The 80s must have been weird, people had their first (useless) PCs in their living rooms and thought in 40 years we will have computers in our head. Can someone who actually live back then explain this to me?
It'd be damn hard to explain this without ending up with a TL;DR to end all TL;DRs but I'll try.
Cyberpunk was a reaction to the mostly-utopian sci-fi that had ruled the roost before then: you know, the shit with spaceships and galactic empires and the occasional psychedelic-political-libertarian Heinlein yarn thrown in. Until then, a lot of sci-fi had been focused almost exclusively on "what kinds of new cool toys will Science give us in 20/50/100/500/10,000 years?" Cyberpunk reframed it: "What kind of psychological, social, and political changes will all these new technologies bring with them?"
In 1980 we did have the first clunky home PCs. We also had TV games and similar shit. More importantly, we started to see the first portable personal electronics. The Sony Walkman was released in 1979. The first mobile phone network went commercial the same year in Japan. Wide-area networks (WANs) were well established by then, and especially universities started to connect to each other. Dial-up bulletin board systems were pretty common. Usenet -- the first global 'social network' -- was launched in 1980.
Another significant thing was the emergence of an underground higher-tech drug culture. People were experimenting with various chemicals and coming up with innovations like crack cocaine and labs cooking up crystal meth, ecstasy and a variety of other amphetamine derivatives.
Around the same time, we had the collapse of post-war optimism with social-democratic welfare states deep in the doldrums, the USSR showing obvious signs of sclerosis, and then Reagan and Thatcher coming onto the scene trumpeting the glory of the free market: unbridling capitalism, they promised, would lead us all to a glorious, rich, and happy future.
So, the cyberpunk writers looked at all this and asked themselves: "what will society look like if all this shit continues to develop in the direction in which it seems to be going now?"
They imagined that computers would keep getting smaller and more powerful; personal electronics more personal and more powerful until eventually they merged with the humans they served; drugs would get stronger, more varied, and easier to obtain. They thought that Reagan's and Thatcher's utopia would quickly go dystopian as the rich would get unimaginably rich, the poor would fall off the train, and corporate power would eclipse and eventually take over governments and state power. And they were in some ways remarkably prescient about the effects of a global data network that penetrates everywhere: the underground hacker culture that coalesced around BBSs would go global, data would become the most precious, most highly-coveted, and most heavily protected corporate asset. Pollution would go on unchecked and lead to ecological catastrophes. Armies would fight bush wars for corporate interests in third-world shitholes.
So there you have it. The eighties were an absolute shit decade, and cyberpunk
was the eighties, with everything cranked up to the max.