Take me Back to the Future
By Liz Biggs
I had a dream last night that I was a time traveler. I traveled back to the 1980s, and it quickly became a nightmare. I was looking everywhere for my cell phone, but duh, it hadn’t been invented yet. Everyone thought I was insane when I told them about search engines, FaceTime, Netflix, Jumbotrons, Hawk-Eye, GPS, Black Monday and knee replacements.
If you could travel back in time (knowing what you know now), what would you miss the most? For me, it’s definitely the wealth of information we have at our fingertips… aka our phones. I can’t bear the thought of being a mother back then, with only a landline to communicate with my children (if even that, due to lack of access and expensive long-distance charges). Their texts, photos, FaceTime calls, Instagram posts and group text banter pretty much rock my world.
How reliant we have become on the exponential amount of information we are able to Google! How barbaric to go back to looking up things in an encyclopedia or (gasp) go to a library and research a topic on microfiche. My favorite hobby of doing a deep dive down random rabbit holes would not exist in the ’80s — what a bummer.
I tried to listen to music in my dream and it tried my patience. Spotify wasn’t there for me to access any song I wanted to hear immediately. I remember going to record stores in the olden days and wishing I was rich so I could buy all the records. And when I splurged on a record, sometimes I loved one song but didn’t really dig the rest. Making mixtapes was quite an investment in time and money, but worth it. How I would miss 2026 — making fun, fantastic playlists in minutes.
When I was a sales rep, fresh out of college, my company car was loaded with maps of all the states and cities I had to cover. Sometimes I still have nightmares about all the times I got lost; the worst was in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I didn’t look at the map very closely and thought I could zip from Atlanta to north Georgia and back quickly. Dang, those mountains got in the way. I ran out of gas and slept in my car. Finally, the next morning a car passed, and I frantically waved for help. (I never left the house without snacks after that.) How frustrating to use paper maps again when you know modern navigation systems exist in the future!
And sports, don’t get me started on sports. In basketball, the 3-point shot wasn’t invented until 1980 — on a trial basis to boost excitement — and was initially considered a gimmick. In tennis, the Hawk-Eye electronic line-calling technology was developed by Paul Hawkins in 1999 and was first used in Grand Slams in 2006. Good riddance to the days of “You cannot be serious!” Football would be hard for me to watch before 1986, when the NFL started using instant replay to overturn calls. How boring it would be to go to a big game without a Jumbotron, which was introduced by Sony in 1985.
My apologies to Marty McFly, but in true Biff fashion, maybe I’d pack a bag of money and go back to December 12, 1980 — the day of the Apple IPO. Since 1980, Apple has conducted five stock splits, turning one original share of the IPO into 224 shares. I’d stick around for the Microsoft IPO on March 13, 1986 — it created 300 millionaires instantly. I’d buy stock in the top performers of the decade: Circuit City, Hasbro, The Limited, Gap, Reebok, Wal-Mart, Marion Labs, Toys R Us and Tyson Foods (chicken nuggets for the win). Of course, I’d sell them all on Friday, October 16, 1987, in the nick of time before the stock market crashed on Black Monday, the largest one-day drop in the Dow Jones Industrial Average’s history. And buy them back on Tuesday. Maybe not Circuit City, though, since they filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Maybe not Toys R Us either. I wonder about Hasbro too, but this column is due, so that rabbit hole will have to wait.
It would be really hard to go back to video stores to rent movies when you know how easy it is to stream movies and shows nowadays. I surely don’t want to go back to getting rolls of film developed — remember all the bad pictures you paid for? And think of all the medical advancements — we can all be like the Bionic Woman now with knee and hip replacements.
Yeah, if my dreams send me to the 1980s again, I will click my ruby slippers and go back to the future.
