, where the archaic Social Credit Party still had control.

Things settled down politically in the US with Jimmy Carter as POTUS. There was tremendous inflation. Interest rates were 13-15% for a mortgage, IIRC. Then the eighties. Reagan became POTUS. In many ways he was as corrupt as Trump. For instance it was pretty clear he had made a pre-election secret deal with Iran to kill the negotiations with Carter about the hostages. The Democrats couldn’t get any traction on that issue though, and barely got convictions on the Iran-Contra deal. Americans in general loved Reagan for some reason. Most won’t believe you still today if you point out that in terms of felony convictions alone, Reagan’s administration was the most corrupt in the late twentieth century.
 
I graduated high school in 1980, got my Masters in 1986 and started what would become my lifelong occupation as an industry analyst / consultant in 1988. So the 70's and 80's saw me go from a grade school squirt to life as an adult. As far as I'm concerned, any music from the 80's is new music.
 
Politesse said:
I think it matters not just whether one was alive for a decade, but how old one was and where one lived. I was growing up in the dairy-and-almond country of Central California all through the late 1980's, and have a clear memory of those times but from a child's perspective. Less pop culture, more... wood-paneled and carpetish furniture and decor, funny giant hairstyles on the adults, everything analog. Fraggle Rock was my favorite kids TV show, and I was obsessed with our taped VHS copy of the two direct-to-video Ewok Star Wars movies that no one seems to remember anymore. Despite the recent resurgence of the franchise, it's now very difficult to find a copy thereof, and even Disney appears to have disowned them. I adored the Ewoks though, and had a little stuffed Wicket throughout my childhood. I never saw the actual theater movie Return of the Jedi until years later.

I was well positioned to observe the slow changes wrought by the internet, as my parents were well-educated and keen to adopt new technologies but most people in my small town were not. I was already in college by the time high speed internet arrived in our little burg of Waterford. There was always high technology that existed in theory, even not so far away by literal miles, but functionally did not yet exist in most of rural America. In elementary school, later on toward the very tail end of the 80's, I was "on call" at the library, as one of the few kids who could sometimes fix the computer when it wasn't working. Yes, you heard right. The computer, and they needed a third grader to trouble shoot the thing :) It did have Oregon Trail on it, though. And later, the Encarta Encylopedia. My parents had a full set of actual encyclopedias at home though, inherited from my dad's parents and living on a dedicated bookshelf in the office. I could often be found on the office floor puring through the collection with vigor and interest. The original Simcity was released in 1989, and my mathemetician grandmother came by a bootleg copy that very year. It was so different from games that had come before, and seemed like a sign of things to come. It was. I started dreaming up the future existence of something like Google Maps while playing that game, and only had to wait sixteen years for it to appear for real.

The 90's were a more optimistic time, and I enjoyed them more. I don't always connect with the version of the 1980's one sees in nostalgic TV shows and the like, which seems much more fun and funky than anything I recall experiencing directly. CDs were another thing that are starting to really date my micro-generation; we adopted them late in my childhood, and they are all but extinct now. Social media was after my time, and I am curious how it will affect the generation that is growing up now. When I was young, social media consisted of the nightly news, and telephone calls to family members and friends. Yes, before there were cell phones, people actually called up their casual acquaintances on the kitchen telephone, which was attached to the wall by a curly cord.

My students often seem to assume I was there for the 70s, too. Must be the moustache? I'm getting older, but not that older. :D
Click to expand...

This reads largely like my life, except I believe you're a few years ahead of me. I have no memories of the eighties at all, I would have been about three and a half when the nineties hit. My first vivid memories of the nineties are trips my family took to the U.S. - Myrtle Beach a few times, Florida, Tennessee. I never thought of that decade as an optimistic time myself, but in retrospect it seems true compared to how thing have gone in the 00s.

And yea, the transition to the internet will likely be one of the more interesting aspects of my life. Like you, in high school I'd talk with friends on the phone for hours, which is unheard of today. We did have an unconnected PC in the early 90s, then one fateful day my dad brought home a machine with Windows 95 on it. I can still remember how fascinating those early days of the internet were for me - you can just talk to anyone... anywhere? It seemed incredible.
 
