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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in the 80's and saw the original Back to the Future in a theater. When I was a kid, I remember thinking 1955 was ancient history. It's pretty wild that young people today, like the high school students I teach, feel the same about 1985 as I felt about 1955.

I wonder if there's something different though? I knew little about the 50's when I was in high school. None of my peers were "into" the 50's, and nobody was listening to music from the 50's. But my current students still love 80's metal bands like Metallica and Slayer, and 80's hip hop like NWA and others. They like 80's movies, and will have quote battles about 80's movies.

Maybe 1985 doesn't feel as far away to them, or as irrelevant, as 1955 felt to me.

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I wonder if the cultural shifts - the pivotal moments in history - were more significant between 1955-1985, than 1985-2015.

Between 1955-1985 we had the civil rights movement, the moon landing, the Vietnam War, and the final decades of the Cold War. Between 1985-2015 we've had the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall, the Gulf Wars and Afghanistan, and 9/11. I'm obviously missing some other significant events.

We also had technological shifts - 1955-1985 saw records -> tapes, but CDs and PCs were not quite massively adopted yet. 1985-2015 has seen CDs -> flash storage, mass adoption of PCs -> laptops -> smartphones, and social media apps. Much of the advances in technology have connected us geographically and temporally.

I feel like the significant events between 1955-1985 separated the youth of the 80's from the youth of the 50's, more than the significant events from 1985-2015 have. I also feel that many changes between 1985-2015 actually connected today's youth to people and events of the last 30 years.

> I wonder if the cultural shifts - the pivotal moments in history - were more significant between 1955-1985, than 1985-2015.

That might be part of it, but I think a lot of it is just that the Baby Boomers are the worst generation in history, while today's younger folks are…just younger folks.

> I think a lot of it is just that the Baby Boomers are the worst generation in history

Why do you think so?

I don't think they were the worst generation. My parents were baby boomers, and I guess I am too. A lot of Boomers grew up feeling like there was a good chance they would die, and not by natural causes. As a child I used to think what's the point to it all if Russia fires those missiles. My father used to worry about the Vietnam draft. I know both my parents tried to rebel against the strict conformist values of the 50's. Even though they didn't have access to the Internet--they did care about the environment. As to money; they knew after the hippie phase they needed it. I don't know if they will pass that money on to good causes, anymore than rich millennials? I do know this--my parents and their frends were honest, and kept their word. A handshake was substituted instead of a Lawyer when I was growing up. Neighbors would never consider suing their neighbor. They might puch said neighbr on nose after a few drinks though? So no, they weren't perfect, but they wern't the worst generation either.

I think economically the Boomers were a disaster (cashing checks that future generations now must cover).

Socially and culturally however I think they achieved many great things we take for granted (birth control access, environmentalism, civil rights advances, multiculturalism, the sexual revolution, etc).

I think this idea that the Boomers were somehow special or more damaging that newer generations is BS.

Technologically 1985-2015 seems a lot less than 55-85, video games are video games, digital networking is still digital networking, in different clothing but still. Especially if you watch Alan Kay talks showing how things in the 60s and 70s are still relevant .

I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe from a technology underpinnings perspective, but from the perspective of the mainstream consumer, things changed radically from ~1985 to the present (give or take a few years).

PCs weren't really mainstream in 1985 (though C64s and the like were relatively common)

Hardly any consumer PC could connect to the pre-WWW Internet. And I'm not sure a lot connected to online services in general. (As I recall, a service like CIS had hefty per-minute charges at the time.)

So relatively few consumers had email or any way to get information online.

VCRs existed but I'm not sure how widespread they were; I know I didn't have one until the late 80s so there was relatively little timeshifting. Cable TV was fairly widespread though.

Few had mobile phones and air charges would have been significant. Answering machines were readily available but I don't know what the penetration was.

Anyway, my basic point is that the mainstream consumer would find the pre-eighties and the post-eighties to be enormously different world from a technology perspective, especially with respect to communications. I frequently think if I were to go back to my job in 1986, I'd throw up my hands in horror at my inability to do my work--given the difficulty of getting information and generally communicating (though we did have internal email).

