Yes it was. The first CGI in film was Westworld in 1973. Tron came out in 1982. Nearly all special effects from the 1984 film The Last Starfighter was CGI. Star Trek TNG had some CGI like the crystalline entity. Star Trek IV 1986 had CGI renders of the crew's heads. A number of other films as well did that decade. Dire Straits Money for Nothing music video 1985. Flight of the Navigator 1986 had a morphing space ship.

If you want a real trip. Check out Young Sherlock Holmes 1985 Stained Glass Knight. A knight from Stained Glass comes to life and kills a preacher. CGI.

Wow. I wonder what kind of computers they used for that in the 80's. Had to have been something a hell of a lot more powerful than consumer grade computers. That's really damned impressive!

I don't have extensive knowledge of supercomputers of the era but I know of a couple. The Bosh and the Cray series. Cray computer was used for Tron.  Back then CGI was custom software unique to that computer and programmer I believe.

 64bit CPU at 80MHZ 9MB of Ram.  300MB of Storage. 160MFLOPS in 1975. I think it was the first to do vector processors. Think of it as the great great great grand daddy to the Cell in PS3 CPU lol

At one time, now-defunct publisher Acclaim was offering to pay families to advertise Shadow Man 2 on a deceased loved one's headstone.

That is not CGI. That's the demons of hell boasting about their invincible armies. They just happen to like the NES.

This has to be up there.

There's some of interesting stuff in this thread, but none more so than you quoting Al Bundy.

I think that one wins. It doesn't even make sense as an analogy for always online, at least not a good one.

Trying to make Yoshi's Story, obviously a kids game, look cool to teenagers was probably not the smartest idea.

Wtf is this even. Bizarre, uncomfortable, no message, nothing.