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All this stuff was made in high cost countries in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a

All this stuff was made in high cost countries in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap" country. That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it. We had a VCR really early cause my father worked at GE in the early 80s in a TV/VCR/Cable TV division. He got the VCR free I think at work. The only time we got new movies was when one of his co-workers would bring a VCR over and they would hook the two up and pirate movies. FWIW that early VCR lasted 20+ years.. it was built like a tank and I remember tearing it apart in the 2000s along with a broken Samsung from the early 2000s and comparing the two and it was pretty fascinating how things had changed. I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over. Computer equipment was the same way, just about out of reach for most. My dad moved into network equipment and internet stuff by the mid 80s and we had a PC or Mac almost all the way through the 80s but it was always a loading dock discard that my father would grab from work before the computer went into the trash when they upgraded. I don't think he ever paid a dime for a computer till about 1993. When I went to college in 1995 I bought a laptop and it was an obscene purchase for an 18 year old, I could have bought a pretty nice used car instead.

mprovost 5y ago
Most of us in the 80s taped Star Wars off network TV (including ads) - they used to show it once a year. And for some reason you could see the masks around the TIE fighters against the star background. When I was visiting my parents for Christmas last year we watched the Ewok Adventure that we had taped on VHS and the most interesting parts were the ads!
- canadianfella 5y ago
- ben7799 5y ago
  Our Superman 2 VHS was done that way with imperfect pressing of pause on the commercials.
- brimble 5y ago
  > And for some reason you could see the masks around the TIE fighters against the star background. You can in all versions from before the "THX remaster" release, AFAIK.
  - mprovost 5y ago
    They weren’t there on the laserdisc release!
    - brimble 5y ago
      From Wikipedia: > 1985: The original Star Wars film was re-released on VHS, LaserDisc, and Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) with an improved audio mix. The LaserDisc and CED sped the film up by 3% to fit onto a single disc.[10][b] > 1993: The original trilogy was released on LaserDisc as "The Definitive Collection". With the exception of a new THX audio mix, scratch and dirt removal, and color balance changes, it matched the original theatrical releases.[10] > 1995: The original trilogy was re-released on VHS with THX audio, advertised as the final release of the theatrical versions.[12][13][14] I'm guessing the '93 LaserDisc (like the '95 VHS) lacked those obvious matting artifacts on some of the space shots, but the '85 release still had them.
throwaway123x2 5y ago
What laptop did you get in 95? I didn't even know laptops were a thing then.
- ben7799 5y ago
  Laptops were a thing well before 1995. Mine was a 486, I don't remember seeing any laptops before 386s but they existed and Apple had laptop/notebook machines in the pre-PPC era as well. But $3000-5000 was totally normal for laptops till the late 1990s. Technically they were already "notebooks" in 1995. Everything today counts as a Notebook I think if you consider the original definitions. Something like the "Macintosh Portable" would have been a "laptop" but not a "notebook" by the old school definitions. Modern definitions basically say a laptop is a big huge notebook with fans and optical drive whereas a "notebook" is basically an Ultrabook. In the 80s laptop and luggable were different things. The entire computer didn't fit into the screen + keyboard portions of a clamshell. When I went to college (for CS) in 1995 it was rare to have a personal laptop, slightly less rare to have a desktop PC. By 1997 all the incoming freshman at the school had IBM Thinkpads.
- stinkytaco 5y ago
  Then you don't know about the PowerBook 5300, arguably one of the worst computers ever made. We had one and though it never did set on fire, it was pretty crappy.
- mprovost 5y ago
  I had an Apple PowerBook 520c in 1994. The "c" was for "color", they still had a greyscale version! One of the best laptops I've ever owned actually. It was the first laptop (from any manufacturer I think) with a trackpad.
  - technofiend 5y ago
    Oh check out the HP 110 from 1984!. [1] I lusted heavily after them but could never afford one. There was an editor and spreadsheet included so it was fully functional. It was far lighter than later portable competition like Compaq and Kaypro luggables. Speaking from experience you didn't really need or want to park a Compaq on your lap, just the keyboard. [1] https://vintage-laptops.com/en/hewlett-packard-hp-110-plus/ https://vintage-laptops.com/en/hewlett-packard-hp-110-plus/
CPLX 5y ago
Yup. My grandfather worked for Zenith for 50 years, and he lived in Chicago, and was the head of quality control for factories that made TV’s that were literally in Chicago. It seems inconceivable today but people in the US used to make consumer electronics. The fact that we don’t any more was a catastrophic policy decision not some kind of law of nature.
- rasz 5y ago
  Direct assault on the entire American electronics industry as a form of revenge for ww2. Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c "September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American television industry? The secret history of that strategy reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..." https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVdEh3wdnXAJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/japan-and-the-big-squeeze/0fb1617e-8756-4390-a776-f1619d59869a/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVdEh3...
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > The fact that we don’t any more was a catastrophic policy decision One effect of this is that the US and China are economically interconnected. It makes war a lot harder. It's why the EU is dragging its feet on oil and gas from Russia because that's the one Russian export they need.
  - CPLX 5y ago
    Yes and our supply chain is a house of cards that was bound to melt down one day because of a shock and finally did. And the industrial base of the country's interior has endured two generations of economic collapse leading to widespread misery and political upheaval. The free trade and industrial policy decisions of the 90's and early 2000's will go down in history as era-defining mistakes in this county's political history.
thatwasunusual 5y ago
> in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap" country. So US is still a cheap country?
CWuestefeld 5y ago
a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies Yup. For me it was Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and probably a few others. Freshman year of college my roommate had a VCR. We learned that if we hooked up the VCR's RF output not to the TV input, but to the antenna, we could broadcast movies to the couple of neighboring rooms in the dorm.
- dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
  How does that work? Did you need to tune the tv to it?
  - fibonachos 5y ago
    It was still relatively common at that time for VCRs and gaming consoles to have an RF pass through and would broadcast on channel 3 or 4. You just tuned the TV to that channel.
bluedino 5y ago
> That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it. Not quite - the movie studios hadn't figured out they could sell way more tapes to consumers than video rental stores, so they lowered the prices to $19.95-24.95 in the late 80's.
Broken_Hippo 5y ago
I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. Or you had parents like mine. They used a lot of blank tapes, which held 6 hours worth of stuff. 3 movies each, that was. I think my parents saved up for it in the mid-80s. Back then, the cable companies used to run weekends with free HBO, Showtime, Disney (which was a premium channel back then) and so on. Hours of movies. Hours of looney tunes cartoons. Hours of old TV from Nick at Night, Nickelodeon's nighttime programming for adults. (So much I love Lucy and Dick van Dyke shows). Some still had commercials, but we didn't care. It was really nice during times without cable. I thnk they finally got rid of a lot of them about 15 years ago when their final VCR broke.
brimble 5y ago
> I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over. Yeah, 80s/90s kid here and I think by the end of the VHS era we owned about a dozen movies on VHS, including the Star Wars trilogy and maybe half a dozen animated kids' movies, plus three or four movies taped off TV. Anything else had to be a rental (and we almost never rented new movies because they were super expensive to rent, and nb that "new" might mean "was in theaters within the last 5 years") I watched those ~15 total movies (commercial and recorded-off-TV combined) a lot of times.
fibonachos 5y ago
We had that top-loading JVC with the big plastic buttons on the front and a wired remote. That thing was built like a tank.