It might be the names:

A C64 was a PC (sensu latu) and the latest Dell/Compaq octo-core gaming rig is a PC, so same-same. Name hasn't changed, so the massive technical advance is hidden.

The BBS networks were networks and the Internet is a network, so they're the same. Never mind the fact BBS networks were lucky to get email across the country in a few days whereas Internet users can chat real-time with full voice and video around the world.

Cell phones existed in 1985. Cell phones exist now. Guess which devices can access global databases in a fraction of a second and which devices were bags which had handsets wired to them so people could make and receive phone calls from their cars!! Again, though, the name remains the same.

People in 1985 had cheap cameras. People in 2015 have... cell phones.

People in 1985 had little black books with phone numbers in them. People in 2015 have... cell phones.

People in 1985 had really nifty digital watches. People in 2015 have... cell phones.

(Really, though, the fact cell phones have kept the same name is pretty amazing, given how radically the devices themselves have changed.)

> People in 1985 had really nifty digital watches. People in 2015 have... cell phones.

...synced to really nifty digital watches.

My friend had a Casio watch that could control his VCR. To this day no wearable can control his VCR.

Maybe not his specific VCR, but I found out that Roku has a remote control app (controls it over wifi).

But you just gave me a great product idea. Wifi accessible infra red remote controls that you'd mount in various rooms in the house that contain IR-remote controlled objects (TVs, ceiling fans, etc) along with an app to control them from your handheld.

The Pebble watch can control Plex, VLC, XBMC and the WDTV over WiFi:

https://github.com/Skipstone/Skipstone

Cost makes all the difference. In the 1980's, a long-distance phone call was still a big expense. Being in a big city like New York gave you substantially more access to information than being in the rural USA. Knowledge of skills and techniques were siloed within big firms and academia, and sourcing goods would require the discovery of either local retail, or a phone or mail-order service. It's astounding that anything got done with such high costs of doing business.

Now we think nothing of calling somewhere, as long as somewhere is "within civilization" - even if it's a materially poor, remote area. It's easy to find goods online, even relatively obscure ones. And if we have a question about a specialized field, we can usually find some online source that can point us in the right direction.

What we haven't really done yet is reorganize the economy to make good use of all these new efficiencies. We still manufacture and market as before, just using some additional channels.

There were some big cultural changes, vastly increased acceptance of homosexuality and trangenderism, much less acceptance of sexism, especially in professional contexts.

Don't forget BTTF is complete with generic middle eastern terrorists, something still relevant today but absolutely unheard of in 1955.

I would say the cultural and technological shifts between 55 and 85 were far bigger.

In 55 space travel was in its infancy, segregation still existed, jet planes were in their infancy, computers were in their infancy. The impact of consumer technology was really the family TV and the car.

In a lot of ways today is just a evolutionary version of 1985, whereas 1985 was mich more of a revolution from 1955.

I think the time is right for another sequel - jumping forward to 2045.

Except BTTF doesn't mention gays or trans people. If it did, you'd see a lot more of the major cultural shifts, especially surrounding trans rights and trans acceptance.

It also doesn't focus as much on television, except to the extent that people in 1955 apparently didn't know what a "rerun" was. (Did they in reality? Honestly don't know.) The other side to that is, back in 1985, if you wanted to see an old episode of I Love Lucy or Gunsmoke (which had actually gone off the air by then, I believe) you either caught the rerun of the one episode some network was broadcasting or you were SOL. I'm not sure anyone was even selling video tapes of episodes back then, even assuming you were one of the comparatively few people to have a VHS or Beta player. Your cultural library for recent-ish pop culture was about a millimeter deep, compared to now.

So, yes, 1985 is closer to 2015 than 1955 was to 1985 in some key ways. Some of that is because you can only repeal Jim Crow laws once. Some of that is because Netflix has Punky Brewster on demand. Some of that is because most people are neither gay nor trans.

