<p>It was a big deal in the 1980s when libraries became computerized and got rid of their card catalogs. Some people mourned the loss of the card catalogs, which were kept in banks of many small wooden drawers that the library patrons had access to.</p>
<p>It was kind of fun to look at the card in the little pocket that was inside each book and see who had checked the book out, and when. I think this system may still be in use in at least some school libraries?</p>
<p>Remember having to write a check to “cash” to get money for the weekend. Hoos Drugstore in Evanston, IL was a lifesaver!</p>
<p>You could order coffee without having to think about tons of details.</p>
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<p>That happened during HS French class sometime after noon and I heard it when it went off because my HS’s new building is located only blocks away. Not too long afterwards, my classmates and teacher stared outside the window as we saw NYPD Huey helicopters fly around and land in an open field across the street. About 10 minutes later, an announcement was made that the school was in lockdown and there were serious subway/bus disruptions. </p>
<p>Ended up having to walk up to Chinatown with a best buddy where his dad had a loft as there was no subway service so we figured we’d do some homework, hang out, and relax at his place before heading home. Ended up doing that for about 3 hours before the TV/radio came back on clearly and said the subways were running again so I can finally make my hour-long commute home.</p>
<p>80’s I smoked (cigarettes) in the hospital emergency room. We dressed like astronauts to enter the rooms of soon to be AIDS patients. I injected kids with factor VIII. Zork! My first computer game, on an Apple IIc. CompuServe was a listserv.</p>
<p>90’s doesn’t seem long enough ago to reminisce about, but it does blow my mind that there are kids born in 2000 that are teenagers!!!</p>
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<p>Not yet…</p>
<p>I recall countless times in the 80s of going to the medical school library with a big bag of dimes and looking up hard-copy journal articles and using the dimes to make myself a copy on the library’s pay xerox machine. Or alternatively you could write to the main author of the paper and request a free reprint, but that could take months to arrive.</p>
<p>Nowadays you find the papers on-line and immediately download a PDF, sometimes for free. The whole process takes minutes instead of days or weeks or months. I haven’t stepped foot into the UCSD medical school library in years and years.</p>
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<p>I’m not surprised. The people are reading the question and posting their answers using a lot of technology that they didn’t have back in the 80s. Plus technology has probably changed a lot more in the last 20-30 years than has many other aspects of life such as food, housing, clothing, etc. Styles and fashions always change, but those changes are seldom revolutionary to the degree that technology has changed.</p>
<p>I sold Smith Corona typewriters and later Word Processors with 5KB to 10 KB of memory. Upper Management was convinced our PWP’s were better than PC’s. Savings Bonds were a popular way to save for college. Theme Parks were becoming the rage. Wore a tie to work every day. 45’s…8 tracks…cassettes. </p>
<p>I don’t think renting videos or games came out in the 80’s but I’m not sure? IRA’s only offered three basic choices of a stock fund, bond fund, or a money market fund. There were not as many cable channels. There was a waiting period before you were vested in a pension plan or 401 (K). </p>
<p>Most products were made in the USA or Japan.</p>
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<p>While I won’t discount the possibility, the expense of VCRs and video game consoles/games was such the market would have been limited to the well-off. The added risk of being robbed/burglarized of what were high-ticket items back then would have been a further impediment to that type of business. </p>
<p>VCRs were so expensive and rare in my neighborhood those looking for a bargain were cheated a few times by fly-by-night electronics vendors who’d charge $200+* for a “bargain VCR” that was revealed to be nothing more than a disguised cardboard box filled with wet toilet paper. </p>
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<li>Real VCRs commanded a price at least 3-4 times that amount in the early-mid '80s in my area of NYC.</li>
</ul>
<p>I remember that someone bought what was then the cheapest CD player available (a bit under $100 then, more like $200 in today’s dollars). It was not a scam, but it was not of very high quality in that it did not last very long before it stopped working.</p>
<p>In the 80’s everything we used was made in the USA or in Japan.
We had more fun to travel by airplanes.
