Computers
My family got a computer in the mid 1980s. It looked like this:
It did nothing. Well, that's not exactly true. I played chess on it. You could also type literally anything into it and get "command not found". Good times! Also, if you dropped, touched or even looked at the 5.25-inch floppy disks, they wouldn't work.
Toys
I stood in line at the Consumers Distributing for what felt like 6 days but was probably 20 minutes to try to purchase G.I. Joe action figures. The catalogue would always show awesome action figures that they never carried. To this day, when I hear "Consumers Distributing" I smile with delight that the company went bankrupt. It feels so good. I found these action figures at Sears (they were $3.00 each) and played with them until they literally fell apart. Snake Eyes once disarmed a nuclear bomb that Cobra Commander had planted in my bath tub. Good work Joes!
Saturday Morning Cartoons
Once upon a time, long ago, kids used to get up early and watch TV on the weekends. Superfriends was awesome, although I wondered why Superman needed a wimpy guy like Batman all in the same city. Superman was punching asteroids and Batman had a rope and Robin, who was a teenager in really short shorts. It was less weird back then, I promise. Aquaman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern... they were all just hanging out in the Hall of Justice, also known as the Greatest Place On The Planet. Why were the super villains so dumb as to attack the one city on Earth that happened to house all the heroes in one place?
Cheesy writing... activate!
My favourite cartoon was this one called "Dungeons And Dragons". The general rule was to not bug me at 10:00 am because there was a guy with a magic bow and a unicorn as a pet! There was no VCR—life did not begin until 11:00 am on Saturday when the boring news or basketball game came on.
Comic Books
Spider-Man got a new suit in the mid-1980s. It is still awesome even all these years later!
I find it weird that I think of Spider-Man still wearing this suit, even though it has been over 20 years since he wore it in the comics. Even more disturbingly, I don't find it weird that a guy in tight spandex is swinging around New York City. Totally normal.
Music
Since there was no internet, and there weren't CDs, I spent New Year's Eve of 1985 making a double cassette mix tape of the best songs of the year courtesy of the radio and my parent's stereo system. It was a real art taping REO Speedwagon and Dire Straits in real time and then quickly editing down the DJ's comments before the next song came on.
Literature
I know that I can handle whatever life throws at me, because I learned many decision-making skills on board a spaceship, in an Old West town and in a submarine. Thank you Choose Your Own Adventure. Plus I got abducted by aliens. Great books.
The best part was that after I got killed or the story ended, I would tell myself that I didn't REALLY choose that ending... in fact, yeah, in fact I really chose the OTHER ending! Yeah, that's the ticket.
Wrestling
In the 1980s, wrestling was completely real.
Christmas
I want to end with the greatest Christmas present that I ever got—a tabletop hockey set. Unfortunately, there was no way to know which two random teams were in the box—I got the Montreal Canadiens and Boston Bruins. I paid extra money next spring and got a bunch of extra hockey players sporting the colours of the Hartford Whalers, Colorado Rockies, N.Y. Islanders and many more. Strangely, Coleco spent all their money on the jerseys and had no money for different faces. They were all the exact same guy—I wonder if Larry the face model (I am assuming that was his name) is now a billionaire because every NHL player had his likeness in the 1980s. Awesome times! The only thing that was more challenging than scoring a goal was trying to find the hockey puck after it fell under the couch.
And then the 1990s happened and now we live in the future. I recommend spending a couple of minutes to think about the awesome toys and games that you had as a kid—it also helps us to appreciate the technology of today—I can better appreciate the high-speed Wifi and multi-gigabyte computers that we use to share cat photos with people in other countries. I Can Haz Technology Indeed, LOL Cat. I think it was Winston Churchill who said "those who cannot remember the past... are destined to look it up using The Google."