>Except BTTF doesn't mention gays or trans people. If it did, you'd see a lot more of the major cultural shifts, especially surrounding trans rights and trans acceptance.

Well, rights or no rights, they are still a quite small minority -- say 10% of the population for both. And that's the big number -- because the more relevant for a movie number, that of "trans people" + "gay people that you can tell from straight people" (e.g. with clear stylistic choices in clothes etc) is much much smaller.

So, unless the script calls for it, they'd only show one in a movie with like 5-10 people in the whole cast if they want to go out of their way to include the "token gay guy".

> except to the extent that people in 1955 apparently didn't know what a "rerun" was.

I believe they did not: teevee was broadcast live, and mostly not recorded. IIRC.

One major cultural shift -- I had my first part time office job in 85/86 (was 15/16 at the time), and remember being extremely agitated about people smoking at the desks next to me. Now you can't even smoke in a bar in most places.

In 1985, much of what we could look back on of 1955 was in black and white. Much of what we look back on in 1985 is in color. Personally, I think that plays a pretty big role in how we look back at stuff. Even much of the 60s is still in color, but the 50s - TV shows, movies, etc - the artifacts we have are largely B&W.

Standard definition video is the new black and white. At this point when I see sub-HD video it looks like an old artifact of history.

I really think the medium for recording/displaying history has a lot to do with how 'current' recent history feels. And I think b/w to color is a much bigger jump than SD -> HD.

e.g. 'WWII in color' films make things feel remarkably more relatable than B/W footage

Wouldn't be surprised if we see a similar change, if not more dramatic, if/when VR becomes a more prevalent form of media

Standard definition isn't too bad, it's that old analog video has degraded. Older videos have weird VCR artifacts from being stored on tapes for years. Older movies have the color washed out and sound distorted. Even older pictures often have weird color.

30 years from now kids will occasionally stumble upon youtube videos made today, and they will look exactly the same as when they were made. Possibly better if upscaling algorithms improve and are more common.

I hated the sampling rate far more than the low resolution. Old TV, over an antenna was maddening. On the other hand, analog movie resolution was noticeably superior in resolution until recently. The only serious artifact I recall was the jitter of text in the credits

Also, we probably have a lot more footage of 1985. Since video recording equipment got cheaper, more videos got made. Since many of those videos still exist, 1985 is still "present" in 2015 to a much greater degree than 1955 was in 1985. The same holds true for audio recordings.

I too saw it in a theater when it came out and I recall thinking "who the fuck orders a tab? Have a Diet Coke" and that it was a pretty awkward way to make the gag.

We knew about the 1950s from "Happy Days" which, in retrospect was analogous to "Freaks and Geeks" for my generation. The difference was that the media was obsessed with the baby boomers in a way that they never were about Gen X. The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.

I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign.

"I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign."

That is purely a result of your experience. You were probably a teenager in the early 80s, so you began paying attention to popular culture when the 70s music was still frequently played on pop stations.

I saw a study online that showed music hadn't changed much since then. I suppose the test would be to ask the same question of a group of people in their 20s, 30s, 40s,50s, 60s etc.

In contrast BTW, I think television from back then seems bizarre and old.

You can certainly find TV shows for the 80s that would seem pretty normal today. http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2014/11/the-80-best... There was a lot of crap but then there always is.

But you go back to the 70s and with a few exceptions, e.g. MAS*H, they start to look considerably different and less watchable by a modern audience except as cultural artifacts.

It's strange to say, but TV has gotten a lot better decade by decade. There was simply nothing remotely like "Breaking Bad" in the 60's or 70's. I recently watched an episode of "Charlies Angels" and was surprised at how insipid and simply awful it was, and it was a hit show in its days.

The proliferation of options for people to watch has forced an upgrade in the quality of the writing.

Breaking Bad is a high bar and Charlies Angels was always pretty low-brow fluff but I agree with your basic point. There were some good shows (Twilight Zone for example). But the list of shows from that era that are truly enjoyable today is pretty thin in a way that isn't true for movies. While a show like Breaking Bad isn't to everyone's taste--and arguably doesn't work without time shifting and even maybe the Internet--anyone who tries to argue that there's nothing good on TV any longer basically doesn't know what they're talking about.

