Born in 1970, the 80s were basically my teen years. What do I remember?
Feathered hair. Towards the end of the decade a lot of girls got way too into hairspray and would tease up this sort of crest above their foreheads. It looked horrible. Luckily not all did that. Girls' (and some boys') makeup was colorful and thick. Wearing an earring in one ear was pretty daring, and you had to remember (if you were a boy) which ear meant you were gay and which meant you were straight. I could never remember which was which and passed on the whole piercing thing. No one I knew had a tattoo.
Computers were pretty rare and difficult to use. Knowing how to use one was a prerogative of nerd circles. It generally involved programming in Basic. Printers were dot-matrix and made a high pitched screaming sound when they ran. Actual practical software you could use, like a word processor, only came along late in the decade. I was writing school papers by hand until 1987 or 1988 (wasn't a good typist. Some kids used typewriters).
Arcade games, however, were huge. When I was, say, 12 to 14 the big social thing to do was to go down to Funspot with $5 or $10 in quarters and blow an afternoon playing Pacman, Centipede, Zaxxon and so forth. When you ran out of money you watched other people play.
Fashionable colors were nearly all pastel. I spent 86-88 (last two years of high school) at a prep school and all the preppies had this uniform of khaki slacks, blue or pink button-down shirt, yellow tie and navy blazer. I hated it (it was not an official school uniform, though we did have to wear ties - I avoided the preppy look, wore skinny leather ties and things like that).
Synthesizers were novel and cool and all over pop music. I loved Howard Jones and Tangerine Dream. Most of the music my crowd listened to was New Wave, where standard band members were drums, guitar, bass, singer, and synth. But the music was not generally programmed other than synth arpeggios. You mostly bought your music on vinyl LPs for about $10-12, most of them with some neon cover art. You also bought blank cassette tapes so you could make mixtapes for your friends and a copy for the car, which only had a cassette player. CDs came along at the end of the decade and if you wanted to get into them, that meant paying $16 a pop for an album you already had, an outrageous price increase for music. I couldn't afford it.
There being no internet, when you were going to be a slob and hang around doing nothing you watched TV - way more than I do now. We lived out in the country where there was no cable, so that meant about half a dozen channels. MTV was a treat when we visited friends' houses in town. Otherwise it was Carol Burnett and Love Boat reruns.
The VCR and answering machines were just becoming affordable for middle-class families. I think we got our first (of each) around 1983. You could record your favorite TV shows (or MTV from your friends' houses) and hit fast forward to skip ads. That was exciting. The answering machines used cassette tapes. You needed an outgoing message to explain to people calling that they were talking to a machine, not you, and that they should wait for the beep to leave a message.
Us teens were terrified of nuclear war. We were sure we were all going to die in a nuclear winter holocaust. Our parents laughed and asked what we were so worried about. They had lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis, this was nothing. Good kids (I was pretty squeaky clean) were also terrified of AIDS and other VD (as we called it at the time), drug addiction (cocaine was the drug of the era), and homelessness (just hitting our radar as a possible outcome of bad decisions).
The whole category of young adult fiction (like Harry Potter) that exists now, didn't then. There were children's books, and when you got too old for them you read adult books. I read about world war II a lot, Tolkien and knockoffs, science fiction by Heinlein, Asimov, and Herbert, also a lot of lower-level sci fi on Del Ray by guys like Alan Dean Foster, and Robert Ludlum thrillers, starting maybe 7th grade or so. Ludlum stories would feature a sex scene like clockwork about the 50th page, which would keep you reading in hopes that there would be another one coming up. That and my dad's stash of Playboys (until he stopped getting them) were my main source of notions about how all that part of life worked.
The bad = Well... men felt the need to wear skin tight pants too ( guilty as charged ) and tying bandanas to yourself was a thing. An unfortunate thing. Also, pant legs in boots. Seriously *** yo.
