For those who enjoyed the 80's........

CNN is starting their 80's series tommorow night (Thursday at 9 pm Eastern Time) in the first of 7, a 2 hour premier hosted by Tom Hanks I believe. First episode will be the 80's TV shows like Miami Vice, Dallas, no doubt Cheers and ST: The Next Generation and many others.

What were your favorite memories of the 80's, assuming you were alive? I was 18 when the decade began, 28 when it ended, so obviously a great time for me, lots of beautiful women with big hair, lots of diverse music, Ronald Reagan was president while I was in the military (Reagan gave the military nice annual raises!) having a blast in England. MTV actually played music videos all the time. PC's were still a niche for the public, which I think was a plus, as we went out and explored much more.

I was young and fearless, lots of British and American women! At dance clubs we actually danced, not simply grinding. The college/underground music scene was amazing. It set the stage for 90's music.

The music, the trend, the movies were my fav. The tv shows rocked, they all taught you something about life. From Different Strokes, to family ties, or who's the boss. I mean it was an important decade. Imagine life without it, if it just went from the 70's to the 90's, we'd be screwed.

I am a child of the 80´s, I was 16 in 1980; that horrendous musical abomination called "disco music" had just deceased, MTV aired music videos 24/7/365, Apple II PCs, discotheques in which rock was the music you danced, man, I miss those years, satellite TV was the hottest thing in the planet ( because you stole cable TV signal ) being able to watch HBO without a subscription.

tivo set up to record it for sure.

was a child during the 80's so a lot of the geopolitical crap and other grown-up stuff that went on that decade I'm not so familiar with ( or least wasn't at the time )

my best memories from the time were the endless summers playing outside and bike riding around my neighborhood. the awesome tv shows with toy tie-ins like masters of the universe, transformers, voltron, mask, etc... and of course the NES coming out and my best friend being one of the first people i knew to get one so i'd spend hours at his house

I remember PCs that had only 64Kb of memory (or less) and that used tape recorders as external storage devices ... and that didn't periodically render themselves unusable for more than an hour at a time just so that they could neurotically scan and update themselves!

@Stesilaus:

Wow, that's some good old school stuff. Sometimes Stesilaus, when you aren't trolling you put up some nice posts.

On another note, I'm sure millenials have some 80's memories also, if only because their parents lived it and passed some of it down, even if it was just music by Prince or Huey Lewis and the News.

@Stesilaus said:

I remember PCs that had only 64Kb of memory (or less) and that used tape recorders as external storage devices ... and that didn't periodically render themselves unusable for more than an hour at a time just so that they could neurotically scan and update themselves!

my parents had a commodore 64 when I was little. a few years later my dad built a pc with help from his friend with a 80286 and 640k of ram. i remember him being excited because it had 10x the ram as the old crappy commodore 64

The C64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum were the machines that my classmates had at home. But my Dad spurned both of them in favor of an Acorn "BBC" Model B computer like this one:

In 80s South Africa, where I spent my early childhood, UK-made machines were most prevalent, although US-made machines like the C64 and Apple II were also available.

I remember being envious that all my classmates could build up huge libraries of pirated ZX Spectrum or C64 games just by doing tape-to-tape copies, while games for the BBC B were comparatively few and expensive.

And I remember how excited my Dad was when he upgraded from a tape recorder to a floppy disk drive. :-)

I wasn't around back then. lol

great memories. I grew up in the 80s and 90s(born in 77). My best stuff from the 80s are

MICHAEL JACKSON+MTV...I loved the music back then. To this day I think every pop video by a male star is derived from one of MJ's videos.

Cartoons

Transformers

Voltron-Form Blazing Sword

GI JOE-Now you know

He-Man- I have the power

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles-cowabunga

Spider Man and his Amazing Friends

Looking at the above cartoons you could just as easily be talking about the 2010s as most of them are or will be making a comeback. Other one would be USA Cartoon Express.

