With apologies to my younger readers.

I miss the 80s. I spent my formative years in the 80s, in the US. I
went to high school, got my first computer, had sex for the first
time, started driving, got drunk for the first time, got high for
the first time, had my first girlfriend, and went away to college
(not necessarily in that order).

Of course people will accuse me of looking back with rose-colored
glasses. What was bad about the 80s? Let's see...recession, high
interest rates...mullets...expensive long distance phone calls...gas
prices...Reagan, Challenger...still I can't say that since then we
haven't been through equally fucked-up decades. Hell, the one we're
in right now is one for the record books.

Is it true that as you age, you look back with fondness at the prime
decade of your youth? Perhaps but not always. Sometimes things
_were_ better.

So what was good about the 80s? Well, if you were financially
astute, high interest rates were a boon. Many a boomer retired on
money they invested in US savings bonds. Savings accounts were a
thing. Sadly, I was too young and too self-involved back then to
even consider retirement planning.

TV - sorry, no this was bad in the 80s also.

For music, we had Neil Young and Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, and no
one was auto-tuned. What they sang was what you heard. Sometimes it
was good.

Analog phones - holy hell, it used to be that you could call someone
and actually understand them. What was a voice codec? No one knew,
thankfully. You could dial '0' and speak to a real human, for
free. 411. You could take a phone off the hook. Someone else's
long-distance corporate calling cards.

Home computers - the first one I owned was a Commodore 64, although
I had played with Vic-20s and TRS-80s before that. Computers were
simple, back then you could hack _everything_. No hardware or
software was off-limits, there was no DRM, no "trusted computing". I
mean the C64 booted into a BASIC REPL, for fuck's sake. They were
inviting you to program it. Nowadays everything is a black box,
locked tight and certain to spy on you. Stallman was right.

More? Let me think...if you were in the Boy Scouts, you did a lot of
wilderness camping and hiking. Helicopter parents were not
invited. The cover of your handbook was a Norman Rockwell painting,
not a glossy marketing photo-shoot. It may have also contained
actually useful information.

What else? There were no cell phones. People went on trips and used
real paper maps, as opposed to driving into lakes. There was email
if you were at a university or government lab or large company, but
no spam. You could go home from work and be assured of not being
bothered by work. You could fix cars yourself. If you got in a car
crash, your car was likely made of steel and tended not to crumple
(ignoring the fact that no one wore seat-belts, I know, still the
cars were tanks). If you landed a steady job in the 80s it very
likely offered a generous pension plan. Well-funded public
libraries. The internet (as opposed to the world-wide web, which as
we all know came later and was/is a disaster). BBSs. SDF - it's
amazing that SDF has been around since the 80s, not that I was a
member back then, but still, amazing.

I keep threatening my wife to "live" in the 80s again as a fun
escape. It would be the merest shell of its former self,
unfortunately. More's the pity.