Twilight Zone is an interesting case, because while it's still quite watchable today, it's very obviously a different style than anything on modern television. Watching Twilight Zone episodes feels like watching a video tape of a stage production. The acting is much broader, the sets are more suggestive than realistic. It's clear that they had good writers and performers, but they were still finding their feet in a totally new medium.

Sure, BB isn't for everyone. But there's Suits, and House of Cards and Sons of Anarchy, it goes on. The good stuff today far, far exceeds the best of the 70's.

Of course, there's plenty of crap on TV today, but I'm talking about the good stuff from each era. Yes, Twilight Zone was good. I think it was quite an anomaly.

I think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something. It depends on your taste.

There's an incredible amount of bad programming on today, in my opinion of course. See any Kardashian-esque reality TV program.

I can't watch very popular programs like Big Bang Theory. I find the laugh tracks and lousy one liners unbearable. If something is funny I'll know it and laugh. I don't need a cue.

>There's an incredible amount of bad programming on today

Well, Sturgeon's Law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

The crap today is crap in different ways from older television but I'd argue what's good is very, very good. And frankly, if you can give me a handful of hours of quality television a week, I'm happy. Give me much more than that and I'm not going to watch it anyway. If there's a greater percentage of poor TV today, it's probably because there are more time slots that need to be filled cheaply but whether it's 99% crap or 99.9% crap doesn't really affect me.

I never got into Big Bang Theory and have pretty much lost my taste for sitcoms generally in any case. I'm not sure I'd even get into Seinfeld today although it was pretty much a cultural touchstone at the time.

> I think something like Alfred Hitchcock Presents is very watchable today and I often do. You get a little mystery and murder and all within an hour. There were other watchable programs, like Perry Mason or something.

Those tend to be pretty good, I agree. I watch them on Me TV sometimes. (Digital subchannels are what UHF and cable were Back In The Day: Cheap timeslots filled with whatever someone has to hand.) However, they're good writing one episode at a time. These days, you get good writing a season at a time; it allows more characterization, more complex plots, and more flavor. Breaking Bad is a novel-length plot, something TV only did in soap opera form back then. And soap operas have never been accused of having good writing.

In my experience, this is fairly recent. I'd give Lost as a starting point. Maybe not Lost per se but the period. Movies were a little boring, people started to go big on TV Shows and a lot of ambitious ones suddenly popped. Now you have BB, HoC, GoT. Before that it was the same recipes sitcom/soap/police/scifi used from the 70s to the early 2Ks.

Link to that study?

Sorry. I have failed you

No prob. BTW I saw a Top 100 Billboard(R) chart from the 90's and one from the 2010's. Surprising how much of today's music is pop. Pure. Pop.

There was a fundamental change in Hollywood in the late 60 early 70s, when a new generation of filmmakers came up through indie cinema and the studios. Those filmmakers changed the technique, style, and values of the studio system pretty dramatically. Many of those changes persist until today.

Also in the mid 70s, you had the rise of the modern high-concept blockbuster, with films such as JAWS and STAR WARS. Not to mention the advent of the modern superhero movie with SUPERMAN. Those changes have definitely held on until today, and shape not just the content, but also the form of much of modern movies.

There really was a qualitative change in movies around 1970, so it's not unusual if someone can relate more to movies from that point onward.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Hollywood

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-concept

>The baby boomer history and progress was in our face all the time and I couldn't wait to be old and have them mostly be dead so I could stop getting media progress reports on them.

This how I feel about millennials. Unfortunately, since I am one of them, I can't just wait for them to go away.

There are several more examples of "Happy Days"s, including That 70s Show, That 80s Show, The Andy Griffith Show, and Wonder Years. They all seem to happen about 20-30 years after the fact too, or roughly the length of a generation.

