The technology of the eighties might have amazed us, but there was more to life than what follows in this editorial.
Despite the fact that there was no internet, no Xboxes and no 500-channel satellite, there was still a lot of fun to be had in the 80s. I’m going to take a moment to talk about the state of technology back in the day and how it affected us as kids
Television
Fraggle Rock | Cable was limited to a mere 13 channels. We had the three Canadian channels, the three American channels, and public television. There were specialty channels, but you had to have a set-top descrambler to see the likes of MTV and the movie channel. So we didn’t watch a lot of TV. When we did, it was a family affair. We’d all sit down on Sunday night to watch the Muppet Show, then Fraggle Rock. Other than that, the only regular TV that I can remember watching was Saturday morning cartoons. I guess that’s why I’m not a fat-ass. |
Satellite TV was not unheard of, but only the rich people had it. It required a fucking full sized radio telescope in your backyard, and this gave you a few extra channels. I watched what was (at the time) the funniest movie ever, Eddie Murphy Raw, on sat TV at a friend's house.
If you weren't rich enough for a satellite dish and you wanted to watch movies at home, there were two competing technologies at the time – VHS and Betamax. Guess which one my parents bought?
A Betamax VCR | Our Betamax VCR weighed a good 50 pounds. The small beta tapes loaded into the top. The remote control was a single plunger-style button (“pause”) with a 10 foot wire that had to be physically plugged into the back of the VCR. This expensive device lasted only a few years since Betamax eventually lost the format wars and we had to buy a VHS. Sadly, this was the first in a long series of bad choices that my parents made with regard to new technologies. |
Video Games
Combat for Atari | Before the release of the original NES, there was a different kid in town – the Atari. It was similar to satellite TV in that every kid in the neighbourhood would gather at the one guy’s house who had an Atari. We’d play graphical masterpieces like Combat, Astanax or Space Invaders. We wouldn’t play for long though, as these games get really old really fast. |
If Atari wasn’t doing it for us, and we had some change, we’d head over to an arcade. There aren’t too many of these left, but back in the eighties an arcade was
the social hub for kids. The likes of PacMan and Double Dragon could be played for 25 cents, or billiards for a dollar (every kid thought he was a pool shark back in the day).
The release of the NES pretty much destroyed arcades. One by one, kids begged their parents for an NES until they gave in. I asked my parents for one too, and guess what they bought me? That’s right – a fucking Sega Master System. Gay.
ComputersMy parents were the proud owners of a Commodore VIC 20. As the successor to the Commodore PET (a beast of a computer that was used in my school), the VIC 20 had 5 KB of RAM and almost no ability to display graphics. RPGs were text-based back then, but still fun.
I remember the heady days when I received my first computer – a Commodore 64. Remember LOAD “*”,8,1 and all that shit? Who else wasted their time learning BASIC back in the day? Anyways, the games weren’t too bad (at least there were graphics). The original Test Drive, Winter Games and Ace of Aces entertained us for hours. We were content with our C64s, that is, until one of our friends stepped it up a notch.
Shadow Of The Beast for Amiga | Few things caused as much neighbourhood hype as when one of our friends got an Amiga 500. It didn’t look too special, except for the 3.5” disks (which I had never seen before). We all marveled at the fact that the Amiga would load a program from floppies automatically – no need to enter commands. Then he fired up “Shadow Of The Beast” (at left). We oooed and ahhhed at what were, at the time, unbelievable graphics and sound. Sure, the game was impossibly hard, but we had never seen graphics like that before. For us, the Amiga remained the gold standard for computers until the end of the 80s (not a single guy I knew had an IBM PC or an Apple). |
By the way, for anyone complaining about load times when playing modern games, back then you could wait for 5 minutes for a game to load. Programs running off of cassette tapes could take even longer. The above mentioned Shadow of the Beast required 3 floppy disks, and you’d have to change disks mid-game from time to time.
Online
A typical BBS game menu | The internet would not be made available to the public for some time, but you could still communicate “online” in a different way. The same kid who had the Amiga also had a 2400 baud modem. We used this to connect to BBSs. Even our small town had a few, my favourite of which was called “The Gates Of Oblivion.” It didn’t offer a hell of a lot – mostly text-based games and forums. There was no porn, since a .gif image took a long, long time to download with a 2400 baud modem. Still, BBSs whet our appetites for the soon-to-follow Internet. |
Music
The Sony Walkman | No, I never had a huge boombox, but I did have a Walkman. This beast weighed at least half a pound, required 4 AA batteries, and had the ugliest, most useless headphones known to man. Still, it allowed me to listen to cassette tapes on the go. We were immune to the shitty sound of cassette tapes back then, since we hadn’t yet been spoiled by listening to CDs. |
At HomeOne of the most mind-bending technologies of the 80s was the microwave oven. This incredible device could cook food without heat, and it only took a fraction of the time that it took to cook something on the stove. Back then, there were high hopes for microwaves. Ours came with a huge cookbook featuring a roasted turkey on the cover. Fools like us thought that this device would replace conventional ovens, but these dreams were dashed when it turned out that microwaved foods taste like dried-up shit.
An 80s era cordless phone | Another marvel that arrived on the scene in the late eighties was the cordless telephone. Our first cordless handset was HUGE. It had a retractable antenna on it that extended to about 2 feet, and the range was pitiful (100 feet max). You could talk wirelessly, but if you wanted to walk AND talk, you were out of luck. You actually had to be standing still for the phone to work properly. As for cellular phones – I hadn’t yet seen one, but rumour had it that they existed and allowed one to make calls from your car. Imagine that!. |
Now don’t be fooled by this editorial. Technological advances such as those listed above played very small parts in our lives. You were more likely to find us outside rather than plunked in front of an idiot box or computer. In the 80s, the world was still an impossibly big place, and we were determined to explore every bit of it either by bicycle or on foot. We traveled around town stirring shit up, getting in fights, or just exploring for the sake of exploring. Those adventures are too numerous to mention here; I’ll save that for another editorial.