What was life like in the 80s?

Oh yeah, the terrifying AIDS PSA ad with the volcano and graveyard!
And yes smoking being cool, then not - by the very end of the 80s the anti-smoking campaigns. My dad not only smoked heavily but actually worked in advertising cigarettes Sisters and I used to lecture him and hide his fags bc smoking was baaaad although that was maybe more early 90s.

The bad stuff was the unemployment, the fear of nuclear war (we lived near a USAF base so had fighter jets screaming overhead), the National Front trying to recruit school kids and AIDS. I had a friend who was disabled and his life was a bloody struggle. Looking back on it he was a bit of a trail blazer because be wouldn't take no for an answer, got a proper well-paid job, etc.

The good stuff included the freedom children and young teens had - our mothers (who mostly worked part time) would let us loose after breakfast in the summer holidays and not expect to see us again till lunchtime. My mother was considered an adventurous cook as she made curry. If I turned into our street and could smell it, I knew it was for us.

I remember the excitement of seeing my first microwave and playing early computer games.

Being less excited about changing terry nappies when looking after other people's kids.

And I thought Princess Diana was great for the sole reason that she was tall and wore flat shoes so as not to tower over Charles, and so made flat shoes trendy. This was fab for me as I hated heels.

I also remember taping the charts on a Sunday night with one of these and a wee microphone. You'd have to press play and record at the same time and try not to get the DJ talking over the end of the song which was completely impossible.

My sister and I used to sit in the dining room in front of the stereo, which was fucking huge, shushing mum and dad so they didn't spoil it. We'd get so mad at my dad as he'd occasionally burst into the room pretending to be Boy George and we'd yell at him to get out. My sister found one of these tapes a couple of years ago and we laughed til we cried when we heard it. It was so lovely to hear my dad's voice again now that he's been gone for ten years. Even if we were yelling at him and he was pissing himself laughing at us. 😂 This thread is making me have some lovely memories.

I was a student in a Northern university in the early 80s. In those days we were given free tuition and grants were available. It was a fabulous time but in the North, we were very definitely living in a bubble as there were economic troubles all around us. In true student style, we experienced reality by listening to the Smiths and subversive anti government music.
When I graduated, there were only jobs in London so I "got on my bike" and went down there. It was totally different but I cant say whether it was times changing or the London effect. I lived in the City of London and it absolutely buzzed. There really was "loadsa money" about, lots of hard work and fast living. Very extravagant lifestyles and everything excessive. Yuppies everywhere. In the meantime Ken Livingstone was on the South Bank leading the campaigns for equality and gay rights. Lots of free concerts and events.
We did wear some fantastic costumes with massive shoulders. It was all a whirlwind which required a lot of energy. We coped fantastically well without any mobile phones but less well at work with one "terminal" and word processor between us. And yes the smoke everywhere - buses, cinema, restaurants , next desk....
It was the best of times in London but the rest of the country???? Not so sure

Born 83 so remember the mid to late 80s. One of my first memories is that my parents bought a new colour TV to watch the 1988 olympics on. I was almost 5 and was enthralled. I think prior to that we’d only had black and white and I hadn’t given in a second glance. But the olympics - I would sit within inches of the (admittedly small!) screen and be told I’d get square eyes!

Rampant TV advertising towards the end of the decade especially to children. Not sure whether this is just the same as now but the toys.

Remember thinking like fast food looked like the best thing EVER and it being a massive treat to go to wimpy (my mother refusing to entertain any other fast food establishment but Wimpy had “proper plates and cutlery”

Also remember my dad’s record player and jumping around the room and it skipping.

Garish fashions in the late 80s, much like the early 90s. Littlewoods, Woolworths and C&A. Also catalogues but my memories of those probably more 90s. Supermarkets like Gateway (later bought by Safeway?) giving out stamps that you had to stick into savings books - early loyalty cards I guess.

Lots more “hand me downs” from family and close friends - both clothes and toys.

I remember being aware of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and asking lots of “why / how” questions.

My memories are fond but that’s probably because I was only 7 when the decade ended!

Ellmau oh yes! The Net Book Agreement! I had forgotten about that!

Do you remember mail-order book clubs? I used to belong to one. You got an initial batch of books as an introductory offer, then one book each month. You could opt for the recommended book of the month or change to an alternative. It was the way that many people bought books in the '80s.

