What was daily life like in the 80s/90s/00s?

[Butters and Pepper]

You would watch channel 9 for Wide World of Sports on a weekend yto get a run down on all the different sports. The Hawaiian ironman specials they did once a year were always a favorite of mine.

SBS/ABC would have a Premier League soccer round up usually shown on a monday (from memory) which showed 3-4 mins of highlights of each game.

WWOS would also have the strongman competitions where attempts would be made to lift cars or other ridiculous stunts.

Chappelli seemed a bit out of his depth if the story wasn't about cricket.

 

[VicPark Bitter]

writing in cursive, or "running writing" as it was called in primary school.

I did the entirety of of my schooling in the hand written form, not a keyboard in sight!

 

[Cuzz09]

Remember that show "THE EXTRAORDINARY"

On SM-S908E using BigFooty.com mobile app

 

[revo333]

Buying the Saturday paper to check for jobs.

It might be harder to find a job these days but the process is better than what it was decades ago.

Too bad if you didn't like talking on the telephone and making calls, it was your only choice.

You have it good if all you had to do was send a resume through online and then wait for a call.

 

[DickieKnee]

Simon Townsend's Wonderworld.

 

[kickazz]

Remember that show "THE EXTRAORDINARY"

On SM-S908E using BigFooty.com mobile app

The Telly Savalas story was a good one.

 

[the_interloper]

I feel sorry for the modern day pizza dude with harsher speed limits, gps, mobile phones and roadside drugs tests. When I worked in pizza bar the drivers were an even mix of pot heads and boy racers who'd last about five minutes these days.

Absolutely, also sniffer dogs at festivals really took the fun out of things.

 

[Gough]

Going back to early 80s/late 70s, The Wonderful.World of Disney was on Sunday nights - sometimes it was a live action episode, although I preferred the cartoon episodes.

Back then Disney was just a couple of theme parks in America and naff Sunday night television not the monster transnational company it is now.

 

[bresker]

Simon Townsend's Wonderworld.

Pretty sure that’s Gary Lyon

 

[Bernie L]

Owned a few trotting horses back in the 80s and 90s when living in Adelaide. One was running in Victor Harbor one day. It was a non-Tab program so no radio coverage. I couldnt get down there, so rang the trotting club a couple minutes before start time. They transferred me to the race caller box. The race caller held the phone to his mouth when calling the race.

Oh, she won

 

[Cuzz09]

Oh yeah Victoria Park and Cheltenham were around in the 80s and 90s

On SM-S908E using BigFooty.com mobile app

 

[bresker]

writing in cursive, or "running writing" as it was called in primary school.

I did the entirety of of my schooling in the hand written form, not a keyboard in sight!

From year 4 we had to copy from the blackboard with a fountain pen in old fashioned joined up writing . It was sore on the hand, it’s since been shown to cause repetitive strain injury .

We worked in complete silence as Mrs McFarlane roamed the room. If she didn’t think your work was up to scratch , she’d stick the nib of her sharp pen into the back of your scalp. She was generally one of the less severe teachers !

Feck I hated school. I think I’m almost certainly autistic but there was no diagnosis or help back then . Sink or swim . Most of the time School made no sense to me.

 

[Gough]

From year 4 we had to copy from the blackboard with a fountain pen in old fashioned joined up writing . It was sore on the hand, it’s since been shown to cause repetitive strain injury .

We worked in complete silence as Mrs McFarlane roamed the room. If she didn’t think your work was up to scratch , she’d stick the nib of her sharp pen into the back of your scalp. She was generally one of the less severe teachers !

Feck I hated school. I think I’m almost certainly autistic but there was no diagnosis or help back then . Sink or swim . Most of the time School made no sense to me.

Mental health care barely existed in the 80s.

 

[Plugger35]

Our year 4 teacher was a crazy old woman that should have been in a mental health care facility herself, that was the last year she taught at our school so maybe she ended up in one or she just retired. Thankfully most of my other primary school teachers were pretty good but she was a nightmare.

 

[Kram]

We had rugby league star Benny Elias' brother for a PE teacher mid 90s, bloke was a complete psycho.

