I feel like the 80s were the best time to be alive in American history...

I feel like the 80s were the best time to be alive in American history. It was liberal enough where it wasn't authoritarian and conservative enough were it wasn't completely cucked. The cost of living wasn't that bad and work wasn't that hard to find. It had some some the greatest movies, television, and music and you saved up some money you could have stuff like VCR and computers with usenet.

No internet faggot

90s were even better

>No internet faggot
usenet faggot

What's to go back to the days of this

you're retarded

Fuck you luddite

Cities were riddled with crime everyone fked to suburbs work was hard to find and a fucking vcr cost about $1000 in today's money

It stinks

>vcr cost about $1000
No shit, that's why you save money. That was top notch technology.
>Cities were riddled with crime
They're not now?
>work was hard to find
citations?

My guess is OP was born in the 90s.
I was born in the 80s, and feel the same way about the 70s.

I thought about the 70's as well but technology wasn't really good enough. Early 90's work as well.

computers and television cost a fucking fraction of what they did then

Crime is at an all time low since the 50s

All major cities are having a renaissance food is 1000 times better quality more abundant and more diverse then any other point in human history.

what are you fucking homeless?
I've never lived in a city
>food
seems like a fair trade

in fact I've never lived in an area with 5000+ people

Actually remembering a world without computers and Internet everywhere, I'd choose that in a heartbeat.

I prefer the 80's because """internet""" and computers existed but they were too complicated for normalfags to understand. What was life for a non-normie/robot/wizard/etc like in the 70s?

...

I prefer the 50's myself. Economy was booming post war, the middle class soared during this era. Sex also became more mainstream and acceptable during the late 50's. Plus there was no internet which means none of you fags would be fags

Guyses, don't you think the 70's were actually THE decade to live? Come on, the whole history of rock was written in the 70's, and all that came along...

The 50's were good economy wise but there was the threat of nuclear annihilation. Of course it didn't happen but you wouldn't have known that then. In the 70's and 80's the soviet union was pretty much done for. But I see your point.

Music was awful except for a few exceptions. Reagan did his level best to fuck the middle class and laid the groundwork for al Qaeda. Fashion was stupid. It did gives is AIDS and crack. The worst part was getting crabs every three months. Bald pussy is hygienic pussy.

fashion has always been stupid
also
>3dpd
kill yourself

Civilisation reached the high tide mark in the 1980s
90s was the beginning of the world turning to Satan

i fail to see how al-qaeda, crack and aids concerns me

I was 14-24 in the 80s.

>I feel like the 80s were the best time to be alive in American history.

It was okay, but I had older cousins, and friends had older brothers. All agreed 70s were better than the 80s.

>It was liberal enough where it wasn't authoritarian and conservative enough were it wasn't completely cucked.

No, there was a lot of Reagan bullshit controlling society. Just Say No, Wall Street movie, etc. This wasn't a balanced time - the conservatives had a lot of power.

>The cost of living wasn't that bad and work wasn't that hard to find.

Nice stuff is always expensive and you always have to work a hard job.
The main difference today is that everyone spends more money on non-essentials -
Starbucks coffee every day, Netflix plan, cell phone plan, wireless plan, cable plan, etc.
Back then you didn't waste your money on this stuff.
People lived in 2000 sq ft houses with 1 1-2 baths,
instead of the 4000 sq ft houses with 4 baths, huge living rooms,
granite counters, etc.
The cost of living wasn't really lower, it's just that people were okay with less.

>It had some some the greatest movies

This is absolutely goddamn true. Best movies you'll see IMO, especially for action and the few fantasy ones.

>television

Naw, man TV really sucked. There were a couple of stand-outs like Moonlighting, but TV was a wasteland. Today is the golden age if you like that kind of entertainment.

>music

80s music was alright, especially in the 80-83 years, but it rapidly turned to hair bands, early rap, and bubblegum mush. 60s-70s had much better music.

>VCR

yeah, most people had this and it helped

>computers with usenet

Wow, you are really off base here. Usenet existed,
but the average person had no clue it existed
or affordable access to it.
The best you could really hope for was for rich
parent's who would shell out for a PC and modem
so you could access a BBS.

I had usenet access in 89, but that was at a software company that was on the Internet.

>average person had no clue it existed
that's why I would've liked it. How much did usenet service cost then? Were there any ways to steal it?

IIRC Usenet required a relatively large bandwidth, disk space, and a direct internet connection.

What you'd really want is dial-up access to an account on a mainframe that had those qualities.

I had never heard of being able to purchase that kind of account at the time.

I think the best you could realistically do would be to have a parent
at a high-tech company or university that was on Usenet,
and use their account for free from home.

