You can tell that Darren at Livingroom is a young whipper snapper. The first topic in blogger idol is "the 80's". Really! Those of us who were there know that the 70's crapped all over the 80's as a decade. The seventies was the decade of flower power, peace and love. Of course we were napalming Vietnamese children in order to keep from falling into the evil clutches of the communists but we will overlook that.

We were hippies in those days; all long hair, embarrassing clothes and idealism. Sadly, it was not to last. Peace guided the planets and love ruled the stars only for the briefest period. We had ascended the spiritual heights, meditated with a guru, listened to whale song on the reel-to-reel tape player, attuned ourselves to the cosmic realm but, as the song says, "You'd better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone for the times they are a changin"

Change they did and sink we did. PCs and Microsoft arrived like a firestorm in the IT marketplace. That elegant piece of assembler that ran on a mainframe in 64K of memory, instead of being viewed with awe by junior programmers, was now an anachronism. It was the same throughout industry, "executive" and "over 35" were mutually exclusive terms. Commerce and industry were the domains of the young corporate high-flyer. They grabbed the joy-stick and, after a few loops, plowed our economy into "the recession we had to have" You see they had stopped making things and started making money. Sooner or later someone was bound to open a door and allowed in a gust of common sense. The "house of cards" that our economy had become collapsed.

If that wasn't bad enough, the 80's saw the first outbreaks "economic rationalism", a disease that afflicts industry to this day. Like any disease that is not managed it has spread through the corporate community to the extent that, like herpes, it is ubiquitous.

The 80's has a lot to answer for really, perhaps I'll just drag out the beads and the tie-dyed shirt and meditate on it. If only I could still fit into the matching pants.