I am old enough to have watched the first few hours. The cable came into a box on the TV. I think it was a 25 inch tube as my Dad liked to watch the NFL games. The cable box was a dial with ~60 channels on it and a A/B switch (so there was channel 60A and channel 60B). The TV had a remote but of course that did not work with the cable box so my job as the kid was to change the channel when my parents asked!<p>There was not a ton of videos so they replayed them a ton. I remember seeing The Buggles, Go-go’s, Toto, Prince, etc. A lot of the videos where just the band on stage playing with various camera views. I also remember watching the premiere of Michael Jackson’s Thriller (1983) with my parents. It was pretty cool.
I remember there were no 'alternative' radio stations around me at the time, so I looked forward to every Sunday night to watch and listen to MTV's 120 minutes to hear all the new stuff (or new to me anyway). Thanks for sharing these.
This collection has 8 videos from 1990 and 3 from 1991. There is a few others from MTV's 90s on other collections at archive.arg: <a href="https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221999%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221998%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221997%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221996%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221995%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221994%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221993%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221992%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221991%22&and%5B%5D=year%3A%221990%22&sort=-downloads" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/movies?sin=&and%5B%5D=MTV&and%5B...</a>
Does anyone know where to <i>buy</i> good quality music videos from the 1980s?<p>Currently some are available on YouTube, some on iTunes, some nowhere. Quality is very hit-and-miss.<p>Why doesn't Apple have all of these for sale? Is it an issue of rights? Do they think there wouldn't be enough demand? Is there is a lot already available in torrents and that would compete with iTunes?
I've heard that MTV caused new fashions to become popular outside big cities first, because rural areas were more likely to have cable TV in the 1980s.
All of the links on the site are now broken with the message "The item is not available due to issues with the item's content."<p>Was the content taken down because of copyright issues?
Back when music videos were awesome works of cinematography, production, visual, and musical art:<p>Dire Straits - Money For Nothing (complete with CG and 80's pastel graphics on live video) - <a href="https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/csje_Tb0U0c</a><p>Here's a playlist of 80's MTV videos, starting with the Space Shuttle and Apollo launches followed by landing the MTV flag on the moon:<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vTkLK-Y7lCVSM5aC3wBYzAcyw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NBhuf1g-rY&list=PLDHCLXs2vT...</a><p>Like most things on Internet Archive, individual videos are not annotated very well so you have no idea what's in the content. Digging through it would be, sadly, mostly a waste of time. It would be more useful with annotations.