Extra notable to the discussion is that both "That 80s Show" and "Freaks and Geeks" failed to catch on. I never saw any of either, so they might have just been bad (though at the very least Freaks and Geeks seems to have been looked upon positively), but I wonder if it wasn't representative of the fact that we still feel that the 80s are more or less the modern era, in a way that wasn't the case prior to that, and so there's less to have nostalgia about.

Of course it could also just be that there were crappy examples of that kind of show throughout TV history that we just don't remember.

Freaks and Geeks was amazing. That 80s show was dumb but featured a super hot girl who sported an extremely punk spike hair-do which challenged the viewer to recognize her hotness. It was two levels of difficulty above the thick frame glasses previous shows have used

I'm 25, I think of the 80s as the beginning of the "modern" world. I guess it's the same for your students. Plus a lot of cool movies were made back then, and I imagine that's part of the reason why the 80s are considered cool.

I think you're 100% right, 1985 doesn't feel like ancient history at all.

> I think of the 80s as the beginning of the "modern" world.

I was born at 1980, and that's exactly how I felt by the 90's time (that the 80's were the beginning of the "modern" world).

Maybe it's because it's true. There was a cultural transformation at the 70's, so that the 80's were completely different from the 60's. We didn't have any other such transformatio after that.

In a lot of ways, it was - popularization of home computers and home video playback/recording, the first commercial mobile phones, popularization of synthesizers, etc. So much stuff that was the first generation (in significant numbers in homes) of almost all the ubiquitous technology we now use.

Politically, in the US at least, we're still very much under the sway of the 80s. The rightward shift is ongoing, and it seems to me that most of our modern mainstream political spectrum would fit pretty well under the tent of the 80s and early 90s right.

S&L and the housing crash could be seen as defining the pattern that the boom/bust cycle has followed since then.

This is the real elephant in the room. With the end of the Cold War, pretty much all systemic critiques of the American Way of Life were swept away, and any request of change was shut down for ever. America (as depicted in Hollywood movies in 1985) was crowned "best society ever" and social mores were frozen in place. As globalisation started to hit harder and harder, generating a timid backlash in Seattle etc, 9/11 happened... and again any critical point of view was banished. Even "western" foreign policy is basically still the same. No wonder Reagan was all but beatified when he died.

I think it might just be hard for many of the people on HN to have an objective opinion about it. We might just think of the 80s as the beginning of the modern world because it's when we were born.

> I think it might just be hard for many of the people on HN to have an objective opinion about it.

Opinions are, by definition, subjective, and the issue here is a subjective question of feeling, not an objective question of fact, so, yes, its impossible for anyone to have an "objective opinion" about it, for a few fairly fundamental reasons. (And its not just limited to people on HN.)

Well, my point was more that "of course we think the 80s were significant because that's when so many of us were born", and less a discussion on the meaning of "opinion".

If some of the older posters (40-60 rather than 20-30) were to post a similar sentiment about the 80s then it would say more.

Edit: Alternatively, I'm very likely just projecting my age range on some posters who are in that age range, but them chiming up to confirm that fact would be helpful.

I was born in the 70s, and I feel my whole decade was left out of your age range.

People who are in their 40s now were teens and young adults in the 80s, and are therefore likely to agree that that decade was significant, and I can understand that (I'm 41).

Let me try to give a different perspective, though: Modern times seems to me to have started about when The Matrix came out and Google came along. It's truly amazing to me that we managed to get along without immediate and virtually unlimited access to any information about anything. Being able to just look things up completely changed my life. The internet was qualitatively enormously different when the best search engine was Altavista and most of my time was spent on IRC and Usenet.

When I talk to teenagers, they view the 80s and 90s as ancient history. They talk about the N64 and the Playstation 2 as if those are classics. It's really weird.

I was recently a chaperone for a teenager weekend event which included several concerts and public speakers. I brought my 3DS with me because I figured I'd get a lot of street passes (for those unfamiliar, a street pass means that if anyone else walks by you with a 3DS in their pocket, you'll share avatars with one another automatically, which can be used in minigames). I was extremely surprised that I didn't get a single street pass. It turns out that their generation is largely gaming on their phone and doesn't care about handheld consoles too much.

