What America was like in 1978
You were born in…
1978
This is where your story begins.
You’ve been here for
48
years
That’s about 17,500 days of history.
A first-class stamp in 1978 cost
15¢
Today the same stamp costs 82¢.
A dollar from 1978 would be worth
$5.17
today
Measured by the government’s Consumer Price Index.
The federal minimum wage in 1978 was
$2.65
an hour
Today it’s $7.25.
The president in 1978
Jimmy Carter
Since then you’ve lived under 8 presidents.
The 1980 census counted
227 million
Americans
By 2020 there were 331 million of us.
You’ve been around for
48
Super Bowls
From Super Bowl XIII in 1979 to Super Bowl LX in 2026.
You’re older than…
- The Sony Walkman went on sale in Japan1979. You were 1.
- MTV started playing music videos1981. You were 3.
- Compact discs reached American stores1983. You were 5.
- Apple introduced the Macintosh1984. You were 6.
- The World Wide Web opened to the public1991. You were 13.
- Amazon sold its first book1995. You were 17.
…and 4 more on our list.
So yes,
you’ve seen the worldchange a lot.
And you remember it.
Your 1978 story
That was 1978.
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Where these numbers come from
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), U.S. city average, all items, 1982-84=100
- U.S. Postal Service, Rates for Domestic Letters Since 1863
- U.S. Department of Labor, history of federal minimum wage rates
- U.S. Census Bureau, decennial census resident population
- Presidents and milestones: widely documented public records.