mprovost 5y ago

Most of us in the 80s taped Star Wars off network TV (including ads) - they used to show it once a year. And for some reason you could see the masks around the TIE fighters against the star background. When I was visiting my parents for Christmas last year we watched the Ewok Adventure that we had taped on VHS and the most interesting parts were the ads!

canadianfella 5y ago
ben7799 5y ago
Our Superman 2 VHS was done that way with imperfect pressing of pause on the commercials.
brimble 5y ago
> And for some reason you could see the masks around the TIE fighters against the star background. You can in all versions from before the "THX remaster" release, AFAIK.
- mprovost 5y ago
  They weren’t there on the laserdisc release!
  - brimble 5y ago
    From Wikipedia: > 1985: The original Star Wars film was re-released on VHS, LaserDisc, and Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) with an improved audio mix. The LaserDisc and CED sped the film up by 3% to fit onto a single disc.[10][b] > 1993: The original trilogy was released on LaserDisc as "The Definitive Collection". With the exception of a new THX audio mix, scratch and dirt removal, and color balance changes, it matched the original theatrical releases.[10] > 1995: The original trilogy was re-released on VHS with THX audio, advertised as the final release of the theatrical versions.[12][13][14] I'm guessing the '93 LaserDisc (like the '95 VHS) lacked those obvious matting artifacts on some of the space shots, but the '85 release still had them.

throwaway123x2 5y ago

What laptop did you get in 95? I didn't even know laptops were a thing then.

