About the 1980's The eighties were marked by a distinct conservative shift in our political and economic climate. We sent a former Hollywood actor to the White House, and Reaganomics was the mode of the day.  These policies were based on the "trickle down" theory of wealth and its distribution (loosely translated, it meant p--- on you).  Big business was busy busting unions, workers were scrambling to hold on to what fragile gains they had made, almost everything people bought was made in some other country, John Lennon was murdered, someone tried to assassinate Reagan, the government defined ketchup as a vegetable in school lunches for the disadvantaged, we had high ranking officials being chummy with known cocaine importers, and the personal computer was about to make that quantum leap into being a part of  everyone's lives.  The sexual freedom brought about by the free love of the 60's and 70's made us acutely aware of a new and devastating STD called HIV, which rather suddenly changed the way we all interacted. It was a time of great technical groundbreaking as robotics became an integral part of manufacturing (the birth of robots making robots) and personal computers literally booted themselves to the forefront of the new world and through their power of statistical analysis we got a clearer picture of how much we were messing things up. The boomers were busy raising their children and the world was changing at an accelerated pace, although nothing really changed at all.