80s Tech Guide

LIVING IN THE 80S

A Sporebound Player's Guide to Everyday Technology

Welcome to the 1980s. You don't have a smartphone. You don't have the internet. What you do have is a rotary phone, a television with four channels, and, if you're lucky, a computer that takes up half a desk. The world feels smaller and bigger at the same time. Smaller because your reach is limited, bigger because the world beyond your neighborhood can feel genuinely unknowable.

The Sporebound are the resistance, but the world is not connected yet.

Almost everyone has a telephone at home. Most likely you have a rotary phone, putting your finger in a numbered hole and spinning the dial. Your parents probably bought it from Ma Belle (Belle Telephone Company) before it broke up. If you’re fancy, you shelled out for a touchtone phone. Either way, it plugs into the wall, it has a cord, and it doesn't go anywhere with you.

To call someone, you need to know their number. You memorize the numbers of people you call often. For everyone else, there's the phone book. If you need a number you don't have, you call 411 and an operator looks it up for you, for a fee. Long-distance calls cost significantly more per minute. People are brief. They plan what they're going to say.

If you call someone and they're not home, the phone just rings. You hang up and try again later. Answering machines exist but are a novelty. Payphones are on every street corner, in every gas station, every diner, every mall. They take quarters. People remember where the nearest payphone is.

LARP TIP: Calling someone means knowing their number, hoping they're home, and being brief. No texting. No leaving a voicemail trail. Coordination requires planning ahead or showing up in person.

Most Americans receive television via antenna. This gives you maybe four channels: the three major networks (ABC, NBC, CBS) and your local PBS affiliate. What's on is what's on. If you miss a show, you missed it.

Cable is spreading fast, bringing HBO, MTV, CNN, and ESPN for a monthly fee. Cable is not universal. If you're poor, you don't have cable. If you're clever, you bought a box from a seedy friend and spliced into your neighbor's cable line. Their picture got a little worse when you did.

There are pirate TV (and radio) stations around, usually with only enough signal to reach a neighborhood or two. The FCC hunts down the transmissions. The clever pirates move them around.

The VCR is one of the transformative technologies of the 80s. For the first time, you can record a show to watch later, or rent a movie from a video store. Video rental stores become social hubs. Kids pick out movies and have sleepovers. Betamax was better, but no one cares anymore. It takes up dust in rich people's closets.

The TV schedule was published in the daily newspaper, and, especially if you had cable, you get the weekly TV Guide. If you couldn’t watch it live, you used the TV guide to program your VCR to tape it for you.

LARP TIP: TV schedules matter. If something important is happening, everyone who has access to a TV is watching the same thing at the same time. There's no pause, no rewind, no catch-up streaming.

The arcade is the premier gaming experience of the early 80s. Large cabinet machines, one game each. You insert a quarter. You play until you die. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Galaga, Space Invaders. Getting the high score means your initials live on the machine until someone beats you.

At home, the Atari 2600 dominates until the industry crashes. Then Nintendo releases the NES, and everything changes. Super Mario Bros is a revelation. Games come on cartridges that you slot into the machine. You blow into the cartridge when it doesn't work. Computers like the Commodore 64 double as gaming platforms. Loading a game from a cassette tape can take 10-20 minutes. You sit there and listen to the screeching data sounds and wait.

LARP TIP: There's no online play, no voice chat, no streaming. You play together in the same room, or you play alone.

The personal computer is new and exciting and confusing. The IBM PC and the Macintosh define the 80s. A decent home computer setup can cost $1,000 to $3,000. Plenty of households don't have one at all. You might have an Apple II or Apple II+, late 70s tech that’s still hanging around. If you have to fix or upgrade your computer, you probably need a soldering iron. If you want a “portable” computer, the Apple IIc is the size of a briefcase, and Compaqs are the size of a suitcase.

