What would a 1980s student make of modern research?

I was trying, as one does, to stay current with the scientific literature the other day, when a list of abstracts made me realise something about chemistry the way it’s practised now, versus the sorts of papers I used to read when I first started keeping up with the field. That would be the mid-1980s, and back then I used to subscribe to the Journal of Organic Chemistry – around the time it switched to the dark blue covers – and read it in the launderette. That certainly kept the crowds away. Now, of course, I haven’t seen an actual physical copy of the journal in years, but I suppose that I could read one next to my own washing machine should an issue turn up.