| Author |
jin
Joined: 28 Dec 2015
Posts: 30
11 Jan 2016 08:15 |
|
| Message |
 nike air max womens clearance
|
   |
|
What was life in the late 80's and early to mid 90's war
Well for me during that time I realized girls existed and stopped playing with my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I got my driver's license in 1994 (I think); there were no strings attached for 16 year old drivers and gas was only a buck a gallon. Damn! I'm sounding like an old person!
Sometime nike air max 2015 black/blue around 1993 94? my High School set up a class called "Lab 2000" which left me fully expecting to be an adult in a futuristic (and optimistic) techno wonderland where all my dreams would come true. There wasn't anywhere near as much pessimissm or "apocalyptic thinking" and the word "war" meant an extremely short, extremely 1 sided non stop news extravaganza (Operation Desert Shield, for example). It seemed life could only get better; that I could only get richer as I got older too.
Also, there wasn't anywhere near as much diversity in my area (Salt Lake City) and I almost never heard foreign languages spoken out in public. There were about half as many people here too.
It really doesn't take long for the world to completely change. I imagine it will be just as different and go in a totally unexpected direction in another 20 years.
People were much more tuned into mainstream culture, if only because you only had the main 3 TV stations and a few cable station that everyone watched. nike air jordans shoes People read the newspaper and the nightly news for their information, or went to the library.
Music also was very different. These things called "CD's" were replacing cassettes, though most people had Walkman's for their portable music since portable CD players were a new thing and usually skipped it you barely bumped them. Glam rock and "hair bands" were on the way out and grunge/alternative were in. Hip hop and rap were gaining a lot in popularity. Michael Jackson was still popular (King of Pop in the late 80's) and so was Madonna. The Seattle scene spread into a cultural movement with flannel popular, "slackers" and "Generation X" becoming catchphrases.
The world was undergoing a transformation from the Cold War era to a world of free democracy. The Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed and one by one the old Soviet states had revolutions whereby they overthrew communism as their form of government. This brought about relatively peaceful times (minus Gulf War 1, I suppose). Terrorism wasn't really a threat in the collective minds of the people aside from a few isolated incidents like the World Trade Center bombing and later the Oklahoma City bombing.
Today's mainstays of technology were pretty under the radar. The internet existed but was Nike Air Max 2016 only something that a few intellectuals on college campuses used. There were no web browsers until Mosaic was invented in the early 90's, which led to Netscape Navigator. My high school had a computer lab with the some Macs where you could do basic word processing, but nothing fancy. Gaming was starting to become more popular, though. Nintendo gave way to the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo, which my friends and I spent countless hours playing at each other's homes. The graphics were primitive by today's standards.
Nobody had cell phones except a few really rich people who might have had car phones. Those things were huge and bulky, though, and had limited range. People did start getting pagers when I was in high school in the early 90's. You'd still start dating a girl by "getting her digits", though, and that meant her writing them down on a piece of paper.
In sports, most of the top name players were probably on steroids, but nobody knew it yet (or really cared). Michael Jordan was probably the biggest celebrity in the world. Nobody cared about golf except a few old rich guys because there was no Tiger Woods. Auto racing and tennis seemed more popular then. The major sports were going through a lot of expansion into new cities at that time. College sports seemed more pure, and nobody in college basketball jumped straight to the NBA. Most players played all 4 years of college.
As far as other things, well, most people probably weren't as knowledgeable about things as they are now (thanks to Google, the internet, etc.). There were few beers snobs or wine snobs or food snobs. People drank what they knew and there was little variety available as compared to now. People probably ate out less, too. Certain ethinc foods hadn't really caught on yet, either (Thai, Vietnamese, Sushi) except in places like LA or New York, maybe. Surprisingly, though people paid less attention to what they ate, the obesity rate was much lower than it is now (but rising). A college degree meant a lot more and unemployment was low, save for a brief spot in the very early 90's where there was a slight recession. Overall, the US economy was good, though, and it would hum through the 90's at least until the dot com bubble burst.
