What kind of household tech did y'all have in the 1970s–1990s?
Posted by Tight_Note4515@reddit | AskAnAmerican | View on Reddit | 437 comments
I'm really curious about the history of average consumer technology in America during the late 20th century.
Looking back at the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s:
How common were everyday items like landline telephones, color film, and color televisions in standard households?
Was there a specific "turning point" decade where consumer tech suddenly exploded into the mainstream, or did it happen gradually?
I'd love to hear what it was like growing up or living through that era of tech development!
Mental_Freedom_1648@reddit
In the 90s, landlines, color film and color TV was standard.
opheliainwaders@reddit
I'm an elder millennial, and when I was little, I remember we had a rotary phone and a black and white tv (the kind where you change the channel with the dial). Color film was pretty standard, but it wasn't as vibrant as it is now.
By the 90s we had a cordless phone in addition to a landline with buttons, an answering machine, and color tv/cable (though my parents were late adopters of cable, I used to go to a friend's house to watch MTV). We also had an Atari and a GameBoy.
I learned to type in school on a typewriter, but at that point we already had a desktop computer at home - my dad got one from work and we were sometimes allowed to play Lemmings on it.
Vintage-X@reddit
I'm young GenX and we had pretty similar childhoods, except my parents were early adopters of cable, and I had an original Nintendo instead of the Atari. I learned to type on my dad's office computer; an IBM which had Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing on it. I remember when he brought home a Mac Quadra with a CD ROM and I got Oregon Trail and Myst. We had AOL dial up with a 9600 baud modem and an Apple laser printer that was almost as big as our TV and took forever to actually print anything. I won a cordless phone in a raffle which was used upstairs and the basement phone was a big brown push button model and had a 50 ft cord so mom could carry it around the whole basement (semi finished like That 70s Show style with dark wood paneling and rust colored linoleum tile and a gas fireplace) while she did laundry and stuff.
AltDS01@reddit
We had a MS DOS computer that dual booted Windows 3.1.
On the DOS side we had Doom, Duke Nukem (1, 2, and 3D Atomic Edition), Wolfenstein 3D, and a bunch of other DOS games. Aces of the Pacific, a F-18 game.
Windows side had Civ 1 and working Netscape.
Certain_Luck_8266@reddit
80s too. 70s (I was pretty young but here's what I remember). Born early 70s and have no recollection of any tv other than a color (but small and we only had one), likewise a landline was always present and there are no b/w photos of me indicating only color.
Narrow-Durian4837@reddit
Black-and-white TVs were still around in the 70s (and maybe into the 80s). We had a small B&W TV that we used as a backup when our color TV was being repaired.
frog980@reddit
You could still buy a new black and white in the 80's, we had one.
Kathw13@reddit
I had a small B/W when I was in college. 1978-1982. Not sure when I got a color TV.
MesopotamiaSong@reddit
always hear a lot about tv repairmen. how often was your tv in need of repair? how long would a tv last before its first repair? what usually was problem with a tv that would need repaired/ what was the fix?
Up2nogud13@reddit
The TV repairman was whoever was closest to the TV when it needed a smack on the side.
Auntie_Venom@reddit
I had to take all of our flat screens to a TV repair about 10 years ago. Despite being plugged through a surge protector they all got fried through the cat-5 cable. They fixed all of them for less than the price of buying 1 new TV. Granted they’ve all pooped out from old age and we’ve since replaced them but there are still TV repair services.
Way before I was born, my grandfather was a TV and electronics repairman in the 50s & 60s during the winter months and made a good living to supplement running the big family farm in the summers.
KoalaGrunt0311@reddit
CRT-- Cathode Ray Tubes--is the technology for the standard screens before they were replaced by LCD and now LED. The tubes managed the picture by putting voltage through a vacuum to create the picture. If they cracked and lost the vacuum, they could be replaced. Also, electronics DIY was a common hobby of the time.
Even today, when something goes bad, it's usually something minor like a single component on the board going bad, like a transistor not transisting or a resistor no longer resisting appropriately. TV shops would check the circuits and actually fix the components on the circuit board whereas today we just either replace the entire device or replace the entire circuit board.
Snoo_16677@reddit
TV repairmen started to disappear in the 70s. The last time I remember a TV repairman visiting our house was in 1973 or so, when I was 13 or 14. We didn't have a color TV until I won one in a sweepstakes in 1975. TVs had tubes and other problems. Eventually the price of new TVs came down enough that they weren't worthwhile to fix.
I don't remember how long before a new TV would break or how often they would break.
PseudonymIncognito@reddit
TV repairmen were more of a thing before solid state electronics became the standard and before Japanese manufacturers hit the market in a big way. My boomer parents remember drug stores and supermarkets having tube testers lying around that you could use to check if your vacuum tubes were still good.
nietheo@reddit
We didn't get a color tv until the mid 80s and not a vcr or a microwave until the early 90s, but I had a single mom. My friends had those things sooner.
shelwood46@reddit
We had a 12" b&w tv most of my 1970s childhood, but my working mom blew a ton of money in the late 70s to buy a microwave. My grandparents had a big color tv with a remote, I thought it was amazing. I did not encounter a vcr until high school (1981) where my school had a 1/2" pro vcr in the library.
Illustrious_looser@reddit
That wasn't a remote haha, it was a "clicker". At least that's what my family called it. Late 70s too.
cmatbmed@reddit
Clicker, you were living the the good life. We had some vice grips because the channel nob was stripped 😂
DogDeadByRaven@reddit
I remember calling it a clicker, still do on occasion. I also remember the dual knobs. One for the lower channels then you would turn that one to U to get the upper range of channels from the 2nd channel knob. Little knob that was the power and volume. Turn it to the right to click it on then keep going to reach the volume you wanted. Whole house had one TV until the early 90s when the TV with the knobs made it to my parents bedroom and we got a new fancy 26". I was the clicker until I was about 9 or 10.
Illustrious_looser@reddit
That was the TV before for that. There used to be two knobs one for changing the chanel and the other to fine-tune it depending on meteorological conditions. My dang little brother wandered off somewhere with one so we either pinched real hard with our fingers or yanked one out to switch to the other.
Neenknits@reddit
We called them clickers too!
yodellingllama_@reddit
Wasn't there a commercial for a product (perhaps a bed?) that advertised a "free gift," with the choices being VCR, color TV, and microwave? I distinctly remember watching daytime television at my grandmother's house in the 80s and watching this. The "satisfied customers" (who now I assume were actors) were older folks, very excited about their free gift choice. To the point where my brothers and I would immitate them in jest all the time. "I got the microwave!"
ohfucknotagainagain@reddit
I can hear it now. The product was the Craftmatic Adjustable Bed!
Healthy_Blueberry_59@reddit
I grew up with black and white TVs which were still sold into the mid 80s. We probably switched to color around 1985.
Clean-Fisherman-4601@reddit
We had our old B&W TV in my mother's bedroom. It was backup for when there were arguments about what to watch.
godzillasegundo@reddit
They were around but usually not used as a primary television, even in the 70s.
Rhomega2@reddit
The song "Money For Nothing" by Dire Straits was released in 1985 and mentions "Gotta move these color TVs."
LiqdPT@reddit
Righ, we had 3 TVs in my house in the 70s.The living room TV was color and the ones in the basement and my parents room were black and white. Sometime in the mid 80s the bedroom TV got upgraded to color and I got a color TV in my room
FLOHTX@reddit
I had a 5" b&w with rabbit ears til maybe '93.
FilthyMindz69@reddit
Beat me, we had a bw til 91.
juan_humano@reddit
The only black and white TV I saw in the 80's was a tiny 6 inch screen, portable TV with the old school rabbit ears that my grandpa kept in the kitchen, so he could watch the news while he did the dishes.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
how small do you mean by small
Certain_Luck_8266@reddit
Couldn't have been more than 20 inches
kanakamaoli@reddit
20" diagonal tube, but the case was 36" wide. 😆
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
Thats still quite big imo, I think we got anything bigger than 20 inches in 2002 or so. volor tvs only became common in like 1992-1995 or so here.
swest211@reddit
Where is that? My family was kind of poor and we got our first color tv in '77. It was a 32 inch console. Pretty pricey, but my dad received a settlement from a work injury and we got fancy lol.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
Estonia, once we regained independence we did progress very fast. during the occupation most "consumer" tech was only meant to be used by the military, its insane how much money was being spent for the military, like fr 1/3 or sometimes more of the budget.
swest211@reddit
Oh gotcha. I'm in the US. We spend a crazy amount on the military now
jiminak@reddit
> We spend crazy amount on the military “now”.
I’m not sure the qualifier, “now”, is accurate, since it presupposes that we spent less at some point (in recent history). We’re actually spending pretty low right now compared to most of the past few generations (in terms of budget). Obviously, in terms of dollars, it goes up year over year, but we spend more and more on other things relatively.
Right now, military spending is about 2.8% of GDP, and roughly 13% of the entire federal budget. Working backwards, we see:
Date | %GDP | % Fed. Budget
Now: 2.8 13
2010: 4.7 20.1
2000: 2.9 16.5
1990: 5.1 23.9
1980: 4.9 22.7
1970: 7.8 41.8
1960: 8.9 52.2
1950: 4.9 29.8
1940: 1.7 17.6
1930: 1.1 22.0
1920: 4.8 40.5
1910: 1.2 30.0
1900: 1.6 33.0
swest211@reddit
It was in relation to the "was being spent" in Estonia. I guess I could have said still, but taken in context of the comment I was replying to, "now" makes sense.
sgtm7@reddit
Except----the USA doesn't spend a crazy amount on the military. In fact, as both a percentage of GDP and of the federal budget, it is the lowest it has been in over 100 years.
jiminak@reddit
Hmm. Ok. Their comment was that the military budget was 1/3 of the total budget.
I guess I would have said, “We used to spend a lot on the military compared to the rest of the budget also, but not nearly as much anymore.”
swest211@reddit
Well then you go right ahead and say that. I was referring to what I already said I was referring to, not the 1/3 of the total budget or any other part of the comment. Context clues help 😉
o93mink@reddit
We had 60” rear projection TVs pretty commonly in the late 90s
Legitimate_Catch_626@reddit
Black and white was still fairly common in the early 80s. TVs were expensive back then and you didn’t replace a working black and white TV with a color one unless you had money. Buying a new black and white wasn’t as common, but there still a ton of them around in use.
Vyckerz@reddit
My mom won a color TV in 1971 at a store opening, which is the only reason we had a color TV so early in the 70s. My grandmother had a black and white TV but by mid 70s also got a color unit.
Saruster@reddit
The TV we had in the 70s and early 80s didn’t turn on right away. You had to wait a couple minutes for it to warm up until an image appeared.
I don’t remember if it was a TV we owned or not but the remote was nothing like modern ones. It was heavy and thick and when you pushed the button to change the channel it made a solid “ker thunk” sound. It felt like mechanical things were happening inside the remote.
Also the remote was pretty unreliable so most of the time the real “remote” was the youngest kid (me) standing next to the TV and turning the knob.
CatPesematologist@reddit
In the early 1970s, we kids were the remote. That’s why we laid all over the floor watching tv. I think we moved up to a real remote in the late 1970s.
These were all common. The only type of phone was a landline. You might be asking about party lines? Single lines were common/normal in the 1970s. Mom was in a 9 party line when she was younger though.
Cell phones were pretty normal toward the end of the 1990s. I think beepers/pagers were more typical early to mid 1990s. Every important person wanna be had a pager.
Probably the turning point there is when you moved from like a bag phone to something you could put in your pocket. There was also an affordability difference where the smaller price difference between a landline and a cell meant you could drop the landline.
captainecchi@reddit
My parents had a party line when I was very young (like < 6), so that would have been early 80s. But we lived pretty rurally.
SugarHooves@reddit
I had a pager when I was couch surfing for a little more than half a year. It was the only way anyone could get in touch with me. I paid $4 a month for it. Iirc, the pager was free with sign up.
CousinBarnabas1967@reddit
I never really thought about the warm up time on an old tv. On 09/11/2001 my FIL called and said one of the buildings of the WTC was on fire. I turned on the TV in our kitchen and just as the picture faded in, United Airlines 175 crashed into the South Tower.
Curmudgy@reddit
It probably was. Early wireless TV remoted used "tuning fork" bars that were struck by a spring loaded hammer to generate a distinct tone for each button. An audio receiver at the TV could distinguish the different tones and take the appropriate action.
New_Part91@reddit
B/w photos were a choice. And still are. My son got married in the 80’s, had part of their wedding photos shot in B/W thinking it looked cool. Or whatever.
cat_prophecy@reddit
In 1996 my dad's coworker gifted us a 27" TV since he had upgraded for the Olympics. For a CRT it was massive. The only thing bigger at the time we projection TVs that cost $2000 and took up half your living room.
cornlip@reddit
It’s weird to me that my 19” Goldstar was totally fine for so long to me. I used that thing into the early 2000s when the Simpsons started to be purple instead of yellow. Then got a 27” and it blew my mind. Now I have three 55” TVs and they look too small. There’s some games I struggle to play cause I can’t read some of the text.
theshortlady@reddit
My parents didn't get a color TV until the 80s. Color was more expensive and the picture quality wasn't good where we were.
ancientastronaut2@reddit
We had a color tv in the living room, but I had a 13" black and white in my room.
lezzerlee@reddit
They were standard but in the 90s black and white was still around. Especially if it was a small, secondary one other than the main family room.
suffaluffapussycat@reddit
Until the internet, the main difference between 70s and 80s were cable TV and VCRs. I know some places had cable TV in the 70s but most didn’t.
Cordless phones were maybe early-80s for most people.
In the 70s if you missed a movie at the theater, that was it unless it aired on TV with lots and lots of commercials and lots of content cut.
wonderbeen@reddit
And possibly a vcr and/or cable box?
Sheila_Monarch@reddit
They were standard in the 70s too. But there was only one tv, in the living room, it weighed 500lbs, and it came in a wood cabinet like a piece of furniture. Kids were for changing the channel.
mvanpeur@reddit
Was it normal to have more than one tv in the 80s and 90s though? I feel like it was the late 90s to early 2000s before it became common to have more than 1 tv.
Sheila_Monarch@reddit
It was. And even in the 70s there might be a small black and white in another room. By the 80s it was common to have a small color tv in the bedroom or wherever the teenagers were hanging out.
IHSV1855@reddit
Absolutely
Able-Steak-2842@reddit
Also the 70's and 80's, but there were more of the older tech lying around the further back you go. Telephones were standard in all houses in the the 70's. More variety in the 80's, cordless phones in the 90's, 8 tracks in 70's, cassettes in 80's, compact disks in 90's.
ghostwriggle@reddit
yes - we also kept the older tech around though. I remember our secondary land line phone being a rotary phone through the early 90s, and we kept a small old B&W TV in the kitchen as well
Diligent-Touch-5456@reddit
in 70s-90s we had color TV, landlines, color photographs, record players, and cassette/8-track players. We had a video recorder as well in the 70s.
Beginning_End_361@reddit
My family got a color tv in the 1960s. In the early 60s black and white photography was the norm. Later in the decade color photography was less expensive and much more common. By the 1970s, color tv and color film was the norm. Landline phones were basically all we had from their invention through the 1990s
frog980@reddit
Went from and Atari to a Nintendo to a Sega Genesis to a p1, p2 ,p4.
SnowblindAlbino@reddit
We got our first color TV in 1984 and a VCR in 1985.
dealers_choice@reddit
Got our first microwave and vcr in the mid 80s. We had an Atari and I was pretty excited when I got a phone in my room and it wasn't a rotary! I also had a small black and white TV in my room. CD players were getting pretty popular by the late 80s but I didn't one for several more years but I did have a Walkman!
max_m0use@reddit
Born in 1983 and our family was lower-middle income. We had:
I would say consumer electronics were common in the 1970s and 1980s, but they became "affordable" to the point that you could pretty much buy whatever you wanted without much financial consequence in the early-mid 90s.
Somethingisshadysir@reddit
My memories start around 86, and we had all of that.
Minimum-Syrup7420@reddit
I had a computer... I didn't have internet or cable till like 2007 though
Katze-der-Kanale@reddit
I grew up in the 90s, born in the late 80s. We were pretty poor growing up but still had a landline, color tv (even multiple), a desktop computer, radios, video game systems.
My mom was into tech so she prioritized the computer. She’d have one built and I’d play games from floppy disks. We had them from MS Dos through the Windows era. I remember playing games her friend would send through the mail on floppy disks, like solitaire, jeopardy, even strip poker 😂 My favorite was a game called Dave, which was a side scrolling platformer similar to Mario…kind of.
I got the latest video game systems for Christmas and they usually came with a game, which would be the only game I owned. Then we’d go to the local video rental store where I could pick out games to rent. I remember playing Aladdin and Lion King on the Sega Genesis this way. Also a bunch of really oddball games.
I also had an NES and N64, played the hell out of Mario 3, then Mario 64 and Star Fox 64. I have a photo of me on the Xmas I got the NES zapper, and I remember playing Duck Hunt. I played mortal kombat at a friend’s house all the time, and NBA Jam. What a fun time.
Computers didn’t really become a household thing until later, in the AOL era. AOL was honestly pretty cool imo. Landlines were extremely common, most had one. Cell phones weren’t super prevalent until much later. I didn’t even get one until high school (early 2000s), and even then I didn’t always have service on.
All that said, not all families were into tech so computers were definitely not a household good in the early 90s. They weren’t unobtainable but they were niche so only people into the technology really had them as far as I could tell.
minousmom@reddit
TVs (with a cable box if we were lucky) and telephone (with an extra line for the teenagers if we were rich)
eirika_genesis@reddit
I was born in the early 1980s In the 1980 and 90s, everyone had at least one landline phone per house, and teenagers usually had a phone in their room too but it used the same phone number as the household phone so the family couldn't use both phones at the same time. Some teenagers had their own phone number but I knew very few who did.
The last generation of black and white photos taken were of my parents when they were kids, in the 1960s.
I don't think I've ever seen a black and white tv that still worked.
The ten years that seemed like tech was starting to explode was maybe around 1997-2007.
In the late 90s, this time period started out with the internet being available, but it was very different than it is now. There wasn't a whole lot to even do online yet. Chat rooms were a big thing for those of us that had the internet, but lots of households didn't have online access or even a computer. Many people didn't even know how to use a computer and would get very frustrated if they had to interact with them in any way.
By 2007, it was everywhere, and the internet had changed drastically. YouTube, Wikipedia, Myspace, Reddit, and Netflix streaming were all available, established, and easy to find and many houses had Wifi, and Bluetooth was becoming much more popular.
The concept of the uni-culture from previous decades' of the past were starting to fade away, people were developing more diverse interests, and many aspects of society and homelife were questioned and exposed in ways that I'm sure many people never expected (example: before the internet I frequently didn't know how to explain to someone why they were making me uncomfortable, because not many people had the words to explain concepts like boundary-violations or certain types of manipulation, or other forms of disrespect and attempts to assert control that aren't directly hostile. The internet gave many people power over their own lives in this regard).
kanakamaoli@reddit
70s to 90s all that stuff was standard. Telephone was corded and usually in one central area-kitchen or living room. Usually no second phone unless there was one in the master bedroom. TV was typically only in the living room, no bedroom tvs. Only rabbit ears, no cable tv. Rich people had cable (and only 30 channels).
Color film was common, many people had 110 or Polaroid cameras.
nana1960@reddit
I was born in 1960. We had all of those by the end of the 60s .
secrerofficeninja@reddit
When I was a kid in the 70’s we had a color TV with a dial. We could get maybe 6-7 channels. We had a landline phone.
Late 70’a to very early 80’s we got our first microwave and also a VCR. We also got a 2nd TV in our basement (20 inch TV I think) that had a remote control. That would be super important around 1982-1983 when we got MTV on our cable TV and maybe 20+ total channels. I spent a lot of time down there.
Late 80’s I think my mom got a cell phone? It was a huge one you could take in your car.
Early 90’s for a desktop PC and added model for dial up internet. Basic to American Online. Also got cell phones. I think my first one was a flip phone ? That might have been more like mid to late 90’s.
In 2001 at work we had fastest internet at the time but so many people tried getting on to see NYC 9/11 that it was random images that would freeze. The internet was in infancy and still very slow.
Discount_Plumber@reddit
80s I was young. We had a landline with a corded phone. Our TV was a small black and white one until 1989 with a roof top antenna. There were 3 channels and one of them was always at least a little fuzzy. Did get an NES and first played it on that small black and white TV. We also had an Atari 2600.
In the 90s we did get an SNES, Sega Genesis, and N64. Never had the internet or computer at home. So I did my school papers on an electric typewriter. We had the same 27" color TV my parents bought in 1989. My dad was a builder and got a bag phone to use for work in the early mid 90s. Late 90s I got a Motorola with direct connect. Best phone I ever had. Durable, battery lasted forever, and best signal rural areas.