 

[ioppolo]

We had rugby league star Benny Elias' brother for a PE teacher mid 90s, bloke was a complete psycho.

PE teaching tend to draw some weird units in.

 

[Howard Littlejohn]

Mental health care barely existed in the 80s.

It mostly consisted of "yes, the cane is illegal, so what? WOP"

 

[Frank Bunn]

Hey Bigfooty,

I am trying to get a rough idea of daily life as an adult in the 80s/90s/00s.
Today I woke up, went gym, had breakfast, and have been watching YouTube videos for the past half hour. Now I'm posting online.
I am wondering, what would I, as a 30-something year old, be doing on a Saturday if this was 1994 or something?

I was born in 1991, so I have fond memories of the late 90s, but my most distinct memories are from the 00s, and I was a kid, so it was mainly just school and mucking around with friends.

I just want to know what your average daily life was like? What your Saturdays were like?
I don't really care that a pint was cheaper or that there was less security at the airport. I want the boring stuff.

Historians might look back on times before and after the internet and mobile phones. But just on the mundane stuff...

Printed newspapers used to be a big thing. So first thing on a Saturday you would wander down to the local newsagent and buy a couple of papers that would keep you busy while having half an eye on the crap that was on one of the four TV channels.

I'm struggling to think how I occupied my Saturday afternoons. It was like a void period. But I would always have something arranged for Saturday evenings. You would ring round on people's landlines and coordinate a pub and time to meet.

Nearly all transactions were cash. There was also a new fangled machine that slid over your credit card to make a carbon copy.

Music has gone from vinyl to CD to streaming then back to vinyl.

pr0n is a whole story in itself.

 

[revo333]

Following something like American Football would be much harder and I'd love to hear some insight from others as to what it was like, but again maybe I would never be interested in that as it's mostly been due to the Internet.

It was more mysterious and that's what made it so appealing for me.

Hard to find out anything about the players and teams it felt like it was played on another planet.

But the most interesting thing is how much I coped for liking the NFL in the mid 90's and some of these people who dismissed the game at the time now follow teams and are right into it.

 

[Roobs321]

The buffet dine-in at Pizza Hut & Sizzler screams 90s to me

Rage Top 50 at crack of dawn on Saturday. Likewise, Golf was captivating Thurs-Sun viewing, heyday for Hopman Cup, triathlon, Surf Lifesaving Ironmen, etc. ABC after school programs had a huge captive audience and made a reliable babysitter.

Sunday morning church was a 90s thing in my life (except during nippers summer season)

School: Tazos, trading cards, marbles, those once-a-week lunch orders, Where’s Wally, Goosebumps, the growth in school computers (and associated facilities/capabilities/focus/expectation) throughout the 90s, dancing was Macarena/Nutbush/Coco Jamboo/Backstreets Back/square dancing

I taught myself how to read pre-memory, grew up in small towns and barely had any household tech, so bikes, corner shops, bookworm, lot of mostly vacant places to hideout with your mates or siblings and chill, plus quiet streets to play games in. Trampoline. You’d use your imagination to entertain yourself. I once lived on a block that was practically all holiday houses except for us, so hide-and-seek for much of the year was EPIC. A lot of board games like Stratego, Chess, Scrabble, self-made snakes’n’ladders, Mouse trap, monopoly, etc.

In small towns most kids were white, some were aboriginal, that token asian kid, seldom came across any kids who were Indian, wasn’t even aware of the ‘wog’/‘leb’ thing till a bit older. When my parents lived in Redfern in the mid-late 80s and had me they were evangelical types and kept a spare room for a young Chinese lady, a paranoid guy who’d escaped Romania, and a Uruguayan.

Takeout was typically the occasional fish’n’chips. Maccas was a rare occasion on road trips. Kermonds when in Warrnambool. Didn’t enter a KFC until about 9-10yo with the Godzilla merchandise. Mostly cooked dinners at home. The supermarkets weren’t all Woolies/Coles, we used to go to Franklin, Jewel and small IGA-esque independents.

