The Walkman decade: private soundtracks, plastic everything, and the VCR clock blinking twelve.
The gadget detaches from the wall and clips to the belt. The Walkman gives every sidewalk a soundtrack; the answering machine speaks for the household; the camcorder films the birthday; the NES colonizes the den. Nobody ever sets the VCR clock.
The Walkman - the first machine that let you be somewhere else, in public, on purpose.
The farm crisis forecloses the heartland while the ticker cheers; a new disease is met first with silence. The decade's soundtrack has a hard bass line under the synth.
The eighties of a mall teenager, a laid-off machinist, and an immigrant engineer in a new Silicon Valley cubicle run on three different currencies of hope.