Most computers in the early 80s have no mouse, no icons, no clicking. You type commands at a prompt. You need to know the commands. If you type it wrong, nothing happens or something breaks. Data is stored on floppy disks, 5.25-inch flexible squares you handle carefully. Keep them away from magnets. Don't bend them.

LARP TIP: Sharing information digitally means physically handing someone a floppy disk. There's no such thing as attaching a file to a message.

Before the internet, people connected their computers via phone lines using a modem. The typical home modem transmits at 300 baud, about 30 characters per second. With a modem, you can call a Bulletin Board System (BBS): a computer someone has set up in their home or office that lets callers dial in, post messages, send private messages, download files, and chat.

Because each BBS is a single phone line, only one person can be connected at once; you dial until you don’t get a busy signal. If someone in your house picks up the phone while you're on, the connection dies and you have to retry dialing and dialing all over again. The BBS community is usually local, because long-distance charges apply. BBSes have their own culture: handles, hierarchies, access levels, download ratios. The hacker underground lives here. The Secret Service and FBI run raids on hacker BBSes, and it takes a month to find out the new phone number to dial in.

"The board goes down sometimes for days. The sysop doesn't explain why. Everyone understands."

FidoNet connects BBSes to each other. Participating BBSes call each other at night when rates are lowest and exchange messages. A message can take days to reach someone across the country. But it works. It's a miracle, actually.

The BBS community grew out of an old one: the HAM radio community. HAM is a good fallback if the BBS is down. But everyone can hear you if they want to. You hunt through channels until you find an unused one, or you scan through them to try to find anyone who will answer.

Phone phreakers discover that thanks to those new touchtone phones, they can make free long-distance calls by manipulating telephone switching systems. A hacker named Cap'n Crunch can phreak the phone system with a toy whistle from a cereal box. They build "blue boxes", electronic devices that generate tones to trick the phone network. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak sold blue boxes to fund their early work at Apple. As PCs and networks grow, hackers grow out of the phreaker communities.

LARP TIP: BBSes are the dark web of the 80s, spaces outside mainstream surveillance where information flows that can't flow elsewhere. For Sporebound operatives, a BBS run by a sympathetic sysop could be a vital resource: a message board to coordinate, a way to reach other Troops in the Colony without meeting in person.

Pagers let someone send you a number to call back. You find a payphone. Fax machines transmit document images over phone lines, faster than mail. Physical mail takes 2-5 days. Any document someone needs quickly and in high quality gets delivered through couriers. People write letters. Pen pals are a real thing. Need to sell something or connect with someone? You put an ad in the newspaper classifieds, or post a notice on a corkboard at the laundromat or library.

LARP TIP: A Sporebound Troop that controls a BBS has power. One that has a dedicated fax line has reach. One with a trusted network of physical couriers has security. Different tools carry different trade-offs between speed, security, and access.

The Walkman is a small cassette player you clip to your belt. For the first time, you have a personal soundtrack to your life. The boombox is the opposite: large, loud, and public. You put it on your shoulder. You play it loudly. Boomboxes are a statement.

Photography requires film. You won't see your photos for 1-3 days. You're allowed 24 or 36 shots per roll, and once the shutter clicks, that moment is spent. Polaroid cameras offer instant development. Expensive per shot, but satisfying in a way film cameras can't match.

Everything is slower. Everything requires more planning. Information doesn't flow freely. It moves in channels, and controlling those channels is power. A mix tape someone made for you took hours of effort. A letter someone wrote in longhand means something. When you finally connect, there's weight to it.

Your Troop of six Sporebound who meet every Tuesday night is harder to infiltrate than a group chat. The man isn't going to hack into your Sneakernet of floppy disks under park benches. The Blue Blight operates in the mainstream, in the broadcast channels, in the corporate fax lines, in the acceptable surfaces of society. The resistance moves in the margins: the BBS boards, the zines, the payphone calls, the hand-delivered notes. That's where you live. In the cracks.