Game Systems

TI-99 4a-parsec, munch man, hunt the wumpus...soooo many great memories

NES-nuff said

Nickelodeon

You can't do that on television was an awesome show

Ditto for double dare

Other TV Shows

The Cosby Show-Before DVR was appointment viewing. All of Americans made sure they were in front of a TV on Thursdays at 7p CST to watch it.

Silver Spoons

Knight Rider and Dukes of Hazzard

Dallas

Falcon's Crest

Knot's Landing

Soooooo many great memories.

@Stesilaus said:

@comp_atkins said:

my parents had a commodore 64 when I was little. a few years later my dad built a pc with help from his friend with a 80286 and 640k of ram. i remember him being excited because it had 10x the ram as the old crappy commodore 64

The C64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum were the machines that my classmates had at home. But my Dad spurned both of them in favor of an Acorn "BBC" Model B computer like this one:

In 80s South Africa, where I spent my early childhood, UK-made machines were most prevalent, although US-made machines like the C64 and Apple II were also available.

I remember being envious that all my classmates could build up huge libraries of pirated ZX Spectrum or C64 games just by doing tape-to-tape copies, while games for the BBC B were comparatively few and expensive.

And I remember how excited my Dad was when he upgraded from a tape recorder to a floppy disk drive. :-)

we never had a tape recorder for our c64. 5.25" from the start :) my dad used to get tons of games ( including the classic strip poker game which i quickly became an expert at ) and software from people he worked with so he was always bringing home new games for us to try out. i always hated when we'd try to load a new game up and it would say "press play on tape" because we didn't know WTF it was talking about :)

I was born in 89... just barely squeezed in.

My mom had a bad ass hair due tho

@comp_atkins: Doesn't RAM build in binary structure? For example you can't just add a "0" to the end because there is no "0"? 1mb is 1024kb for example.

@Stesilaus said:

@comp_atkins said:

my parents had a commodore 64 when I was little. a few years later my dad built a pc with help from his friend with a 80286 and 640k of ram. i remember him being excited because it had 10x the ram as the old crappy commodore 64

The C64 and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum were the machines that my classmates had at home. But my Dad spurned both of them in favor of an Acorn "BBC" Model B computer like this one:

In 80s South Africa, where I spent my early childhood, UK-made machines were most prevalent, although US-made machines like the C64 and Apple II were also available.

I remember being envious that all my classmates could build up huge libraries of pirated ZX Spectrum or C64 games just by doing tape-to-tape copies, while games for the BBC B were comparatively few and expensive.

And I remember how excited my Dad was when he upgraded from a tape recorder to a floppy disk drive. :-)

I used a BBC Micro at school and college and had an Acorn Electron at home. Best BASIC ever. I also had a C64 for games and that just kept giving. The computer is worth playng Paradroid alone. And don't get me started on Rob Hubbard.

Hypothetically speaking of course but how about getting HBO by using a D cell battery, a metal box (for index cards), some copper wire and a few parts from Radio Shack?

The 80's were quite a time. Movies, toys, television, cartoons, ARCADES, etc..,

Dude you brought me back. Yes, playing with toys like transformers, GI Joe's and such, kids don't know what they missed. NES, yes ! You definitely were here man.

i can't think of anything in the 80's that i don't like. the 80's seems so futuristic even now. i just leave this here in honor of that absolutely perfect decade, i wish i'd died in the 90's and never saw anything past 2000.

@LexLas:

Even though I started the 80's in my late teens, I remember the kids had a lot of those toys. GI Joe was even further back, I remember having him and Action Jackson in the 70's. Transformers was pretty big in the 80's as I remember. Haha just for kicks me and a buddy dusted off Trivia Pursuit recently, a trendy game from the mid to late 80's.

MTVs 120 minutes was a great underground music source, there was a heavy metal show also, but there was so much diversity in 80's music overall that there was something for everyone. In the 90's music videos gave way to reality TV :( .

If you guys want to enjoy a nice slice of 80's music, listen to the soundtrack of GTA: Vice City, Vice City being associated with Uber cool 80's tv show Miami Vice.