As far as equality, well, Rodney King happened, followed by OJ, so that was not good. People in general were not nearly as accepting of GLBT. Women probably had a little less opportunity than now, though I think it was easier to raise a family off one income then. Things seemed cheaper as a % of income. I know the cost of gas, healthcare, and education were a lot more reasonable.
Other countries hated us a lot less and the world was a little less complicated than it is now.
There's a lot more, but as someone who grew up in the late 80's and 90's in a midwestern suburb of Chicago I think that pretty well sums it up from my perspective and is probably somewhat respresentative.
The late 80s set up the very early 1990's. It is a time to itself. It is not the 1990's everyone knows (the Clinton years) or the Reagan years so much. '87 '93 was a very unique time. You knew you count on seeing The California Raisins, Energizer Bunny, Spot (7up), and the Crash Dummies during commercial break. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were not just comic book characters. The original NES when you got home with a friend. Taking the first Gameboy to school. High hair and recognizable prime time characters. Everything went downhill in 1993.
People used newspaper libraries microfish ( imagine a book on camera negative laid out in a grid pattern requiring a small projector to view the pages) encyclopedias and books. Clothing styles were. Anywhere from Levi's to baggy parachute pants. Neon stuff was way in, as far as cars 200 mph was nirvana and the corvette had less HP than a V6 Hyundai and would probably have its azz handed to it by the average family car today. 17inch wheels were unheard of and came only on ultra rare supercars. GMC Syclones pick up trucks were beating Ferraris and every cop detective thought they were Crockett and Tubbs.
I can't say what others lives were like but in 1980 I had been out of the military service and married for 8 years and had graduated with a MS. My daughter was 6. I began a career in biology that same year after moving across three states making about $12,000/year doubling that each year with overtime in a Gulf Coast seaport. By 1984, we had moved back west across two states and by 1986 across seven states to the mid Atlantic region. In 1995, we moved back across eight states to the southwest where I retired in 1999.
What was life like during the mid 1980s to early 1990s? I don't know. I was way too busy to pay attention.
The internet was just beginning to get popular in the early to mid 90s. No one but uber nerds or people looking for naked pictures of Sandra Bullock (and those were usually the same people) took it very seriously.
The economy was better and people were generally more optimistic about the future.
Popular music SUCKED. I mean it was really, really horrible. Janet Jackson and Milli Vanilli took home Grammy Awards. MTV was phasing out actually playing music, which was a shame. For folks like Cheap Nike Air Max 2016 me who lived in small towns who only got Top 40 radio, MTV was the only place to discover exciting new music or the old classics. "Alternative" was a buzzword for a while, which basically meant overly produced corporate designed punk; or what some executive in a suit and tie thought punk was. Then grunge came along and saved rock and roll. Love it or hate it, say what you will about grunge, but it did do one thing: It got all those frickin' hair bands in leotards off the radio.
On weekends, people still went to the movies or rented movies at a local video rental store. That's dead now. I remember when I went to see Tim Burton's Batman movie, the theater was shoulder to shoulder PACKED. And if you wanted to rent the latest VHS releases on a Friday or Saturday night, you'd better call and reserve it.
Clinton was a never ending source of entertainment. It was like having a horny Bugs Bunny in the White House (gray fur and all), while Newt Gingrich played the part of Yosemite Sam.
Thursday night really was "must see" TV for most young people. Seinfeld, Friends, and Frasier. Nerds fought over which was better: classic Star Trek or Star Trek: The Next Generation.
There were still actual card catalogues at the library.
I thought it was largely a rather heady and, in retrospect, naive time. The collapse of the Iron Curtain and the subsequent breakup of the Soviet Union meant that a huge geopolitical challenge simply melted away.
A lot of that was due to the adroit foreign policy of the first President Bush. I think historians are going to be very kind to him, given how he managed to navigate three huge challenges without World War III breaking out. Because the liberation of eastern Europe, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the first Gulf War could have all wound up being far, far worse. The fact that only one of the previous posters even mentioned these tectonic shifts in world history speaks volumes about how perfectly he managed things.
After the Gulf War, I remember Congress speculating over how to spend the Peace Dividend, the savings we would enjoy from our reduced need for armed forces. Now look at us.
|
|
Search