HeyPurityItsMeAgain@reddit
I think you're 20-30 years off.
Moist_Asparagus6420@reddit
In the 90s some landmark tech acquisitions in my household were,
Digital answering machine - no more rewinding the tape, all messages neatly organized, absolute game changer
Remote control tv - wonderful, 10/10
Seperate VHS rewinder - cool novelty, rewound tapes way faster, it was shaped like a red sports car, 5/10, it broke one of my tapes cuz it rewound it to fast🤣
PlayStation - 3 dimensional gaming 10/10
Home computer - x wing vs tie fighter and EverQuest, fantastic
Internet - for me it was a novelty in the 90s, great for the porn but I didn't discover how useful it was till the 00s
Cell phone - my dad was the only person I knew who had one, but it was pretty cool being able to call people from anywhere
ConcertinaTerpsichor@reddit
I think technology spread like it often does, from urban to rural, from wealthy to poorer areas. In the 1970s in Tennessee, we switched from UHF black and white to color TV around 1974. No microwave till the 1980s. Color film the same, except for Polaroids, which were a big deal. Remote garage door openers were in use by then, but not much before.
In school teachers used mimeograph machines with purple ink to make worksheets and tests before Xerox came along, and we had filmstrips and overhead projectors in class. All class notes were taken in paper notebooks, and we wrote essays in blue books. My mom took dictation on a dictaphone and typed on a big electric typewriter with a rotating key ball. In the library we had microfiche machines and paper card catalogs.
Angsty_Potatos@reddit
All those things were standard. They were the only option. If you didn't have a land line, you didn't get calls.
Fuhugwugads@reddit
In the early eighties we had a whole house intercom system with consoles in every room and a base station with a radio in the kitchen. You could play music throughout the house.
MamaLlama629@reddit
Landlines, tv with bunny ears, primitive gaming device, answering machines and eventually a caller id box
FernX02@reddit
We had a VCR, Nintendo, microwave, that giant stereo that had its own cupboard in the Entertainment Center surrounding our 32" wood encased tube TV.
CemeteryDweller7719@reddit
In the 80s, landlines were common. My grandma still had her phone that was owned by the phone company. It was rotary, but more and more people got touchtone. My other grandma had a rotary phone in the kitchen that could stretch into the living room. Later in the decade my grandpa paid to have a phone line added to her bedroom, and that was a touchtone phone. Color TVs were common but people didn’t really get rid of the black & white TVs. My grandma had a small color tv in the living room; in the family room was the old, cabinet style, two knobs the change the channel, black & white tv. One knob was missing so you had to use pliers to change the channel. (Us kids watched the black & white tv.) Almost everyone was using color film, unless they deliberately wanted black & white. Not a more affordable or common, just they opted to use black & white.
In the early-mid 90s, landlines were still common. Pay phones were still around. People increasingly had cordless phones, and there was a growing amount of beepers. TVs were almost all color, but people would still use black & white if they had one that worked. (I dated a guy that his parents had an older black & white tv in the kitchen.) Those big, heavy, box TVs were becoming more and more common, so people would either get the big entertainment centers to sit them on or you’d have the tv sitting on the old cabinet style tv that no longer worked. (But you had to have a solid entertainment center because those TVs were so heavy. There’s kids that actually died from the TV falling on them.) Color photos were the norm, and even parts of the newspaper switched to color images.
Airamis0007@reddit
I was born in ‘84, and can still remember having one small color TV with 4-5 channels.
I’d say around 1990, things started to change much more quickly (everyone having color tv, multiple landlines, and VCR’s).
My Grandfather was a Colonel in the AF who started installing computer systems in the 60’s. He taught my Dad everything he knew about computers in ‘93, and they both started home computer businesses. This meant that by the time I was 10, we had the best home PC, fastest internet, etc. about 5-10 years before anyone else I knew.
By 1997, I was 13, and could build a PC from scratch.
219_Infinity@reddit
Once the personal computer started appearing in households we were on the way to a screen dominated world
SpellVast@reddit
I remember my father bringing home a microwave in the 70s. He had to show everybody how it could cook a hotdog in a few seconds. Back then “microwave safe” was an experiment. I remember seeing plastic bowls melt or cups with metallic designs on them spark in the microwave. We didn’t have cable tv but satellite TV was a thing. People with a satellite had one that looked like it could belong to NASA. They were 12 feet in diameter. We didn’t have computers, just typewriters. I temper my first video game—it was Pong.
Definitive_confusion@reddit
We had surround sound 8 track in our trailer. Speakers in 3 rooms with a single control deck in the living room
Yeah, we were fancy
Wild_Replacement5880@reddit
TV and VCR was pretty much all you needed. Every house had a radio too in case the Russkies dropped the bomb.
Prize_Consequence568@reddit
Google search to find out OP.
jackfaire@reddit
Landline phone, went cordless in the 90s. We only had one color tv in the living room. My brother and I were allowed a small black and white tv in our bedroom.
My family got our first home computer in the late 80s. We went online in 1991 with Prodigy. My friends considered us rich for having a computer with internet access. More of my friends got them in the mid 90s.
All of us had some form of gaming console. My family got an NES in 88. We skipped over the next gen. We got a N64 and PS1 when they came out.
We never did pagers or cell phones. I didn't get my first cell phone until I was 21 and married so I could call my then wife when I was stuck on base.
Lemon_Poppies@reddit
We had WebTv. It was the internet, on TV. 1998ish. Before that we had TV’s, VCRs, and sterio systems. When I got my 5 disc changer I was stoked.
sgtm7@reddit
Growing up, we had bw TVs in our rooms. Our parents had color in their room, and in the living room. Color photos was the norm. In my adult life(from age 18 in 1983), I never had anything other than a color TV. VCRs were standard from the mid-1980s.
Skoolies1976@reddit
80s kid we had a color tv for sure and we rented a vcr from blockbuster when we wanted to watch something. In the 90s we had several landlines
Tankieforever@reddit
We didn’t get a microwave until the late 90s, and still only used it sparingly because it was believed to zap the nutrients out of the food. Had a washer but no dryer. We had a landline phone, only one in the house and it was corded and had a rotary dial, no cordless phone until around 2000. We were pretty far behind on a lot of stuff… and yet had a home computer back in the 80s when it was quite rare… but my mother worked for a publishing company so used it for work.
bananapanqueques@reddit
We got our first color tv in 1994. We were also poor, though.
No-Fix-614@reddit
Landlines and TVs were basically standard by the 70s and 80s. The real “holy shit the future is here” explosion was the 90s with home PCs, internet, CDs, cable TV, cellphones, gaming consoles etc. Humanity speedran from rotary phones to arguing with strangers online in like 20 years.
landonburner@reddit
Cable tv was before all those except the gaming console. The Atari 2600 and cable tv with about 40 channels was before 1980.
somecow@reddit
“Should I put the adapter for the sega genesis on channel 3 or 4”? 3, always 3.
mcsangel2@reddit
4 in my area
Everything_Breaks@reddit
4 gang here too in the tri-state area.
twelfthfantasy@reddit
There's like 20 tri-state areas.
Everything_Breaks@reddit
Lol, I didn't think of that. I grew up in NJ so I heard the term all the time. They exist, but I haven't lived anywhere else where the term is so ubiquitous.
twelfthfantasy@reddit
I'm also in NJ, and it was 3 if you were closer to NYC and 4 if you were closer to Philadelphia, because CBS is channel 2 in NY and NBC is channel 4. In Philly, CBS is 3 and NBC is I think 10. I was pretty much right in the middle but before 9/11 we got the New York channels a lot clearer so we'd watch those.
Everything_Breaks@reddit
Okay, so I was in Sussex county and you'd think 3 would have been better for me. We received stations from both regions.
twelfthfantasy@reddit
Surprised you could get Philly stations up there, but aside from 3, all of those are New York.
2) CBS 4) NBC 5) FOX 7) ABC 9) Not sure what it is now, it was UPN back then but it's changed names a bunch of times 11) CW, formerly WB 13) PBS
LadyB5091@reddit
I go back even farther: From the 1950's 2)CBS 4)NBC 5)WNEW 7)ABC 9)WOR 11)WPIX 13)WNDT 7 Channels, some have changed call signs over the years.
Everything_Breaks@reddit
I'm just realizing all this is moot because the little tv I used for my VIC was in the basement and 4 just happened to have a better picture for me.
MyUsername2459@reddit
Humanity speedran from rotary phones to arguing with strangers online in like 20 years.
I still marvel at the fact that when I was a kid in elementary school, I was talking on a rotary phone and listening to music on a turntable and watching broadcast TV (and maybe a few times a year we'd rent a VHS player and some tapes for a special weekend at home watching movies). . .and by the time I was graduating from college I had a cell phone, was arguing with people on the Internet, and watching DVD's.
Within \~20 years, from the early 1980's to early 2000's, it seemed we truly jumped forward immensely in computing and telecommunications technology. It really was analogous to the jump in aerospace technology in the mid 20th century where we went from the first jet aircraft to landing on the moon inside of a quarter-century or so.
adambuck66@reddit
I don't feel as if there was as big of a jump from the 2000's to 2020's.
Boopa0011@reddit
By the end of the 90s, lots and lots and lots of people had home computers and internet connections. It felt weird and new for many people even in 1993 but by 1999 they were quite common and by the mid 2000s they were pretty much ubiquitous, although they were likely still hooked up to dial-up connections and you might have needed a separate phone number for them.
gc3@reddit
1970s, landlines phones, color tvs, and air conditioners, electric typewriter, old reel to reel tape dictating machine, toaster, we didn't have a blender or a mixer (we had a regular manual cake mixer) and lots of toys like a lite brite, etcha sketch, and my parents had a home movie player (for film), we only made a few.. and also had a slide projector.
Neona65@reddit
We got our first color television when I was about eight in the early 70s.
I remember babysitting and thinking my neighbors were rich because they had a microwave, none of my friends had one. That was late 70s.
Same family had the first beta recorder, I was fascinated. Beverly Hills Cop was the movie in the machine and so was the first recorded movie I watched. That was whatever year that movie came out.
Always had a corded landline growing up. Didn't get a cordless landline till I was grown with my own family.
arcticmischief@reddit
Without outing my exact birthday, I can tell you that my formative years of core mid to late childhood memories were the very late 1980s into the mid 1990s, and my teenage years spanned into the late 1990s to early 2000s.
In my childhood home, these are the consumer tech things I remember having from my earliest conscious awareness up through about, say, 1993:
* color TV (antenna, not cable)
* VCR
* corded touch-tone landline, later replaced with a cordless phone
* answering machine (tape-based, I believe)
* boombox-type radio with cassette and CD player
* hi-fi system with large speakers, a tuner, and a tape and CD player (certainly was not an expensive one; it may have been a garage sale find)
I think that’s it. I am visualizing all around my house and struggling to think of anything else we had.
Then, in around 1993 or 1994, we got our first computer, an Apple Macintosh Performa 476. This wasn’t entirely foreign to me, as my grandfather had had mostly Apple-based home computers for several years at this point, from the Apple Lisa up through the Macintosh IIcx, which I had played on while visiting him. But it was the first in our home. I believe it came with a modem, and I remember us pretty quickly signing up I believe at first for an AOL account, then eWorld, and then migrating back to AOL when eWorld sunsetted service. We never had a second phone line for the Internet, although my grandfather did.
I feel like we were a bit late (compared to some of my junior high school friends’ families) to acquire a DVD player and upgrade to a cable modem. I think those didn’t come into our house until the early 2000s.
I don’t ever remember black-and-white film; we had color film as early as I can recall, and I think even my earliest baby photos were in color. But I wasn’t alive for the first half of the decades in your question. I believe we got our first digital camera around the 2000.
Oh, I forgot—I think my dad had a pager when I was a kid, too (or a “beeper,” as he called it).
Based on my personal experience, I would say that the turning point of an explosion of consumer electronics happened somewhere around 1995, just a little bit after I got my computer – I was a bit of an early adopter, thanks to my grandfather, and I was definitely well ahead of most of my classmates in having a computer at home, although I did know a couple of households that had older, more limited computers, like Apple IIgs or various Intel 486 DOS/early Windows PCs, in the very late 80s/early 90s. but prior to that, I feel like household consumer tech was pretty stagnant for most of the 80s into the 90s, with basic tube color TVs, VHS, radios with tape players, and landline phones being pretty universal and mostly unchanged throughout that time.
Then in the 90s, CDs appeared, DVDs and widescreen TVs exploded onto the scene with vastly improved fidelity, and home PCs became common, and the race was on. Laptops and cell phones and Wi-Fi and all kinds of other things appeared within just a few years, followed shortly thereafter by smartphones, and the pace of innovation in consumer electronics just kept going up as it became obvious that investing in research and development of those goods was a very profitable exercise.
Expensive-Vanilla-16@reddit
We had a color TV in the living room. Dad had his sansui 881 receiver with 15" speakers and teac cassette deck and some kind of turntable.
Mid 80s he bought a Panasonic 2 piece vcr and attachable wired camera. Grandma bought me a commodore 16 1 Christmas which I still have.
The 486 computer he bought new from H.H. Gregg was the coolest thing I ever used. Still have most of it too.
dr_strange-love@reddit
Computers exploded in the late 1990s when AOL was mailing people floppy disks to get them on the Internet. Landline telephones, color film, and color televisions were pretty standard by the 1970s, but still a significant expense.
Narrow-Durian4837@reddit
Lots of people had home computers in the 80s (things like the Apple II and the Commodore 64), but there wasn't really an internet to connect them to. We used them for things like games and word processing.
BigCrunchyNerd@reddit
This might have depended on your income level. I only knew one person who had a computer in the 80s. I think after Windows 95 came out and by then computers had gotten much cheaper, it seemed to explode in popularity. Then the Web got invented and boom, everyone wanted their own computer, but they were still pretty expensive. Computer labs were very much a thing when I was in college (1997-2001) because many people didn't have their own.
RandomPaw@reddit
There was a kind of internet and all kinds of interaction all the way back to the 70s if you went to one of the colleges or high schools with the Plato network. We had email, texting, lessons for our classes we could do online, all kinds of video games with teams made up of people from around the world who had never met, and people arguing in “forums” with moderators who would ban people who got too nasty.
EatLard@reddit
My grandma had an Apple IIe we used for some games when we visited. She used it to do some of her work from home as a college professor. We didn’t get a desktop computer at home until I was 8 or 9, and we had Prodigy internet for a short time in the very early 90s, with some educational games like Carmen Sandiego.
Back when people thought the internet would make people smarter.
AineDez@reddit
Yeah, we got our first computer in 1993 and dial up in I think 1995. Going over to people’s houses to play on the Apple II was exciting
BigCrunchyNerd@reddit
All of those things were normal in the 80s. I was poor and we still had all of them. I was born in 1979, so not sure about the 70s.
VCRs were just coming out in the mid 80s, I remember very clearly getting our first VCR and what a big deal it was. And then we got a camcorder to make home movies.
gdubh@reddit
70s = CB radio, console color TV; stereo console with record player, tuner, and 8-track; pong video game console; land line telephones; point and shoot color film cameras with one use flash cubes, cassette recorder, transistor radio; manual typewriter
Vyckerz@reddit
My family’s house was built in the early 1970s. It had a built in intercom system where you could talk to people at the front door from the kitchen, and also to each bedroom.
We had a color television. We had an aerial antenna on the roof that my dad installed which we could rotate with a switch by the TV to dial in reception depending on which channel we were trying to get. Before that we had “rabbit ears” on the set top that you had to manually position but we barely got any channels.
Cable TV came to our town the next year after we moved in. My dad was one of the first to sign up. It was pretty basic with maybe about 15 channels
We had one landline phone in the kitchen with the long ass cord so you could go into other rooms. Later we got a second phone in the basement that my dad installed so we wouldn’t have to run upstairs from the family room to answer the phone.
By the 80s we had cordless phones.
“Bag” phones came out at some point. These were cell phones but were huge hand sets with a separate unit that mounted in your car.
We had Polaroid cameras mostly. My grandfather had an SLR camera and a video camera that took spool film you had to develop. It was color film but no sound though.
My cousin had an early VCR video camera that had a giant camera that looked like a news camera and the tape and reorder were a separate unit like a suitcase connected by a cord to the camera
Cell phones came out later in the 80s early 90s.
Computers were becoming more common in homes.
I’d say late 80s to late 90s were when electronics really started to explode
loweexclamationpoint@reddit
1970s everyone had those. 1960s,some places had b&w TV and party lines
SmartFX2001@reddit
In the early 70s, we had a black and white TV and landlines. We also had color film and the old Polaroid cameras where you had to wait to uncover the picture until it developed.
Mid 70s, we had a color TV (no remote control as if it even existed at that time, it wasn’t mainstream).
No_Mony_1185@reddit
90s- Color Tv, landline with cordless phone, grandma had a rotary phone, cd/DVD players, Sega. Mp3 player in the 2000s
FineUnderachievment@reddit
This house was built in like 1956, with previous owners doing additions and whatnot, I’ve never seen this anywhere else, and it’s totally outdated now, but I’m sure it was really cool when it was added in the 70s. There is a panel in my kitchen that has buttons for every light and other things in the house. It still works, but we just have a picture covering the panel. It’s really not practical, and while I labeled some of them, I honestly don’t know what some of them control. So I don’t mess with it. Hit a random button and turn off the water heater, or an outlet that powers my WiFi. I’m sure it was cool when installed, but just doesn’t seem to make sense now. I’ll just use the light switch like a normal person
Intrepid_Art_6628@reddit
This is really an economic class question. TVs were one of your most expensive purchases in those days. Now a moderate size tv is cheaper than date night if you need a babysitter
NotTurtleEnough@reddit
1980s entered with some LED football games and an Atari 2600. Then we got LCD games, and in the late 80s, the original NES.
IPreferDiamonds@reddit
I was born in 1968. I remember when VCRs came out!
science_nerdd@reddit
Am/Fm stereo with turn table and cassette
80s =
atari
90s =
Neenknits@reddit
We got our first color television in 1969. We had it and a black and white for at least 10 years. The screens were 15-24” on the diagonal.
Everyone I knew had a landline telephone in the 60s. By 1975, we almost all had at least 2 extensions, if not a phone outlet in every room. One line.
We got Pong, one of the first video games, with wired controllers, in 1979.
In the late 70s we all got extra long cords between the handset and base of the phone in the kitchen, so we could sit where we wanted.
My college dorm had telephones in every room, but had to call collect to get an outside college line. 1981-85. Most colleges had hall phones only.
We got phone answering machines that recorded onto cassette tapes in the late 80s. Cordless phones in the early 90s. Almost everyone in my family got them within a year or two of each other.
My father had a cell phone in the 70s. It only worked within a certain range of Boston. It had a giant antenna on his car roof, and was called a “car phone”. It was crazy expensive. I think work paid for it. Oh, and it was wired directly to the antenna.
I got my first cell phone in about 2000.
I got my first email address in 1982. I have had internet access since then, but only as email until AOL came out.
I’ve had a computer in my house since 1985. Omega, Mac, and PCs. I remember when Windows came out. Such a buggy mimicry of Finder. And then the viruses. All the viruses. We had to have protection software on our PCs, but not the Macs.
My first PDA was a Newton. In about 94. I had a series of palm pilots and Treos, mostly gotten the years they came out, the last one was a TREO 300. It had a fabulously designed keyboard. When it stopped playing nicely with my Mac, I upgraded to the just released iPhone. Added an iPad almost as soon as they came out.
About the only thing I wasn’t an early adopter of was Kindle!
kellyforeal@reddit
MS Dos, landlines, mix tapes, dial up Internet. Plugging tape into the car cigarette lighter and the headphone port on your discman so your car had a "CD player."
We had "computer class" at school where we played Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing (the worst!), Mineral Quest and on special days we got to play Oregon Trail and be sharp shooters. Who else forded the river? "Mary has died of dysentery." "You have typhoid fever."
Spirited-Way2406@reddit
Everybody and their cousin had a landline in the '70s. I knew families who still had black and white TV because "use it up and wear it out" was the standard. We had radios that picked up AM, FM, and a bunch of other stuff, including one band where somebody was always beeping away in Morse code too fast for me to write down. Record players with big fabric-fronted speakers. (Tape decks came in later and the sound was never as good.) Flashlights made of steel and powered by heavy stacks of big batteries; you could hurt somebody with them.
Silly-Shoulder-6257@reddit
Microwave, VCR, video games, remote control for TVs, refrigerators with water and ice dispensers, portable phones
jaypl99@reddit
Color tv was standard for my family in the 70s, 80s and 90s.
We had an atari vcs when it came out. We had a betamax when it came out.
Personally, I got my first computer in 1981 and I had a computer every year since then. My first computer was a Texas instrument TI 99/4a then I got an Atari 130xe.
