I was working on integrating a Materials Control system at an electronics company into the newly installed Accounting system in an IBM System 360 Mini-Mainframe, while trying to ignore the fact that I was essentially eliminating my own job maintaining the old system. Meanwhile, my fiance' was planning our June wedding, that occurred one week after I was officially laid off (making everybody I had invited from work into no-shows - none of them could face me). '86 was a weird year.

In 1986 I was working in an office and going to law school for my degree at night. I remember feeling a definite sense of 'haves' and 'have nots', as we were in the middle of Thatcherism and Reaganomics. I was definitely one of the 'have nots', but surrounded by people who nastily flaunted their wealth and privilege every day.

It was the start of a general lack of kindness in society in Britain, I think, which has grown and continues to this day, an all-pervasive "I'm all right, I don't care about you" mentality that makes London an unpleasant place to be sometimes.

So, on to the pictures:

My friend Paul:
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We had become pals at the Commodore 64 users group, and hung around together talking computers etc; he was larval stage and I was working at ADP at the time. (Larval stage is the first bloom of computer addiction, when you do insane things like 30-hour hacking sessions, sleep 2 hours and go at it again) We shared a sense of humor and a similar outlook, and could make each other laugh. I miss him sometimes; he's running his own business in Chicago now.

My second wife:
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Ah, Sandy. This was taken in that early stage of infatuation when no problem seems insurmountable. In this picture, we had just come back from a Chinese dinner, and she wanted to get a photo by her Ficus tree. She taught 3rd grade in the Chicago Public School system when I met her, and ended up teaching a computer lab to Junior High School students. We were together for seven years.

Proof that I wasn't always a PC weenie:
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Up until I saw this photo, I didn't remember that I had owned any Apple product prior to my iPhone, but clearly I did. (My first computer was, in fact, an Altair 8080 clone, and I graduated from that to a TI-99, and then a C-64.) I probably took this because I had just gotten the C-128 in the middle, and it sort of says a lot about how we had to do things. There weren't any ISP's as we think of them today, everything was done pretty much with modems and analog POTS lines. The XT clone on the right side of the picture ran my BBS, and used to dial up another FidoNet node every night to exchange email and USENET group messages. My email account was reachable through a UUCP bang path that included Chinet, IBMCHGVMIC4, and UWISC, among others. So different from now.

What do you remember?

1986? I remember not crying when my mom dropped me off at Kindergarten even though a bunch of other kids were crying; my mom stood at the door for a while and then I looked up and she was gone and I knew she would be back.

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Wow, 25 years ago.

I was working at Southern Cross Yachts (now defunct) building awesome semi-custom high-performance sports-fish boats for export to the US market. A couple of years from the nsaty end to a destructive, abusive relationship with the mother of my eldest daughter. Broke. Unhappy. Determined to do better but having no idea of how to go about that, except that I knew by this stage my future wasn't in boat-building (it was another 5-6 years before I worked out where it was, though). Getting interested in computers.

I was 19, working at World Savings & Loan in the loan funding department, was among the not-have-very-much, living at home (Orange, CA) but desperately wishing I could afford to move out, bought my first car (green 1973 Super Beetle) from Bro#2 (although I loved the car, don't ever buy a used car from Bro#2), started on the road to debt, visited Seattle for the first time and fell deeply in love with the city, horribly lonely but finally comfortable with my sexuality, but way to shy too do anything about it.

My first semester majoring in Nuclear Engineering Technology from Aiken Technical College, and a major milestone in my life. I had three glowing letters of recommendation, each from a different employer in the nuclear field, as well as an honorable discharge with commendations from the United States Marine Corps where my field was Nuclear Defense Logistics.

I was three years away from meeting my future wife, and seven years shy of my son's birth. A goddamn lifetime.

So you really are a rocket scientist, Ardiril.

I finished my undergrad degree in August (I had to go to school all summer to get enough credits to graduate because I kept changing majors). Then I went off to library school in September in a town where I knew no one and hated every minute of it. I spent a lot of time in my basement apartment watching tv, especially baseball. I'd grown up watching sports kind of casually, but this was the first time I watched every game, every pitch, with absolute absorption. That '86 World Series was something.

My apartment had a betamax player, and I rented movie after movie for it. You could always get what you wanted in the beta side of the video store, because beta was already dying as a format.

