You in the 80s: Journey through the Decade

The purpose of this article is to take you on an immersive journey through the 1980s, exploring what it was like to truly live in this unique period of history.You will discover not only the cultural and technological highlights, but also understand the real context that shaped this so memorable and influential era. Prepare to explore concrete scenarios and everyday situations that defined the experience of those who lived in these eight transformative years.

The Technology You’d Use in the ’80s

If you were a young professional in the 80s, your relationship with technology would be completely different. Personal computers were just beginning to gain space in homes and offices, but they were still large, noisy and often incomprehensible machines for the average user. You would probably have a Commodore 64, an Apple II or perhaps an IBM PC in your office, machines that required considerable technical knowledge to operate.

You would be used to typing commands on command lines, waiting long minutes for programs to load, and dealing with the constant frustration of systems that regularly crashed.If you wanted to work with text, you would use WordStar or WordPerfect, software that required memorizing dozens of key combinations. Your communications at work would happen mostly by phone or paper memos, not by email or instant messages like you do today.

The first laptop computers began to emerge in the late 80s, like the GRiD Compass, but you would never take one home or to a cafe with the lightness with which you charge your modern smartphone.These early laptops were heavy, expensive and had a battery life measured in minutes.The idea of having instant access to any information in the world, as you now have through a simple touch of the screen, was simply science fiction.

Vintage photo maker Classification: ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^”’ 4.42 Age Classification: Classification 12 years Author: CRE APP.COM Platform: Android Price: Free ▶Download on Google Play

Your Day to Day Leisure and Entertainment

You in the 80s would have a completely different concept of how to spend your free time. If you were a music fan, you would be buying cassettes or vinyls in specialty stores, listening to the music when you wanted through a Sony Walkman or a large home stereo. You could not just open a streaming app and access millions of songs in seconds as you do today. You would create playlists manually copying songs from an album to cassette, a process that took hours and often resulted in lower sound quality.

Your experience with movies would also be radically different if you lived in the 80s. You would have three main options: go to the cinema, rent videocassettes at a video store or wait for the movie to be broadcast on open television or cable. The idea of having access to thousands of movies on demand through a streaming service, as you now own, was completely nonexistent. If you wanted to watch a movie again, you would have to wait until it was shown on television again or leave home to rent it physically.

Video games represented the peak of entertainment technology for you in the 80s. You could spend hours in a arcade, spending coins in Pac-Man, Space Invaders or Donkey Kong, or be among the lucky ones who owned an Atari 2600 console at home. These games were simple by comparison to current standards, but you would settle for pixelated graphics and basic gameplay.The social experience of gaming would be completely different too, involving being physically close to other people in a arcade or inviting friends to your home to play together on the console.

Personal Communication and Social Relationships

If you were a teenager in the 80s, you would schedule dates and conversations in ways that seem almost impossible today. You would need to use the landline of the house, at the risk of having to deal with that uncomfortable moment when one of your parents answers the call. There were no texts, there were no direct messages, there were no video calls. Communication was synchronous or you needed to leave written messages. You would have to wake up early to call your girlfriend or friend before she left home, or wait until the evening when long distance fares were cheaper.

Your romantic relationships would be built entirely on face-to-face interactions and occasional phone conversations.You couldn’t get to know what your crush was doing or thinking through social networks, couldn’t send flirtatious messages without waiting for the answer, and definitely couldn’t hold a continuous conversation throughout the day. Dating required careful planning and genuine commitment, as once you scheduled a date, there was little flexibility for last-minute changes.

Friendships also worked differently when you lived in the 80s. You would spend significant time in local groups, meeting mostly people from your immediate community. Your social network would be considerably smaller than the one you maintain today, but potentially deeper. You would not have the ability to maintain hundreds of superficial connections through social networking platforms. Communication between friends who moved to other cities virtually disappeared, unless you had the dedication and money needed to make long distance calls or write letters regularly.

Fashion, Style and Personal Identity

Your personal style expression in the 80s would be shaped by very different trends from those you follow today. Fashion was overblown, colorful and often kitsch to contemporary eyes, but at the time was genuinely desirable. If you were an urban young man in the 80s, you could be wearing bright fluorescent colored clothes, leg warmers pants even out of the context of exercise, and large T-shirts with bold graphics. Women could be wearing long-lasting hair, heavy makeup with vibrant colors, and tight clothing that accentuated the body. Men often wore open silk shirts over T-shirts, gold chains and pants always with a voluminoused waist.

If you were part of a specific cultural subgroup in the 80s, your style would be much more defined and clearly identifiable.You could be a punk with spiky hair and safety pins, an elegant and dramatic new waver, a metalworker with heavy leather jacket and chains, or a hip-hop enthusiast with baggy pants and gold chains.Your outfit was a statement of cultural affiliation much more explicit than it tends to be today. The fashion of the 80s also worked in much longer cycles than today, as there was no social media accelerating the cycle of fashion trends from Reeb Top jeans to High Gess.

