<p>I guess I am the only one remembering how great it was when full screen editing came out with Apple. Before that, I had to send an email line by line. Many oopsies.</p>
<p>I wrote my first resume using the PDP 11 at DH’s lab, and very elegant it was too! The computer at Harvard was attached to a computer lab’s worth of computers (20?) took up a large room. </p>
<p>My 1984 wedding gown was an antique from the 1930s. It had sleeves and I still think it looks fabulous. I am not a fan of the sleeveless wedding gown. It cost $300, which was a lot, but it was fabulous, fit like a glove.</p>
<p>We left Germany a few months before the wall fell. I’m really sorry we missed it. We had a guy in my office who defected from East Germany that last year.</p>
<p>Given how many gay guys there were in architecture school, I feel very lucky how many survived the Aids epidemic.</p>
<p>I had my first kid in Germany. I could have stopped work 6 weeks before my due date (I didn’t). And then I had six months paid leave which I took advantage of. It was great.</p>
<p>DH got his first lap top that I recall in 1984, we got our first PC at home in 1998.</p>
<p>I remember seeing Diet Coke for the first time in a vending machine in Harvard Square in late 1982, while I was visiting my boyfriend, an MIT student. The machine took dollar bills, too!</p>
<p>In the 1990s, there was a lot of fuss over “year 2000 bugs” in computer programs which were written for two digit years.</p>
<p>[Year</a> 2000 problem - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem]Year”>Year 2000 problem - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Non-computer items also changed to prepare for the year 2000. Paper checks (remember those?) used to have the date line as:</p>
<p>_____________<strong><em>, 19</em></strong></p>
<p>In the late 1990s, paper checks became to come with date lines like:</p>
<p>DATE _________________________</p>
<p>Speaking of banking, there were large numbers of small banks and savings & loans in the 1980s. There were a lot of failures, but there were also a lot of mergers and acquisitions not related to failures. The present-day Bank of America began as a small bank in North Carolina. One of its later acquisitions, when it was a large bank then called NationsBank, was a large bank named Bank of America; it chose to use the acquired bank’s name from then on. The present day JP Morgan Chase company began as a banking subsidiary of a chemical company, Chemical Bank. Along the way, its acquisitions included Manufacturers Hanover, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan, and Bank One. Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in their death throes were also acquired.</p>
<p>In the 1990s, there was a lot of fuss over “year 2000 bugs” in computer programs which were written for two digit years.</p>
<p>[what</a> - me worry?](<a href=“Y2K Problem? What Y2K Problem?”>Y2K Problem? What Y2K Problem?)
I had a Mac.
:)</p>
<p>When I was in college (late 70s-early 80’s) the drinking age was 18 and there was a bar on campus in the student union. During the fall and spring celebration days, the local brewery would bring a little truck on campus to give away all the beer you wanted…Needless to say this was in the days before binge drinking became a concern…</p>
<p>White-out. In the days before editing, if you made a mistake typing on a typewriter, you painted over in white and retyped after it dried (did blowing on it make it dry faster?) If you made too big of a mistake, you retyped the whole page…
College cafeterias gave you two choices for dinner. Only in my senior year did they add a salad bar and custom burgers. Now when I visit my son’s campus dining hall, I am amazed by the food court-esque experience and variety of options.
Cable TV exploded in the late 1980’s. Before then, you had three choices (ABC,NBC,CBS) and maybe a PBS or local channel (channel 38 and 57 for those in the Boston area and the only reason people watched channel 38 was that they carried Bruins games) Cable had all news, all sports like ESPN when there was only one ESPN and it carried Australian rules football to fill up the time and MTV actually played videos…
Research was actually done in libraries with books and not using Google.
The whole college application process was much simpler and less technical. You sat down with your guidance counselor, they evaluated your grades and GPA, recommended a few schools, and you applied. If you went to visit, they didn’t record “level of interest” and you didn’t pay thousands for someone to evaluate your essay and/or hold your hand. With no common app, you had to write or type each one, a lengthy process that by its nature prevented you from applying to twenty schools. An experienced GC had their own internal Naviance and could give you a pretty good idea of what schools were safeties, likely, reach, high reaches without looking at scatter-plots…</p>
<p>I think overall it was a more innocent, optimistic time. People seem much more cynical and suspicious now. Back then, of course, we didn’t have the anonymous online nastiness that has been such an unpleasant side effect of the internet. People had their differences but there was a greater sense of trust in the media and respect for elected officials, for the most part. The loss of civility in our society is one of the things that makes me sad about the times we live in.</p>
<p>Stocks went crazy. We have a little room at the top of our home we call the outlook rather than the look out–as in Microsoft outlook which paid for it. (90s)
I learned DOS on our new PC and was so pleased with my programming skills (inane now but then…). And the internet only took 2 minutes to load a page! (late 80s)
We were glad when we moved and I didn’t have to commute so far because gas had gone up to 75 cents a gallon. (late 70s).
Carter years were gas lines and price wars and inflation–buy two today because the price will be higher tomorrow. The mentality translates to bulk sizes we see today in Costco and Sams. Stockpiling mentality.