1986 was the last year I typed school papers on a typewriter.

I joined a college/community chorus and sang Handel's oratorio Saul. That was wonderful.

The year also featured getting un-engaged and then making some spectacularly dumb romantic choices, the ramifications of which continue to this very day.

Some highlights, but mostly 1986 was not a good year.

damn I dunno. Learning to crawl?

In 86, I was a shy 14 year old. I spent a lot of time in the library and avoiding my peers.

Screwing up in college and generally being good for not much.

in 1986 I was 11. My mother had (at my request) pulled me out of the very good private Catholic school that I was attending (thus being the first of my myriad cousins to not attend Catholic school to the end of high school) and I was off to the public intermediate school. I had skipped a year in primary school, so was a *lot* younger than my peers - a year is a big difference at that age - and all the girls were going through puberty and were scary to me.

That year I made a friend who got me interested in music. She had a ridiculously cool older brother who listened to The Clash, The Ramones, Bowie etc. and his tastes trickled down to us. So we were considered weird by our friends who were all listening to Bon Jovi, Europe and Mel & Kim.

That's about all I remember from that year.

I was 21 and doing a lot of drugs. The only thing I clearly remember about '86 is the Challenger explosion.

I was 7/8 and I think that might have been the year of My First Trip To Hospital. I came off my bicycle at the bottom of a steep slope, and had minor head injuries. I remember my mum trying to keep me awake in the car on the way to hospital, and the porter who wheeled me to X-ray telling me "I've had more X-rays than you've had hot dinners". The split lip resulting from this accident was how I stopped sucking my thumb - the thumb wouldn't go in for a few days, and that was long enough for me to break the habit.

Generally, I was at primary school, fairly happy and secure. I had skipped a year, like gaspode, but that didn't seem to matter at the time. Secondary school is another story, but that was a few years later.

Hmm, I would have been in grade 8, so I'd have been getting ready to graduate and move on to high school. At this exact moment 25 years ago, I'd have been sitting on a TTC bus making the long trip to school. I was in one of those "gifted" programs for the supposedly smart kids, and there was only one of those programs, so it was a long commute for most of us.

Our graduation trip was to Expo '86 in Vancouver. The most memorable thing about that trip was the air travel. To save a few bucks, we took flights that made about 7 stops in each direction. Many of them at airports so small they stopped the plane at the end of the runway, wheeled some stairs up to the door, and one person got on. But they served snacks after each stop, so we ate a lot. We also only spent 2 days going to the Expo and another 4 in Victoria because, we suspected, one of the teachers had family there and wanted to visit them.

1986 was also the year that I, and several other tall, clumsy, overweight kids suddenly grew about 2 feet (or so it seemed to us) and absolutely cleaned up at the track and field competition. Instead of being tall, clumsy, and overweight, we were suddenly huge, muscular, and fast (relative to our peers). I think that was the only time in my life I could have been considered "athletic".

1986 was also the last year that I did generally well in school, until I gave up on high school completely around 1989, puttered around for a few months, and then went to college in 1990.

I was a 17 year old virginal high school senior, eagerly anticipating being a 17 year old debauched college freshman.

I was 16 in 1986, and so...was a year or so into a lousy high school relationship that I would keep up for another 3 years or so. Wasted my youth, I did!

Also, my mom's second marriage was ending a little messily, and its effect on me was not positive. I didn't like the guy anymore, and was pretty glad he was leaving, but it left me kind of shaken. I ended up dropping out of highschool that year. I had gone from the "go-to kid with the answers" to the "kid who didn't even hear when his name was called", so I was terrified that I was going to FAIL courses and then ruin my future. Figured dropping out, getting my shit together, and returning the next fall was the answer.

So...I did. Then, my mom kicked me out when I told her I wasn't going to get a full-time job (if I'd wanted a full time job, I would have stayed in school!) and I ended up crashing at the aforementioned lousy girlfriend's parents' place. Interesting times indeed.

By the time 1986 rolled to an end, I was back at school, proving nearly everyone wrong - they'd all been insistent that IF I quit, I'd not return. Had a vice-principal of the school even threaten to call the police if he saw me on the school grounds after I quit (I'd gone to meet some friends for lunch). I was amazed.