Zealousideal_Draw_94@reddit
In the 70’s the “Tech” in the kitchen was a cheese fondue
GrannyTurtle@reddit
I built my own PC in the 80s. (I’m a programmer.) We also had the Mark I Nintendo system. Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, Castlevania, and more. On the PC, we had Leisure Suit Larry. 😁
Reader124-Logan@reddit
We always had landline phones. Mom’s got the same phone number from 1972.
My parents had color tv in the early 70s. We got our first dishwasher and handheld hair dryer in the mid 70s.
First microwave in the late 70s. We went straight to VHS, though I knew people who bought Betamax and laserdisc.
My parents weren’t early adopters. The price had to come down.
Heidiwearsglasses@reddit
Picture it- 1984. We had a color tv in the living room. A small b&w tv in the parents bedroom. A microwave. Each kid had an AM/FM radio with cassette player and a clock radio. We had an Atari 5600 also. Later in the 80’s I had a Walkman and we had a VCR and a family desktop Macintosh computer.
Reddittoxin@reddit
My mom grew up in the 70's and I remember she always told me something like she was spoiled growing up for having her own landline phone in her room, bc her dad worked for the telephone company and was able to get an additional line for free or super cheap through his job.
Now I was born in 95 so I don't have many memories of the 90's, but I do have a vague memory when I was really young in the late 90's of my dad getting his/our first ever home desktop computer. Only can even remember that bc it was such a big deal to my parents, as before that sure, some people had em, but it was still kinda a "rich person" thing at that time. Just kinda starting to get to a price point where every home got one. I also remember when my dad got his first blackberry cellphone through his job, probably somewhere in the early 2000's and I thought that was super cool bc it was a very "futuristic" cellphone at the time. (And then smartphones came out when I was in late middle/high school lol). I know I had seen cellphone phones since I was a young kid, not extremely often, but enough to know what one was. Though those were very primitive flip phones, and back then cell phones were pretty much adults only, no kid would have a cellphone like they do today lol. Hell even my own dad only had his "work cellphone" for a while, bc his job paid for it. Otherwise, he couldn't justify the expense since they were still very used to just using landline phones.
Illustrious_looser@reddit
My family didn't get a color TV until the early-mid 80s. I remember watching a rerun of I Love Lucy and believing that the TV set was on the blink.
PurpleAriadne@reddit
70’s was rotary telephones, records, 8-tracks.
80’s was answering machines, cassettes, and videotapes, walkmans. Apple IIE
90’s was CD’s, BlueRay, then at the end MP3’s. Dial up modems and internet.
molotovzav@reddit
I grew up in an early adopter tech forward household. I was born in 1990, my grandparents were younger too so I saw a lot of their tech from the past. My house had a home computer in 1995, always had a landline. I remember getting the aol discs. Fax was common since my parents owned their own businesses (really small business but needed to fax stuff). Beepers, the first flip cell phones with the antennas and such. We always had a game console of some sort and kept the old ones so we still had Atari, NES, alongside the new ones we bought.
Music was big and we didn't have mp3 players until the aughts really. But we had walkmans for cassette tapes. Cd players. Lots of older analog audio stuff for me to grow up playing with. Back then the older stuff lasted a longer time so it was still hanging around. Vcr to record shows and play vhs, later on dvds replaced it slowly but it wasn't until dvr that the VHS turtufully died as the means or recording TV in my house.
ZoeTravel@reddit
1980s... Had a 20 foot telephone cord from the phone on the wall...that let me all the way into the hall closet so I could have a private conversation. We also had tinfoil rabbit ear antenna assist so that we could get a better picture on the TV
Eogh21@reddit
In the '60's and '70's, we had 3 garage door openers, me, my younger sister, and little brother. Dad would pull into the driveway and one of us would run to to open the garage door for him.
We had a black and white TV. It was a really big deal when color TV's came into being and became affordable in the early '70's. The neighbors who got color TV's first would have dinner parties for their neighbors to come over and watch the Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. Almost every household, with kids and a TV watched the Wonderful World of Disney.
The colored TV's had wonderful science fiction sounding names like Zenith and Quasar. When we got our Zenith color TV, Dad invested in an aerial antenna. It was attached to the chimney. We could turn this knob and the antenna would change the direction it was pointing in. We had to be careful because it was easy to twist the wires. Before that, one of us kids had to HOLD the antenna wire so Dad could watch the Cincinnati stations. The person holding the antenna could not see the TV. I took up reading so I was out of the living room. And to change channels or turn up or down the sound, you had to get up and physically turn the knobs. That also went for turning on or off the TV.
We had landline phones. Most people did. There was a flat monthly rate to make local calls. Long distance calls cost extra and if you made a day time long distance call during before 7:00 Eastern time, it cost a lot of money! Until the late '70's you had to call the phone company to come wire your house for the phone. It could take 2-3 weeks to get your phone hooked up. We had a phone on the dining room wall, right next to the kitchen. Mom and Dad had an extension in their bedroom room. My grandparents had a phone nook, and a special piece of furniture to hold the phone, phone book and a place to sit when you talked on the phone. My mother grew up with a party line, which meant you shared a line with multiple other people, and nosey people could listen in on you phone conversations from the comfort of their own homes.
My little brother got a Pong console in '76 or '77. His friends congregated at our house to play it. But it was boring and after about an hour, they'd go outside to play.
In the mid '70's, Video cassette players and recorders came out. By the mid '80's most homes had one, usually hooked up to our console TV sets.
Almost everyone had a stereo. We had long play vinyl albums if we were seriously into music, or little 45 records, if you just wanted what you heard on the bubble-gum station. Then in the late '90's the music systems got smaller and so did what we listened to music on. First CD's, then MP3 players, now streaming music.
We had computers that could not do what our cell phones do today.
I'd say after the 1990's technology really started taking off. TV screens go larger, thinner and lighter. Computers keep getting smaller and thinner.
I could probably go on, but I am tired now and my brain hurts from remembering.
BreadPuddding@reddit
Color film and tv were standard by the 80s. Color tv might have been less standard in the 70s (and I think you could still buy portable black and white tvs jn the 90s?) but color film was common. Telephones were ubiquitous WELL before that, only very poor or very rural areas would not have had telephones by the 60s, even. Some rural areas might have still been on party lines in the 70s? But people typically had private lines in their homes, and by the 80s and 90s those who were wealthier might have multiple home phone lines and multiple televisions (by the late 90s my dad had a cell phone - he was a newspaper journalist and my mother was a SAHM, though TBF he covered tech and tech policy so we were often early adopters).
snowsurface@reddit
Landlines were ubiquitous in the USA and probably all of Western Europe. In the 70s AT&T was still a monopoly and had control over both lines and equipment, so you rented the telephone as part of your service so there were very few styles. Also low income people could qualify for very cheap service because it was considered essential for life safety and I'm guessing that was part of the consideration for allowing the monopoly.
Snoo_16677@reddit
Stereo systems. AM/FM receiver, turntable, cassette deck, speakers (passive speakers).
Portable radios and cassette recorders. VCRs, CD players. Portable TVs.
Clean-Fisherman-4601@reddit
My older sister bought a microwaves in the mid 70s. It was super expensive and weird to work, but it lasted for decades.
I remember helping her clean on my day off and trying to heat something up when we took a break. There was no pushing 1 for a minute of heat, I had to find the instruction manual she kept in a drawer under it to figure out how to use it.
DEADFLY6@reddit
The phone's ringtone sounded like.....the phone.
When I discovered beepers, i thought, "Wow!!! What will they think of next?"
Melora_T_Rex714@reddit
We had a wall phone, with a stretched out curly receiver cord. And a 13 inch color tv that got horrible reception.
allthelostnotebooks@reddit
I feel like it happened gradually but at steadily increasing speed. It snowballed.
We had a black & white tv when I was really little. Color tv by 1977-ish. Land line phone with the long curly cord. To set the time on clock you called a phone number that just announced the time on repeat.
Around '82 came a cordless phone. Than a year or two later. CALLER ID which was absolute MAGIC and also answering machines!!!
Cable tv, HBO, MTV and Fox (the Simpsons!) all were a big deal around this time (late 70s to mid 80s and onward) - before then there were only the three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) and PBS. You couldn't record shows to watch later yet. Kids got up early to watch cartoons on Saturday mornings, which was glorious.
We didn't have a computer, but my grandparents did - Grandma was a teacher, and apple marketed to schools, so they were early adopters. Green screen, DOS commands. My brother and I coded a "guess a number between 1 and 100" game and played it endlessly.
Arcade games like PacMan started showing up next to pinball machines.
Soomwhere around 82 or 83 We got an at-home video game! Atari! We played Pitfall at home, the graphics were amazing! (Huge pixels lol. But color and movement!)
By 1985-ish we got a microwave, although I had used them at friend's houses before then. You were supposed to be able to cook whole meals in them as a primary cooking appliance, that was the hype but it never really caught on. We made gross "grilled cheese" sandwiches by melting America cheese on sandwich bread, made hot water, and re-heated things, kinda like now. Frozen meals started to have microwave instructions and not have foil on them. Great grandma worried all the time about the microwave being "left on," she always needed to check if it was turned off before she went to bed, which we tech-savvy young'ns found hilarious.
Shortly after the microwave came the vcr. We also had a betamax. Stores existed where you could rent movies on vhs cassettes to watch at home.
And walkmans were huge! So cool to be able to walk around listening to music without having to be plugged into a wall! Boom boxes (portable stereos) were also big. Breakdancers used them.
CDs got invented and were considered indestructible. People marveled that you could throw them around the room and they'd still play! Which obviously isn't actually a good idea, but compared to the fragility of vinyl they were seen as durable. But it was also emotional moving from vinyl to CDs. I had a large vinyl collection and buying my first CD felt weird - exciting and sad. Both co-existed for a long time. CDs were cool because you could play them in a stereo or a walkman. Instead of having both records at home and tapes for portability, CDs could play everywhere. But with tapes you could copy music, which was technically illegal but we did it with abandon. Everyone had tons of copied albums and mixed tapes in their music collection.
At some point we also got a home computer. My brother and I stayed up many nights playing this awesome game where you led a D&D-type band of companions into a series of floors under a mountain. I can't remember the name - Mountain King maybe? It was still DOS green screen, all you saw were lines to indicate the shape of the square of hallway you were in, and text describing the action. I honestly still really miss this game. We had reams of graph paper where we mapped put the floors as we went. It was so cool. This game was not online, we ran it on a disc. Online through a dial-up modem was slow. I can still hear the screechy connection sound! But you just did that to check email, and most didn't use email that much. There wasn't much else "online" unless you were a researcher looking up published papers & stuff like that.
I went off to college in 1988 with a fancy word processor that could store a whole paper on a sort of a floppy disk (different than the computer floppy discs) and printed by activating the typewriter. You had to hand feed the pages, and people in my dorm would hear it and thought I was a super fast typistist people just had plain typewriters. There was also a computer lab at the college which you would use for research papers because you could look up research on them. You could also check email.
Regular computers at that time didn't print on regular 8.5x11 paper, you used printer paper that had perforated strips along the edges with holes in them so gears could advance the paper, and the paper was a continuous sheet with perforations every 11 inches so you could separate the pages after printing.
No cell phones yet. Car phones were a thing but only rich people had them, the guys in Miami Vice used them which was part of their whole cool vibe. They were huge, like a big plastic brick with buttons in the middle.
No platforms for independent musicians, either, other than playing live. Ani DiFranco was a big deal for being independent/not having a record contract but still having commercial success, that was basically unheard of or at least that's what I remember hearing/thinking, but I wasn't an expert on the record industry. You couldn't just google stuff to learn more, you had to be committed to learning about something and use lots of sources over time to gain knowledge of a subject.
I remember yahoo being big news when I was in college for inventing the first of the modern search engines we use now. Before google. Or something like that. The internet started to be for more than research.
In the mid 90s we used pagers (aka beepers) to communicate. Cell phones weren't widespread yet. But you could "page" someone by sending your phone number to a pager, and the person would go find a phone and call you back. Payphones were still everywhere.
TeVO got invented and you could record, pause, and fast forward live tv!!! That was a big deal!
After that, with the internet, things really escalated. Cell phones came out, and personal devices like blackberries that had apps and could check your email. most people still had a big desktop computer at home. No flat screens yet! But laptops became a thing at some point. Super expensive at first, but the idea of computers being portable was starting. Since then it's been an onslaught of new digital tech that seems to increase in speed every year.
joekryptonite@reddit
Two items became affordable in the mid 70s: digital watches and pocket calculators.
Both were more expensive than what they cost today. But they were obtainable at the equivalent of about $80 or so in today's dollars.
The pocket calculator made the slide rule obsolete overnight. Thank goodness.
Embarrassed_Wrap8421@reddit
We had an electric blender and a landline phone. Here we are in 2026 and we still have a blender and a landline (because husband is always misplacing his phone).
LaffingAtYuo@reddit
For me, here's the peaks. I think we were late adopters for a lot of things.
1978 - born
1986 - Got cable TV, a microwave
1987 - VCR
1988 - CDs
1992ish - Mac computer (had a modem I used exactly once w/ a free AOL trial
1996 - went to college and went on the actual internet for the first time in the computer lab. Sent emails via pine
1997 - got a cell phone
1998 - got my first computer, used with high speed internet via ethernet in the dorm
The 90s by far was the biggest tech boom in my life.
getElephantById@reddit
My first memories are from around 1984. I remember we had a color television at the time, but it was controlled by knobs. I don't think we had a remote control until we got our next one.
We had a landline on the kitchen wall, it had a piece of paper with every friend, family, and local restaurant written on it. Their was also a landline in my sister's bedroom—she had the stereotypical pink phone.
We got a computer around 1987-88. It was an Apple IIc. It might have been used, I'm not sure.
We were early on getting a computer (thanks Mom) but in all other respects I think we were pretty average for a middle class family.
The late 80s and into the 90s is when I remember consumer electronics becoming a thing. Digital watches, the Sony Walkman, and the Gameboy were very common in elementary school for my generation.
Most middle class families owned a personal computer by the mid-late 90s, and cell phones around the turn of the century.
GoDenBroncos5280@reddit
I was born in '75 and both parents worked in technology. So I grew up with Apple, 2, 2c, 2e etc...for my 12th birthday I got a 1200 baud dial up modem where I would dail into Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) that were local, that had email, ASCII games (Operation Overkill and Legend of the Red Dragon were favorites). My parents were kind of anti gaming console. Puberty woke not much later when gateways like America Online came along allowing teenage me unfettered access to the internet.
Waiting as pictures would download little by little from top down was almost it's own sensual dance, and that holiday season I got a 2400 baud that felt blazing fast. 13 year old me thought nothing could surpass my 2.4kb speeds.
Somewhere around 1990 my parents businesses paid for a T1 to the house. It was amazing, but teenage me was terrified that the business could see the history, so the more spicy parts of the internet felt off limits. The Telecom professional I've become is a bit amused by how little I knew.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
What is a T1? Some kind of landline? I don't knoe what it means and didn't find out with some google searches
GoDenBroncos5280@reddit
T1 was a 1.5Mbps dedicated internet line. As opposed to DSL at the time that shared the main telephone line, T1 was dedicated to data transfer.
To give comparison, 5G internet is (therotically) 100Gbps to the device. The T1 is 1.544Mbps...streaming video would be impossible, and downloading a video like a 30 minute TV show would take days to download.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
damn that sounds incredibly fast for that time. Throughout the 90s we only had 56kbps, I think I tried 6Mbps at a school once but consumer wise it was low
GoDenBroncos5280@reddit
It was top of the line for a residential link at the time. Felt like light speed...I kind of miswrote, the 2400baud would take days to download video. The T1 was hours instead :)
Ok_Organization_7350@reddit
In the 1980s:
* A lot of houses had household intercom systems. You could press a button and speak into a microphone embedded in the wall, and your family members in another room would hear you talk from the speaker in their room. This required no setup or connection. I don't know why they don't still use these anymore.
* Most televisions at first just had basic stations. Then cable was invented. You had to order the special cable box, plus call the cable company to come out and connect you.
* When VHS movies were invented, that was a big deal. We got to rent a VHS player from the video store, plus pick out a couple movies. We did this for special occasions such as a birthday slumber party. Then when more people started actually buying their own VHS players, it was also fun to go to the VHS rental store on Friday night to pick out the family movie.
* The concept of microwave ovens was new. Only a few people had them, and they were considered high tech. It was really neat to be able to re-heat your dinner that got cold in 2 minutes, instead of wait for the oven. And before that most families had a plug-in popcorn maker to make popcorn.
* All phones were landlines. Talking to someone from outside your city or especially from another state was expensive. So if someone called from out of state for your mom, you would yell "Mom, the phone is for you, and hurry because it's long distance!" And all the phones were corded, so you could only talk on the phone as far as the cord would stretch. There were several phones throughout the house, but they were all connected to one phone line. If someone was talking on the phone, you would have to wait for them to get off before you could call someone, even from a different phone in the house. There was also the constant problem of privacy, because when you were on the phone, someone in another room could silently pick up the phone and listen in. Siblings did this a lot to their older teenage sisters or brothers when they were trying to talk to dates on the phone. It was a special privilege when a teenager finally was allowed to have their own phone in their bedroom. And it was fun to pick out your own phone, because they came in all different colors, styles, and novelty types.
Perdendosi@reddit
TV: 1 color TV was pretty common starting in about the 1960s. Id say almost everyone had one by the 70s.
By the 90s, multiple TVs were common. CRT SDTVs we're pretty affordable right before the introduction of HDTV.
Phone: Basically everyone had a landline phone by the 1970s. I'm pretty sure that even rural areas were covered. I'm not exactly when party lines were eliminated but my parents had a dedicated line and number by the early 80s.
I lived in a rural area so fell phones weren't really a thing until the late 90s. I think I knew 2 people who had one.
We got our first computer in the mid-80s, probably 1984 or 1985. It was an apple IIe. We were definitely early adopters of that (though far from.the first people in town). But by the late 80s and early 90s many more people had pcs (apple, pc, or commodore).
I had plenty of computers in the 90s but I didn't have a laptop until I went to grad school in 2000.
FataMorganaForReal@reddit
I was born in '73. As long as I can remember, we had a landline and 3 phones - one on each level of the house. I remember color TVs in the den, my parent's bedroom, and a little one in the kitchen. As I got older, I saved Christmas money from my grandparents and bought a color TV with remote control for my bedroom. My parents were jealous of the remote - LOL. I remember when we got our first Betamax (early model VHS). Initially Blockbuster Video had both Beta and VHS movies to rent. VHS was more popular and the new movies were always rented out in VHS, but we got to rent new movies in Beta because it wasn't popular. One big event that I remember was loading into the station wagon to go to Sears to buy a microwave. It was a big deal then. We went straight home and made an apple crisp in it. My parents let my one sibling and I stay up late past bedtime. I remember when we got our first cordless landline phone. It didn't work everywhere in the house, but limits were easily learned and you could walk around the main floor talking, the upstairs landing, and three steps downstairs. At my age, I was most impressed with MTV/cable. Prior to MTV you could watch music videos at like midnight on Saturdays for an hour or two. MTV started as actual Music Television with (mostly) 24/7 videos, Headbangers Ball, music news, guest rock star VJs, and video countdowns..... ! Then it became crappy with reality shows. I have had streaming services for years now, can't get MTV, and don't feel like I'm missing anything if it still exist on cable/satellite service.
Thanks for the walk down memory lane! I'll go invest in a Rollator
mrsmicky@reddit
Don't forget the fancy component stereo! Receiver, turntable, speakers, and tape deck.
Remarkable_Table_279@reddit
80s - we had a small tv & I think it was originally bw & then we got a color tv. I only know two family who didn’t have a TV but that was for religious reasons. Color film was standard by 80s. I even have some early 60s photos of my family. Cause my uncle was an early adopter.
Everyone had a landline. Tho we just called it a phone.
the earliest “this is do high tech” moment I recall was when we got a microwave. And then in early 90s. We got a cordless phone and my dad thought that was great. He didn’t like having to find it tho.
shelwood46@reddit
I was a poor kid in the 70s. We had one landline phone. We had one black & white 12" tv (portable). Movies at the theater were in color, of course. When my dad died in 1981, my SS survivors benefits were enough that we finally got a color tv (20") and cable tv (whoo, MTV). I moved out shortly after, I managed to get a cheap massive console color tv (still a 20" screen) at the thrift store, and my housemates and I paid for cable (no premium, but it had the slider box and if you tuned into the premium stations, you got the audio, but a scrambled video). When I moved out to NJ in the late 80s, my aunt had a VCR (1, in the living room). I got my first tv and cable box with a remote when I got my own place a year later. It took me a while to save up enough for a vcr, they were expensive. Eventually I could afford a tv in the bedroom, too. I had PCs (and Macs) at work & my volunteer gig. I think my first personal PC was an IBM AT. I remember my last desktop ran Windows 95, then I switched to laptops (already had one from work, it had a PC-MCIA 300 baud modem).
aladdyn2@reddit
1982 we had a console color tv that still had old technology, possibly vacuum tubes? It took about a minute to fully turn on to the point you could see the picture clearly. Pretty cool though it had a remote that worked on radio waves so you could put your head in the way and it would still worked (my mother hated that) or you could change channels from a different room to prank people. My father also installed a motor controlled antenna on the roof so we could get the best signal from all of the four channels available to us.