The music was obviously fabulous but also you could be an individual & have your own look. Teens weren't identikits like they are now.

Omg yes computer games on floppy disks that took forever to load! We had an Atari
My mum thought spaghetti bolognese was exciting and did a bad mock Italian accent when she made it, 10yo me -

I do think that your age at the time is a key factor. Someone upthread said the eighties were smelly and smokey, but that is how I remember the fifties. My memory of being afraid of nuclear war are from the fifties and the early sixties. The sixties for me were about leaving home and going to university, plus fashion, films and music, the seventies about life with a young family and starting my career and the eighties were when our careers took off, we had more money and travelled a lot.
It is always interesting to read about people's experience and memories, but there is a danger about extrapolating from the personal to the universal. 😊

Princess Diana, Big Hair, Ronald Reagan.
YMCA, Moon Unit Zappa, ShuddupaYouFace, DuranDuran, Sting, Madonna.
Anchor Man 2 movie has a lot of great period touches for the 1980s. I got hyper excited at the Garfield book.
Recurring fear of nuclear war. Naked Gun has a lot of good period cultural references.

(California) My schools were full of out & proud gay kids.

English DH is astonished to learn I was taught to touch type in a regular school class (but no cooking, textiles or DT classes). I was just a bit too young to get drivers' education provided in school, too.

I was in programming summer school in 1983 (but computers were not common in schools yet).

Textbooks for every subject; we made so we could decorate them & return the actual book in good condition.

In class you took notes about what was told to you or written on chalkboard; no one gave you a printed out version of the powerpoint presentation to annotate.

Uni: 3 x Sliding up/down chalkboards written on rampantly during lectures; my nearest Uni still has such sliding boards in largest lecture theatres.

No hummus Oh yes there was! One of my flatmates went vegan and lived on the bloody stuff!

I remember spending most of the 80s as a teen wishing I lived in the 60s. You were either a Durannie or a Spandau Ballet fan. The Smiths came along and saved me.

Little bowls of pot pouri everywhere in my mum and dad's house and the shop Athena was popular. And posters of Pierot.

Red and black striped wallpaper and matching duvet sets.

People having massive stereo systems and messing with the dials and balancing them out all the time.
Sending your friends mix tapes in the post!

Living on a full student grant with no debts.
Ringing your family once week on a pay phone.

I remember when Filofaxes came out and them being a real craze. Same with ra ra skirts, then puffball skirts and massive wide black elastic belts that fastened on hinges and pulled you in at the waist, usually worn with a body so you had to keep popping prestuds and hinges every time you went to the loo.

Also when Frankie Said ... T shirts and Deeley Boppers on your head became a thing and everyone in Wales on holiday in whatever year it was wearing them.

Everywhere hair spray and mousse and perms.

Boys had awful hair, cut over ears and longish and wore Miami vice/ Durannie type jackets rolled up at sleeve and very thin Ties if they went to nightclubs, which always shut at 2am and used lots of smoke machines. Inevitably they'd put slow dances on at the end. Usually Phyllis Nelson's Move Closer.

Big thing about plants. Everyone had indoor plants. A Yukka plant was the popular choice.

Smoking in the pub like a trooper. Everyone smoking and no gyms.

I think there was less pressure. No one was interested in having big tits or big lips or BOTOX or documenting every inch of their lives on social media or being tagged everywhere you go.

So essentially freedom and privacy. Not as intense as my daughter's generation. So in that sense I'm grateful for that.

We had a cabinet in our hallway solely to store the yellow pages and phone books.

Wow I could talk for ages about the 80s. Like others I was 5-15. Completely agree about Findus crispy pancakes 😆

Besides those, normal food for us was Mac cheese, cauliflower cheese, eggy bread, spaghetti Bol, chilli, shepherds pie. Roast on Sundays. Delia was big! And Freezer Cookbooks. I was lucky my DM and DGM were amazing cooks.

Games: pretend play ruled. We also had a game based on Dukes of Hazzard. 40-40, Polo, Grandma’s Footsteps were big at school. We played out at lot! Had Care Bears, I loved Barbie dolls and Sindy accessories. Strawberry Shortcake, Star Wars figures! Loads of board games especially Game of Life & Ratrace. Garbage Pail Kid stickers; Cheeky Charles made me laugh the most.