Huh, so yeah, 25 years ago...life was pretty interesting. It wouldn't be THAT interesting again for another 7 years...then another 15 years after that!

Potty raining. I was 3.

Riding my bike. Soccer and G.I. Joes. Q*bert & Airborne Ranger on the Commodore 64. And whatever else first-graders did in the mid-80s.

I was in second grade. I have no specific recollections of that year. Maybe I was messing with a loose tooth.

1986 was a really eventful year for me. The last year of an oh so useful fine arts degree is so much fun, independent painting study, my own studio, materials grant so I could buy a whole roll of canvas: never again would I have the space and time to work like that. I was in a couple of shows that year and working in the college gallery, determined to make my life in the arts and be a Famous Painter. I was also working at a French restaurant in downtown Charleston and then working at a crazy frame shop where my paychecks bounced all the time and my nutty lesbian boss was constantly disappearing out the back door while her furious lovers were storming the front. At home, I was getting a divorce and my daughter was three (yes I was a teenage mom; we all survived.) I lived with three or four of my friends in a huge haunted downtown apartment that had been carved out of an antebellum mansion and we drank too much and did a lot of drugs. That summer we went to Ireland and then that fall we moved to Baltimore. I think that was the year where on my birthday in May we all got really drunk on free champagne and jumped into the Cooper River on a dare, getting all cut up on oyster shells in the process and not even caring. And, like Deborah, I had a Bug, a 1972 baby blue beetle that really only worked well at high noon on a sunny day, what with the fucked up electrical system, brakes that disappeared every time you hit a puddle - bad, in a coastal town that floods regularly - and numerous other delights. Oh and my romantic life was highly dramatic, event filled and completely disastrous for everyone involved.

Heh. Apparently it was also the year of Blonde.

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Charleston. That might be 1985, actually, it was my birthday.

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Baltimore.

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And way out in Baltimore county at a party.

1986: Ah, the heartbreak of the World Series. One. Strike. Away. Fucking shitty shitheads. And Roger Clemens was skinny with a higher voice.

Junior in high school. Over the summer, I participated in an exchange program where a student from France would visit me for a month. I was never a huge people person, and she and I had absolutely nothing in common so it was a very painful month where the two of us just stared at each other and I would say things like um, want to play Monopoly again?

Also that summer, we went to Martha's Vineyard with my dad. Being athletes, my dad, sister and said exchange student were puzzled as to why it was torture for me to bike all the way across the island and back. We went to a clothing-optional beach, and my father would not allow any of us to disrobe. This annoyed me, because I wanted to participate.

(It was also at this beach where said nude people were taking mud baths. That's now against the law, I believe, in order to protect the cliffs.)

In 1986 I was single, having broken up with the person who is now my wife.

Going out a lot, sleeping with a number of people, living in a small old apartment (which I still ride my bike by on the way to work).

Working for the school dist, as I do now, but in a different capacity. Driving a huge old chevy van with palm trees painted on the doors.

Spent three years in counseling/therapy during then. . .which I am really ambivalent about still.

I still have clothes from then, and I ride the same bike, FWIW.

I was living in a studio apartment in Queens and working at my first real professional job, programming in Pascal. It was OK until one of my coworkers got promoted to manager and made it his personal project to make me miserable. I quit. I'd rather not think about it.

I was five going on six. We still lived in Louisville, my parents were still married. I was in Kindergarten, and boy, what a time. First kiss (Megan in the loft, and what a sweet loft it was). First time I stole something (more to see what would happen; I took an eraser and when my mom asked where I got it, I was totally honest with her... I think that caught her off-guard as I was never actually punished). I also had to take the placement test all kids took (dunno if it's still in effect) where I got pulled out of the herd and selected for the smart kids' school (yay, Wilder!).

It was the last good year before we moved to NJ, I lost all my friends, my parents divorced, I found out the schools in NJ were worse than Kentucky (bye bye smart kids school and back into the herd, until I got skipped, at least, and even then, it was just an older herd), and my life changed forever. For the worse? Eh. You make the best of what you're given. I used to feel like I'd have grown up better adjusted in Louisville, but I'm sure my parents weren't going to stay together anyway and my mom would have probably had to move back by her family in NJ anyway. Still, I was never maladjusted or a social misfit til we moved...

