alt Hacker NewsI suspect your family was not as middle class as you think it was. You're describing a very similar childhood to what I had in the late 80s, but we were lower class for sure
I'm not saying that middle class families flew all the time in the 80s, but they absolutely could afford to if they wanted to make it a priority
A cursory google search seems to bear this out. Cheap flights in north america started in 1978 with some air travel deregulation.
GP claims their family was lower middle class not properly middle class. My family mostly traveled like kelnos family did at the time. Also gas prices in the 80s-90s were so cheap that it rarely made sense to fly over driving. We flew as a family twice as a kid because we were an immigrant family and we saved up to visit the country of origin but it was ridiculously expensive to take the whole family, so dad stayed home one vacation, and we always stayed there with family.
We did have a computer but it was really a one time expense. At the time computers were improving quickly so I scavenged parts which wealthy areas that threw last Gen hardware away but were better than what we had (and I was a kid with a lot of time on my hands.) Giving a computer to a kid for Christmas in '83 is a very different value proposition than even a family vacation because a vacation is something the whole family does.