We had a VCR before a lot of my classmates because my grandfather would buy the latest technology and gave us his old VCR.
We could have gotten a microwave but my mother didn't trust that technology so it was quite some time before we got one. Maybe in the mid 90s?
My father was into computer stuff so he bought us a commodore 64 and we had home computer games and learned basic programming before most of the kids I knew. This was around/ before the Atari popularity
Alternative-Being181@reddit
In the 90s we had a cd player that also played cassette tapes, a color tv (never heard of a b&w one being used in the 90s), multiple phones on one landline.
OperationPinkHerring@reddit
I was born in the early 80s. We had a landline phone always. In the mid 90s we got a big desktop PC and a dial up modem that we quickly got a second phone line for so it wouldn't be tying up the home phone line all the time..
elderly_millenial@reddit
We just got yelled at to get off the internet
nerowasframed@reddit
Yeah, we had a rule that we weren't allowed to be on the Internet when our parents weren't home, in case they needed to call home for some reason.
houseplantsnothate@reddit
Wow, we had this rule too but I never knew why, now it totally makes sense.
jiminak@reddit
I don’t think we even called it the internet yet. In 1984, when we got our first modem, we just got yelled at to “get off the computer”. We dialed into local BBSs and CompuServe, or directly to our friends to play 1v1 games. Later in the 80s, Prodigy, and then AOL sometime early 90s.
But I don’t really remember using the term Internet very broadly until the WWW came along. We usually just said “online” or “the computer”.
elderly_millenial@reddit
I was referring to the 90s when long after had a PC at home. I don’t think we a modem until 1996 or so
somecow@reddit
If you were really well up, second phone line, even for the kids, one for the fax too. Ugh. Brb checking into retirement home now.
Euphoric_Ease4554@reddit
😎
FrenchFreedom888@reddit
Yeah bro you must be getting on in age
nunyabizthewiz@reddit
We (me as a kid and my parents) had one color tv in our house (77-present). I had a little black and white TV in my room (88ish to 94ish). I had a big stereo system with a 5 disc CD changer 1993-??. We got our first PC in 1993. Dial up internet soon after. Landline telephone all my life up until this year.
version13@reddit
1970s: landline phone, cable tv with 12 channels, TI computing calculator, Merlin handheld gaming device, portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, 8 track tape player / turntable combo (we’d record albums to play in the car!) cassette tape player. Also, our house had electricity and indoor plumbing.
In the early ‘70s dad brought a video camera and recorder deck home from work for the weekend. My brother and I recorded a TV talk show.
Justadropinthesea@reddit
I was born in the mid 1950s. I remember going next door to watch The Wizard of Oz movie with Judy Garland because my neighbors had the only color TV in the neighborhood. This would have been late 50s I guess. We only had black and white at home until about 1960 but we did have a landline with several extensions and all the usual appliances.
Chalupabatmanm6@reddit
As a kid in the 80's we had a Tandy TRS-80 color computer, microwave, weird internet I didn't get at the time because I was a small child ,cd players. Lots of what I didn't realize was rare for people to have in the early to mid 80's
Joel_feila@reddit
You pick probably the biggest time of change for home eletronics.
in the 90s cd players were common even in poor homes. They did not exists in the 70s. you had vinyl, 8 track, and audio cassetes.
Home pcs were common and nicer homes might have 2 with one connected to the internet. The 70 only very VERY rich homes had any kind of personal pc, the apple 2 one of the first widely sold home computers came out in the late 70s, even the apple one came out in the mid 70s and cost when adjust for inflation was $4000.
I the 70s color tvs started to out sell black and white and most homes had 1 or none. IN the 90s multi tvs were common. lots of my friends had a tv in their bedroom and their parents had one in their bedroom.
qu33nof5pad35@reddit
Cable tv, landline
CommercialExotic2038@reddit
I got a 10 key calculator when they were brand new: $40
LivingGhost371@reddit
Landline Phone- Having one was the norm by the 50s and by my memory of the 70s I never knew a person without one.
Color Film- This was also widely used by consumers starting in the 50s and black and white film would be unusual by the 70s. Not everyone had an expensive SLR camera but there were 35mm point and shoot cameras and various cheaper formats like disc and 110 as well as instant cameras.
Color Television- again I didnt know anyone in the 70s without one. although if you had an extra set in a bedroom or downstairs in might be black and white. Plug in type black and white sets ceased production by the early 90s although portable models continued a few more years.
EstablishmentSea7661@reddit
Phone with very long twirly cord that was always mis-twirled.
GoPadge@reddit
Almost everyone had a land line, some form of Kodak camera (mostly 110 packs) or Polaroid color camera, and by the 90's color TV's. In the 70's black and white TV's were more common and screens were rediculously small. I can remember watching Saturday morning cartoons on a 12" TV. Somewhere in the mid 80's we got a basic microwave (turn dial timer) and a 19" color TV.
Darkest_Brandon@reddit
Here’s one for you: our late 70s early 80s camera used flash cubes. You’ll probably need to look those up
Narrow-Durian4837@reddit
Almost everybody had a landline phone. Often multiple phones, but they were usually on the same line (so if more than one phone was in use at the same time, they were participating in the same conversation).
StrawberriKiwi22@reddit
But the thing that is missing nowadays is when mom would say, “Grandma and Grandpa are on the phone! Everyone get on!” And it would be one big family conversation.
Narrow-Durian4837@reddit
Long distance phone calls were a big deal. They were expensive, so you wanted to get your money's worth.
somecow@reddit
Even worse in the country, party lines. Each house had their own ring. “ring ring RIIIIIIIIIIIIING ring”, yup that’s me. And of course everyone would pick to eavesdrop (dammit mrs green get off my phone call).
Euphoric_Ease4554@reddit
Or Mrs Jones, Betty is really sick. I’ve got to call the doctor. Started a lot of gossip.
Remote-Bug4396@reddit
Landline phones are pretty old. Telephony was pretty well adopted in the U.S. by WWII. The big thing was actually dialing the number yourself rather than picking up your receiver and asking the operator to connect you to someone or someplace. There are 1950s era instructional films posted on YouTube showing people how to dial numbers.
ancientastronaut2@reddit
We had two lines. One was for my dad's business and our relatives out of state. The other was for my mother's hours long daily gossip marathons.
GOTaSMALL1@reddit
“Thanks Mom! I got it. Mom!!! HANG UP!!”
Murky-Purple@reddit
I guess we were a pretty techy family compared to some here. I was born mid-70s. Always had landline phones. Had multiple color TVs. Plus my parents had a 4-inch set w/ built in AM/FM radio in their bedroom. We got a Commodore 64 computer in the mid-80s and our first video game console (Colecovision, I believe) around then, too. They both hooked up to the TV. My sisters and I all had little, cheap color film cameras by the time we were 12 or so.
My family was, I suppose, mid-to-upper middle class? My father was an engineer. Mom a housewife.
Top-Rip-5071@reddit
People have stated the “what” but thought I’d chime in with amounts. Color TV’s, landlines, color film was standard in the 80s and early 90s. But wealth could be pretty easily tracked by how much of each of these a household had. Most houses didn’t have multiple TV’s or landlines. This shifted in the early 90s as tech got cheaper. Shortly after that started getting desktop computers in the mid 90s, and again, it was one for a household. By the late 90s a cellphone might be added to the mix.
Can only speak for myself/somewhat for my region, which at the time was NYC exurbs in a middle class community.
seifd@reddit
I can only talk about the 1990s because that's as far back as my memory goes. My house had a landline telephone, corded at first, but we switched to wireless. We had a color TV with basic cable and a VCR. We started the decade out with a Tandy Color Computer, but got a HP PC with Windows 95 later in the decade. However, we wouldn't have internet until around 2005. Early in the decade, my video games were a generation behind, but I caught up by the end.
Interesting-Quit-847@reddit
Born in 1974.
Growing up, color film, landlines, and color tv were ubiquitous.
We got cable around 1990, it was kind of expensive.
We had personal computers starting in about 1981, but only because my dad got a grant to buy one. My friends all had ataris, nintendos, but my mom didn’t like them, so I didn’t. We had a modem and access to gopher sites and bbs by about 1991. My grandpa bought me a desktop computer to take to college in 1993, about half my classmates had one.
thankyoufriendx3@reddit
Color TV and a HiFi in the 70s. Walkman in the 80s. Video camera in the 90s.
Spacekook_@reddit
Unfortunately no condoms
Wonderful_Adagio9346@reddit
Tech exploded with transistors in the 1950s. And then microchips after Apollo.
If you really want a good reference source, find an old Sears or Penney's catalog from the era. The electronics section will show you what was common then, and what was luxury.
Personal computers were not common. Video game consoles were still a luxury to some.
MsE0@reddit
A few people still had black and white TVs in the 80s, but it was rare, unless it was a second TV relegated to the basement or garage. Landline phones and color film in almost every household. If you wanted to take black and white photos for art, you had to buy specialty film.
One big change in the 80s was touchtone phones instead of rotary dial phones. I remember my grandma was excited to get touchtone service in her rural community in the mid-late 80s when we had had it in the town where I lived my whole life (born in 1980).
ChaChiBaio@reddit
Electric can opener that mounted under the cupboard.
rdubmu@reddit
Atari, Tandy 100, 286, 386 and 486, and late 90’s the first pentium.
NES, SNES, N64
Pagers, early cell phones, car phones
TheJokersChild@reddit
Landline phones were all we had. Unless you were a big-time detective on TV who had a phone in his car. Cordless phones came along in the early '80s, then cellular phones in bags and briefcases.
Color (and BW) film was also all we had - no SD cards or even Compact Flash. Not just for stills but also for video. 110 Kodak pocket camera or Polaroid for pictures, Chinon super 8 camera for movies. VCRs were kind of exotic until the mid '80s when you could get one for less than $500. Camcorders were like $1000-$1500 into the early '90s...but they could pay off if you sent a tape from one in to America's Funniest Home Videos.
We'd had color TV since the '50s, but it didn't go mainstream until the mid '60s and it wasn't until the mid '70s that color was affordable enough to overtake BW.
I think the mid '80s was the time the boom took off. Thanks to stores like Crazy Eddie in the NYC metro and Federated or Fry's on the west coast, more people could afford electronics. Listen to Dire Straits' Money for Nothing to get the vibe of what it was like to work at an electronics store like that: "We got to move these refrigerators / We got to move these color TVs."
drnewcomb@reddit
Color TV was common but not universal in the ‘70s. In the ‘80s cordless phones were a pain because they were on low frequencies and were analog. You’d pick up other people’s calls and wireless mics on your cordless phones. My dad had to be on-call, so we had a long extension cord so he could answer the phone out on the patio. We got a microwave in the ‘60s because dad worked late and it was better to have microwaved leftovers than leftovers desiccated by the oven’s pilot light. No cable TV. When a plane flew between the transmitter and our house the multipath would cause the TV signal to strobe. Dad got a pager some time in the later ‘60s. It just beeped and he called his office. Not all cars had FM radio. The big thing was to have an 8-track cassette player in your car. Kids would have cassette cases the size of a suitcase. We got a roll-around dishwasher in the ‘60s. It was like a top-loading clothes washer with casters. It had a double hose that clipped onto the kitchen faucet. You hooked it up, opened the hot water valve and hit the start button. The used water flowed into the sink through the second hose. The big technology was photography and audio. People spent huge amounts of money and time on those two items. Video tapes and that whole industry didn’t come along until the late ‘70s. Video on demand just wasn’t a thing before then. If you watched a movie, it was on someone else’s schedule.
StatisticianBoth3480@reddit
80's--
Microwave just came out. Oven. Light bulb. Dishwasher. Hot water heater. Remote car start. Color TV. Iron. Toaster. Shovel. Cassette and record players with amp and speakers. Vacuum.
SherLovesCats@reddit
We had a big color tv and a small black and white in our kitchen/dining area. My dad worked nights and it was his chance to watch tv during lunch before he left for work. Everyone had landlines. We got a VCR in 1985. The microwave was a few years before that.
NoseDesperate6952@reddit
Calculator
rcvard@reddit
Landline phone with an answering machine.
ajkimmins@reddit
As for turning point. Late 90's early 00's. Internet started taking off better with broadband instead of having to use dial up. MP3 players being developed, made better and bigger. Digital cameras taking actual decent pictures. Before smartphones but the biggest turn I think are smartphones where we have it all in the one device.
HoweHaTrick@reddit
486 processor baby!
We could write batch files to play the heavy games
Mysterious_Luck4674@reddit
I was born in 1981 and all those things were standard. I was in a working class neighborhood and I can’t imagine someone not having a landline or a color TV.
LilacNites777@reddit
In the 70's our TV was black and white, we had 1 phone in the house and it was on the wall next to the kitchen. It was a rotary dial with a long curly cord. We moved out to the country and still had a rotary dial phone with a long curly cord, except this time it was a party line. As kids, my brother and I would listen in on other conversations. I remember being able to call the operator for phone numbers, the time or temp. I remember pretty much only listening to AM radio (I possibly just didn't have one that played FM) . In the late 70's I bought my boyfriend an FM radio for his truck. We had LP albums and 8 track tapes that made a clunking sound when changing tracks. In the 80's I bought a TI 99. The games I played on it were the Scott Adam's Adventure series. Initially they were just text adventures but later we had some that had graphics. Still some of the best games I've ever played. Later, we had a Comadore 64. I remember playing Mario Brothers on that. In the 90's we got our very first actual computer. I remember how, at the time we had one of the "fastest modems". It was 56k and we had a 2 gigabyte hard drive (could be wrong about that). I still remember the sound of the modern dialing in and then connecting to AOL. In the late 90's I had a pager and then early 2000's finally got my first cell phone. Super clunky. One of my daughters still has that first cell phone number we had, just now on a smart phone. Thanks for walking down memory lane with me.
OhNoBricks@reddit
In the 1990s, we had two big screen TVs. We had land lines, a personal computer, alarm clocks, VCRs, a stereo, cable with around 50 channels with local channels. I also had a radio with a cassette player in it.
khauser24@reddit
In the 80s I was developing my own color (slide) film, and prints.
Landlines super common in all those times.
It wouldn't be surprising to find multiple TVs, but only one was big (when big was 25 inches, lol)
bradd_pit@reddit
The first family computer in my house in the early 90s could only display black and orange. I remember when we upgraded to windows 3.1 and that was a big deal because the computer had a built in modem. We didn’t get high speed internet in the house until I was a junior in high school in 2004
lwsquared@reddit
The television in the 70's was color as far back as I remember. My older brother once recalled that our family had color TV long before his friends. Music was on a hi-fi stereo that was in a big wood console cabinet. It had AM/FM radio, a turntable, and 8-track tape player. My parents had 8-track players and CB radios in their cars. In the early 80's my family got a console TV, which was a regular TV inside a big wood cabinet. First VCR and first microwave in 1984. I got a small black and white TV for my bedroom that year and a mini "boom box" that had AM/FM and a cassette player. The TV had a dial that you turned to tune in whatever channel you could pick up with the built in antenna. Always landline phones. Long distance calls (i.e. to people in other area codes/states) were on Sundays when the rates were cheaper. When I was a teenager in the late 80's/ early 90's, I got my own phone line. I was not allowed to call long-distance on that line. First cell phone in 1995. It was stupid expensive to use - you were charged for calls by the minute. Texting on those phones wasn't a thing. First DVD player sometime in the 90's. Can't remember exactly when.
mentalbackflip@reddit
My dad got an apple computer when I was in high school so I think somewhere between 1979-1981. We used our TV as the monitor and booted it up with a tape recorder and acoustic coupler. We played a lot of pong and brickout. My dad played a Star Trek type game late into the nights.
rosycross93@reddit
I was born in 1959 and we had a TV since I can remember. We had a stereo console - one piece all wooden, open the top for the turntable and radio, speakers on either side, record storage. My parents got a VCR and microwave as soon as they were available. My Dad liked new stuff. As I recall their first VCR WAS $400. In the late 70s I bought a Hitachi system with turntable, dual cassette players (to play and record tapes), am/fm radio. I had a “boom box” that used D batteries and had an 8 track player.n
ScarletDarkstar@reddit
I was little in the mid 70s, and thought landlines phones, color film and cameras, color TV, stereo with am/fm radio, cassette, and record players were all common household items. There were a lot of console TVs, that were built into wooden cabinets so they were a standalone piece of furniture.
I remember when we first got a cordless phone, because occasionally a car stereo driving by would ring the phone and it took us a few times to realize what was happening. My brother and I had cassette player Walkman, and I won a portable black and white TV with radio and cassette deck in a raffle when I was about 6. We had an Atari, too.
I was in elementary school when we got our first home computer, the Macintosh. At the time not all of my friends and family had a PC of some kind at home, but we were learning to use them in school. The library had a set of them in a computer lab we worked with on our library days.
80s - pagers, phone booths, boom boxes, black and white TV was rare, microwave cooking went from unusual and often terrible to mainstream and efficient, Nintendo stepped up home gaming consoles, and PCs were getting more and more common.
By the 90s as many people as not had TV in their room and the living room, game consoles, cordless phones were more normal than corded ones, and cell phones were headed in the direction of not only being business devices, but there were still pagers and public phones because cell phone minutes were limited and expensive. It was probably 1995 or 96 before I had my own cell phone, and it was used sparingly.
Leverkaas2516@reddit
My first camera in 1971 was a black and white Kodak "Brownie" made of bakelite plastic. My dad had an SLR and used Kodachrome slide film. We had a slude projector. At that time my mom did the bookkeeping for her home business using a large mechanical paper tape adding machine that weighed about 30 pounds and ran on AC power.
Within 10 years we had a 32-inch color TV and a Sharp microwave, and I had a japanese Pentax K1000 SLR camera. My parents never did have a computer in the house until well after I graduated from college (with a degree in Computer Science). My first home computer was a Macintosh Plus with 1MB of RAM and an external 30MB hard drive in the mid-to-late 80's when they were near the end of their market life and being sold at a discount.
MetroBS@reddit
Late 80’s early 90’s would probably be the “turning point” insofar as what kind of technology people had in their homes
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
what kind of tech though? (for example I first saw Atari 2600 in 1995 and felt as if I'd been struck by an anvil into my skull)
notacanuckskibum@reddit
Early 80s was when the first generation of home computers and having consoles came out. Nintendo, Atari, Commodore Pet, TRS-80.
Mid 80s the IBM compatible PC with DOS became the standard. But most families didn’t bother with as computer until the web came out in the 90s.
Shoddy_Consequence78@reddit
Don't forget that a IBM PC could be stupidly expensive. My parents bought a IBM PC AT close to its discontinuation so it was cheaper but it launched at $6,000 or nearly $20,000 today. We had a modem for it and a CompuServe account which was also generally stupidly expensive. Very much outliers to the average American family.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
what was it like? what did you get it for / do with it?
Shoddy_Consequence78@reddit
Well, I was a child, so mostly games, drawing using MS Paint (it was running MS-DOS and I think Windows 3.0 to start), stuff like that. Dad did some programming, they had an early version of Quicken (home accounting software), stuff like that. Not sure what Dad really did with the CompuServe and other BBS access.
Euphoric_Ease4554@reddit
Word processing.
notacanuckskibum@reddit
Yes, until the 90s PCs (whether IBM or Dell or…) were mostly business desktop machines. As were Mac’s.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
We didn't have dos but had a kind-of clone of it, a decree was made in the 1980s which required people to be computer literate in the future, starting from 1985ish all schools had computers, I remember in 1988 I had to write simple programs in DOS to pass and get into high school.
They were 8-bit pcs tho, thats why they didnt have DOS and instead a clone.
Anyway, can you remember when you/the family first got a pc with access to the internet?
TsundereLoliDragon@reddit
The Atari 2600 came out in the 1977 and was basically already considered an antique by the late 80s and especially by '91 when the SNES came out.
texasrigger@reddit
I had a second hand 2600 about a decade prior to that. By 1995 the super Nintendo had taken over. We had a computer pretty early in my household. We'd been online since Q-link for our Commodore 128 since 1986. However, TV-wise my mother still had a small black and white set in her room until the 90s and the main TV was a tiny (by today's standards) color. We never had cable so we typically only had 4 channels which didnt come in reliably. We had a VHS and renting movies was a weekly event. We always had a landline.
francienyc@reddit
In the late 80s I and many of my friends had: cable tv, VCRs, CD players, boom boxes with cassette players, Walkman (Walkmen?), color tv as standard, NES, and some of my friends quickly graduated to SNES. PCs weren’t as common as you needed to know DOS but we had them at school, along with an Atari.