I was a little over sixteen months old. My grandparents were all still alive. I still had a mole on my face (I had an adorable little mole on my cheek as a child; it disappeared when I was two.)

I have asked my mom, and she said I spent a lot of this time of my life naked. So, there you go. I was probably naked.

I was twelve. Learning to play the tenor saxophone, hating middle school, and hanging out with my best friend Celia (who still is my best friend.)

mygoth, look at all that blond hair!

Oh, right. That was the year my parents decided that I, the second-child-"problem-child," was the problem with their marriage. They took me to a counselor, who told them that most parents would kill to have a kid as bright and compliant as me, and the problem with their marriage was the husband and wife part.

My dad went back the next week, alone, and started working on those problems. My mom took me to another therapist to continue to try to get them to "fix" whatever she thought was wrong with me. That was the beginning of the end of my parents' marriage, and the beginning of my intense feelings that therapy was useless, since nothing ever happened as a result of all those damned therapy sessions with all those damned therapists.

Turns out every time she took me to a new therapist, my mother would have the first appointment herself, tell them all the bizarre invented things she thought were "wrong" with me, then dump me unsuspecting (usually yanked out of school with no warning that I was even leaving early that day, much less going to an appointment, much less going to a new therapist) on this yet-another therapist, who would surely fix me THIS time. The therapists and I were always working at cross-purposes, to my frustration (and probably theirs). Eventually, I stopped trying to participate. Now, I realize what a terrible practice it was for the therapists to even let my mom do that.

That was my first experience with strong feelings of betrayal and helplessness, I think: an already abusive parent's mis-use of the system to make an abused and frightened child feel even worse about herself, to insist that the problem was the child and not the parenting, to fruitlessly, relentlessly attempt to fix problems that did not exist--and the therapists who let her, over and over.

Crawling maybe? I was probably still living in my maternal grandparents' house with my parents, while the house we moved into and in which I lived until I was 21 was built.

About to graduate high school and go across the country to college. I had to learn for myself that physical distance isn't what cuts the cord.

The school was a magnet 4-12 with double periods, 1-3-5 and 2-4-6 on alternating days.

It's having an all class reunion this weekend, but I'm not going. I have other things planned and I don't have fond memories of the place....which include being told that someone was talked out of asking me to the prom.

April 1986. I was approaching 16, but refusing to learn to drive. It was probably around this time that I auditioned for the show choir. Definitely around this time I "borrowed" the dress I'm wearing today from my sister and never gave it back. I had a huge crush on one of my sister's friends who used to leave mysterious messages on the chalkboard in the choir room and who slipped me a copy of Siouxsie and the Banshees "Hyaena", shrugging and saying "I figured you'd like this." That was the year I got a puppy for my birthday. There was an earthquake in North Palm Springs that year which damaged something in the walls of our house. I also think this was the year I learned that people can be dicks when you break up. Previously, my experiences with dating had been awkward or half-assed, but generally polite and drama-free.

galadriel, that makes me sad to read. What a terrible experience.

I was 16, a neo-hippie involved in the arty stuff at my high school, cynical and introverted, somewhat. I was devoted to playing the guitar and trolling local thrift shops for vintage clothes, like giant 1950s men's shirts and overcoats and 60s Gidget-type minidresses, and old beat-up LPs, books, and aluminum tumblers. Journaling obsessively and reading obsessively I had a best female friend, Becky, who was always dating someone new, and a best male friend, Patrick, who was gay and having a hard time with that, and an odd bunch of close friends, mainly a small posse from my neighborhood. I loved going to the beach, riding my bike, taking long walks downtown with Becky. I went to school, and was always in the mildest sort of trouble because of my lack of respect for authority, but generally was a good kid. I worked as a library page after school and at the Gap on weekends, and got dinner started most weeknights while my parents were getting home from work. On weekend nights we would get into my friend Brian's yellow 1970s Buick Skylark and drive down the beach road to Asbury Park and Long Branch and Seaside, listening to Cat Stevens and CSNY and Richie Havens, and walk on the beach and goof off and eat food in diners.

Probably trying to come up with some different way to apply the image of a fat orange cat to yet another 12 SKU's of nightshirts, while writing some cute, humorous bon-mot to accompany them.