NES was great in the 80's, arcades still were as well. I remember mastering Defender and a game called Phoenix in the early 80's.

yeah, ram is power of 2 based. so 64k = 2^16 ( 16 bits of an address can address up to 65536 bytes of memory, 64x1024 = 65536

the 640k the newer system had was something like 512k + 128k

there's a discrepancy when you start talking about base10 values vs. base2

for base 10

KB = 1000 B

MB = 1000KB

GB = 1000MB etc..

for base2

2^10 = 1024 B = 1KiB

2^20 = 1048576 B = 1024x1024 = 1MiB

2^30 = 1073741824 B = 1024^3 = 1GiB etc...

Oh gosh, lots of good stuff, lots of bad stuff. Started going to the San Diego Comic-con in 1982 when it was the basement of a hotel down the street from where it is now. It was super nerdy back then (it hasn't been nerdy since the mid 90s) and a really good way to find out about rare comics, indie comics, unaltered anime, and talk to the creators...except Alan Moore who just couldn't understand why anybody would want to talk on a panel.

Enjoying my Atari computer and the Atari community in the South Bay area whilst hating on Commodore computers and their users because they were THE WORST :P and they were all jealous of our superior BBS boards anyways.

Started to really explore music outside of what was on the radio and enjoyed browsing the record stores hoping to find some hidden gems. Started going to a lot of concerts in Los Angeles at the Roxy, The Whiskey, The Palace, The Wiltern and occasionally the horrible Forum.

Video rental just exploded with richness allowing us to enjoy tons of films on a weekly basis...in extreme contrast to the '70s where we could only watch edited films on TV or enjoy the occasional film if we knew somebody with that new-fangled HBO. Enjoyed going to a lot of Samurai film festivals and hatin' on Italian neo-realism 'cause...in your twenties you tend to blindly hate on something just to do it because you're a judgmental idiot. People were still enjoying sexuality as a holdover from the '70s so the films just had gobs of casual nudity in them...sadly the '90s would put a damper on that.

this was awesome too.

@comp_atkins:

Oh wow, that was classic! I remember that. 1983 was one of the best years of my life personally as well, lots of great stuff happening in my life then while I was stationed in England and when I took my 30 days leave back to the states around Thanksgiving. When I came home I first discovered my family had MTV. I was hooked on those videos.

I agree that the Acorn machines' BASIC was outstanding. I also much preferred 6502 assembly language to the Z80 assembly language that the Sinclair machines used, although I never got to do much with it: A few months after I'd learnt 6502 assembly language, my Dad sold our BBC Micro and replaced it with an MS-DOS PC.

But, man, the nostalgia is terrible. :-( It hurts to remember playing those old Acornsoft knock-offs of popular arcade games, like Galaxian, Asteroids, Defender et al. Those were the days!

Ah the 80's. I had my first "brand new" car. A 1986 Nissan Pulsar NX like this one.

@AFBrat77: "1983 was one of the best years of my life personally as well,"

And you should as I was born that year.

@PSP107:

Haha, well played.....

You could have been my son the way I was spreading my seed in those days.....the women relied on birth control pills and Aids was confined to certain regions and mostly gay community in those days.

@AFBrat77:

How was sports back in the 80s compared to 90s 2000s and 2010s?

It's impossible for anyone who wasn't there to understand just how big MTV was in the 80's. It was a cultural thing as mush as it was a TV station. I wasn't that big on it but it was impossible to avoid.

Thundercats rates pretty highly on my 80's list as does Blade Runner.

@br0kenrabbit:

Martha Quinn!

@PSP107:

Sports was a lot of fun.....the NBA was what you call old-school then, guys like Dr. J, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Dennis Rodman, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, and some guy named Michael Jordan. Oh and the Boston Celtics/ Los Angeles Lakers rivalry was in high gear. Seemed like the NBA had more character (characters?) then.

Hockey was dominated by 2 of the greatest offensive players ever, Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux. Baseball started with my local team the Phillies winning the World Series, but later baseball legend Pete Rose was guilty of betting on baseball, and the late 80's was the beginning of widespread steroids. Football was dominated by the San Francisco 49ers and the Joe Montana/Jerry Rice show.