It was pretty kitted out, but just different kit.
Dave_A480@reddit
Microwaves were a new and cool thing (you could actually buy one big enough to cook a ham or turkey in & it came with a plug in digital temperature probe (for auto cooking large hunks of meat) because someone thought this would actually be a normal use for a microwave)......
We had a Ti994A computer that my parents got on clearance. It plugged into our TV and came with BASIC and LOGO programming languages but no actual software (that's why it was on clearance - it had been discontinued) and no printer....
Every phone had a cord ...
Banks occasionally ran promotions for 'free' bag phones (early cell phones) with new account opening as junk mail. Being a kid I thought this was a great deal (no idea what a subscription was) and wondered why my parents didn't run out and get such a cool thing for our car.....
Got our first PC in 1988 - a zenith 286 laptop with 4 color grey scale screen - because my dad's new job made him buy it... Finally didn't have to handwrite papers for school anymore...
First real desktop computer in 1990 - 16mhz 386 with 2mb RAM and 40mb hard disk - and making that play video games (Nintendo wasn't allowed in our house) launched my future IT career.
Soggy-Attempt@reddit
Microwave oven
limbodog@reddit
The big mixer that took up half the kitchen counter was my mother's pride and joy
rcjhawkku@reddit
You had a landline because that was the only phone available.
Color TV came out in the 60s. You bought one because you were an early adapter (see my grandfather), or because your B&W TV had finally given up the ghost (my parents, late 70s).
Color film became standard sometime in the late 60s, but people still used black and white.
For the rest of it, you bought it when you could afford it (microwaves, VCRs) or found it interesting (Apple* or Commodore computers).
* I spent as much on my Apple //e as I did building my current 64GB workstation, and in 1980s $ as opposed to 2020s $.
CarolinCLH@reddit
We got our first color TV in the 60's. They were standard by the 70's. As were color film and landlines.
In the 70's phones could be put on a wall and have a long cord so you could walk around while talking instead of having to sit by it. Sometimes households had extension lines with several phones in the same house! NOTE: They were all the same number and if you picked up another extension, you could listen to the conversation. That is how we did conference calls ;)
TVs were color, but quite expensive. Before the 70's most households only had one. In the 70's smaller, cheaper ones became available. The early adopters might have one really little on in the kitchen, so the mother could cook while watching TV. I never knew anyone who had a TV in their bedroom while I was growing up, but that started in the 70's
freecain@reddit
By the 80s it wasn't uncommon to have an apple 2e or something similar. By the 90s most families around me had dialup internet, cable tv, vcrs (with dvds becoming popular), walkman, cd players, compact cameras, video cameras, some sort of gaming system, radio alarm clocks and microwaves. Cell phones and personal data assistants were becoming common by 2000. Around 2000 gps became a common device in cars. The combination of cheaper fast internet, the dotcom boom, cellphone hardware developments and China ramping up high tech manufacturing lead to the explosion of home tech. So, 2006 was probably the tipping point.
RandomPrimer@reddit
,>How common were everyday items like landline telephones, color film, and color televisions in standard households?
I was born on the early 70s. All of those were common back then. Color TV maybe not so much I the early 70s, but by like '75 or so, they were pretty common.
I'd say the real explosion was in the 90s. That's when cell phones, personal computers, an internet became much more common. I had a computer and "internet" access back in the mid 80s, but that was uncommon.
doozle@reddit
Early 90s: DOS computer. VHS player. Color TV. Basic cable. Answering machine. Cordless phone.
bramblefish@reddit
70s - landlines, TVs, stereo equipment, tape recorders, Walkmans introduced, boom boxes
80's -the above but add VCR, CD players, dial up modems, home computers, Explosion of portable audio, beginning of Brick cell phones, cable TV growth (yes started much earlier, but really expanded in the 80s, videogame consoles, pagers, fax machines.
90s - the above, but add laptops start, pocketable cell phones, virtual pets, internet access in homes expands, web browser (buh bye Comuserve), dvd players, ecommerce.
playinpossum1@reddit
In 1975 I got my first TI calculator. It added, subtracted, multiplied and divided. It was $100, expensive! I used it all through college.
DavyDavisJr@reddit
Land lines, answering machines. Separate long distance phone companies constantly contacting you to subscribe to their services. HiFi with phonograph, cassette and later CDs. Then came VCRs and time shifting and the freedom to be somewhere else when your favorite TV program came on.
cstar4004@reddit
In 1990’s-2000’s everyone had a landline phone, most people had a color TV with basic cable, or DishTV Satellite services if you lived somewhere without cable access. Some houses started replacing gas stoves with electric stoves. Fridges started coming out with Ice and Water dispensers on the door. Before that we had to make our own ice cubes in ice cube trays.
Cell phones existed, but only rich businessmen had them, because they were really expensive. It was more common to have whats called a “beeper” or a “pager”. Basically it’s a little box you clip to your belt, at it beeps when someone pages you, and tells you who is paging. You then need to find a landline or a payphone to call the person and find out why they were paging you. Beepers could not call or send texts. It only “paged” to let them know you need to talk. In 2000’s to 2010’s cell phones became cheaper, at first parents would have them, not kids, but then kids started getting them too. I got my first cell phone when I was 16, around 2008.
We had an Original Nintendo (NES) with Tetris and Mario/Duck Hunt, which came with a light zapper gun to shoot at birds on the screen. We skipped The Super Nintendo, (SNES), but I got a Nintendo 64 with Super Mario Kart, and Super Smash Bros.
ice_princess_16@reddit
In the early 80s we got a VCR and cable. As an adult I realized we were somewhat on the early side of those. Usually had more than one tv in the house. Heard about the first black and white and color TVs from my parents - early boomers. Parents were educators and we had early Apple computers at home in the 80s. Always had a landline of our own for as long as I can remember (70s and later) but my mom remembered having a party line. My parents were pretty late with smartphones though - kept their prepaid flip phones for a looooooong time. They’ve converted now.
FionaTheFierce@reddit
We got a color tv by early 1970s. Probably 73 or 74. Landlines were what everyone had, assuming they had a phone (which basically everyone had). Some people still had party lines (single line shared by multiple houses) and rotary phones were common. Color camera film was standard.
LiqdPT@reddit
I had all of those things in my house all of my life. I was born in the mid-70s. In fact, my father (born early 50s) had both a landline phone and color TV in his childhood home, though I'm not sure at what point he got each.
Cyber_Punk_87@reddit
So late 80s/early 90s, all of those things were standard. We had a landline, color TV (with an antenna and like two channels in the 80s, finally got cable in 1990 when we moved), and color film (my dad actually had a nice Nikon SLR that he got around 1990ish). All of those things were pretty standard from the 1970s.
We also had a VCR and a Betamax. Record player throughout that time. We got a CD player around 1993 I think (it was definitely before 1995). Vehicles had cassette decks in them. Got a DVD player in the late 90s.
Because my mom had her own business, we also had at least one PC in the house from around 1990. Got (dial-up) internet around 1997-98.
SpatchcockZucchini@reddit
Born in the 80s and graduated high school in the 90s- color TV, color film, landline phones. We didn't have cable TV until the 90s and I remember getting a cordless phone in the early 90s. We had computers because Dad loved tech, but we were definitely the outliers. I remember playing games on PCs running DOS! I also remember thinking how amazing color monitors were and how amazing the internet was with a 14.4 modem.
Our phones were touch tone at our house, but it wasn't uncommon to still see rotary phones. In fact, my grandma had a harvest yellow rotary phone on the wall until whenever it was they switched to digital.
NarrowAd4973@reddit
Pretty sure all of those were standard in the 70s, or at least common enough to be expected.
Color TVs were extremely common, though black and whites were still around. What you didn't have was a remote control for the TV. You had to get up and turn the channel dial. Or have your kids do it. And you'd sometimes have to adjust the antenna to fix the signal.
Color film was standard. But you has to take the roll of film to a someone to have it developed to get pictures. Unless you splurged on a Polaroid that printed the pictures immediately.
Landlines were standard. But it was likely a "party line", in which every phone in the house used the same line. If someone was talking in one room, you could pick up the phone in another room and listen. Incoming calls were blocked. So if someone was expecting an important call, they'd be camped out by the phone (no answering machines, so if you missed it, that was it), and nobody was allowed to use it. Also, they'd be rotary phones, where to had to turn the dial for each number.
IntentionAromatic523@reddit
70s. The big things in our household was a side by side fridge, color console TV and an electric can opener.
2PlasticLobsters@reddit
By the 70s, pretty much everyone in developed areas had the option of a landline. Probably there were some who couldn't afford it, and a few late-adopter holdouts who thought they were o tool of the devil or some shit.
My aunt, who was thrifty to a pathological point had a party line because it was cheaper. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea for that household. She lived with two elderly relatives, one of whom had had two strokes & was extremely frail. The delay in freeing up a party line could've been a disaster.
Most homes had color TVs by the middle of the decade. I only recall seeing B&W ones relgated to a den or basement where the kids hung out.
The tech arrival that made me happiest was getting a microwave in the early 80s. I've always hated cooking.
Hungry_Reading6475@reddit
1980's, we were a middle class family, but on the upper end of middle class (without being upper middle class, if that makes any sense). We had 1 color tv and a VCR. 3 landline phones (one on the main floor in the kitchen, one in the master bedroom, and one in our basement). Once they became commonplace later in the decade, we had an answering machine. Dad had a stereo system that played the radio, records, and 8-track. Again later in the decade us kids had portable stereos that played cassette tapes, and I got a walk-man in middle school. Older brother bought an Atari with paper route money, but no other gaming systems (mom and dad didn't like them, thought they were a waste of time).
What we did have, which was still very, very rare in the early 80's, was a home computer. I can't stress enough how unique this was. Usually only schools and businesses had them at this time. Dad worked for Xerox and got a deal on our first one. No idea what type it was, or what he even used it for. He got rid of it after a couple of years and then got an Apple II/e, I think this would have been around '82 or'83, I was pretty young. We had a PC by the time I hit high school around '90.
AuburnFaninGa@reddit
Gen X here: we always had a color TV, landline and pictures were in color. Our house was built around ‘66/67 with central AC. My parents still kept boxes of slides and b&w photo albums for years.
We had a stereo set (not the large console-
My grandparents had one of those!) and that got upgraded every few years.
We got our first VCR and microwave in the early 80s. I had my own portable TV and phone extension in HS. My parents had a small
TV in their room.
Euphoric_Ease4554@reddit
We had all of these. Color tv appeared around 1960. No remotes though. Color film in the 1920s, landlines in the 1930s.
Scootchula@reddit
My parents’ house (1960s) had an intercom system. Front porch, kitchen and bedroom. Fancy at the time, I guess.
ATLUTD030517@reddit
Born in '83(with a '79 brother). Can't remember a time in my 18 years at home that we had fewer than three landline phones(downstairs den, kitchen, parents bedroom) or two TVs(downstairs den and parents bedroom) in the house and eventually we had five phones and four TVs once my brother and I both had them in our bedrooms.
I can't remember when they upgraded but I can remember my parents bedroom phone being rotary.
Euphoric_Ease4554@reddit
Everyone had all of those.
RandomPaw@reddit
We had a color TV in the 60s. I remember watching The Monkees in color so maybe by 66. I got my first VCR in the early 80s. My parents had a small color TV in the kitchen and a bigger one in the family room.
Yes we had landline phones. More than one so you had one attached to the wall in the kitchen and one on a bedside table in your parents room. Cool kids had a phone of their own. Again that’s all in the 60s. My college dorm in the 70s had phone attached to the wall in each room.
Color film came in way back when. Like the 50s. But we were still taking our film in to get developed in the 80s and Polaroids were popular in the 70s.
I would say consumer music equipment was where things changed the most. My parents had a stereo that looked like You needed a turntable, speakers and a receiver to play vinyl albums when I went to college but then eight tracks came in and then cassettes before cds.
The other thing is home computers. We had our first PC by 81 and the tractor-feed printer was super expensive. And yes we had email and message boards.
jreashville@reddit
We had all those things in the 80s and 90s. Microwave ovens and answering machines became common in the 80s. So did VCRs. Pagers became common in the 90s. Cell phones existed but only rich kids had them.
JusMiceElf@reddit
In the 70s, landline phones were common, but back then, we rented the phones from the phone company, and most folks had dial phones at home. Even in offices, dial phones were common, with physical buttons to switch lines or put a call on hold. It wasn’t until later that we could buy and own our own telephones. That was also when cordless
DrBlankslate@reddit
Landline telephones were standard.
Color film - do you mean for cameras? Yes, common.
Color TV - not probably until the early 1980s.
gkcontra@reddit
Born in ‘69 and I don’t remember not having a phone, color tv or color film.
Our phone was on a wall in the kitchen so it had the really long cord so you could stretch it to other rooms, until cordless phones became mainstream.
We had a color tv in the living room and my parent’s bedroom, 19” was standard and if you could afford it 25 or 27”.
For cameras I think we used a Polaroid the most and then disposables after that.
I also got an Atari as soon as I could, then a Vic20, and mid to late 80s my first PC.
DogMom641@reddit
We got our first black and white tv in 1959. A few years later, our neighbor bought a color tv. We had a kitchen aide stand mixer, got a blender in the late sixties. Phone was a landline, wall mounted.
SpaceCatz03@reddit
I remember the day (in the 80s) when our black-and-white TV broke. I had been watching an episode of The Munsters so it didn’t matter that it was a black-and-white TV.
We got a color TV soon after WITH a remote and, as an only child who had previously been used as an in-person television channel changer, it was amazing!
I wish I had purposefully broken that old television years earlier
HappyJoie@reddit
I have black and white photos of me from the 70's, but that's only because my uncle considered himself a photographer (he even had a dark room). Black and white was his artistic choice. Otherwise, my life has been in color.
iowanaquarist@reddit
Those were all common place in the 80s. It was not super uncommon to have many handsets in the house or even multiple phone lines.
jigokubi@reddit
I was born in the mid-Seventies. At no point covered by my memories did we not have a landline and color TVs, though I still encountered a few b+w sets.
All of my childhood photos are in color.
Background-Passion50@reddit
Cable television was not as common in certain parts of America. My grandparents didn’t have cable tv on their farm in upstate New York in the mid 90s. An address book or rolodex was common for everyone because, contacts couldn’t be saved on a cell phone. My mom, who used to be a very successful marble executive and banker had two cell phones. The briefcase one and the thick, gray Nokia people remember from older movies. Pagers were still a thing even into the early 2000s. I watched my dad’s police car go from the Crown Victoria to the modern Dodge Chargers we now see regularly.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
How exclusive were mobile phones though? (if) For example here an entry level mobile phone in 1995 would cost about a year's salary (activating the sim card could cost 2 weeks to. 2 months of salary)
MonicaBWQ@reddit
In the ‘90’s mobile phones themselves weren’t that expensive. But the service was very expensive. So not a lot of people had them. And if you did have one you used it sparingly. You were charged by the minute. And you were charged more for “roaming” when you traveled out of your immediate area.
Mental_Freedom_1648@reddit
My family got our mobile phone around 1995, and we weren't rich, so they weren't that extravagant, but they also weren't a thing that every household had.
According to google, my phone (which I got in 1999) was about $200. My parents were probably making $30,000-40,000 a year in that time period.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
by 1999 here mobile phones were getting chraper - about 1 or 2 months of wage. My father managed to get one in 1994 which was insane to almost everyone he bumped into - people who had a mobile phone were seen as rich people or mafia bosses or some shit early on. in 1999 though it was more like just very expensive
Mental_Freedom_1648@reddit
I don't remember what our mid-90s phone was, so I can't look up a price on it, but nobody really thought it was weird to have it. Maybe that would've been the reaction in the early 90s or the 80s.
Me having a phone in the late 90s was more unusual, but that's because I was under 18 and cell phones for kids wasn't the standard yet.
troublepansies@reddit
In my area cell phones weren’t common until the early 00s. I knew a couple people who had them in 1998 or so. I didn’t get one until 2002, I was in my 20s.
Background-Passion50@reddit
So from my memory a cell phone was a middle class to upper middle class device and even then somewhat rare. Children certainly didn’t have them like they do now. I don’t recall any of my friends parents having one but, I also lived near NYC so it’s not impossible for them to of had them and I just never saw it. Phones built into cars were also a luxury item and I remember one of my moms Cadillacs coming with one of those as well.
xxxjessicann00xxx@reddit
My parents still don't have access to cable TV and just recently (like 2 months ago) got internet that is good enough to stream. They use a satellite dish for TV and the internet used to be satellite. I swear they aren't even that far from civilization lol.
FancyPickle37@reddit
My place is the same way, cable isn’t available out here (which is fine, I don’t want it) and satellite internet doesn’t work well either. We used to have some huge hunky antenna thing that picked up a few local channels. I never knew what “fast” internet was before Starlink. I’m only 15 minutes from town 😆
Background-Passion50@reddit
I believe it. My dad recommended to my grandfather he get satellite tv and I distinctly remember him staring at my dad and just saying “why?” I mentioned in a previous post over 6 to 8 months ago my grandparents were never big tv watchers and only owned 5 movies. Gettysburg, Gone with the Wind, Bambi, Tora Tora Tora, and Kelly’s Heroes. Though at some point I do remember returning in my adulthood to see a 6th movie. Gladiator. I never got to ask but, I’m positive that was grandads movie because, Grandma doesn’t like anything violent or heretical and she still only reads the Bible and ancient romance novels she finds at garage sales.
RubGlum4395@reddit
In the 90's remotes for TV's, cordless phones often a two-pack, a modem for your computer to get online, a desktop, a Sega, Nintendo, Turbo-grahics etc were very common household items.
MMARapFooty@reddit
Dial up internet 1990s
Cock--Robin@reddit
I can remember when we got our first color tv in the early 70s. They were around before then of course, but very expensive. They got more common as the 70s went on. Color film and landline phones were commonplace, although only the well to do had more than one phone, and the really well heeled were the only ones with more than one phone line.
Rare_Independent_814@reddit
I was a 90s kid, born mid 80s. My dad was always into tech so we had all the latest stuff at the time. I remember my friends thinking it was ok to steal my cds cause I had a cd burner. But the burned ones never sounded as good.
purlknitpurl@reddit
I think color was pretty standard from the 70s on. Anything that was still B&W was simply because it hadn’t broken yet and didn’t need replacing. We got a new tv 92-95, and the upstairs tv replaced the basement tv which was a B&W knob tv my dad had since the 70s. Technology was not as easily or quickly replaced and was much more expensive than it is today. New technology was considered a BIG purchase for most families. It was built to last much longer than today’s planned obsolescence. If it did break it was easier and cost effective to repair. You used to be able affordably get something repaired at the repair shop or find a replacement part at radio shack and fix it yourself. We got a used Atari at one point. The buttons on the controls didn’t work so my dad replaced them with spare parts he had around the house. My mom used computers with her work so we had one before many people. We had the same tower for a long time and just added more ram or memory, or connected new drives/cdrom/hard floppy readers as was needed. Some stuff was almost never replaced. My parents had the same phone in their kitchen for 20+ years, they used the same cameras they got when they were younger when I was growing up. My dad still uses the sound system he got in the 70s today.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
Alright this is the 11th time Ive tried posting this and altering the post's wording for it to not gen instantly removed.
Why Im asking:
I grew up in a country occupied by the Soviet Union. Back then, the regime poured an astronomical amount of the state budget (around 15–38%) into the military. Because of that, basic consumer goods and tech like household landline phones or calculators were quite rare and mostly exclusive to official or military use. On top of the shortages, there was a massive push to suppress our national identity, which made everyday life feel intentionally drab, gray, and restricted. Coming from that background, I've always been fascinated by what the average American household looked like during the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
So basically catching a glimpse of american movies or even having a plastic shopping bag was quite exclusive
AdFinancial8924@reddit
I never even considered a landline phone “consumer tech.” It’s always been a necessity. Every house in America has had a hookup to a phone line since the 1950s and even before then towns were getting wired with phone lines in the 1920s. Things like call waiting, caller ID, cordless phones, and voicemail came around in the 90s. Though answering machines are much older. In the mid 90s pagers got really big and cell phones were around in the late 90s but typically only used for work. Cell phones weren’t mainstream until 2000-2005ish.
moonwillow60606@reddit
I have a unique perspective here that may be helpful for you.
I grew up in 70s and 80s. In the late 80s, I also did a summer study abroad in the USSR in the late 80s. The technology gap between the US & USSR was pretty big back then.
Color TVs, microwave ovens, color film (both cinema & photography film), landlines were common. VCRs, cable TV, cordless phones were becoming much more common. Also in single family homes a washer & dryer were also common.
But the biggest difference I saw, and that actually gave me culture shock when I returned to the US, were the options available in consumer products. I remember going to the grocery store and being overwhelmed by the 20 different types of laundry detergent. Same for cereal. Or shampoo. Or toilet paper. Dozens of options vs 1 or 2.
