Reasons to Love the '80s

Music

When people think of the 1980s, music frequently comes to mind and it's not hard to see why. The best-selling album of all time, Michael Jackson's "Thriller," debuted in 1982, the same year as the first CD player. "Thriller" was also known for its music videos, which played regularly on MTV --- the channel that launched in 1981. Fans of hip-hop and rap music have reason to love the '80s, too. The Beastie Boys' "Licensed to Ill," released in 1986, was the first hip-hop record to top Billboard's charts for the best-selling album, helping to mark that genre's transition into the mainstream. The 1980s also saw the rise of the "alternative music" scene, with bands ranging from the avant-garde R.E.M. (1980) to the quirky They Might Be Giants (1988).

The IBM PC, launched in 1981, popularized the x86 instruction set that Intel and AMD still use in their processors today. Apple fans, on the other hand, can look to the 1984 Apple Macintosh, one of the first successful computers to use a graphic user interface and mouse. Modern life also owes a debt to the 1980s for overseeing the transformation of the military-focused ARPANET into today's Internet. IPv4, the standard that allowed widespread Internet connectivity, was formalized in 1981. Users of LANs or home wireless networks should also love the '80s: IEEE group 802, the group responsible for networking standards and whose name shows up in wireless cards that describe themselves as 802.11 compliant, first met in February of 1980.

The '80s were the years when comic books shed their clichéd superheroes and hackneyed plots in favor of thought-provoking and radical ideas. Independent publishers willing to take a chance on unorthodox material spawned properties like the punkish "Tank Girl" (1988) and the quirky "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" (1984). Mainstream publishers became more radical, too, with the anti-authoritarian "V for Vendetta" (1982) and the postmodern "Watchmen" (1986), both of which later became motion pictures challenging the notion of comic book movies as campy or frivolous. Viewers who loved Heath Ledger's Oscar-winning performance in the 2008 film "The Dark Knight" can also look to the '80s; his dark, chaotic portrayal of the Joker owes its existence to "The Killing Joke," first published 20 years earlier in 1988.

Although the 1980s gave us plenty of reasons to stay at home --- blockbuster movies, home video game consoles and personal computers --- one of its most enduring legacies is ability it gave us to keep in touch when on the go. In 1983, Motorola unveiled the DynaTAC, the world's first commercially available cellular phone. By 1984, there were 300,000 cell phone subscribers; today, more cell phones than that are sold every two hours. In the decades since, cell phones have gone from being bulky, unwieldy communications devices to multifunction tools. They can even tell you where you are, courtesy of the Global Positioning System, or "GPS" --- a position-finding technology first made available to the public in 1989.