Kids did not have to write a lot of essays for college application and did not have to apply to many colleges.</p>
<p>PC’s were beginning to be available - in 1984 there were a few clones, by '85 the clone craze hit big time. I had a very nice PC (AT&T 6300) with hard drive, color CRT, printer, and modem for $2500. The PC-AT did cost $5K. Compaq, Osborne, and a few others were getting started.</p>
<p>By 87-88 clones were in full swing and by 1990 things had settled pretty well. We did not have online mail order yet but there was the PC-Shopper and similar monthly or weekly phonebook sized publications… </p>
<p>I got married in '86 and we had budgeted $300 for a wedding ring 
but Mrs. Turbo preferred to spend the $300 on a VCR so she could timeshift her soap operas while in grad school… We never bought wedding rings afterwards.</p>
<p>In 1986, I got a VCR for Christmas. I hooked it up to my 13 inch B&W TV. There was a mom and pop video store down the street. I think it was $5.00 for 3 days rental. I thought I was so lucky! Oh, and I had a cassette Walkman!</p>
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<p>Ah, the memories… I remember going into the chemistry library and digging through the dusty volumes of Chemical Abstracts and Beilsteins to locate papers, then finding the journals on the shelves and making copies of said papers, yup, using quarters and dimes. Then the machines got upgraded (I think in 1992?) to accept copy cards… If something did not go right, Suzanne, the wonderful librarian, would always come to the rescue. There was a huge fig tree just behind the building, and the figs always tasted delicious after a long August day at the library. The library has been closed for a while, the CA volumes are probably collecting dust somewhere in the basement, replaced by Scifinder and other online search engines, and I can download any article from any journal that the the U has subscription to in a PDF format in a few clicks.</p>
<p>My dad brought me a cassette Walkman from HK in 1980, before they were available in the USA. It was a marvel of sound quality. </p>
<p>There were few Chinese imports, as Chinese imports were banned up until the late 70s. Then a few things started to trickle in. I traveled in China in 1982, the first year independent travelers were allowed in the country. Mao suits were standard. </p>
<p>I am fascinated with the stories as my cultural horizons were limited after kids arrived. As the parent of 3 young ones, my life was home, neighborhood and work. I remember gazing at the fall of the Berlin Wall on TV while trying to get the baby twins upstairs for a bath, thinking how nice it might be to pay attention to world events. The end of the USSR, the opening up of Eastern Europe and China meant the world as I had known it since birth was radically shifted. </p>
<p>Some of us avoided a home PC for years, as the simplest machine was $2000. Finally in the late 90s I got one when the price came down.</p>
<p>In my journalism classes (early 80s), we used 11" floppy disks. I spent many hours in the college library doing research in the stacks.</p>
<p>COA at DH’s Ivy was $10k/year. At my flagship, it was $2800. We were able to put ourselves through college without parental help via student loans, a job and FA. </p>
<p>DH’s first car (1983 Mazda GLC) cost $5600. It was a stick shift and I taught him how to drive one.</p>
<p>I worked at a major consulting firm in the mid-late 80s and was considered to have taken great initiative in learning Lotus 123. We did not have PCs at our desks. They hired folks mainly from local schools, and were happy to let folks prove their worth even without a top tier degree. When DH went to law school, we got a PC. 256k memory and a 20 MB hard drive. It cost almost $2000. That was a LOT of money.</p>
<p>The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union were mind-blowing; it made me delirious and terrified all at once. My dad was stationed in West Germany in the 1970s and we were not allowed to go enter into the Iron Curtain countries. It blew my mind when we visited Berlin, east and west, four years ago.</p>
<p>Flex time and part time career-related employment were unheard of in the 80s. At my job, you came back after eight weeks and worked 50+ hours a week or you quit. No happy medium. My DH was the first person in his law firm to take paternity leave in 1991.</p>
<p>I used to be on Prodigy!</p>
<p>Got married in 1982. My wedding dress cost $140.
Just before we married,DH bought me a no frills Ford Escort. The interest rate was 18%.
Curly perms were all the rage in the early 80’s. I had big hair in 1983. </p>
<p>We got a vcr in '84 or '85. We paid something like $600 or $700 for it. We debated over whether to get VHS or Beta. Charged it on our MasterCard and took forever to pay it off. </p>
<p>Bought our first house in '86 for $68,000.</p>
<p>But mind blowing was MOSTLY in the 60’s and 70’s.</p>
<p>In the early 1980’s (1982) I wore suits to work with shirts that had bows around the neckline. The large public accounting firms were called, the big eight. There weren’t many female partners in firms and we studied them wondering why they had made it. The work world was very sexist and women were expected to come back to work full-time soon after we had children. There wasn’t any flextime and no-one worked remotely. It was a very tough environment.</p>
<p>As a college student in the late 70’s and early 80’s my parents weren’t involved at all. They never questioned me about where I wanted to go to college or what I wanted to do. I just figured it out. I didn’t worry so much about my future the way kids (or should I say parents) do today. I found my interests just by taking a variety of classes and figuring out what I was good at. Oh, and I didn’t do any SAT prep. I just showed up at school and took the test.</p>
<p>We registered for classes by going from table to table and signing our names on pieces of paper that were numbered with the number of students allowed in the class. Teachers were very interested in us and we connected with them easily. Our communications were face to face and never by phone. We usually signed sheets on their office doors for appointments.</p>
<p>Most of my friends spoke with their parents only one time per week, usually on Sunday. We relied on our friends and not our parents for advice and support.</p>
<p>Housing prices really began to rise from the early 80’s to the 90’s, doubling in some places. Oh, and in the eighties there weren’t so many varieties of bread and food choices. </p>
<p>In 1985 we bought a compaq computer (2) 5 1/4 floppy disk drives and 512k ram for $2,000. My husband’s graduate MBA program required it. We had only one computer until 1992 and in 1996 be bought a second computer and by 1999 we had around four computers. Our computers got viruses all of the time.</p>
<p>The 1980’s were a very scary time for many people suffering from HIV and AIDS. So much was unknown, and the media was so judgmental. Going to the dentist was kind-of scary.</p>
<p>I remember at some point going to buy a record in Harvard Square only to find out that records weren’t being made anymore and there was something called CDs. Not quite sure when that happened.</p>
<p>Oh, and there used to not be any Starbucks. Just kiosk kind of coffee shops. Also, there used to be a lot more unique boutiques in major cities.</p>
<p>The 90s were a bit of a blur for me. Young kids, work, etc. I think there was a huge movement to make really nice playgrounds at schools. </p>
<p>Oh, and I remember the church pedophile cases in Boston. That was very big news in the 90’s. We didn’t have cable television in our home until the 21st century.</p>
<p>Sorry for all of the rambling, but these are some of my memories from back in the days.</p>
<p>In the 80s, wedding gowns had sleeves. :)</p>
<p>Your Social Security Number was on your driver’s license and was your official student number at college. Profs posted grades on their doors, listed by SSN.</p>