@AFBrat77: when my parents first got cable we didn't have a remote for our tv. the channel selector was this box that would manually select the channel based on the level position.

my siblings and i would get yelled at for zipping the selector up and down the box too fast :)

@comp_atkins: Okay but there wasn't anything on the market with a split RAM in those days. And everyone knows...

KEEP RAM EQUAL!

the 80s were even worse then the 70s

Do explain?

don't know what to tell you. maybe it was dram directly attached to the board and not in a dimm form factor, i don't know when simms or dimms started to really take off. but it was 640k :P

something like this perhaps? no expansion slots for memory, just soldered on discrete devices and a bunch of isa slots.

hm, I just realised there is something I realy like about teh 80s ...

wow, thats 'heavy' ...

is this inappropriate ??? ... its on YouTube :)

I've got a 80s party coming up in May. Gotta figure out what/who to go as.

what !? how can you even ask ...

@omotih:

Joan Jetts remake wasn't bad.....I remember seeing her at about that time at "Monsters of Rock" concert in 1982 while I was stationed in England. Queen (with Freddie Mercury!) and Heart were there as well.

I miss the 80's when people in my country live a secular life, big hair, cheesy music, uncensored TV .... now become more radicalized ..... even shaming those who don't wear hijab or those who wear speedos/spandex for sports. Some was even stopped when entering government building because wearing skirt above knee

@omotih:

I actually owned that album by Culture Club, it was a good album. My British gf at the time was a huge fan, great memories with her.

@drspoon:

Yeah Blade Runner was a great 80's movie, here are some more decent and iconic movies:

Aliens

American Werewolf in London

Back to the Future

Blue Velvet

Childs Play

Die Hard

Escape from New York

Rambo: First Blood

Fright Night

The Hitcher

Nightmare on Elm Street

The Empire Strikes Back

Return of the Jedi

The Terminator

The Thing

The Breakfast Club

Raiders of the Lost Ark (first 3 movies)

Star Trek 2: Wrath of Khan

Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home

E.T.

Platoon

Poltergeist

Ghostbusters

Superman 2

Risky Business

Ruthless People

The Lost Boys

St Elmos Fire

Karate Kid

The Untouchables

Raising Arizona

Witness

Ferris Buhlers Days Off

Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior

Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunder dome

Stand by Me

The Accused

The Fly

Beverly Hills Cop

The Big Chill

Fatal Attraction

Trading Places

48 Hours

Altered States

Dangerous Liaisons

The Dead Zone

...there was something for Everyone. Looking back I never realized how big Harrison Ford was in the 80's : the 2 best Star Wars movies, 3 x Indiana Jones movies, Bladerunner and Witness, what a resume!

Well, I'm certainly not going to flag it! :-P

However, I should point out that a video's being on YouTube doesn't necessarily mean that linking to it in an OT posting won't get you moderated. YouTube has become surprisingly tolerant of controversial material lately, including:

• "naturist lifestyle videos" (i.e. full frontal nudity)
• "sex education videos" (e.g. "how to put on a condom"---demonstrated using a real penis)
• "war news videos" (i.e. macabre images of people blown to bits)

I've been moderated twice for linking to YouTube videos that evidently violated the ToS. (In each case the video depicted real world violence from a headline news story.)

@omotih:

Lol, those women in the Hagar video are all in their 50's now, probably grandmas, because they are all about my age, I was 20 or 21 when that video came out in 1982.

Sucks getting older.

I didnt realised much from the 80 myself but these movies create some strong Images in my mind ...

and I would have liked to see Tom Selleck as Indiana Jones like it was originaly planed, but he had no interest in doing the movies

@AFBrat77: you are only as old as you feel ... mom ^^

@omotih: Actually he wanted to do the movie but because of his commitment to do Magnum PI he had to decline. Not a bad call imo Magnum is one of my favorite tv shows of all time.