It was the decade that began with the murder of John Lennon and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall. A generation later, Rubik’s Cubes and yo-yos are in the shops again, defunct bands are reforming and slapping on black eyeliner, a new Rambo film is in the cinema and an Indiana Jones one is on the way; even Knight Rider is making a comeback on television.

So if you can feel the beat of synth pop pulsing in your veins and you want to shape up your Flock of Seagulls quiff, go to the web for a revival of everything 1980s, from film and music to culture and politics, as well as the chance to buy mementos from the decade that taste forgot. Nothing does nostalgia better than the internet; you just need to know where to look.

THE CLOTHES

Mention 1980s fashion and most people will conjure up images of shoulder pads and power dressing. You can relive the look at www.ultimatedynasty.net , which features chat rooms and links to sites dedicated to all things Dynasty. You can buy retro-style Nike Air Jordan trainers (an instant hit when they came on sale in 1985) new from £70 at www.nike.com . If it’s a T-shirt you want, try www.truffleshuffle.co.uk , which trades in tops featuring 1980s stars such as David Hasselhoff in Knight Rider and Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze in Dirty Dancing, as well as prints from 1980s cult films such as Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Top Gun and The Karate Kid, all costing between £17 and £27.

THE CARS

The decade had more than its fair share of classic cars. This is something of which the makers of the BBC television series Ashes to Ashes, set in 1981, were well aware when they cast an Audi quattro to co-star with Gene Hunt (played by Philip Glenister). See tinyurl.com/352vge for Audi’s animation and diagrams of the technology behind that original model and its successors; the enthusiast’s site www.t85q.com and the owners’ club www.quattroownersclub.com focus more on the car’s rallying pedigree.

But you can’t beat the real thing: well before Hunt, Tom Selleck in Magnum, PI was taking his Ferrari 308 GTS from 0 to 60 in less than 6sec in Hawaii. A Magnum-style Ferrari is selling for £26,950 at tinyurl.com/38xcyf .

At www.classictvcars.com/kitt.php , you can find another automotive star of 1980s TV: Kitt, the 1982 Pontiac Trans Am driven by Michael Knight. You can’t buy it but there’s a gallery of pictures of the Trans Am, alongside, on other pages of the site, photographic celebrations of the General Lee Dodge Charger driven by the Dukes of Hazzard and the GMC van driven by the A-Team.

John DeLorean’s gullwinged creation, which starred in Back to the Future in 1985, gets a whole website to itself at www.deloreans.co.uk .

THE TECHNOLOGY

It was the decade personal computers arrived in the office and home. For a chronology of the evolution of computers, check out oldcomputers.net/index.html. More fun is to be had at www.worldofspectrum.org , where you can play games designed for machines such as the rubber-keyed Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The decade was also the era when music became more personal, first with the portable ghetto blaster, then with the cassette tape Walkman and the CD equivalent.

Sony offers a nicely illustrated sprint through its highs and lows at tinyurl.com/3xx3je and there is an exhaustive history of 1980s technology at pocketcalculatorshow.com. You can even buy and sell bits of kit at the website’s message board at stereo2go.com .

THE CULTURE AND THE HISTORY

Unlike the casualties of the 1960s, there are people still alive who partied through the 1980s without blowing their minds on drugs and rock’n’roll. If you are one of them and want to test your memory, try the 80s Pop Culture Quiz Night DVD Game, hosted by Suggs of Madness (£14.99 from play.com ). You can swot up first with the BBC at tinyurl.com/edr99 , which contains all the essential trivia. For example, the Rubik’s Cube arrived in 1980, the Filofax became a status symbol in 1984 and in 1987 we saw the arrival of the smiley face.

If it’s pop culture you are after, magforum.com/mens.htm explains how the magazine The Face became the style bible of the decade for the new romantics such as Spandau Ballet. The centre of the early 1980s pop scene was the Blitz club in London, comprehensively documented, with hair-raising photos, at tinyurl.com/2f2fu7.

Politically, it was the decade of the Northern Ireland Troubles (see the University of Ulster’s cain.ulst.ac.uk/index.html ), the miners’ strike (check out the stark black and white images at tinyurl.com/29ofj2 ) and the Falklands war ( tinyurl.com/3t6d6 is an armchair general’s heaven).

THE MUSIC

While the rest of the world moved out of the 1980s, Steve Spears stayed stuck in time. The online editor of The St Petersburg Times (that’s St Petersburg, Florida), Spears broadcasts a daily podcast of his award-winning blog Stuck in the ’80s, blogs.tampabay.com/80s/ , with, among other things, a mix of the 10 saddest songs, candidates for the ultimate front man and the top three reasons Thriller is the best Michael Jackson record.

In the greed-is-good decade, Dire Straits’ song Money for Nothing defined the mood and is remembered, along with the likes of Prince, Bananarama, Duran Duran and Billy Idol at eightiesclub.tripod.com/id14.htm .

If that isn’t enough of a nostalgia fix, try the eye-catchingly titled Like, Omigod! 80s Pop Culture Box (£94.49 from amazon.co.uk ). This seven-disc collection of one-hit wonders includes Buggles’ Video Killed the Radio Star, the song that launched MTV in 1981.

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