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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why do you think so?

One major cultural shift -- I had my first part time office job in 85/86 (was 15/16 at the time), and remember being extremely agitated about people smoking at the desks next to me. Now you can't even smoke in a bar in most places.
Technologically 1985-2015 seems a lot less than 55-85, video games are video games, digital networking is still digital networking, in different clothing but still. Especially if you watch Alan Kay talks showing how things in the 60s and 70s are still relevant .
I'm not sure I buy that. Maybe from a technology underpinnings perspective, but from the perspective of the mainstream consumer, things changed radically from ~1985 to the present (give or take a few years).

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were some big cultural changes, vastly increased acceptance of homosexuality and trangenderism, much less acceptance of sexism, especially in professional contexts.
In 1985, much of what we could look back on of 1955 was in black and white. Much of what we look back on in 1985 is in color. Personally, I think that plays a pretty big role in how we look back at stuff. Even much of the 60s is still in color, but the 50s - TV shows, movies, etc - the artifacts we have are largely B&W.
Also, we probably have a lot more footage of 1985. Since video recording equipment got cheaper, more videos got made. Since many of those videos still exist, 1985 is still "present" in 2015 to a much greater degree than 1955 was in 1985. The same holds true for audio recordings.
Standard definition video is the new black and white. At this point when I see sub-HD video it looks like an old artifact of history.
I really think the medium for recording/displaying history has a lot to do with how 'current' recent history feels. And I think b/w to color is a much bigger jump than SD -> HD.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freaks and Geeks was amazing. That 80s show was dumb but featured a super hot girl who sported an extremely punk spike hair-do which challenged the viewer to recognize her hotness. It was two levels of difficulty above the thick frame glasses previous shows have used
"I think the modern media goes back to the early 1970s. Some movies and some music from then seems pretty current still. Earlier than that things seem increasingly weird and foreign."

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

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

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

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

See:

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a lot of ways, it was - popularization of home computers and home video playback/recording, the first commercial mobile phones, popularization of synthesizers, etc. So much stuff that was the first generation (in significant numbers in homes) of almost all the ubiquitous technology we now use.
I think it might just be hard for many of the people on HN to have an objective opinion about it. We might just think of the 80s as the beginning of the modern world because it's when we were born.
When I talk to teenagers, they view the 80s and 90s as ancient history. They talk about the N64 and the Playstation 2 as if those are classics. It's really weird.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think it's an illusion. If you look at culture today, there are a bunch of influences from the 80s. (For example, Taylor Swift's latest album is titled '1989' and has an 80s-influenced feel to many of the songs.) In the 80s, there was a bunch of 50s influence. Billy Joel had released "Uptown Girl" and the rest of an album of almost doo-wop pop hits. Grease was a hit movie in 1978, just a few years earlier. You could still catch shows like Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, and Hee-Haw on TV. So I think it's just a matter of what you remember. I watched and listened to all that stuff and the 50s still seemed like ancient history to me. (My parents were barely teenagers in the 50s!)
Just yesterday I played a DooM game [0] with four friends who were born in 1990, 91, 92, and 93. Another friend who was born in 94 wanted to join the game, but we'd set it to 5 max.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recording fidelity was much better by 1985 - sound was much richer, production values better, video was almost exclusively in color, and of course there was a lot more of it all, and in a much wider variety than in the 1950s, so there is more to choose from for later generations. Movies became more sophisticated too, both technically and artistically.
I blame youtube. Today Buddy Holly is just as accessible as Iggy Azalea. Just type it in. In '85 it was easier to get Marcus Aurelius than Buddy Holly.

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

Only 10 years later we had cell phones and browsers.

> Let’s stop checklisting and complaining and start opening things up and bolting them together again.

Good luck with that. Electronics made in the 80's were a lot more friendly to open up and repurpose (to the individual part level) than what you buy today.

On the one side, you're right.

On the other, as a popular internet image says, you've got everything listed on a full-page Radio Shack - and more - in a package smaller than a walkman in your pocket nowadays, with the possibility to write any kind of software (or indeed attach any kind of accessory to) for it, which far exceeds anything anyone with an old radio and a soldering iron could ever do - and in a fraction of the time. And share that same thing instantly with a potential audience of tens of millions with the press of a button.

So maybe you can't open something up and bolt it together again - but you shouldn't marginalize what you can do instead either.

True but technology is becoming increasingly restrictive as time goes on. A kid today can't write software on a phone like you could with old computers. And just like hardware, software is growing in complexity and buried from the user.
I loved the trilogy when it came out, and then met Tom Wilson (who payed Biff) a number of times. He's really funny and has an amazing tenor voice. It was hard to put that voice with his character. Everyone always asks him to record a voicemail message "Hey Butthead".
Have you heard his standup/music bit where he sings about fans always asking him the same things?

On the off chance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iwY5o2fsG7Y

Yes, he's actually pretty nice about it in person.
Rather than respond to a lot of different comments, I'll just note (and these comments are US-centric):

1. Because of the internet, recording technologies, etc., we have a much more accurate view of the relatively recent past than one had in the 1980s.

2. From the 50s to the 80s there was a huge change in societal attitudes vs. authority, order, etc. Nothing as dramatic has happened since. Cynicism has changed in its specifics, been put aside occasionally, etc., but since the stock market crash of 1987 and Iran/Contra took some of the bloom off the Reagan rose, there hasn't been a huge societal consensus, so there in particular hasn't been a huge societal consensus that was later shattered.

3. Sexual mores had a much bigger shift from the 50s to the 80s than from the 80s to the present; the 80s are when the view was adopted that sex was permissible but dangerous, and that's been the general societal attitude ever since.

4. I agree that modern filmmaking techniques emerged in the 1970s. Hollywood then regressed to the more commercial action blockbusters, but eventually technology evolved to the point that the same or even greater quality of storytelling was possible on television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was like a series of 1970s auteur movies of 22 * 47 minute duration. The same is true of Babylon 5, except that the dialogue (usually stolid at best, Londo & G'kar excepted) and special effects were more in the George Lucas vein. TV may have progressed even further since.

5. The internet brought tremendous changes to day-to-day life, especially if you include the rest of computing (PCs, video games, mobile phones) as well. I don't have a good answer for why that alone doesn't make the 1980s feel more distant than they do.

6. People never know many details of era before their own. This was brought home to me when my stepdaugher, who is a Middle East expert (e.g. relevant Master's degree from Harvard), couldn't get a Trivial Pursuit question whose correct answer was Gamal Abdel Nasser.

I saw an interview once with the producers saying that 1955 was not that much in the past had changed. So for some of the things (like the gas station attendant scene and some of the cars) they had to go back into the 40s to make it look 'older'.
Great Scott!!