Electronics in the 1980s were the best

Electronics in the 1980s were the best. It was all about lots of switches and lots of lights.

Video Cassette Recorder (VCR)

The 1980s were the decade where VCRs took off.

Before this, you had to watch what was on television at the time it was on television. No watching what you wanted, when you wanted. No recording something to watch later. No buying or borrowing movies and definitely no streaming.

My family's first VCR was an Akai around 1980, and I have always admired the distinctive look of this brand's models.



Early models had the tape going into the top of the unit but it didn't take long for front-loading to become the norm. By the end of the 1980s you could get a stereo units and some had editing functions like my Sony SLV-757.

Hi-Fi Systems

In contrast to modern audio equipment, 1980s systems were almost a piece of furniture on their own.

Although some systems were just a single box with speakers, the best systems were made up of components. You would have an amplifier, an AM/FM tuner, a cassette or double-cassette recorder, and a record player.

A graphic equaliser was a very desirable feature, preferably with a spectrum analyser to visualise your music.

Car Audio

Although many car radios were just simple radio and sometimes cassette players, big stereos were popular.

One of the most revered systems was from Fujitsu Ten, which almost resembled a home component system.

Digital Watches

Although digital watches were available prior to the 1980s, the black plastic digital watch became very popular in the 1980s.

Common features were one or multiple alarms, hourly chime, stopwatch, countdown timer but the ones that was most interest in were calculator watches.

Clock Radios

Back in the 1980s we could choose to wake up to a noisy alarm or the the sound of a radio broadcast.

Clock radios might have peaked in the 1970s but were still popular in the 1980s. There's not much that can change with a clock radio other than styling, although some did integrate extras like a cassette recorder, a (corded) telephone or even a television.

Here is a picture of my Soundesign clock radio that I had as a child.

Games consoles

Although simple game consoles were becoming popular in the 1970s, by the 1980s some lucky families had something like an Atari 2600 or an Intellivision. The 1980s was a peak time for gaming consoles. They seemed to fizzle out with the rising popularity of home computers in the 1980s, but then they rose again during the 1990s and 2000s.

Computers

In the 1980s we weren't limited to just PC (or Linux) and Mac, although these systems all started in this decade. The home computer industry was just getting started and there were many manufacturers producing their own systems, most incompatible with everything else available. Many came and went quickly, never to be heard of again.

Home computers were, of course, simpler, and most booted into the BASIC programming language which resulted in many people learning to write their own software. It was also extremely popular for magazines to feature program listings -- mostly games -- that you could type in, which would usually take hours and involve finding and fixing many errors due to misreading or mistyping.

Here in Australia, Commodore was one of the most popular brands, particularly the C64 and then later in the 1980s, the Amiga.