Some of mine:
* Riding a bike 20 miles (give or take 5) to see friends because that was the only way socializing was possible without having to pay out-of-town long-distance charges on the phone--sometimes i got yelled at for a surprise 500$ phone bill when the calls were only to the next town, even now that's bad.
* Listening the the top 100 on new years eve so we could know what was actually on the billboard charts and prove to our friends which song was better
* Records, 8-tracks, reel-to-reel, my kids dont even know what these are, but were the gems, even compact discs and tapes are a stretch for them
* The 80s internet was used by ONLY people like me who were in that field of study, and the people online were also like that, so you knew you were talking to another computer science major or at the very least University student when you were online. It was a safe internet, a free internet, pre-google, pre-aol, pre-everything. We didn't even have web pages! (newsgroups were the closest thing to that) The internet was mostly used for e-mail (SMTP), chat (IRC, TALK, etc BBSes via TELNET). Later on the BBS made a temporary grandstand ~ 1989-96 as ISPs before AOL, Mindspring, and companies later to become just Verizon and Comcast took over entirely. The big telecoms own everything now and lease their hardware to the lesser companies stripped of their bodies. Google came and went, now still called Google but is actually Alphabet using that original promise "No Ads or Prioritized Results" in which now the exact opposite is done, LOL! But since it happened so slowly nobody noticed?
* Saving up quarters to call friends at a pay phone
* Going to the skating rink, still exists but its just not the same (an all-night skate now is over at 7pm, when I was a kid it was actually ALL NIGHT, thanks to the bad people for making our world so less safe!
* Police actually had time to talk to people
* Hospitals didn't have the same entry procedures as prisons
* Schools didn't have the same entry procedures as prisons
* Trick-or-Treating happened AT NIGHT, ON HALLOWEEN (not on the saturday before halloween at 4pm!)
* We could walk around town when we were 5 years old without having child services called on us because it was normal for a 5 year old to walk around town.
(this is basically about the smallish town I grew up in, over the years it has exploded into a tri-city area with most of it's scenic areas where I hung out covered in pavement, Endless Stores and Malls dotted by the occasional Applebees/Gas Station combo set. Funny thing is nobody even realizes places where a very beautiful beach+river was, lined with lush plantlife and wildlife is now all underground in some cement tunnel, grated and ending at both ends of the city with a master padlock, but there is very little distance to the next tunnel that starts the next town. So sad T~T