Tech: ZX Spectrum! We played loads; Horace Goes Skiing, River Rescue, Manic Miner, Orc Attack, some game with a character called Photon Man that involved the Raiders destroying the Operatives computer. My best friend and I conquered Penetrator through dual control; we also went berserk the one day we destroyed the Operatives’ computer; the on-screen celebrations were brilliant.

Loading games by cassette; the onscreen wide red and turquoise bands followed by the narrow yellow and dark blue bands.

Also those hand held consoles; I had Parachute and my sister Donkey Kong. The appreciation of the improvements in graphics was something I feel lucky to have gone through. Pong, with its daytime/sunset/nighttime backdrops of famous world landmarks I remember loving and being really excited to see which came next. My sister and I played this game The Dagger of Amon Rah towards late 80s and the graphics on that were another step up.

Media: I vividly remember Return of the Jedi; I loved Luke and thought Leia was sooo beautiful. Grange Hill, Battle of the Planets, Ulysses, Dungeons and Dragons, Penelope Pitstop, Oliver Postgate shows, Crackerjack, Cheggars Plays Pop, being terrified of the Vortex on the Adventure Game. Mr Men Seesaw programme at lunchtime. Chockablock, Button Moon, the Flumps, the Fraggles and Muppets in general. Speak-singing in films! Like The Slipper and the Rose. Plain Jane Superbrain’s transformation in Neighbours.

Fashion: lots of bright colours and ra-ra skirts. Plastic beads and chiffon scarves. A pattern of paint splashes known as ‘scritti’. Puccini Peach lipstick from No. 7. Body Shop White Musk scent; although def remember Anaïs Anaïs too (pronounced Annay Annay until some posh person corrected us). Leggings coming into fashion.

News and fears: Def nuclear war and AIDS. Challenger and both Royal Weddings. I remember loving Di’s dress but I preferred Fergie’s when it came along; I loved the bumblebees embroidered on her train. I don’t remember much news; I don’t think I liked it. I do have some recollection of the miners strike and the Falklands but not much. I remember the raising of the Mary Rose.

Entertainment: Roller discos (Love and Pride and You Spin me Round were the ‘must skate’ songs as I recall). Swimming centres with slides were big treats. MacDonalds, sadly. Cinema. We still went to a lot of National Trust places, but we mostly played and went on walks.

Education: The cane was still occasionally used. I remember health campaigns like ‘Not so fast Nick-o-Teen!’; the terrifying ones about trespassing on railway lines and the ‘Natural Born Smoker’ ones (shudder), Tufty Club and Green Cross Code for road safety. We did Normans in Y3 but I can’t remember any other years. SMP cards in maths. Cycling Proficiency test.

Oh and have flying cars

What a lovely, nostalgic thread this is! I was a young mum in the '80s and much of the music and events of the early years of that decade passed me by, as I was too occupied with the day to day life of SAH motherhood.

Life was simpler than today. Most things (housing being an exception) were much more expensive than they are nowadays and people had less money on the whole, so we made do with 2nd hand stuff a lot of the time and we ate simply. Our house had no central heating and our son was born in mid winter, so we had to buy a plug in heater for his room (overnight temperature in the house was sometimes below freezing in other upstairs rooms, as there was no heating upstairs at all). I recall one morning going into the bathroom to empty the nappy bucket (nappies from the previous day/night were soaked in a bucket of water with Napisan) and finding it frozen solid and the loo was also frozen!

It seems very different to me, although I'm not that much older than you OP. My memories as a child/ preteen:
Cassette tapes and video tapes that you had to rewind to listen to / watch again, which took ages. Music tapes cost a lot of pocket money.
No Internet. People read books and magazines. 4 channels on tv - Neighbours was cool if you were 8-18 yo, Top of the Pops mandatory. You put up posters of your favourite pop stars that came free with Fast Forward magazine. Going to hang out at friends' houses or the youth club instead of communicating online. Or phoning them on landline phones (with my parents and sisters nagging me to get off). Having to physically write down your homework, no option to check online, and physically writing your essays. No online resources to study from, whether schoolwork or hobbies.
Food was very different, much less exciting. 'Avocado pear' was something you only had at naice restaurants as a starter, probably with prawn cocktail. My mum pretty much made meat and two veg, shepherds pie, etc, chicken nuggets and chips, Findus crispy pancakes.
I feel ooooold now
More seriously, I was convinced we were either going to all die/ become monster zombies in a nuclear war, or colonise space. Tomorrow's World on tv fascinated me. I couldn't have envisaged the Internet, but thought by now we would have holographic watches and wear cool metallic clothes

Ellmau the issuing of library books was called "banging and stamping". 😀
Waterstones started in 1982 and was wonderful.