Your physical appearance would be built through completely different routines as well. If you were a woman concerned about your appearance, you would rely on peroxidation to achieve blond hair, permanent to create that characteristic volume, and water-proof heavy makeup that you would apply every morning.Men could spend hours in the mirror applying hair gel or using hair dryers to achieve the desired hair style.The beauty industry of the 80s was much less sophisticated in many ways, although some revolutionary products like the artificial bronzer were just beginning to emerge.

Education, Work and Career Opportunities

If you were a student in the 80s, your educational experience would be significantly different from that of today’s students. You would do research in libraries, consulting physical encyclopedias and catalogs of tokens to find information. If your school or university had a computer, it would probably be an admired instrument but rarely accessible for personal use. Your technology education would be virtually nonexistent, as most schools did not have computer courses until the late 80s, and even when they began offering, the focus was learning to program in BASIC or use very primitive word processors.

If you entered the job market in the 80s, you would probably stay in a job for many consecutive years, possibly in a single company for much of your professional career. Employer loyalty was more common, and you would build your career through slow but predictable internal promotions. You would not change jobs often as is common today, as there were no online job portals, professional networks or tools to facilitate career changes. To find a new job, you would consult classified ads in newspapers or rely on personal contacts and recommendations. Job interviews would always happen in person, sometimes through recruitment agencies, but via video conferencing.

Your professional skills would also be completely different if you lived in the 80s. You could be highly competent in typing, archiving, and using xerox fax machines and copiers. If you worked in an office, you could meet all your colleagues because you were physically present in the same place every day. The concept of remote work was virtually nonexistent. Communication with clients or partners in other cities meant making expensive phone calls or sending documents by post, not sending files by email in seconds.

Information, News and Global Knowledge

Your relationship to information and news would be completely different if you lived in the 80s. You would receive news mainly through three sources: printed newspapers delivered to your door, television news at fixed times of the night, or radio while driving. You would not have immediate access to breaking news, nor could you search for real-time information about events that were happening around the world. If something important happened in the afternoon, you would probably only know when you watched the evening news.

If you wanted to learn about a subject of interest, you would face a completely different process than what you follow today. You would visit a public library and consult printed encyclopedias, reference books, and perhaps some specialized journals.This process would take hours or days, rather than seconds.If you wanted very specialized or recent information, you could be out of luck, as the published information could be several years late.The knowledge was scarcer, more expensive to access, and often available only in printed form in specific locations such as libraries or schools.

You could access encyclopedias on CDROM if you were one of the few that had a CDROM drive and a computer in the late 1980s, but this was an expensive rarity. Information was also much less interactive, there were no comments from others, there was no access to multiple perspectives in one place. You would receive information more passively, through authoritative sources such as professional journalists, teachers and academics. This lack of democratization of information meant that you would know less about the world, but perhaps with a more focused attention time on what you actually decided to learn.

Travel and Exploration of the World

If you wanted to travel during the 80s, you would face a completely different set of challenges and considerations. You could not simply open a travel app, compare flight prices, book hotels and buy tourist attraction tickets through your phone. You would have to plan trips significantly in advance by visiting a physical travel agency, where an agent would help you find flights and hotels by consulting specialized computers. You would receive your reservations on paper, not on digital confirmations and booking codes stored on your phone.

During your travels, you would be almost completely disconnected from your home life. If you were a major traveler, you could find a pay phone and make an expensive long-distance call to warn people where you were and how you were going. You could not instantly share photos of your experiences, could not get recommendations from app restaurants, could not orient yourself using GPS. If you were an experienced traveler, you would carry film cameras, printed maps, paper travel guides, and would depend on street signs and directions from local people to move around.

Traveling internationally was an even more complex proposition in the 80s. You would need to get a passport considerably in advance, look at travel agencies to check what visas you might need, and perhaps take traveler’s checks because international credit cards were not ubiquitous. The experience of traveling was much more adventurous because there was more uncertainty and less detailed planning possible.

Home Entertainment and Consumer Culture

Your home entertainment experience during the 80s would be centered around television, possibly with a videocassette if you were relatively wealthy.If you had access to a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder), you could start recording television shows you missed or renting VHS tape movies from a local rental company.This was the height of home entertainment technology, and you would find it incredibly convenient to be able to watch a movie you wanted instead of waiting for it to be shown on television. You could build a collection of VHS tapes, which would take up significant space on your shelves.

Your television would probably have between three and eight air broadcast channels, depending on whether you had access to a good quality antenna and its proximity to a metropolitan area. If you were a television aficionado, you could have access to cable television, which offered more channels, but still a limited number compared to current standards. You would watch programs at specific times or record them on tape to watch later. The idea of an on-demand programming grid, customized to your interests, was simply impossible. You would have to work around the available programming, not the other way around.

If you were a child in the 80s, you would spend much more time playing outside with other children in your neighborhood than children do today. You could have some toys, but the variety would be much smaller. You could have a Barbie doll or an Action Man, perhaps a Rubik’s Cube, or an Atari video game console, but the almost infinite variety of options that exists today was absent. Their fun was often created through unstructured play, imagination and interaction with local children.