We didn't even have the fucking Amiga yet. Your options were the Commodore 64 or a Timex Sinclair 1000/ZX81 if your family was REALLY poor. Software came on cassette tapes and took an hour to load fucking Frogger. If you had a PC or Mac in your house, your family was *loaded.*
Don't forget the TRS-80. That's what we had.
I mean if you were really poor you just didn't have a computer. Most didn't.
My dad managed to get us a Timex Sinclair 1000 so I could learn BASIC. It was $99, literally the cheapest home PC at the time. I still have it It was also terrible. I didn't get a real PC until the 90s, when Dad brought home a trashed AT&T 6300 from work.
Yeah not contesting but, as often as not, people didn’t have computers at all.
Ok
Computers were luxuries, at best. My 80s "computer" was one of these, and I didn't get the real deal until 1997.
And as a person who values gameplay over graphics...I attribute that to being forced for years to play things like Bubble Bobble and Carmen Sandiego in solely the glorious, realistic, colors of yellow and black the Apple IIe output games in.
80s nostalgia is horseshit. Either you weren't there or you were and your memory is starting to go. For all we have it worse now, we have it *better* today. Cancer treatments! A no-shit cure for AIDS! Energy efficiency! No hole in the ozone layer! You weird shits, grow the fuck up.
also the cyberpunk fiction dystopias had better healthcare and career options than the shitty near-future fascist autocracy we're in now
Like you want to talk about crime and what cities looked like then versus now in a post-00s rapid gentrification era?
I'm lucky I'm from Ireland. The 80's was possibly the peak of our very shit 20th century so nobody is being fucking nostalgic for them.
The reason why you hate today even though we have real advances that make life better is entirely because of the people running the world, and know that all the good things we have now happened in spite of them. You want better things? Eat the rich, kid.
Or you were a kid and were blissfully unaware of just how many troubles plagued the world which is pretty much universal for any decade; if I time traveled back to the 90's or early 2000's wouldn't be nearly as happy as I was because I'm not a kid anymore
Really, the only thing I'd be nostalgic for is my childhood... but I had to go to speech therapy because of an impediment, got bullied for much of the decade, and in 7th grade (86-87) I got so tired of the bullying that I got into so many fights, *I* got sent to therapy. So yeah, fuck the 80s.
Yes, that's true. You couldn’t make an emergency call to someone unless they had a pager, but you would still have to find a public pay phone and have quarters to make the call. There were no AMBER alerts as well.
(*stands on soapbox*) People who want the 80s back either *specifically* want the bad shit back, like freely getting to drop the N-word and other slurs, like certain demographics being too socially oppressed to EVER see the light of day. Or they want to be a child again and not think about anything.
They want the simplicity of never worrying about their next meal because mom had it in the oven (and it was meatloaf). Of never having to think about anything because there were adults making all the decisions, they just had to enjoy summer break. No worries about "bad music". ... just Meat Loaf.
This reminds me of an old quote about the 50s nostalgia—the 60s were no fouler a decade than the 50s. It wasn’t “Leave it to Beaver” or rock n’ roll parties, it was racial violence, burning crosses, shelter-in-place from nuclear bombs, McCarthyism, and the Korean War.
Every time I think about movies and TV shows from the 90s or 2000, the only thing that stops me from thinking, "I want to go back to that," is remembering how shitty it was for autistics!
Okay maybe not the ONLY thing, but it's a big one!
I think nostalgia is more about wanting to escape the fear & anxiety of today. Your list is extensive and accurate. But, I spend 90 seconds on here and learn some other thing Trump is doing to destroy...well everything. Or how companies are screwing us over even more. It's overwhelming and can feel
a bit hopeless. But, my experience growing up in the 80's & 90's. Maybe it was just me, but there was a sense of hopefulness. The world was (it seemed to me) to be getting more diverse. It seemed like great things were coming. I don't really want the 80's back. I just want the future I thought was
ahead that would see more diversity, science, hope and kindness. Because what we got...ain't that. And to be sure, many of those seeds *were* planted in the 80's.
The 80s were shit. Recession, no jobs, no future, fucking awful fashions, the government destroying and selling off everything they could. Not happy times, to be nostalgic about.
It's wanting to be a kid again coupled with the not-so-subtle cultural propaganda of Stranger Things.
Good luck collecting comics if there was no comic shop in your town. You basically got what you could at local newsstands and grocery stores. And if you missed that comic, good luck finding it. Collected editions were BARELY a thing. No Amazon to order from or online comics.
I want you to know this is the soundtrack to your thread. Like I literally pulled it up and am listening to it right now. www.youtube.com/watch?v=dOV5...
Poor or budget minded. Thatcher’s Britain after all.