I'm 50 years old and the 80s to me don't feel different from now, except that everything seems more 'luxurious'.
Cars are nicer, buses are like coaches and coaches are like luxury airlines!
I remember sitting on horrible faux leather seats on a double decker, upstairs with my mum and everyone was smoking.
Couldn't see out it was that bad!
My first job in an office was being surrounded by smokers.
So in essence, the 80s were dirty, rough, smoky, smelly and the fashion was awful, but the music tolerable.
The one thing I miss about that era was that you had more freedom, no mobile phones and no internet.

But in the long run, things seem better now, but we have lost a lot of nature and freedom along the way.

I found quite a bit of exam pressure but then I was a straight A student in a high performing state school. I’m not sure it was across the board though. My son is in s2 and he’s already talking about his highers I don’t think that had even crossed my mind in s2.

Also I left school after 5th year once I’d done my first sitting of 5 highers. It seems much more unlikely to do that these days.

Library cards were not plastic, but actual cardboard. Children had a different type to adults and you weren't supposed to borrow adult books until you were 12. You could only have three books out at a time unless you borrowed someone else's ticket.

The library catalogue was not on computer, but on a load of index cards in wooden drawers. You could request anything not in your library via inter-library loan.

Books were sold at the RRP only, no discounts allowed. But I think paperbacks were cheaper compared to income at full price; I would never have considered buying a hardback, but my pocket money nd Christmas money allowed me to get several pbs a month. Actual prices obv rose over the decade.

There were a fair number of second hand bookshops, not charity shops but run as a business. Or shops which sold new books on the ground floor but had a used section upstairs. Bookshops were mainly independent apart from WH Smiths; Waterstones didn't exist (maybe it opened towards the end of the 80s?)

Oh god yeah photos. Pre digital photos were all posed and stilted and you got into trouble if you “wasted” one of the photos by carrying on! Sending off the film or spending ruinous amounts to get the 1 hour service in Boots!

Renting videos for a day or 2 instead of buying them. Getting fined if you hadn’t rewound the tape

Ford Escorts

Betamax VCR

Magazines - Jackie, Patches, Blue Jeans. Then Just 17 and More! “Position of the Fortnight” in the latter.

Spending your pocket money on scented rubbers and pencils and then as you got older on Dewberry stuff from the body shop

Wimpy

No nurseries at primary schools

I started nursery in 1976 and it was attached to my primary school! 🤣

I was late teens by the end of the 80s, I don't remember feeling under the same kind of exam/school pressure that teens do now. Even at a grammar school, no one really mentioned exams until you got under the 4th year (yr 10 now) and there was certainly no constant tracking of grades, pressure to improve. You just got what grade you got according to how hard you worked and that was it! No OFSTED or league tables either so I'm sure that had something to do with it. And no-one seems to blame the teachers if you didn't do well either.

When I look back at photos we all looked so...natural compared to many teen girls now. There were some that wore a lot of make up, spent hours on hair but nothing compared to the level of perfection many teen girls expect of themselves now!

On the whole I loved being a teen then but sexism and racism was rife and everywhere was smoky. I remember watching films at the cinema in a haze

I’ve only watched the first episode of season 3 and the most accurate bit of that is Nancy’s experiences at the newspaper 🙄

Photos! No digital photos then. Some people had expensive kit, but most had a simple point-and-shoot. Film came in cartridges which you put in the back of the camera, with 12 or 24 exposures usually on each film - think the max was 48? Then you had to get the pics printed out at Boots or a specialist photo shop, which cost much more than the film, and you still had to pay for wasted exposures etc. So you had to be much more choosy with what you took. There was one sort of camera new in the early 80s which produced an on the spot print, small and square, but not great quality and they';ve faded badly since.

You had to have a separate flash function for indoor shots - a cube you stuck on top. Later in the decade more expensive cameras had the flash included.

Then you stuck your photos in an album to keep - either a scrapbook type album or one with plastic sleeves.

No selfies except in photo booths for passport photos - these still exist. You had to get someone else to take a photo of you.