The first half of the 70s really was an extension of the 60s. Great music and University life were a good mix. The second half of the 70s is a cultural blank because I was in the service and it seemed like I was always working. There wasn't any good music in the 80s that I remember :) but that didn't matter. I had just gotten married and started a family which kept me very occupied, not to mention that again I seemed to be working every waking hour, and lived in five different states. Life was just too busy to enjoy or even notice.
 
T.G.G. Moogly said:
The first half of the 70s really was an extension of the 60s. Great music and University life were a good mix. The second half of the 70s is a cultural blank because I was in the service and it seemed like I was always working. There wasn't any good music in the 80s that I remember :) but that didn't matter. I had just gotten married and started a family which kept me very occupied, not to mention that again I seemed to be working every waking hour, and lived in five different states. Life was just too busy to enjoy or even notice.
Click to expand...

The Grateful Dead were touring all thought the 1980's except for part of 1986.
 
Keith&Co. said:
crazyfingers said:
Ok. I have the tapes to prove it... at least a lot :)
Click to expand...

I didn't ask if it happened. I asked if they knew they were touring at the time?
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I think they remember. They are selling the downloads.. The ones who are left.

Which reminds me, I went to a Dead and Company concert at Foxboro in 2019. It was just like what it used to be like. To bad the 2020 tour had to be canceled.
 
The '70s I was a little kid. There were bikes, a ladybird plague and drought, Abba, and far too much school.

The '80s was the party before the end of the world. We all knew everyone would die at a few minutes notice at best, so we had fun.

The '80s was also, by definition, the absolute last word in modernity. Everything was the pinnacle of technological advance, and would obviously never be bettered. We had walkmans, Elite for ZX Spectrum, filofaxes, and betamax. How anyone could ever imagine anything more advanced I do not know.
 
Well at the dawn of the 70s I was four years old, and by the end of the 80s I was 25, so it kind of encompassed my "formative years" to put it mildly.

Those early years is really just flashes of memory. Big events like the Apollo missions, watching Nixon resign, the evacuation of Saigon, and little things like our first house, my sister being brought home from the hospital, and lots of fishing trips with my dad.

The late 70s were marked by things like going to the theater to see Jaws and Star Wars, along with the time my brother and I got that clock radio we could listen to at night in our bedroom. See, my dad graduated high school before Elvis debuted, and he did not hold with "that rock and roll music." We had a really nice stereo in the living room, but were basically not allowed to touch it let alone play records. So the clock radio was where I listened to the Beatles and the thing we both stared at when the "album rock" station first played Van Halen's "Eruption."

(Side note...if you'd told me back then that just over 20 years later I'd be hanging out backstage with Van Halen I would have said "who are you and why are you in my bedroom?!")


Anyway, the 80s. Reagan. High school. Dungeons and Dragons. The Cold War. It was a foregone conclusion at the time that a nuclear war was going to happen. It was only a question of when. You went on with your life with this sword of Damocles hanging over your head and the realization that all the stuff you were working on had a shelf-life of about 45 minutes if either side figured a "first strike" was the way to go. Graduated in '83, got accepted to my second choice college, went there and learned a lot. Like the fact that you could actually make a living as a radio DJ. A college station where I worked had this crazy idea that playing this new "rap" music alongside top 40 records would become a thing. My senior year was extended a bit due to a personal tragedy, but I also learned about some new tech on the horizon.

High Definition television. This thing called the internet. "Wait...so you plug your computer into...the phone?" I also remember a professor in a film class insisting that "The Road Warrior" would become a seminal, influential work of art, and a history prof said (in 1987) "look, the world is about to change, and if you want my advice, you should go to business school and learn Russian." But Russia is still communist? "Trust me."
 
The 70s were one of the worst decades of my life. I was married to my first husband in 1970, and two weeks after our son was born, his father was drafted. I had been an antiwar activist so I was horrified at the thought that my own husband might be a victim of that war. I agree with the others who said that the early 70s were a lot like the late 60s. There was a lot of unrest. There was the Nixon impeachment. There were those of us who blamed the older generations for everything that went wrong. ( That never changes, does it? )

I agree that when Carter was elected, things did settle down a bit, although imo, this was the beginning of the Republicans blaming Carter and the Democrats for everything that went wrong. IN 72, I returned to school to study nursing so I was extremely stressed out and busy trying to raise a child, put up with an unloving spouse and engage myself in what turned out to be the most difficult thing I ever studied in my life. But, it was also a time when feminism was making a comeback. My nursing instructors were mostly fierce, independent women who taught us to be assertive and never back down to a physician, and to always question any authority. When I obtained my nursing degree, I finally felt like I had what it took to be an independent woman. I spent 1971-75 in San Antonio, Texas. The people I knew there were all into things like vegetarianism, and all kinds of newish health fads. Most of my friends were Baha'is, the religion of my spouse. They were more like left over 60s hippies and it was a refreshing change from my childhood religion.