The interest rates for housing loans went up from 12% to 18% over night (literallly) which cancelled home buying plans just as we finally found one we wanted to buy. (early 80s). We built instead because it was cheaper than buying an existing home (hungry contractor). Our builder had only our home to build when he started and within 60 days, he had 34 homes going. Timing is everything.</p>
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<p>Actually, in the 1980s and 1990s there was a huge fear of crime, due to the much higher crime rates then. The political result was drive for longer prison sentences (not always in the most “efficient” manner in terms of giving the longest sentences to the most dangerous criminals), overly broad “sex offender” labeling (sometimes for non-sex-related offenses), and the like.</p>
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<p>These two are related. Most people these days favor overly partisan media, resulting in hearing only that the politicians of the other party are somehow evil, rather than merely people who disagree on some issues.</p>
<p>People are more divided now on politics than in the 80s because we live in virtual electronic communities that reinforce our own views. We watch the cable news shows and listen to the radio programs and read the websites that reinforce our own prejudices. In the 80s, media was less ubiquitous but more universal, if that makes sense.</p>
<p>I also feel that communities have become more segregated by money and occupation than they used to be, although that could be a function of where I grew up vs. where I live now.</p>
<p>Another general difference (I’m going back to the 70s here) is that people used to be less safety-conscious. We didn’t routinely wear seat belts in cars. My parents took us on long road trips in a station wagon with a lowered back seat for us to sleep. No one thought a thing about it. We kids roamed around relatively unsupervised for hours on end. It was probably more objectively dangerous than now because of the higher crime rate back then, but people weren’t as afraid.</p>
<p>I can tie this detail to a specific year, to illustrate trends: </p>
<p>1980 - worked for environmental consulting firm finishing up multi-year project advising EPA how to track every ounce of hazardous or toxic waste from production to disposal (“Cradle-to-grave”) with written manifests and weighing the vehicle. Before that, trucks could (and did!) just open a pipe to let chemical wastes leak roadside while driving to a disposal site, undetected. </p>
<p>EPA, a relatively new federal agency then, was reacting to the late-70’s discovery of illegal toxic waste disposal sites (including “Love Canal” near Buffalo underneath children’s playgrounds). There, an entire neighborhood was forever evacuated due to soil contamination. </p>
<p>More context: Three Mile Island, a nuclear site melt-down, happened in 1979. This upset a lot of citizen thinking concerning nuclear energy safety.</p>
<p>Early 1980’s: Some rural communities hoped to become sited as potential sites for nuclear energy production plants. Others worked hard not to become listed as dump-sites for nuclear energy waste disposal. My parents, 3rd-tier college professors, led a successful David/Goliath effort to un-list their town as a future nuclear waste dump-site.</p>
<p>NIMBY = “not in my back yard”, a smaller way of thinking about addressing environmental dilemmas</p>
<p>^^My DH graduated from college in 1981 with a Mech. E degree. He took a job at a newly completed nuclear power plant. People were against flooding the area around it to make a lake for cooling. Today there are million dollar mansions all around that lake. Towns that were spots in the road are now huge thriving communities. It’s a highly desirable place to live. Funny how the very thing that people were protesting in the early 80’s has been responsible for growing entire communities and sustaining many thousands of people. DH still works at that power plant.</p>
<p>Correction of #12: Minimum wage did not make it over $5.25 until 2007.</p>
<p>Federal Minimum Wage for all covered, nonexempt workers
Jan 1, 1979 $2.90
Jan 1, 1980 $3.10
Jan 1, 1981 $3.35
Apr 1, 1990 $3.80
Apr 1, 1991 $4.25
Oct 1, 1996 $4.75
Sep 1, 1997 $5.15
Jul 24, 2007 $5.85
Jul 24, 2008 $6.55
Jul 24, 2009 $7.25</p>
<p>I loved the music of the early 80s.
What strikes me as the biggest changes since then are how fast we can communicate (via cell phones/internet) and how fast we can get a huge volume of information (internet). Remember trying to do research–actually going to libraries and looking up things in BOOKS and on microfilm–took so much time for so little information. Now we can Google any random question (like how the minimum wage has changed) and get an answer instantly. The other huge change was the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in Eastern Europe. I was able to visit E. Germany and the Soviet Union in 82/83. I would have never thought that the wall would come down in '89. . .makes me nostalgic for Reagan, Thatcher, & JP II.</p>
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<p>Car crash injury and death rate was much higher back then, due to the reasons you state (not using seat belts and the like), as well as cars having worse crash avoidance and crash protection than they do now.</p>
<p>I remember when minimum wage jumped from four seventy five to five fifteen… It was my first ever raise!!!</p>
<p>I thought of another funny one that people may not know of… In the late eighties Nintendo hired a company known as Sony to create a CD add on for their super nes …they then saw how sega flopped with the sega CD so they canceled the project and Sony went on to release its project in the early nineties as something known as the playstation. I wonder how different console sales would be right now for both companies if that cancellation never happened.</p>
<p>Sent from my DROID BIONIC using CC</p>
<p>how did you guys apply to colleges? Did you use the common app too or did you have to individually fill out applications with different essay topics for each college?</p>
<p>There was no common application, but I used the same essay for all three colleges I applied to. I didn’t apply to Yale because they had weird questions. U of Pennsylvania was my safety!</p>
<p>We still owned a black and white TV in the early 80’s. Do they even make those anymore? We also had a reel to reel tape player and an eight track. Our cars did not have AC or electric windows. We bought our first microwave in 1985. It had a dial, not digital. We were still playing record albums, and our speakers were the size of an end table…each. We got our first PC, a TRS80 when DH was a college senior in 1983. I have no idea how much it cost. Our first mortgage was 12% and we were delighted to qualify for it. I didn’t have a visa or MasterCard because my income as a teacher was too low to qualify for one. No caller ID or call waiting either.</p>
<p>123winner, I wrote my college applications on notebook paper. I didn’t own a typewriter.</p>
<p>First household items DH and I bought were a 13" B&W TV and a record player/stereo. My mom got us a color TV in December 1986 and we thought we’d hit the lottery.</p>
<p>My first full-time, career-related position paid $6.60/hr. This was 1985 and it was with a major mutual fund company. DH graduated from Wharton and started at $24k/year (early 1983). This included a bump above the usual pay scale for being a Wharton grad.</p>
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<p>Individual paper applications for each school, except for being able to apply to any number of UCs on the same paper application.</p>