Pernicious_Possum@reddit
All that you mentioned was common in all three decades you asked about. I’d say the most advanced thing we had in the 80’s was a programmable VCR, 90’s I’d say a DVD player. I’d reckon the mid aughts was when tech started really booming. Like when cellphones became available to the masses. That was the tipping point I think
GoodDecision@reddit
It was common to have a separate machine from a VCR to rewind VHS tapes. Often times they were modeled to look like a car for some reason.
I forget the reason, it was either to save the VCRs lifespan, or the VHS. Someone will clarify maybe.
XandrousMoriarty@reddit
It was to save time, to reduce wear and tear on the heads and motor assembly of the VCR, and you would commonly go to the rental place, rent several movies for over the weekend, and could rewind one while playing another in the VCR. If you rented a movie and returned it unwound, you would get assessed a penalty fee of like fifty cents per movie.
MountainTomato9292@reddit
80’s: landline (one per house, although where my husband grew up they still had a neighborhood “party line”), color tv with no remote (1-2 per house), antennae or basic cable, no computer or internet.
90’s: landline (1-2 per house), small desktop computer, eventually internet access with a dial-up modem, color tv with remote control (1-3 per house), cable or satellite tv plus maybe HBO if you were lucky.
Varies I’m sure based on household income and location, but this is what I grew up with, middle class in the southern US.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
what is a party line? like multiple neighbours javing one line?
can you remember when internet usage became kind-of common in your area?
MountainTomato9292@reddit
Yes, a party line is multiple neighbors sharing a phone line.
I do not remember specifically about internet but probably early 90’s? I didn’t have an email address until my college assigned me one (1996), but we had dial up internet at my house before that. We didn’t really use it much though, it tied up the phone line so we could only use it for school or work. Mostly my parents used it for work.
MonicaBWQ@reddit
I never knew anyone in those decades who didn’t have a landline phone. Color film was the norm. In the seventies I knew a few people who only had a black and white TV. But that was mostly older people or people without much money. . By the’80’s almost everyone had color TV. It seemed like a bit of an explosion of new tech in the mid-‘90’s but looking back it was more of a gradual buildup.
Major-Boot5910@reddit
In the 70s, in addition to several color tVs and Landlines we had the Fairchild gaming system and a microwave. might have had an answering machine. Definitely had a cassette player.
Don’t remember anything specifically about the 80s, but in the 90s I bought a desktop computer with a printer and added a scanner with fax capability as well as additional storage. can’t remember which gaming system I had.
WritPositWrit@reddit
We always had a landline. Everyone i knew had a house phone (although my grandmother had a party line - except no one else did so it was effectively private). Most people had a wall phone in the kitchen. We were slow to switch to push button phones since the old dial phone worked fine so why switch.
Color TV existed, but we had black & white until the 80s. We had one TV; we got seven channels with our antenna so didn’t need cable. We did get a microwave and VCR before most people.
Call waiting came out in the early 80s and calker ID in the late 80s.
I bought my first computer (a Mac) in 1985. I think i bought a printer at the same tine (dot matrix of course).
acu101@reddit
TVs, stereos and old schools gaming consoles. Also, single game handheld video games and fax machines. If you wanted to watch a tv show you had to catch it at a specific time the one day of the week that it was on. If you missed it that week you’d catch it the following week, but you could not watch that episode you missed until the show got rerun or went into syndication. Our internet was called an encyclopedia and phone book.
XandrousMoriarty@reddit
Born in 1973. Lived in a small town in Southwestern Ohio, USA growing up. Here's what we had - the number is the year I remember acquiring the tech item or capability:
Central Air Conditioning with Heat Pump: 1976 Cable Television with Cinevue and HBO - thirteen channels: 1978 Color Television: Parents had one before I was born Telephone line (single party): Since before I was born Touch tone telephone with actual tones: 1982 Home game system - Atari 2600 - 1982 Commodore 64 home computer: 1986 Commodore Amiga 500 home computer: 1989 Nintendo NES: 1988 Cell phone (bag phone, mom's job paid for it): 1989 Microwave oven: 1985
My parents were really forward thinking in a lot of ways, especially my dad with the Central Air and Heat Pump. We were the only house amongst a couple of thousands in our subdevelopment that had such a thing. We lived in a slab house with brick walls, etc. and the vents came up through the floor, covered by registers. I remember the thermostat was made by Airtron. When it got hot in the summer, all the kids came over to hang out and play video games with us since we had real air conditioning and not noisy window units. Neighbors started getting central air installed by companies like Sears starting in the late 80s and early 90s, but their duct work was installed in the ceiling. Our duct work was literally part of the concrete slab of the foundation.
Everything_Breaks@reddit
The house stereo had an 8-track player that needed an adapter so I could play cassettes when I started buying them around 1984.
My computer was a VIC-20 and I stored programs on a tape drive.
I had a Walkman and a disc camera.
Only one wall mounted phone in the house but the cord was so stretched out, I could take the handset into my room and close the door.
No air conditioning, oil furnace and wood burning stove for heat. When it got really hot I'd sleep in the basement with the dehumidifier.
Family cars went from VW beetle to Ford Fairlane wagon to a Honda Accord hatchback, which I wrecked. Then we got a Nissan Sentra and I crashed that too.
For a treat we would rent a VCR from the Grand Union grocery store and pick out a movie right there.
As a teen I got around on a Honda PA50 moped. Before that I had a Schwinn stingray peapicker model that I ruined trying to make it into a BMX bike like my friends had. My town favored tar & chip for the roads so skateboarding wasn't a thing for me.
My school's computer class had TRS-80 model 4s. We learned basic and Pascal.
weirdfambly@reddit
I was born in 1985 and grew up in Silicon Valley.
- I learned how to type on an analog typewriter. We later received a hand-me-down Apple computer and printer from my grandpa that could basically only do word processing. The monitor only had two colors - green and black. In the late 90s we got an Apple PowerPC that was a huge upgrade - the monitor was in color, we could play games, make digital drawings, connect to the internet through a dial-up modem, an still of course do word processing. Being at public school Silicon Valley, our elementary school library always stocked with upgraded Apple computers that we were allowed to use for a couple hours each week to play games, learn some coding, or do creative writing.
- Tv-wise we had and kept a 1980s CRT tv well into the late 90s. It was sturdy and could connect to a VCR so there was no real thought to upgrade. TVs were still somewhat expensive at the time and it wouldn’t have been a massive upgrade in technology. My family didn’t transition from VHS to DVDs until I was well into adulthood in the mid 2000s.
- We always had a single landline. I got my own wireless V-tech phone (clear red plastic) that I kept in my bedroom but it still connected to the single landline that the “family” corded phone in the kitchen was connected to. So if my parents or brother needed to use the other phone I had to hang up (and yes it was called hanging up because the hanging phone had to be placed in the cradle to end the call).
- We’ve always been a big music family. For as long as I could remember my parents had one of those multi-media (vinyl record player/ AM/FM radio, cassette tape/ cd) stereo systems in a cabinet in the living room. I always had some form of boombox and/or stereo system in my own bedroom too. I mostly used it to listen to the radio, listen to cassette tapes and make mix tapes by recording songs off the radio. I was a teenager when the first iPod came out so I begged my parents for one for Christmas. I still have it to this day and it still works! I probably haven’t changed the mp3s on it since 2007-ish so it’s a time capsule!
weirdfambly@reddit
Also I was the first person in my family to have a cell phone. I got it in 2003 when I moved away for college. It was a Nokia. The days of being a kid outside of the house with absolutely no way to get in touch with anyone (and vice versa) are very nostalgic!
AdFinancial8924@reddit
In the 70s and 80s it was common to only have 1 phone and 1 tv in the house. Some households had 2 TVs in the 80s. My house had a computer and an Atari in the late 80s. Mid 90s is when things exploded I think- multiple TVs, cordless phones, multiple video game consoles, multiple phone lines to use the internet by late 90s but it was still common to just have 1 computer.
randomname5478@reddit
It was in the 90s when we finally got our “Own personal” land line
We had a party line in the 80s and until sometime in the early 90s.
Thelonius16@reddit
In the 70s we had all of those. Color TVs (for your main family tv anyway) were getting close to ubiquitous and color film was getting to be the default for most people too. It was probably to the point where you would have to seek out the black and white variety.
Phones were well-established decades before that.
Secure-Ad9780@reddit
About the late 60s everyone in my neighborhood had a color TV, with crappy color, landlines, top opening washers, a sewing machine, percolator for coffee, hand mixer, rolling pin, a car that broke down regularly, an upright vacuum cleaner that lasted for 20 yrs, a record player, that regularly required new needles, and records. Some newer homes had a wall intercom system. When TVs broke they were in the shop for weeks waiting for new tubes.
CaliforniaSun77@reddit
In the '80s everyone had a phone, and television (almost all color but my grandparents still had an old black and white).
I lived semi rural so no cable just an antenna. We weren't rich enough for a satellite dish.
My parents bought our first computer in the mid '80s. It was an NEC, my mom was a book keeper so she wanted one with Lotus spreadsheets. I just wanted Where in the World is Carmen San Diego which was the greatest game a nerdy kid could ask for. I also loved California Games.
We didn't get internet until I came back from my freshman year of college in the mid '90s.
augustwest30@reddit
I was born in the mid 1970s. We always had a phone with buttons. My grandparents had older rotary phones and were on a party line, which meant they shared a phone line with their neighbors and had a unique ring pattern for incoming calls to identify which house the call was for. As far as I can remember, we always had color TV, but we did have a small black&white TV that my mom liked to keep in the kitchen when she was cooking. Our house had basic cable which gave us about 12 channels. My relatives who lived in rural areas didn’t have cable, so they relied on over-the-air broadcasts and only got about 4 channels. We lived in a mountainous area, so the reception wasn’t very good. We listened to recorded music on records, cassettes, and 8-track tapes. It seems like the technology gradually got better in the 1980s. My dad always wanted to have all the latest gadgets. We got a set top “descrambler” box that gave us more TV channels. We started listening to music on CD and portable “Walkman” cassette players. “Boom Boxes” were popular for a while. We would walk around carrying these while listening to the radio and recording songs we liked from the radio to cassette tapes. TVs got bigger, but they were still the heavy CRT technology. Some of our friends had big projection TVs, but the picture looked like crap. We had a 35” CRT which was really big for its time and the picture was much better than the larger projection TVs. Computers we had started with a pong game console my parents had from before I could remember. My first game console was a Colecovision, but most of my friends had the Atari 2600. Our first computer was an Apple IIe with a green monochrome monitor. Computers got much better in the late 80s and early 90s. Every year, the computer you got the year before would become obsolete when something better and faster would come out - 386->486->Pentium, etc. We had dial-up modems fairly early on. You had to dial into a bulletin board service where you could download text and low resolution images. I would get in trouble for calling long distance to California to get hints for my video games. The next evolution online we had was Prodigy, which had news, weather, message boards, and an early version of e-mail where you could send text to other prodigy users. We also tried Compuserve and America Online. Compuserve seemed too complicated and AOL was too slow. In the early 1990s in college, we could dial in to the university’s network to get online. The dorms had Ethernet connections, but you had to pay extra to connect that way. Before the internet was unified in a web browser, you had to run separate programs for different tasks. We used Eudora for e-mail, FTP for large file transfers, Usenet for newsgroups, IRC for real-time chat (before AOL instant messenger), Gopher for looking up research papers, and another program that was an electronic “card catalog” for looking up books in the library. Everything really took off between about 1996-1998 when everything could be done from a web browser. I remember the Super Bowl ads in 1998 were a big turning point where companies that existed only online were being advertised (such as pets.com) and all the other regular product ads had websites displayed at the end of the commercial.
Adorable_Dust3799@reddit
Household tech in the 70s was a microwave, a digital clock and a watch with a real alarm. Atari next, electronic games at the arcade and VCR. Then cable tv. It went quickly after that.
norfolkgarden@reddit
12 or 13" tv was a normal tv size. And expensive! The current day comment about "luxuries are now cheap but basic survival is expensive" is accurate. (Conspiracy theories about keeping everyone "entertained" and under control get less silly and less creepy by the year.) People in the USA are now approaching our own level of Webow surveillance. (Lol, at the time you had to look up a word in the dictionary to make sure it was spelled properly. You couldn't do a random bad job of typing some word and knowing that it would be spelled properly before you finished the sentence.)
Landline single line phone with 2 phones(wall phones). 1 upstairs, 1 downstairs. Long distance was astronomical and local calls were subsidised by the long distance costs. Ma Bell was a single entity. Not the future Baby Bells. ITT was a real company. (International Telephone and Telegraph) undersea cables to connect the world were still new and still being laid.
Cell phones didn't exist except for giant bricks in the early 1990s. No one had them. Plans were all over the place. Only incoming calls were free up to a certain amount (so you only gave the number to clients) Or only outgoing calls were free so you hated having people call you back. Or a tiny amount of so many minutes and then astronomical cost. The tall brick Cell phones were simply a rich guy status symbol.
I guess the easiest way to say it was that there simply wasn't any personal tech. In the late 70's, simple addition/multiplication/divide/subtract Calculators were about 5 hours worth of hourly wage. Imagine working half the day to buy something that doesn't even do square root. Paper and #2 pencil manufacturing were technology.
It shows up in the electric box in your home. There was a time when a 50 amp breaker was standard. (Lol, with screw in fuses). Later 70's, early 80's the 100 amp breaker box was standard. Now is 200 amp.
exedore6@reddit
In the mid 80s, we had one small black & white TV, one large color TV, one small color TV. The large one had a remote. A VHS player by the end of the decade.
Portable radios and cassette players, 3 corded phones and one cordless phone sharing the same line.
An electric organ
A small microwave oven
A stereo in the living room, with a single cassette deck and a phonograph player.
We had a personal computer (a c64k, with no printer or modem till the 90s
A good 35mm camera, a couple of 110 cameras for snapshots.
A tape based answering machine for missed phone calls.
If I was going to say a turning point, it was the 90s. More portable music (walkman, later diskman), CD players, better connectivity in computers, phone features like call waiting. More interestingly, the acceleration of new tech changed.
My family was comfortable enough that we could afford these things, but not wealthy enough to be early adopters for anything.
Ok-Journalist7629@reddit
My mom always talked about how when she was in college they had to rent the vcr when they went to the video store to rent tapes in the early 80s. They also didn't have a microwave. Popcorn was made in the air popper.
Little tape recorders and also full size tape recorders were popular for dictation. A secretary would listen to it and type it out on a word processor or electric type writer. A got my hands on one as a kid when they were going out of fashion and we had SO much fun recording ourselves saying dumb stuff.
toodleroo@reddit
A whole house intercom system. We barely used it but it was there.
carmineragu@reddit
In the 70’s my rich neighbors had a remote control with 4 buttons on it.
boomgoesthevegemite@reddit
Electric can openers. Everyone had electric can openers.
ThaloBleu@reddit
Old Gen X. Landlines, colour film, colour tv were standard from the 70's or earlier. Phones much earlier, film probably 60's.
Tsunami1983@reddit
Color TVs in the 70's - remote controls sometime in the late 70s. Landline phones. Microwave in the late 70's, early 80s. I had an Atari game console in the early 80s.
AZJHawk@reddit
I was born in 1975. We always had color TV and color film for cameras. We also always had landlines (we ditched ours in 2015. My parents still have theirs).
We got our first microwave and Atari game system in 1982. We got our first VCR in 1983. First NES in 1986.
FewRecognition1788@reddit
We were upper middle class financially (my dad was a lawyer), but my parents were late adopters and very frugal, so we usually didn't get newer tech or appliances until they were very, very mainstream.
I was born in 1971. When I was very little, we only had black and white TV. We got a color set when I was in first or second grade, so about 77-78.
We got a touch-tone phone when I was 13 or 14 (1984-85), got cable & a VCR about 86-87, and my parents didn't get a microwave until about 1990.
I don't recall exactly when my mom got a desktop computer and an Internet connection, but it was late 90s-early 2000s.
DissonantVerse@reddit
Everyone had landlines and color TV. In the 80s and 90s the people with a lot of kids had smaller crappy TVs in the kids' bedroom or den or whatever. My grandpa was a big tech guy so he was an early home computer adopter, I spent a lot of hours playing games on that thing. (It was one of those MS-DOS, only displays green on black, the mouse only works in certain programs, type things.)
My aunt and uncle got a Win95 computer when they came out, and that was a big deal since family PCs were kind of a "rich people only" thing at the time. Then it was just a few years later that every household had a Win98 or WinME PC. Always on a giant honey oak desk.
Cerulean_IsFancyBlue@reddit
We had a landline phone. Long after it had become less popular we had a party line phone because it had been installed as a cheap temporary line, and eventually everybody else dropped off it to private lines. My mom kept it forever because we had a locked in very low party line rate with none of the disadvantages.
The house was wired for multiple phone extensions. My grandparents’ house was not, and had one telephone.
I remember the transition to Touch-tone phones from the old Rotary ones.
In the 1970s, we had color television. We had a remotely adjustable rooftop antenna that could rotate. We also had a microwave oven. We had a very early gaming console, I think it was a Magnavox Odyssey. My parents were both connected to people who knew about technology so we also had a very early VCR system. I remember getting a very early handheld GPS unit from my mom. I don’t remember the manufacturer. It gave you your coordinates in text and it was up to you to find a map and translate that latitude and longitude to a location. So I guess my parents were a little gadget, which might explain why we had some of these things pretty early.
LoveThemApples@reddit
Early 90's... We had a home slide projector. To show family pictures (not movies)on the wall. 8 track player in the truck. A black and white TV, with a dial to change channels, Atari. A record player with like 10 records, a cb radio lived in the living room. Also, regular am/fm analog radio with a dial to move the metal band back and forth. We did have a home computer, I think a coco? It was like a color TV that sat on a typewriter and used a cassette tape. I dont really remember it well.
It may be important to note we were unusual household. We were not wealthy, lived off grid and didnt even have running water or power. We had a generator that was turned on in the evenings, also a windmill, a gas refrigerator and a coal stove for cooking on and for heat. We Did not have a home phone. We had a giant satellite a person could lay in, and got 3 channels. This was very rural wyoming.
Physical-Incident553@reddit
How common were landlines? They were the only option unless you were too poor to afford one. I was born late 60s. We had color TV in living room, black and white in parents’ bedroom. I had a 12” BW I went off to college with. Didn’t have a dishwasher until kitchen redo in the mid 90s. Had a microwave from early 80s. We had central ac from early 70s. Always had a clothes dryer. This was very standard. We got cable TV early 80s. This was all in the suburbs of a major Midwestern city.
Substantial-Peak6624@reddit
Rotary phone and TV with antenna. We also had electricity
FoggyGoodwin@reddit
My sister said Dad got a color TV so we could watch Mary Martin's Peter Pan Dec. 8, 1960. Landline was a party line back then. Dad was a research chemist who also developed his own color slides in the 1970s.
lilfoothillsheaven@reddit
We had a color tv, a microwave, and an electric can opener (1990s). No landline though.
GotMeAMuleToRide@reddit
We got a color tv around 1970 I think.
Ladybeetus@reddit
early remotes were a slider box attached to the TV with a wire. Size about half way between a paperback and a hardcover book
Responsible-Ring21@reddit
Also tv’s were incredibly incredibly heavy. A 32 inch Sony my husband bought for me was so heavy it took two of us to move it even slightly
eyetracker@reddit
80s-90s. We've had computers since I can remember, but the first one I had didn't have a hard drive, everything was loaded to RAM on 5 1/4 floppies. Parents added a hard drive later which cost something like $400 (over $1000 by inflation) and was something like 20 MEGA bytes. Despite that expense, Dad was for long too cheap to get Internet for the longest time and when we had it you couldn't use the landline phone. The local library had a 100% text-based, non-WWW Internet for free (Gopher) so we used that or free months of AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve.
Color TV was the norm, just had a physical dial that let you pick the (12 or so?) UHF stations. Or something separate for the more VHF ones. Cameras were in color non-digital film cameras or Polaroid or the semi-disposable ones you dropped off at Walgreens to have them develop. We had an old school camera with flash cubes (disposable object that let you use the flash 4 or so times before replacing) but it was a retro novelty then.
kae0603@reddit
We had landlines. One in the kitchen and one in my parent’s bedroom. We had a color tv. They were huge back then. We had color film, but had to send it out to be developed. Most pictures were horrible.
Katesouthwest@reddit
1981- my very excited mom called me at my college to tell me she had just gotten a huge new kitchen gadget that made cooking faster but took up most of the kitchen counter. It was called a microwave oven.
Ahpla@reddit
I was born in the 80s. In the 90s we had color tv with cable, VCR with a decent VHS collection, landline phone, computer with dial up internet, NES and SNES gaming systems. My aunt had a bag phone and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
MyUsername2459@reddit
As someone who grew up in the 1980's and 1990's, I'll say all that was ubiquitous.