Rock and roll, soul and funky music were the best that they've ever been. We were very idealistic about the future of the world, once the war was over. Then I moved to Virginia so my husband could attend grad school while I started working as a nurse. Oh the horror of that first job. It was on the night shift, relentlessly stressful and never ending. I spent my breaks alone crying and wondering why I chose such a stressful career. After six months I left that job and found a much better one on 2nd shift. I still had hopes that my marriage would workout, as I was still very young and idealistic.

In 77, we moved to South Carolina, which at the time was far more progressive than any southern state is currently. After another few months working in a horrible hospital, I found my first job in a public health department. I loved the work and my boss. I visited people in their homes, and saw unimaginable living conditions in both rural and urban areas. I saw extreme poverty, adult abuse, as well as some of the most loving people one could ever imagine. I still have both good and bad memories of some of those patients, including one who was abused by her family and another delightful one who lived in a low income housing project. I learned about ghetto life and had a patient who had lost an eye from gunfire during a gang fight right outside her door. All of those experiences impacted me, made me want to be more of an advocate for the poor, and the powerless. The public health department in SC, back in the 70s was amazing. The state was run by Democrats and we even had an environmental control department. So, if one of my patients had rats in her home, all I had to do was call that department and they would send someone to exterminate. The health department in Greenville, SC was probably the best run place that where I ever worked.

By the end fo the 70s, my marriage had finally come to and end. Disco was hot and I started hanging out in discos looking for Mr. Right, while usually encountering men who were looking for Miss Right Now. As I was about to give up, I met my current husband in a disco, just before the end of 1979, so my worst decade came to an end.

While I do enjoy my computer, life was simpler without so much technology and without having to be petrified of leaving home without your phone. We spent a lot of time enjoying nature and it seemed to me that people were far less materialistic during the 70s as compared to later decades.

The 80s brought in Reagan and social programs and public health began to lose a lot of funding. People seemed to become more conservative and things that we had taken for granted, like Roe v. Wade, began to be under constant threat. There was the idiotic war on drugs and more divisiveness than what I remember during the 70s. The 80s brought in the era of greed, which has only gotten worse in more recent decades.

I married in 1982 and moved to Raleigh, NC in 1983. I continued to work in public health on and off. I changed jobs frequently and considered leaving nursing quite often. Looking back, that was foolish. I was expecting the perfect boss and the perfect working conditions without realizing that such things rarely exist. Interest rates remained very high during much of the 80s, which was difficult for those of us who were still young, but great for my older patients who had money in CDs. We had a mortgage rate of over 13% at one time, which was refinanced to 9%. Can you imagine such a thing these days?

I was always too busy and stressed out from work to think about much else. I was trying to raise my son. I envied his generation, as they were the first to have computers and they never had to deal with the constant fear of nuclear war as my generation did during most of our childhoods, or being drafted into the Viet Nam War. There were a few scares regarding world war, but nothing like what I remember growing up in the 50s and 60s. I didn't like much of the music of the 80s but did enjoy a lot of the movies of that decade, especially the comedic ones. My husband worked long hours and we were always both so tired that we ate most of our meals out.

I think that the 80s was probably the decade when people started to eat out a lot. While we never did cocaine, it seemed as if everyone else did. Trivial pursuit was extremely popular, from what I remember. My husband had one job where the owners would send one of the night managers out to get some cocaine for them so they could all work through the night. No surprise that the company ended up bankrupt. The company made contact lenses and the joke was, "we lose money on every lens but we make it up in volume."

My son finished high school in 1986 and went to a local community college in the Raleigh area, then later he received a BS in computer science. I finally felt free of the responsibility of raising a child. Some mothers feel sad when their child becomes an adult, it gave me a sense of accomplishment and freedom seeing my son become an independent adult with the potential to always be able to support himself.
 
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