Facts About The 1980s
A billion people tuned in to see Prince Charles and Lady Diana get married.
While royal and celebrity weddings are still a big ratings hit to this day, they pale in comparison to Diana and Charles’ wedding in 1981. In fact, over a billion people around the globe tuned in for the July 29th wedding. To give some context to that figure, just 10.5 million viewers watched Kim Kardashian’s 2011 wedding to Kris Humphries.
The first commercial U.S. cell phone weighed two pounds.
Though the first analogue cellular phone system was introduced in Japan in the late 1970s, it wasn’t until 1983 that Americans could get their hands on one of these devices. The Motorola DynaTac 8000X had a waiting list thousands of people long, despite its high price point and low functionality. The phone could only store 30 numbers, charging it took 10 hours, it only offered 30 minutes of talk time, it weighed two pounds, and came with an exorbitant price tag: $3,995—or $9,410 in today’s dollars.
Michael Jackson was the decade’s most popular artist.
Throughout the 1980s, the King of Pop maintained his spot atop the Billboard charts for a staggering 27 weeks, beating his next-closest competitor, Lionel Richie, by a full six weeks.
The original Gameboy had only five games available in the United States.
Nintendo first rolled out the Game Boy to a Japanese market on April 21, 1989, bringing it stateside just a few months later in July of the same year. However, the playing options were pretty limited: users in the United States could only choose from Super Mario Land, Alleyway, Baseball, Tetris, and Tennis.
The average home price in 1985 was under $100K.
Though home ownership has become prohibitively expensive for many Americans, back in the 1980s, getting your hands on a piece of property was a relatively inexpensive proposition. According to Census data, the average cost of a new home in 1985 was just $92,800, or $229,990.61 when adjusted for inflation. In contrast, the average house bought in the U.S. in 2017 cost $398,900.