But again, I was a comp sci major in a town with a major internet backbone during the 80s,
and I didn't even hear of it until I got employed in Silicon Valley in 89.

BTW, Usenet was basically just text emails organized into threads.

Since MIME attachments weren't mainstream yet,
to download media like a simple GIF image
required the concatenation of 3-5 separate Usenet posts,
with the binary data UUEncoded as ASCII characters.
Once you assembled the separate 1/5, 2/5, 3/5, etc posts into one file,
you would UUDecode them to output the binary image.
This really kind of sucked.

The text part of Usenet is really no different than
a very simple, privately-run text forum nowdays.

are you sure you aren't thinking of something else? I wasn't born then but I don't think usenet was THAT inclusive
Yeah, I know usenet was kinda simple but I frequent some textboards so I'm kinda used to that.

No, I'm positive I'm talking about Usenet.
I remember having to self-compile the client (I used "nn" IIRC).

I imagine lots of colleges had it during the mid-late 80s,
so you could use it via a student account,
but my college didn't.
My college was pretty short-handed for TTY terminals
so it was unlikely you'd be able to sit around for hours reading it -
anyone who had a legit class assignment or thesis could kick any casual users off the term.

but how much was personal service then? Nowadays usenet service is dirt cheap. Like 10 to 20$ a year cheap.

internet service or service like that wasnt a thing in the 80s except for some specific things like compuserve and lexis-nexis.

there was minitel in france and BBSs and compuserve and university dial-ups to get on their unix and VAX systems.

People didn't really buy or sell personal internet service then.
I imagine in really high-tech areas like Silicon Valley it was available.

Dial-up BBS was the name of the game then.
It was free and put you in contact with other people from the same town.

I remember in the early 90s when I worked overseas without Internet for a while,
I bought an AT&T email account that I could access via dialup
so that I could keep in contact with my peers.
I think that was $5-10 a month because it had to
pay for a toll-free number to connect on.

You might want to find other old guys to talk to, but -
I was working in Silicon Valley from 1989-1993 and people just didn't routinely pay for Internet then -
if you needed it, you got it from work or school.

Otherwise, you used a BBS.

And by the time ISPs were springing up around 1994, 1995, the web was able to deliver content
easier, so Usenet started dying then.

Thanks for the info, user.

>Nowadays usenet service is dirt cheap

One thing to keep in mind -
nowadays disk space is dirt cheap compared to then.

Usenet is not a gateway - Usenet is an actual copy of all the content, like keeping every email you ever received in a folder.
That's why it was so expensive then to keep a Usenet server -
you had to constantly download and save all the new messages, which cost bandwidth and disk space.

A usenet CLIENT was easier - all it really needed was a single text file that contained lines like:
>rec.arts.rgp: 11912-13145,13150-13180,13182,13185

To run a usenet client or server, IIRC correctly you had to have permission from the server
you read from in terms of blocked/allowed IP,
so setting up either required some form of payment or agreement with the company upstream.

You're welcome, wish we could sit down and talk live.

I'm off to run some errands now.

So someone like me living in rural florida would never have access to it? That kinda sucks. So I guess the mid 90's would have been best for online services.

Bye bye!

Not really the best because nobody used the internet yet.

Like many others in this thread Im going to go with the '50s 2 words:
>Tail
>Fins
Cars never looked better, Now a days were stuck riding around in grey hunks of aluminum corporations pass off as "Next-gen styling". And from the 70s-80s we were stuck with boxes for cars. So yes the 1950s were the best and still are.

>The 50's were the best

Why?

>Cars

Nice argument faggot.

I'm ok with simple looking cars. But I chose the 80's for multiple reasons. But then I found out that usenet wasn't as easy to get as I thought.

Im a simple man

You have your reasons I have mine

Listen to prog, finally take that guaranteeded goverment job

I gotta agree. The 50s would have been the best time to be alive. Fashion, design, and music were at their peak. Now instead of hiring designers, corporations churn out everything.

The 50s, a wonderful time were, if your daughter started to call herself a man you were not only allowed, but encouraged to beat her

You could get a Burger, Fries and a Drink for 10ยข

And you could not only survive but thrive on a High School diploma

Not to mention women knew their place and you could smoke in a lot more places then you could today

except for the sexism/racism

You have to remember inflation. If you wanted a burger, fries and a drink from McDonalds that'd be .39 cents or 3.96 in todays money

Sexism and Racism have always been a part of history, being human its a part of all of us, and as we've seen you cant just stop thousands of years of evolution

To be honest, most of the sexism and racism was from the South. (What a surprise!) Black musicians dominated the music scene. Women also proved themselves during WWII, working without their husbands. So, no. As long as you weren't in a backwards hick town, you were fine.