ben7799 5y ago
Laptops were a thing well before 1995. Mine was a 486, I don't remember seeing any laptops before 386s but they existed and Apple had laptop/notebook machines in the pre-PPC era as well. But $3000-5000 was totally normal for laptops till the late 1990s. Technically they were already "notebooks" in 1995. Everything today counts as a Notebook I think if you consider the original definitions. Something like the "Macintosh Portable" would have been a "laptop" but not a "notebook" by the old school definitions. Modern definitions basically say a laptop is a big huge notebook with fans and optical drive whereas a "notebook" is basically an Ultrabook. In the 80s laptop and luggable were different things. The entire computer didn't fit into the screen + keyboard portions of a clamshell. When I went to college (for CS) in 1995 it was rare to have a personal laptop, slightly less rare to have a desktop PC. By 1997 all the incoming freshman at the school had IBM Thinkpads.
stinkytaco 5y ago
Then you don't know about the PowerBook 5300, arguably one of the worst computers ever made. We had one and though it never did set on fire, it was pretty crappy.
mprovost 5y ago
I had an Apple PowerBook 520c in 1994. The "c" was for "color", they still had a greyscale version! One of the best laptops I've ever owned actually. It was the first laptop (from any manufacturer I think) with a trackpad.
- technofiend 5y ago
  Oh check out the HP 110 from 1984!. [1] I lusted heavily after them but could never afford one. There was an editor and spreadsheet included so it was fully functional. It was far lighter than later portable competition like Compaq and Kaypro luggables. Speaking from experience you didn't really need or want to park a Compaq on your lap, just the keyboard. [1] https://vintage-laptops.com/en/hewlett-packard-hp-110-plus/ https://vintage-laptops.com/en/hewlett-packard-hp-110-plus/

CPLX 5y ago

Yup. My grandfather worked for Zenith for 50 years, and he lived in Chicago, and was the head of quality control for factories that made TV’s that were literally in Chicago. It seems inconceivable today but people in the US used to make consumer electronics. The fact that we don’t any more was a catastrophic policy decision not some kind of law of nature.

rasz 5y ago
Direct assault on the entire American electronics industry as a form of revenge for ww2. Frontline: Coming From Japan [The Fall Of The US Television Industry] (1992) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aesJTsZqm6c "September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American television industry? The secret history of that strategy reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..." https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVdEh3wdnXAJ:https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1990/09/30/japan-and-the-big-squeeze/0fb1617e-8756-4390-a776-f1619d59869a/ https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVdEh3...
dehrmann 5y ago
> The fact that we don’t any more was a catastrophic policy decision One effect of this is that the US and China are economically interconnected. It makes war a lot harder. It's why the EU is dragging its feet on oil and gas from Russia because that's the one Russian export they need.
- CPLX 5y ago
  Yes and our supply chain is a house of cards that was bound to melt down one day because of a shock and finally did. And the industrial base of the country's interior has endured two generations of economic collapse leading to widespread misery and political upheaval. The free trade and industrial policy decisions of the 90's and early 2000's will go down in history as era-defining mistakes in this county's political history.

thatwasunusual 5y ago

> in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap" country. So US is still a cheap country?

CWuestefeld 5y ago

a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies Yup. For me it was Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and probably a few others. Freshman year of college my roommate had a VCR. We learned that if we hooked up the VCR's RF output not to the TV input, but to the antenna, we could broadcast movies to the couple of neighboring rooms in the dorm.

dhzhzjsbevs 5y ago
How does that work? Did you need to tune the tv to it?
- fibonachos 5y ago
  It was still relatively common at that time for VCRs and gaming consoles to have an RF pass through and would broadcast on channel 3 or 4. You just tuned the TV to that channel.

bluedino 5y ago

> That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it. Not quite - the movie studios hadn't figured out they could sell way more tapes to consumers than video rental stores, so they lowered the prices to $19.95-24.95 in the late 80's.

Broken_Hippo 5y ago

I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. Or you had parents like mine. They used a lot of blank tapes, which held 6 hours worth of stuff. 3 movies each, that was. I think my parents saved up for it in the mid-80s. Back then, the cable companies used to run weekends with free HBO, Showtime, Disney (which was a premium channel back then) and so on. Hours of movies. Hours of looney tunes cartoons. Hours of old TV from Nick at Night, Nickelodeon's nighttime programming for adults. (So much I love Lucy and Dick van Dyke shows). Some still had commercials, but we didn't care. It was really nice during times without cable. I thnk they finally got rid of a lot of them about 15 years ago when their final VCR broke.

brimble 5y ago

> I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over. Yeah, 80s/90s kid here and I think by the end of the VHS era we owned about a dozen movies on VHS, including the Star Wars trilogy and maybe half a dozen animated kids' movies, plus three or four movies taped off TV. Anything else had to be a rental (and we almost never rented new movies because they were super expensive to rent, and nb that "new" might mean "was in theaters within the last 5 years") I watched those ~15 total movies (commercial and recorded-off-TV combined) a lot of times.

fibonachos 5y ago

We had that top-loading JVC with the big plastic buttons on the front and a wired remote. That thing was built like a tank.