How did people communicate in 1980s?

Answer 1

Letters, telegrams, phones, a limited amount of e-mail, bulletin boards, radio, television and lots of other methods of communication were available in the 1980s.

Answer 2

No cell phones, no smart phones, no "Personal Computers", no WWW, no fiber optic cable across the Atlantic, and telephones were analog. Just how rudimentary was the technology can be seen in the computers.

1980 saw several new hobbyist computers introduced. They were not the easy to computers we have today. Some required you to build them from a circuit board, few had cassette or disk drives. Programs were shared by printing out the program and passing the paper on to fellow computer users. They would then type in the code, the whole program, themselves. No music or video files outside of industry.

Without E-Mail people had to use the Postal System. It was even slower than today and every envelope cost the sender. The farther it was being sent and heavier the envelope the more it cost the sender.

Telephones or rather their use was very expensive, particularly in less developed areas. Long distance charges could easily be several dollars a minute and even within developed nations phone use could be $0.25usd a minute. Long distance overseas calls using satellites and land lines would have a noticeable delay making conversation very unnatural. That combined with the high cost kept calls short and to the point, very different than today.

Television was broadcast over the air with a minority but increasing number of homes getting television via cable systems. Home satellite TV was available but expensive and programs were limited.

International communication included Short Wave radio and many portable radios included the short wave bands. Ham Radio played a major role in remote communications and enabled people to talk to people from other nations. Disaster areas relied heavily on local ham radio operators to organize rescue and were often the first to get the message out that something had occurred.

The world was a very different place and not just because there was almost 3.5 billion fewer people. The cold war dominated international politics and yet Western people actually had more freedom to talk without fear of governments listening or recording without warrant. Most people were much freer to communicate even though they had to rely on paper and analog electrical devices to do so.