Virtually every household had landline phones, it was unheard of for someone to not even have a telephone. It was virtually impossible to even find black & white film (my father was in the National Guard, and due to an old regulation he needed a file portrait in black & white, and it took a big hunt to even find a photographer who had black & white film) Virtually everyone had color televisions. . .the only black & white TV's were old ones used as secondary TV's like one you might put in a kid's room or the kitchen, the main TV in a household was virtually always color.
Things didn't change all at once. It just grew over time.
It's like how cable TV went from something new and hot that people really were excited to get in the mid-to-late 1980's, to being ubiquitous and almost everyone had at least basic cable in the 1990's and 2000's. . .to it going downhill as costs increased, channels got worse, and streaming seemed far superior in the 2010's and people started canceling cable subscriptions.
Cell phones became more common over the 2000's, going from relatively expensive things for the affluent at the start of the decade to being something virtually everyone had by the end of the decade.
We got our first PC for the Christmas of 1994. It didn't have a modem, or a sound card, or a CD-ROM drive. It had DOS 6.2 and Windows 3.1. The release of Windows 95 was SUCH a big deal at the time. For Christmas of 1995 we upgraded it with a sound card and a 4x CD-ROM drive. We expanded the RAM from 4 MB to 20 MB for Christmas of 1996.
My first computer that could access the internet was the one I got for Christmas of '98.
When I went to college in 1996, the Internet was something that was a niche interest and you might hear about on TV and only geeks and people really into technology were in to. . .to slowly becoming ubiquitous over the next 20 years or so. The early 2000's making broadband internet with constant connections instead of dial-up connections really was a turning point in it being a lot more common.
olivette00@reddit
I was born in 1979. We had a landline when I was a kid, and in the 80s it was a party line, meaning sometimes you’d pick up the receiver to make a call and someone else would be using the shared line. We had a color TV with about 13 channels and no remote when I was a kid.
In about 1985, we got a microwave oven and a VCR. We got a Nintendo when I was about 8. When In 1993, we got a cordless phone and an answering machine. Sometime shortly after that, people started having caller ID which from what I can remember was a separate box by the phone. We didn’t have that (my parents were pretty frugal). For Christmas 1993, I got a CD player.
In the early 90s, we had a Brother word processor. By about 1997 we had a home computer and dial up internet.
nekabue@reddit
We were broke, mostly. Upper lower class or lower middle class. Not dirt poor, but always struggling. The Catholic diocese provided scholarships so we could go to Catholic school, where I rubbed elbows with the solid upper middle, and entry level upper class kids.
They had microwaves and Atari video games. (Late 70s, early 80s.) They had cable TV with HBO. They had touch tone phones and their dads had the brick or bag cell phones. (Mid to late 8-s.)
We got a microwave when I was in college. (Late 8-s, early 90s.) Instead of an Atari, we got the Pong wired handset game from Radio Shack.
In the early 90s, I saved and saved to get a used Radio Shack 286 computer that booted off two floppy disks. I bought a brand spanking new 2400 baud modem from Radio Shack so I could dial into my college’s Solaris computer and complete my programming assignments without having to drive on campus.
Radio Shack was the bomb.
round_a_squared@reddit
In the 70s it was pretty common to have just one TV in the house, and it was in color. There was still a mix of new color shows and old black & white reruns on TV. You probably had just one telephone in the house, and it was a landline. Your phone was still provided by the phone company back then, and they only had a couple of options, so most people just had one of the same two basic ones - one was wall mounted and the other sat on a table. You probably had a stereo with AM/FM, a record player, and maybe an 8 track tape player too.
In the 80s there was definitely a consumer tech boom. Microwaves, VCRs, and home video game consoles became common, and some people had personal computers. Most early home computers plugged into a TV, so between that and the video games having a second TV became more common. Usually it was a smaller black & white TV or it was an older color one, relegated to secondary use when the family bought a nicer main TV. Cassette tapes replaced 8 tracks, and the Walkman and boomboxes were pretty common. CDs and laserdisc existed but weren't common. Cable TV started to expand a lot too, with MTV and HBO becoming pretty common cultural references. The phone company monopoly was split up and as a result people owned their own phones. There was much more variety as a result, and cordless phones started to become available towards the end of the decade.
The 90s continued to expand the previous trend and also added home Internet. Dial-up and BBS systems had existed for a long time but were very uncommon before the 90s. CDs and cassettes existed side by side and had basically replaced vinyl records. CDs also started to be used as computer media in addition to floppy discs. DVDs became available at the end of the decade but were still pretty expensive so not common yet. Black and white TVs had also pretty much disappeared and the only black and white shows left were old reruns on Nick at Nite. Most people had cable, multiple phones in the house and probably a cordless phone, maybe even a second phone line for the teenage kids or the Internet. Mobile phones were still just big briefcase sized devices that really rich people had in their cars, but we did have pagers. While they were mostly associated with doctors and drug dealers, plenty of other businesses provided people with pagers if they needed them to be available on call.
auntmarybbt@reddit
We had one tv. A black and white with an aerial antenna on the house. Then came color tv and eventually cable tv so good bye antenna. It was a huge deal when we got a microwave oven.
yurinator71@reddit
Atari 2600
HP 85
Sony walk man
Gertrude_D@reddit
Landines were the norm. I remember my dad was a salesman who drove alot. He had a bagphone - an early mobile phone - sometime in the late 80s. It was huge and stayed in the car. We thought it was pretty fancy. You'd see some examples of mobile phones on tv at the time, but it was always used to show how rich someone was. I remember seeing one on the Fresh Prince when it was still novel, but not completely unfamiliar.
Color film was standard. Looking at my baby pictures (right around 70) they were mixed black and white and color. That switched early on and most of the 70s photos were in full color. Thank god we captured the true color of all those striped pants.
As for color TV, I always remember the main console in the family room being in color, but smaller sets around the house were in black and white. I had a portable set in my room that was black and white. I remember my college roommate laughing at it in the 90s, but it still worked and I was happy with it. I watched the Adventure of Hercules and early Xena on that set.
It was maybe mid 70s when my dad brought home our first computer game console. It played pong, bowling, and had a mode where you just watched a pixel bouncing around randomly on the screen leaving a trail behind to create 'fractal art'. Yep. We loved it.
In the 80s, we did have a beginning computer class - nothing in depth, just introducing us to the computer and how to use it. We learned how to create simple commands. the kids just behind us were the Oregon Trail kids. At the same time I was taking these computer classes, I was also taking a typing class elective, using an electric typewriter. I saw them as separate skills.
We got a Comodore 64 in the mid 80s. We played a lot of text based games and Winter Olympics on that thing. I did use it to write my college admissions essay, but I didn't use it for everyday homework. At my graduation, I got an electric typewriter that I used briefly in college. My roommate had a computer with that dot matrix printer. There were a couple of computer labs at college that was always full. It was just a very large room filled with computers and printers so that people without a computer could access them for school work. I think we were using hard disk instead of floppy disks at that point, but I'm not sure when that switched over. I do remember my first real job and using zip disks with a memory of 100MG - whoa!
I studied graphic design in the early 90s. Adobe was around, but in the early stages. I knew a guy who had Illustrator and I was blown away. The school didn't teach the computer design programs, other than AutoCAD for the architects. The skills I learned were analog and I did a lot of cutting and gluing - learning tools that were on their way out. At my first design job, I had to learn how to use design software. The only tech we still used was the waxer for last minutes corrections in placing ads. Oh, did I mention I worked at a phone book publisher? My next job was at a newspaper. Yeah - I sure knew how to pick em.
goblin_hipster@reddit
I was born in 1993. The VCR was huge for me. Dad would tape episodes of Pokémon for me all the time. We had that big boxy kind of TV. Stereos/boom boxes were big too, always a feature at any family gathering.
Landline telephone with the cord, then a cordless landline. The game system we had was an N64, which I never actually played but used to watch my dad play.
What people don't really understand about "old tech" is that we had all the same wants as people do now--we wanted to listen to our favorite music, we wanted to put cartoons on for the kids, we wanted to instantly talk to friends and family. The technology was just a little slower.
JennyPaints@reddit
Cameras were not what they are today. Point and shoots with fixed lenses, disposable flash cubes and cartridge film were the new thing and everyone had one. Cartridge film greatly simplified the process of loading film into and removing it from the camera without risk of exposing it.
People using these cameras didn’t look through the lens and sometimes took pictures of the lens cap by mistake. Also if you forgot to advance the film you got a double exposure.
Polaroid cameras were cool.
SLRs eventually got built in light meters and automated f-stop adjustment.
Zoom lenses were expensive, huge, and cool.
But regardless of which camera you used you were limited by the film you put in it: speed/ color or b&wI/ slide or print. Ifyou went to a sports event you choose grainy high speed film and if you took landscapes you chose dense slow film. Or you went middle of the road and did everything okay and nothing well.
Then you took the film to get it printed. You either got slides ( the family vacation choice) or pictures plus a little sleeve of negatives. The negatives usually got lost by the time you wanted to make more prints. If you were a hobbyist you might own an enlarger or have access to one, and print your own.
Film and printing were expensive. We chose what photos to take carefully.
Rainsoaked_2000@reddit
We had a landline rotary dial phone, one am/fm radio, one television, and for a little while we had CB radios at home and in our cars. All in the 1970s-late 1980’s
syncopatedchild@reddit
I was only alive for the 90's but, yes, color everything was normal and we had a landline. We were part of the pilot program for internet in Key Largo, so we had it from like 1994/5 I think, but didn't get cell phones until 2006, even though they were technically older tech.
wieldymouse@reddit
Land line, black & white and color TVs, 8 track player, record player, VCR, Atari, NES, TurboGrafx-16, SNES, N64, AM/FM radio, cassette player, CD player, DVD player, Timex computer, Brothers word processor, typewriter, microwave, refrigerator, dishwasher, deep freezer, blender, mixer, coffee maker, and Mr. Coffee iced tea maker, hair dryer, curling iron, and curlers.
Adorable-Growth-6551@reddit
We had a color TV in the livingroom and a black and white TV in the kitchen. One of my earliest memories is listening to snow white on my Dads 8 track. We had an old black rotary phone that was a pain when you accidentally misdialled because you had to hangup and start again.
I remember playing with Dads Atari, that paddle game. For one Christmas we got a Nintendo with the OG Mario Bros and Duck hunt. My brother and I played that for hours and hours. My favorite game was the OG Final Fantasy.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
something like pong or breakout? (the paddle game)
Adorable-Growth-6551@reddit
Yeah probably Pong. I was really young at that point. I think he had pac man and the alien one too, but i just played pong
SnooChipmunks2079@reddit
I was middle class.
Every household had a phone. Some families with a lot of kids, or a lot of money, might have had a “teen Line“ that was a second phone line to the house for the kids.
I think we got a color TV in the early to mid-1970s.
My mom bought a Betamax VCR in the late 70s.
Color film was the norm for a long time.
Many of my friends had a computer of some sort, but not IBM PC; those were for business and quite expensive. I got a TRS-80 Color Computer in 1980 or 81, but the Atari 400 or 800, C64 and TI/99 were all more common. Apple was more expensive.
QV79Y@reddit
I never had a color tv until 1982 or 83 but I think this was pretty late. If I remember right, I got a microwave oven about the same time. Pretty sure I had an answering machine by 1981.
Hard to remember exactly, it was so long ago. I do remember that at one point I had some money saved up and I was trying to decide between getting the microwave or a stereo, neither of which I had.
Always had a landline phone. I never knew anyone who didn't have one.
I took black and white photos back then although color film was certainly available. I just liked b&w better.
S_Wow_Titty_Bang@reddit
From mid 80s to mid 90s, we had a phone attached to the wall in the kitchen, a cordless phone in the master bedroom, a CRT TV in the master bedroom, a projection TV in the living room, a VCR with the big screen, and an answering machine. My dad had a stereo with a turntable/tape player/CD player (I was NOT allowed to touch). I had a boom box in my room though.
I got a SNES for Christmas in 1992, then a PC for Christmas 1997. We had dial up internet until 2002 and didn't get a DVD player until 2004.
HermioneMarch@reddit
Most of my childhood wss in the 80s. I remember getting our first color tv. We always had phones, a radio in the kitchen and a stereo system in the family room. My dad had a cannon camera he took on all our trips. We had an Atari 2600. And a Commodore 64. All household tech was shared. It was not till mid 2000s that everyone had their own devices.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
what did getting a color tv feel like
HermioneMarch@reddit
I just remember thinking I’d never known what these characters hair color was. But I don’t remember the show.
Traditional_Entry183@reddit
As a kid in the 80s, my family had one "big" 25" or so color TV, and a small 10" black and white.
We got a vcr and a microwave in the late 80s when they got a little cheaper. We had corded phones up to the point that I was an adult. I got my first cordless phone after college in 2000.
rlw21564@reddit
I was born in '64. We always had a landline as did all my relatives. We all lived in large cities.
My nuclear family got a color TV sometime before the end of the 60s.
We got a microwave in the mid 70s.
My younger brother got an Atari that hooked up to the TV in the early 80s, probably around the same time we got cable TV. I took a computer programming class in high school my junior year, we learned BASIC.
Started college in 1982 as a computer science major and the first class I had to take was Fortran. Ours was the first class that didn't have to use punch cards. We used eight inch floppy disks.
When I met my husband in 1984, he was the first person I knew that owned a personal computer. I think it might have been a Compaq computer and the keyboard latched to it and you could carry it like a sewing machine with the keyboard on the bottom. The screen was black with orange letters. You had to know DOS to interact with the operating system.
(He was not a computer science major but his parents got the computer for him because he'd be writing his masters thesis on it).
After we married, I went back to school in 1988 and got a modem for the computer so I could connect to the school's mainframe computer to upload my programs. I think the modem worked at 1200 or 2400 baud. It's laughable how slow that is compared to today.
By the mid 90s, we'd upgraded to a much better desktop computer at home and I also had a laptop at work. I used Prodigy (like AOL) to make travel arrangement and look up investments. Also loved using UseNet which is probably why I enjoy reddit so much now. We still didn't have a color monitor because everything was still text based. (I never did sign up for AOL)
Then came Netscape and the World Wide Web. My husband worked for a newspaper that was very cutting edge in "new media" and had one of the first newspaper websites. We got a color monitor, maybe a new computer and faster modem to keep up with everything that could be downloaded. Pages took awhile to load because people hadn't learned how to optimize that.
I had my first child around that time and everything is kind of a blur after that. I do remember we upgraded from a regular dial up line to that upgraded phone line thing that would keep you phone line free and let you use the line at a faster speed. I can't remember what it's called. It's through a regular phone line though.
I got my first cell phone in 2000. Can't remember when my husband got his. I got a HandSpring (like a PalmPilot) personal digital assistant to keep up with all my children's doctors and therapy appointments (I had twins after my first child and they had "issues").
That HandSpring had a expandable port in the back and supposedly there was a module you plug into it to make it into a phone. This was almost a decade before the iPhone. I never got that module but thought about it.
A few years later we upgraded to cable home internet and within the last ten years, fiber was put down in our neighborhood.
Switched from my flip phone to a Blackberry in 2008. Switched to Android in 2012.
I've also got several home automation things around the house, mostly lamps on timers and smart thermostats.
Most people underestimate my level of knowledge of technology when I go to get something new or to get something repaired. It's really annoying to be condescended to and not respond with something like, "I've been on the internet since before you were born."
Lovebeingadad54321@reddit
From the 70’s to the 90’s there were tremendous changes in the household tech. In the 70’s we had tv with rabbit ears, or an antenna on the roof, then progressed to cable TV. We added VHS players/recorders. By the end of the 90’s I think 32 inch television was the cutting edge big tv.
In the kitchen we added a microwave oven, and went to an air popper for popcorn from the electric kettle popcorn popper, then microwave popcorn became the default.
We went from a rotary phone attached to the wall in a hallway niche to a cordless telephone with caller ID.
RHS1959@reddit
I think we got our first color tv about 1972. We had film cameras and slide and movie projectors well before that. Everybody had land-line phones. I got my first computer in 1987.
My2026GV70@reddit
Electric can opener
somecow@reddit
The caller ID box that attaches to the landline phone was a nice touch. Also, that thing you just press when a scammer calls you and just puts out a recorded “don’t call me again” message. And of course, answering machine, gotta buy tape for it (of course it can erase, but tape wears out). Phone numbers? They’re written on a piece of paper taped to the inside of the kitchen cabinet, but you just memorize that.
Color film, oh god. Film development everywhere, from a store, or just a tiny little booth in a random parking lot. Get a disposable camera, and like 90% of them come out looking like shit when you get the pictures back.
Also, floppy disks. I’ve got a set of floppies for windows 95 (it’s a lot). Computer has a turbo button (that does nothing), sometimes doesn’t boot directly to windows so you have to type ‘win’ into the dos prompt, unless you set up autoexec.bat.
Air fryers were definitely not a thing. Toaster oven.
LED light bulbs, naah, don’t exist (blue LEDs didn’t either).
TV? De scrambler box. Maybe get lucky when watching the porn channel (costs extra) and see a glimpse of boob.
TheEstablishment7@reddit
Betamax, bro.
Curmudgy@reddit
Landlines were very common in the 50s. There might still be rural communities with party lines (several households sharing a single lime), and I imagine remote places with no phone, but generally any home in an urban or suburban area would have a landline of some sort, and many in rural areas.
Color TVs started becoming popular in the 60s. You can see the progression in a number of shows that went from black and white to color mid-run (Bewitched, Beverly Hillbillies, among others).
Color film was available in the 50s and commonly used in the 60s. Because the cost of the film and the developing was higher, many people would choose black and white film to save money, but they might bring out the color film for special occasions.
The big thing in the 80s were early computers and RS 232, 300 baud modems.
Educational_Bench290@reddit
Landline phone common in 1960's. Tv's same, color tv's common by mid 70's i would say. We were no more than middle class, and we had a component stereo system by the late 60's and a reel to reel tape system before that. We converted from a coal furnace forced air heat to oil in early 60s. Gas powered reel lawn mowers until late 60s, then rotary (like now). 1st a/c in a car around 1980. ALL cars had heat and defrost from 1950 on.
MakeStupidHurtAgain@reddit
Landlines were standard until well into the first decade of the 2000s. In some places (often rural and mountainous) they’re still standard.
Color televisions were standard by the 80s. Color film was standard long before that.
Pagers were commonplace by the mid-90s, and cell phones began to be commonplace by the end of the 90s, though with restrictions (you had to pay per text and only had a small bucket of minutes to talk, though sometimes it was unlimited after 9 pm or on weekends).
Smartphones were unheard of until the 2000s.
Cable television was commonplace by the 80s and satellite television was growing by the mid-90s.
The Internet was becoming more commonplace by the end of the 90s. We had broadband internet where I lived by 1993, but we were an experimental community for Cablevision. Dialup internet was more and more common by the 90s, though dialup bulletin boards and Usenet were in use in the 80s.
schoolydee@reddit
electric can opener
tooslow_moveover@reddit
I was born in 1969 and grew up in the SF Bay Area. We had color TV and a landline before I was born. Got cable - 12 channels - somewhere mid ‘70s. Touch-tone phones probably late 70s. First TV with a remote in the early ‘80s. We had Pong in the ‘70s and then Intellivision. Never had a computer.
MainstreamScience@reddit
Hardwired Intercoms for all bedrooms
CB Radio
“The Rabbit” cable tv splitter so 2 TVs could see one cable box
Historical_Bath_9854@reddit
Only thing we didn't have was a microwave oven.
aWesterner014@reddit
1980s and 1990s
TVs with remotes. Parents no longer asked me to get up and change the channel
Computers changed substantially between 1981 and 1999. For the family, we started with a Tandy Color 2 computer. The computer was built into the keyboard and it used a tv for the monitor. It was replaced by a Compaq Presario desktop (probably a 386, but maybe a 486) with monitor. By 1996, I was in college and bought a Canon laptop (Pentium with 16 mb ram and 750 mb HDD).
Phones were only landline phones. I was the first in my family (senior year in college) to get a cell phone in 1999.
Gaming consoles: NES -> SNES -> N64, Gameboy. My younger brother went for the Sega Genesis.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
When you got a cellphone in 1999, would you say it was more exclusive or common? (Like a status symbol or something like that)
aWesterner014@reddit
The "status symbol" period had probably faded out by then. There were definitely kids that had cell phones a year or two before me, but their parents were paying for them at that point.
Usage rules were still pretty restrictive at that point. Talk time rules before 9:00 pm and roaming charges made cell phone plans very expensive and quite intimidating from a budget perspective.
I had a couple of scary winter trips between home and college by that time and I just wanted to have it more for emergency use rather than day to day use.
beeswax999@reddit
I remember watching the 1969 moon landing on a black and white TV. We got a color TV around 1974 I think. We got an extension for the landline phone about the same time. The main phone was a wall-mounted phone in the kitchen and the extension was a tabletop one in my parents’ bedroom.