Music may be more timeless than other media. I don't think the quality of the music has changed as drastically as that of other technological changes. Videogames have more processing power. TV shows feature characters who dress differently and who show certain quirks of the era.

Interesting to note that the first Die Hard movie is 1988. Just watched it the other day, and it doesn't feel stale at all. Lethal Weapon is 1987, and I bet a lot of kids would recognize "I'm getting too old for this shit."

>"I'm getting too old for this shit."

This is actually a pretty good point, indirectly. The rise of widespread internet culture and meme might have something to do with this feeling. Kids are brought up with international internet lingo and jokes that are ubiquitous and timeless. You don't need to know that joke X comes from old movie Y, you just know joke X and you know it's funny. It permeates your culture regardless of your age, and that creates connection between past and present generations.

This can backfire, because if you see the original source, it looks like it's just full of pop culture references, and isn't as funny or original. (cf. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SeinfeldIsUnfunny )

As the quote goes: "Hamlet is just one famous saying after another"

Linking to tvtropes is evil.

No, Seinfield was unfunny to me even when it first aired, and it's not because of what it says.

I can watch 20 other sitcoms from 10 and 15 years before Seinfield (from MASH to Mork and Mindy to Taxi), that I wasn't even adult when they first run, and they are still funny, even when their styles and jokes have been copied....

You might be reading too much into the name. Seinfeld is an example. The point is that some works, due to their popularity, become so embedded in the genre, that they no longer seem as original as they were.

I think it's an illusion. If you look at culture today, there are a bunch of influences from the 80s. (For example, Taylor Swift's latest album is titled '1989' and has an 80s-influenced feel to many of the songs.) In the 80s, there was a bunch of 50s influence. Billy Joel had released "Uptown Girl" and the rest of an album of almost doo-wop pop hits. Grease was a hit movie in 1978, just a few years earlier. You could still catch shows like Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Hee-Haw on TV. So I think it's just a matter of what you remember. I watched and listened to all that stuff and the 50s still seemed like ancient history to me. (My parents were barely teenagers in the 50s!)

Just yesterday I played a DooM game [0] with four friends who were born in 1990, 91, 92, and 93. Another friend who was born in 94 wanted to join the game, but we'd set it to 5 max.

I was born in 1980 and had played DooM when it first came out. These guys got me back into it. This seems like a bit of a pattern with high school and college aged kids nowadays -- being interested in some of the 80s subculture stuff.

[0] using the mod http://zandronum.com/ and the campaign http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/Ports/me...

Perhaps part of that is music changed a lot from the 1950's to 1980, but 1980's music hasn't changed that much since.

It could also be that, before the internet, music from earlier times simply wasn't that available. It wasn't played on the radio, and you had to work fairly hard to find an older album to buy.

These days, older music is just a click away, though I find that pre-CD music is still often hard to find.

I think it has a lot to do with cultural taboos and media whitewashing. In the 80's there was lots of media from the 50's on TV, like Donna Reed, Leave it to Beaver, The Andy Griffith show, etc. The popular media of the time is mostly about rich white people dealing with simple family problems that result in teaching situations. In the 80's we had Married with Children and Hard Copy, which I can't imagine being accepted on television in the 50s. In the 80s, the 50s seemed so different, a gentler and easier time, without the same strife (which is untrue, mind you). The 80's are relatable because we recognize the same problems in them that we see in ourselves today.

In short, it's not that the society of previous time period was more different during these ranges, it's that our perception of that previous period through their surviving media was more or less relatable to our current experiences.

Recording fidelity was much better by 1985 - sound was much richer, production values better, video was almost exclusively in color, and of course there was a lot more of it all, and in a much wider variety than in the 1950s, so there is more to choose from for later generations. Movies became more sophisticated too, both technically and artistically.

I blame youtube. Today Buddy Holly is just as accessible as Iggy Azalea. Just type it in. In '85 it was easier to get Marcus Aurelius than Buddy Holly.

The "generation gap" was a function of market forces and media. Its gone now. The past is present.

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