I was six. I attended a swanky Quaker school (yes, they most certainly exist) and drove my teachers absolutely bonkers because I would do such horrible things as read ahead of the rest of the class in our reading workbook. I distinctly recall a story about a nightingale or some such being the last thing I could read because the teacher had -- horrors! -- PAPERCLIPPED THE PAGES TOGETHER.

And then there was the day when we were all called together and told, very somberly, that the school nurse had broken her collarbone and we should think good things for her and very expressly NOT get sick if we could absolutely stand it. I threw up on the carpet about an hour later.

I was in the middle of my short-haired "sonny" phase, which I l-o-a-t-h-e-d. So much so that even now, when I am *ahem* most clearly a woman (albeit one who goes to work in jeans and t-shirts if she can help it), I am sensitive about vaguely mannish haircuts.

I looked like this (pink shirt, blue turtleneck).

1986? I was hiding in the basement wearing a frilly dress while my stepfather was going around the house upstairs looking for me for some reason, shouting my name, coming downstairs into the basement, while I hid around a shallow corner as terrified as an eighth grader boy can possibly be,

Reading all this is awesome decent!

I remember seeing a picture of the Challenger explosion on the front page of a newspaper. My mom was carrying me and the paper was sitting on an end table near the door to our garage. I was two and a half and that's my earliest memory.

Senyar: Not quite a rocket scientist, but I could have definitely got a job at Nasa if that had been my inclination.

I was in high school, screwing up mostly, and working at a supermarket.

I was 13 years old. I was in junior high and I remember not having many friends to sit with at lunch. Sometimes I had people to sit with, other times I didn't. I don't know why. I was a lost soul sometimes. I remember seeing the Challenger explosion during lunch period. I was by myself, outside at the picnic tables, and I saw twisty trails of smoke instead of one smoke trail. I knew that there was something very wrong. I went back to class and my teacher was crying and the TV was on.

I also moved into a new house this year. We lived in a hotel for a few days until my parents closed on the house. I had summer school that year because I my mind was not on schoolwork. I had family problems and things pretty much sucked but I didn't fully understand how sucky things were although my behavior conveyed that things were not okay.

Just finishing my freshman year at Michigan. Met my first husband signing up for band auditions (we both played clarinet). We used to play concerts at Hill Auditorium. Great acoustics. Lost my virginity that year. Ate a lot of cream puffs at the dorm. Typed my papers on an electric typewriter.

I was probably tying the other kids' shoes in kindergarten because I was both helpful and a precocious show-off.

I was married to my second wife. I worked over night shift at the World Trade Center in maintenance, specifically in the stock room. I repaired floor waxers and vacuum cleaners and gave out supplies and equipment. I snorted dope and drank at work, like a lot of the guys there. Some guys just drank. A few didn't. At the end of the shift we would gather up the guys that had passed out, so they could sober up enough to punch their time cards.

I'd just met my future husband exactly two weeks ago. I think we'd have just had our first date tonight.

Who wouldn't love a guy who brings his lawyer on a first date?

We broke up about a month later, unknowingly beginning a pattern.

This pic is when I was 14, but I didn't change much.

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The rest of '86 was pretty great. I was a sophomore, and sophomores know everything. Too young to drive quite yet, but old enough to be out a little late with girls who could.

I started going to church and singing in the choir and made more friends. Believe it or not, this was a serious rebellion in my atheist parents' eyes. But I didn't know that yet, so it was great.

I had just moved from Memphis, Tennessee to southern California. I was cruising through 4th grade, the new kid in school. It was hot and windy that summer. There was an earthquake. I read a lot of Donald Duck and Archie comics. I was obsessed with Robotech. That was the first year I tried to make a conscious effort to remember my year, and not just to live life unobserved. I was 10 years old.

I was working part time for the same company I work full-time for now. I was taking college courses for Early Childhood Education, and I was spending a lot of time with my friends. It was actually a fun, free, enjoyable time in my life (before big responsibilities/marriage/kids/mortgage etc.). It was the only time I've ever been to Florida: DisneyWorld and Sea World. I keep meaning to go back, but haven't yet. It was the year I bought my first and so far only brand-new, from the dealership new truck: a 1986 Nissan Pickup, manual transmission (learned to drive stick shift on that car). I turned 20 the summer of '86.

Expanding in weight and growing appendages.