We got a microwave around 1979. Cable TV came to town at about the same time. We certainly had cameras with color film by then too, probably earlier.
We had a TRS-80 computer with the external cassette drive. Was the 80 referring to the year? It was about that time. That was the first computer I got my hands on.
In the small town I lived in once I had my own place, there was only rotary dialing for phones until the late 1980s. No touch-tone dialing at all. I worked at a bank. We had some kind of vendor that we had to communicate with by touch-tone phone. We had to buy a little device at Radio Shack that made the beeps, that we would hold up to the phone. Party lines were still in existence but uncommon.
loquedijoella@reddit
Born in the mid-70s. We were the last family on the street to have a microwave in around ‘85. One color tv. One landline phone. My own Tandy 1000 that was a hand me down from my grandma. Hand me down Atari 2600 that was replaced by a 5200 from my neighbors. Got a Nintendo in ‘88 after everyone else had one. Cable TV around ‘83-84, probably last on the street to get that. I had a few bicycles and spent most of my time at the bmx track smoking cigarettes
RDCK78@reddit
Got our first home computer in 1996, I was a few years behind most of my friends, most of them had computers a few years earlier.
From my first memories my parents had an NES they played, a VCR, I remember Dad updated his stereo system from vinyl and cassette, adding CD in 1990.
Interestingly I remember getting a Super NES and I can never remember my parents ever playing it with me or themselves though they played the hell out of that NES before…
No_Difference8518@reddit
Always had a landline, they were ubiquitous in the, at least, '60s. We didn't get a colour tv until '79... but I think colour tvs were phased in. There were the early adopters, but most people switched when they needed a new tv.
The 90s were a watershed... that is when most people got internet (dialup). Switching to broadband (for me it was 2000) was a real game changer. Going to 1Mbps and not having to tie up the phone was huge.
ZombieLizLemon@reddit
I was born in the late 70s. We always had a landline phone, although we switched from rotary dial to push button sometime in the mid-80s. I can't remember if we had a color TV before 1982 when my parents replaced their set. We had a tiny TV in the kitchen that was black-and-white. I have some color photographs that relatives took at my parents' wedding in 1971, and my cousin recently shared a color photo from a mid-1960s family Christmas (my dad and his younger sister were teenagers).
My parents were a bit slow to pick up new tech, so we didn't have a microwave or VCR until the very late 80s, a home computer until the mid-90s, or dial-up internet until 1999, when I needed it to complete coursework during the last couple years of my undergrad degree. We had computer lab in my elementary and middle school, though, so I had early experience with the Apple IIe model (mostly games like "Oregon Trail").
GlobalTapeHead@reddit
I remember the 70’s well. We had 2 color TVs and a small black and white TV on a cart to roll into the guest room or one of our bedrooms. We got cable tv and HBO about 1983. We had one land line but 3 extension phones in the house, all rotary dial. We got upgraded to touch-tone phones in 1980. We got our first PC in 1986. I can’t think of any other advanced tech we had beyond the touch buttons on our microwave oven or the digital clock radios.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
What isba touch-tone phone
GlobalTapeHead@reddit
The telephones with buttons instead of dials. The technology was called Touch-Tone because when you pressed the number, it sent a tone down the telephone line and the exchange equipment recognized what number you pressed based on the tone frequency. This technology came out in 1968, and is what they use because they did not yet have full digital telephone switching networks.
foxsable@reddit
The big thing INE late 80’s/90’s was portable phones. Still land line but you could carry the headset around the house
WatermelonMachete43@reddit
I was born in the late 60s. We always had a TV, was color in the early 70s, cable TV by early 80s. Amana Radarange microwave in 1975. We had an IBM PCjr personal computer (dad bought it for us for Christmas 1984). We had video games, starting with Atari. Landlines phones on each floor of the house.
-voice_of_reason@reddit
I grew up in the 80s and when I was a kid we had one color TV with 5 channels (no cable), we kids were the "remote control". I remember being excited when a new UHF TV station came on the air when I was in elementary school.
We had one rotary dial landline phone. I didn't get a cell phone until late 1999. That was about the same time I got my first "high speed" internet connection (3Mbit cable modem lol)
Early '80s were also the time when microwave ovens and VCRs were first becoming common in middle class households, but they were still big money items. I remember my mom getting mad at my dad when he spent "so much money" on a microwave.
We got our first 8-bit computer in the mid 80s but that was cuz I was a massive nerd, it was still unusual at that time.
NevetsRetrop@reddit
I grew up mostly in the 90's (born 1985) in what I think would be somewhere between lower middle class and poverty living situations. For the most part, we had no "new" tech for the day. There were a few years where my mom was with someone who landed us closer to middle class amd we got a cordless phone, digital answering machine and a Sega Genesis. This was around '96 or '97. I thought the Genesis was the coolest thing ever, even though it had already been out for 7 or 8 years and several other friends had the 'revolutionary new gaming ststem,' Playstation.
CompetitiveBox314@reddit
My father had an IBM PC Jr. he used at home for work in the mid-80s. I think it was mostly used as a word processor. I ended up taking it to college with me in the late 80s/early 90s.
Otherwise, the Atari 2600 would have been the peak tech in the house.
PabloPicasshooole@reddit
We got our first microwave in the late 1970s. Cost like $1,000 (in 70s dollars). We hardly used it for a long time, because it was so hard to find microwave-safe bowls and plates. All the frozen foods at the grocery stores were still wrapped in aluminum foil.
Then you started seeing specialty microwave entrees from brands like Stouffer's that came with their own plates. My favorite was Swedish Meatballs.
Those plates lasted forever. I still have about half a dozen of them and still use them all the time.
holymacaroley@reddit
Born in 1973. I don't remember a time before landlines or color TV and film. Everyone I knew had these, even when I was little, and we rarely spent extra money on things.
troublepansies@reddit
We had a few landline phones and 2-3 color tvs in the 80s. By the 90s we had at least 5 tvs - living room, basement family room, my parents room, laundry room, kitchen. Don’t remember if we always had cable but we did by the late 80s anyway.
In the mid 80s we got nintendo (somewhat common) and a home computer (very uncommon in my area).
We got a second phone line in the 90s - my dad had a profession where he needed access to a phone 24/7 so the second line was for teen kids to use and also internet once that arrived.
Other tech items: camcorder (mid-late 80s), vcr (the entire 80s i think?).
jrhawk42@reddit
In the 70's, 80's and 90's color TV's were expensive but accessible. Pretty much everybody had one in the living room. Landline telephones were pretty much necessities. In the late 80's and 90's home PC's were a bit of a luxury/niche item. I feel like the 80's was the turning point decade. Lots of electronics coming out in those days from Japan. Nintendo, walkie talkies, cordless phones, answering machines, digital clocks, VCRs, handheld cameras, and portable cassette players for examples.
RoleCombobox@reddit
My family had computers starting in the late 80s, but they had to take out a loan for their first one and kept it for over a decade. I was always bummed out about not being able to use the sample CDs from cereal boxes and mailers because we didn’t have anything with a CD-ROM drive until we finally got a new computer (early-gen iMac) in 1999. We didn’t really have Internet service for anything except email until we got that iMac. My dad worked in IT and insisted we get high-speed cable internet, so the only time I experienced dial-up was at my grandparents’ house.
We had corded and cordless landlines at various points, but I think we gave up cordless because some teenager down the street hacked into it and was dialing premium numbers or something. My dad had cell phones (including at one point an analog one, as well as at least one with a retractable antenna) for work going back to at least… 1996, I think?
We had color TV and cable from the time I was little, but our TVs tended to be older (from the 70s and 80s), and we used cable boxes with them. My grandparents had newer TVs, which I remember because theirs supported closed captioning, whereas ours didn’t. We always had VCRs, and we got our first DVD player when I was in middle school (early 2001).
CatsMom4Ever@reddit
Landlines was standard. We didn't get a color TV until the late '70s. Nor AC until the '80. Only because my parents didn't think we needed either.
Entiox@reddit
I was born in 1972. We always had a phone line and color TV. My mom and I didn't get a microwave until after we moved in 1978 and her parents got us one as a house warming gift. Her mother was an early adopter of microwave ovens and had one since the late 60s. The TV I had in my room as a teen was a portable black and white one, but I didn't care that it wasn't in color, I loved that little TV. It was a combination unit that could pick up TV, AM/FM radio, and shortwave radio signals and had the best reception I've ever even heard of. It's reception was actually mind blowing. We lived just outside of Washington DC and on Sunday nights the local PBS station played Sci Fi shows like Doctor Who and Blake's 7, then when they stopped playing those shows the PBS station in Baltimore would start playing them showing different episodes, then when it stopped the PBS station in freaking Boston would start and if I adjusted the antenna just right I could watch those as well. Yeah, somehow this little portable TV could pick up stations over 400 miles away. I was always so tired in class on Mondays due to being up until 3am watching British Sci Fi shows.
divinerebel@reddit
In the 1970s, we had wall-mounted phones (one upstairs, one downstairs), a console color TV (and got a second smaller color TV for the downstairs), a stereo (played records and 8-tracks), a household wall-mounted intercom (upstairs/downstairs), a laundry washer and dryer, a dishwashing machine, a countertop coffee maker (in addition to our coffee percolator), an electric skillet, a slowcooker, an electric griddle, a blender, a mixer, an electric can opener, a pencil sharpener, electric alarm clocks, and electric garage door openers. Oh, and a window-mounted Air Conditioner unit (one for the whole house).
We had an electric typewriter, too, but in my parents' home office, mostly used by them for business.
I was given a portable cassette tape player/recorder in 1978.
In 1980, I was given a transistor radio. It was the first time I'd heard Top 40 music.
In the 80s, we added...
I got my own bedroom and a 13" color TV of my own. In 1984, we got a VCR. I got my own VCR a couple years later. I got an electric word processor in 1988.
In the 1990s (I was already moved out), my family got a microwave oven.
In the 2000s, they got cable TV and a desktop computer and printer.
That's most of the tech I can think of!
ZetaWMo4@reddit
I was born in the 70s and the only tech we had was a TV. My dad was anti-phones and didn’t see the point in being reached at home.
Tight_Note4515@reddit (OP)
Did you have a color tv or a black and white one?
ZetaWMo4@reddit
Both! We got a color tv around 1980.
mixreality@reddit
Our house had a little box with a wheel connected to a wire in the wall, near where the TV coax cable came through. You could rotate the wheel and a motor would rotate this giant antenna on the roof which picked up different free TV stations depending which way it was aimed.
My rich friend's houses had trash compactors and even whole house vacuum where you just carry the hose and handle around and plug it into the wall to vacuum that room.
We got our first computer in 1995, was a pentium 486 with 4mb of ram. We weren't rich so most of the games I played were demos included in different issues of a gaming magazine.
I did get into Ultima Online in 1998, first game where you were playing with people all around the world and coined the phrase MMO, latency wasn't a big issue it was built for dial up, incredible game.
wwhsd@reddit
In the late 70s and early 80s, most people I knew had two or three phones in the house (all on the same line). The main TV in the house was color. If there were additional TVs it was likely they were black and white.
Color film was the standard for cameras with black and white being either really old cameras people still had or something that someone who was into photography as an art or hobby might have.
By the mid-80s the only black and white TVs that were still common were smaller more portable TVs. Having a 5 inch back and white screen with a built in AM/FM radio that could run for a few hours off of batteries is what I remember most portable TVs being. Cordless phones in the house and answering machines started to become common.
eugenesbluegenes@reddit
In the 80s we had one touchstone phone and one rotary. We got our first cordless phone in the mid-late 90s.
My dad was on the road for work a lot and got a portable phone in the early 90s that came in a bag that was like a cross between a purse and a briefcase.
Dad being a nerdy engineer, we had a home computer as early as I remember in the 80s. I recall when he got a blindingly fast 386.
Home stereo system had a record player and double tape deck. I got the first CD player in the family for my bday in 1996.
We had a beta max in the 80s and replaced with VHS. My parents got a dvd player around when I moved out in 01.
My first bedroom TV was my mom's old one in a wooden case with physical dials.
stinson16@reddit
In the 90s my family had a landline, a color tv and a desktop computer that the family shared. We didn’t get cable tv until the 2000s, but my grandparents and friends had it in the 90s. Color tv and color photos were standard in the 90s. My family didn’t have any gaming systems in the 90s, but some of my friends had the Nintendo 64
I_Am_Mandark_Hahaha@reddit
TV that was essentially furniture. It's a console table with a cathode ray tube in front of it.
Same with record player. That thing is huge!
Outlaw_Josie_Snails@reddit
My family had a VCR, a microwave, video game consoles (Atari, ColecoVision, Intellivision), a Commodore 64, and Windows 3.0/95. Our landline was a corded, rotary phone but we switched to cordless phones when they started to become popular.
My family was late to adopt cable TV though, for some reason. I remember while on road trips, we would stay at motels that advertised, "We have cable, PRISM," etc. That was exciting as a kid.
Thauros@reddit
born in the early 80s. my home always had a game console, a home computer (at least since i was a toddler-a commodore 64) a vcr, and cable tv. my dad was a bit of an early adopter but aside from maybe the computer none of thei was unusual
Danloeser@reddit
Most households would have had a color TV by 1970 or so, but it wasn't unheard of to have older, smaller, black-and-white TVs hanging around for "secondary" use. You could find an old B&W TV in a lot of bedrooms and basements and kitchens etc through the early 2000s.
Thunda792@reddit
Color TVs were pretty common in my area from the late '60s on. TVs started to become more practical and affordable (and less prone to catching fire) in the late '50s, but were still pretty expensive. My Dad (born early '60s) only remembers having a color TV, but my grandfather (born late '30s) remembered when the first TV came to his neighborhood in the early 1950s.
My grandfather remembered color films as being pretty common in movie theaters by the 1950s; the last Black and White movie he remembered seeing in a theater was around 1965.
Land line telephones also expanded around the same period. On my grandpa's rural street in the 1930s-1940s they had a party line, where the whole neighborhood shared a phone number and anyone could listen to your calls. Fun one from him; they actually had a phone in the house before they had a toilet inside the house. My Dad's house in the 1960s had that initially too, but they switched to a private line by the 1970s. Cordless home phones came around the 1990s when I was a kid, roughly parallel with cell phones, though my great grandmother was a holdout and still had an old rotary telephone until the early 2000s.
Cell phones were pretty common when I was a kid in the 1990s, but since my parents and grandparents were in the business world, they had "work" cell phones long before they had personal ones.
"New" consumer tech was generally pretty accessible, it was usually just expensive and whoever had it either had to really want it, or need it because the legacy tech they were using finally broke.
Cheap_Coffee@reddit
I grew up in a rural area. In the 70s party line phones were still in use in our area. At that time, of course, phones were still rotary (at least the ones we and my friends had.)
Cable television was a big deal when it arrived. Suddenly we went from having two television channels to tens of channels.
im-not-a-panda@reddit
Me. I was the household tech during my childhood.
I was the remote, the Roomba, the automatic dog feeder… lol
unknowingbiped@reddit
Color cathode ray tv, button land line phones (no radial dial), encyclopedias. Then we got a desk computer in 1995.
InvestigatorJaded261@reddit
We got our first color TV in 1977. We always had touch tone phones, but they were hard wired and belonged to the phone company at least until the 90s. Got an Atari in about 1980, a personal computer in 1982 or 83 (a C64) and upgraded to a Mac SE in 1988. We didn’t have Cable until 1986 or so, and we didn’t get internet service at home until about 2001. First mobile phone in 1999.
zerstoren@reddit
By 1990, we had an IBM computer, a Betamax, VCR, and a Nintendo
Significant-Way-7893@reddit
We had a wired intercom system between all 3 floors of our house. My mom didn't have to yell to call us anymore.
curiousleen@reddit
In the 70’s, it was quite the tech swap to bring in the automatic can opener. That was my childhood…
TsundereLoliDragon@reddit
Even by the 70s all of these were extremely common. I did still have a small B&W TV in my bedroom though. I don't remember ever having a main TV that wasn't color. We had an Atari 2600, Commodore 64, NES, VCR, microwave. We had cable with maybe 30 channels. I had a walkman and later a discman. I didn't have my own PC until around 1994. I didn't have a cell phone until maybe the early 2000s.
TheEvilOfTwoLessers@reddit
70s, a huge color TV, like the size of a small dresser but even deeper. The signal was via antenna. Phones were landlines, at least one of which was rotary. The stereo was a combination AM/FM radio and phonograph.
The remote for the TV was this giant thing about the size of two and a half decks of cars stacked. It had large protruding buttons, 3 or 4, I don’t recall. It had a black mesh screen on the “front” and made a very audible clicking sound when you pressed the buttons (hence the slang term “clicker” for a remote control). The buttons were channel up, channel down, and I think separate buttons for power on and off. Possibly just off, you may have had to turn the TV on at the TV. You could not control volume from the remote.
In the 80s the TV got smaller, screen size remained about the same, we had a VCR with a plug-in wired remote.
French_Dip_Please@reddit
Growing up during the 90's we had a "Zenith" color tv and a VCR. Rarely had cable so lots of antenna tv. My dad had a stereo with am/fm, dual cassette decks and a turntable for his vinyls. We didn't get a home pc until 97/98? One phone line for the phone/ dial up. Older sister got a boombox with a CD player around then as well which was awesome.
thetonytaylor@reddit
90s I remember every room having a landline in every bedroom and the living room and there being an intercom for the front door that went to my parents room and kitchen I believe.
My current tech is a bluetooth speaker in my island hood in the kitchen, knockoff ring doorbell, and smart appliances.
Zayknow@reddit
I was born in 75. We always had a phone, but we were on a party line until about 87. I think we always had a color TV but we got a big floor model from a neighbor around 80. We got satellite TV around 82 or so, and a microwave oven around the same time. We rented VCRs until about 86 I think. No CD player until about 1990.
I had a few different gaming platforms over the years, and a Commodore Vic20 and then a C64 and finally a PC about 91. It was a 80286 running Digital Research DOS
q0vneob@reddit
Dial-up internet in like 1994, and we got a 2nd phone line a couple years later on AOL which was hot shit for a while.
Early on we didnt even have internet service, but we did have Juno email which would dial up to send/receive and then disconnect.
Early cell phones were wild too, you could text but you had to type it out on a 10-key numpad and you had to make it count cause there were monthly limits and it got real expensive after that.
xqueenfrostine@reddit
Born in ‘81 and we had all of those things. My parents even had a cellphone and a video camera by the mid 80s. They were enormous. I think we were likely early adopter in that respect (I don’t remember seeing these things in my friends’ homes until the early 90s), but landlines, color televisions and colored film were the norm for pretty much everyone by 1980. Landlines were pretty much standard well before that, as the majority of homes had one by the 1950s. Colored televisions were outselling B&W TVs starting in the 70s, but I’m sure plenty of people had B&W televisions in their homes for a little while longer, it just became increasingly uncommon as those sets died and needed to be replaced. Color photography became common even before that.
MrHandsRadDay@reddit
In wall garbage/trash compactor, working intercom system, doorbell activated cctv monitors, bathroom phone. I believe all of that was installed in the 70s. Was still going in the 90s and 2000s.
flp_ndrox@reddit
That's a huge stretch of time in a time of a lot of tech development.
By the '70s color film and TV was pretty common. Landline phones had been common for decades and people didn't really stop using landline phones until the 21st century.
The 70s had vinyl records, 8-track tapes, CB radios, and so much wood paneling. Microwaves were becoming a thing. The 80s had cable TV, cassette tapes, the first car phones, personal computers, video game consoles from Japan, VCRs, and the first arcade boom. The 90s had pagers, flip cell phones, CDs, and the first people using the internet off-campus.
shammy_dammy@reddit
We always had a landline phone. A TV in the 70's, two in the 80's. I had an Atari 2600 and we had an Intel 8088 pc. My dad had a color camera before I was born in 69....there are color snapshots of my parents' wedding.
racingfan_3@reddit
Our family got our first color tv in the 70's. We had a telephone on each of the 3 floors of the house. In about 1977 we got our first VHS video player. Our first movie we owned was the big hit Blazing Saddles.
Ok-Concert-6475@reddit
In the 70s, we had a b&w tv and 1 corded landline. In the 80s, we had a 20" color tv, vcr and a corded landline. In the 90s, we had the same tv, vcr and phone, but also had a DVD player and a cordless phone. There wasnt a home computer until after I left for college in '96.
BrotherNatureNOLA@reddit
We had a microwave, a vcr, and a Nintendo.
overeducatedhick@reddit
We had a microwave, VCR, and a computer manufacturer editor by a company named "Franklin."
PghSubie@reddit
Mid 80s, we had a VCR, an Intellivision game console, an Apple IIc, a landline with two phones, cable tv