 

[Roobs321]

I was closet trans in high school during the 2000s and it was a very lonely experience. There was usually 1 out gay kid in the grade. Every few weeks I needed to chuck a sickie because being in the closet in late high school years was exhausting. Grades suffered after typically being near top of the class. Transitioned at the end of the 2000s, was still very taboo back then but also very obscure so not a culture war thing either, and nonbinary wasn’t even a concept until years later. The day I did my last school exam I walked out and never looked back, was secretly a miserable time for me, had no one to talk to about it, no positive example to follow, and was glad to put those days behind me. Thankfully I didn’t stand out and was just a regular kid that blended in, never bullied. My parents said years later that they would’ve kicked me out if I’d come out as a teen (and I was a considerate well behaved kid who never gave my parents grief). That was the instinct of most (rural) trans people back then, you knew you needed to leave home and become independent before you’d pursue transitioning, the alternative whilst dependent and in school would’ve been ghastly.

 

[blueboy25]

The buffet dine-in at Pizza Hut & Sizzler screams 90s to me

Rage Top 50 at crack of dawn on Saturday. Likewise, Golf was captivating Thurs-Sun viewing, heyday for Hopman Cup, triathlon, Surf Lifesaving Ironmen, etc. ABC after school programs had a huge captive audience and made a reliable babysitter.

Sunday morning church was a 90s thing in my life (except during nippers summer season)

School: Tazos, trading cards, marbles, those once-a-week lunch orders, Where’s Wally, Goosebumps, the growth in school computers (and associated facilities/capabilities/focus/expectation) throughout the 90s, dancing was Macarena/Nutbush/Coco Jamboo/Backstreets Back/square dancing

I taught myself how to read pre-memory, grew up in small towns and barely had any household tech, so bikes, corner shops, bookworm, lot of mostly vacant places to hideout with your mates or siblings and chill, plus quiet streets to play games in. Trampoline. You’d use your imagination to entertain yourself. I once lived on a block that was practically all holiday houses except for us, so hide-and-seek for much of the year was EPIC. A lot of board games like Stratego, Chess, Scrabble, self-made snakes’n’ladders, Mouse trap, monopoly, etc.

In small towns most kids were white, some were aboriginal, that token asian kid, seldom came across any kids who were Indian, wasn’t even aware of the ‘wog’/‘leb’ thing till a bit older. When my parents lived in Redfern in the mid-late 80s and had me they were evangelical types and kept a spare room for a young Chinese lady, a paranoid guy who’d escaped Romania, and a Uruguayan.

Takeout was typically the occasional fish’n’chips. Maccas was a rare occasion on road trips. Kermonds when in Warrnambool. Didn’t enter a KFC until about 9-10yo with the Godzilla merchandise. Mostly cooked dinners at home. The supermarkets weren’t all Woolies/Coles, we used to go to Franklin, Jewel and small IGA-esque independents.

My kids asked me the other day if I went to Church when I was a kid. I explained to them that I did which included sunday school up until I started surf club, footy and cricket on a sunday and my dad thought that was more important....thankfully.

 

[Billy ray]

Pay day

 

[Kram]

I was too young to have had much to do with paper money at the time but remember how bad the first batch of plastic $5 notes were, once seen a couple of kids rubbing the face of the Queen off against a brick wall haha.

 

[Roobs321]

My kids asked me the other day if I went to Church when I was a kid. I explained to them that I did which included sunday school up until I started surf club, footy and cricket on a sunday and my dad thought that was more important....thankfully.

Yes, I think during primary school age is fairly okay, but teens deserve more discretion on how they spend their time. The vibe was welcoming and I was very into a lot of the biblical stuff whereas my younger brothers never were and rather than be restless would usually just play off in the Sunday school room. For a couple years the Church was just across the road so it wasn’t that big of a deal getting there and back. My dad stopped going years before I did so it wasn’t like he had any say in the matter. We were more at home in the local surf club and cross country club (closer demographic with all the young families) so we eventually just drifted away from Sunday service. Kept up Good Friday for a few more years, that was the last to go.