It's 15 years ago. What do you miss?

In My Humble Opinion
21

That really hit me, those of you who mentioned that your parents would still be alive. I’m really sorry for your loss. :frowning:

It’s tied in with the loss of the internet, but I think in 1992 I’d be pretty irritated by how very limited your options for buying books, music and movies would be. Really, unless you lived in a major city (and even then!) you’d be limited to the comparatively dinky selection of whatever little book/music/video stores you lived near – ie not very much selection at all. Now, in 2007, you can get virtually every book or CD ever made through the power of Amazon and eBay combined, and nearly any DVD through NetFlix. It would be frustrating to have to scale back your options so very much if you woke up in 1992.

22

:frowning: , I am sorry. I went from being an HVAC mechanic to a Programmer that year. As long as you were breathing and could program in RPG, there were jobs to be had in the NYC area. We were actually in a recession at that time also, and it was very tough on my Dad who went through what you did job wise. His landing was softened by being near retirement age.

I am glad this improved for you since that low point. I doubt my life will ever be that good again, I was 25 and in passionate love. My new, safer career was just starting. I just wish I had known that becoming a desk jockey would result in a large weight gain from 165 to 240 over the next 14 years. I am now struggling to return to 170.

Jim

23

I hear ya, Spoons. I wouldn’t go back to 1992 for anything. In 1992 I had nothing. It had only been a year that I’d come out of a decade of homelessness. I was on welfare, living in an illegal basement room in Hamilton, unable to even get interviewed by any of the dozens of places I looked for work, over and over, for months on end. I had no love life, no real friends, no hope. Even though my mom was still with us, the period of watching her get ill and die was just the worst experience, ever. I couldn’t do it again. It was like being shell-shiocked for a couple of years, nonstop. Just before she passed away, the woman I would marry came into my life, or rather my mailbox. When it looked like it could become something real, and I’d get my chance to get the hell out of Dodge, I went for it.

So it’s not just the internet and the goodies we have now that I’d miss, it would be like going from having everything back to having nothing. I could live without stuff. I did it for decades. Going back to who I was, in the circumstances I lived in…oblivion would be a better option than that.

24

In first place: That was long before I came out. I would miss my womanhood worse than anything. In fact, I was missing it all that time. I really don’t want to go back to that.

Internet would be in second place. I didn’t know what I was missing. I knew about downloading information off a remote server through a WAN, but joining all the networks into one big one was the missing feature.
A cure for Hepatitis C: I got cured in 2005, I got a more effective treatment that wasn’t available in 1992. That’s why I waited.
Hybrid cars.
I would miss the demise of essentialist gender theories, which as I recall were still current then.
The rest wouldn’t matter much.

What I miss about 1992: seeing Clinton elected. That was nice while it lasted.

25

I would miss the modern computer as much as anything. That and the cell phone have been very useful to me. On the other hand, if I could go back to 1992, I would be able to see my mother alive again. That would easily make up for all that other stuff.

26

There’s a million things I’d do over. Spend more time with my grandpa, do better in high school, go straight to college after high school, be bolder with girls now that I know that they were just as clueless as I was. I would pick one of my many hobbies (writing, drawing, acting, athletics, etc) and focus on it so I could be really good at it. I’m sort of a Jack-of-all-trades, master of none, which is the thing I dislike most about myself. These things are for a different thread, though, I think.

I honestly don’t think I’d miss much technology. Even though I love the internet, I might actually prefer a world without it, or at least limited access to it - I know I’d be a lot more productive. I wouldn’t miss cell phones - I kept a list of about 50 phone numbers in my wallet, and a phone was never hard to find.

Comic books were, for the most part, shit in the early 90s. I guess I’d miss good current comics. Not much of anything else. I guess this thread isn’t much for me considering that if I could pick one historical era to live in it’d be the Great Depression.

I’d go see Bill Hicks.

27

No apologies are necessary. I survived. I’m not sure how sometimes, but I did. It did prove to me that “what does not kill us makes us stronger,” so there you go. And I use the skills I learned in those days now, quite often. But I thank you for your commiseration. It means something.

Aside to fishbicycle: You’ve reinforced my feeling that you’re one of the posters I’d most like to have a beer with. Not only are you a “working class Joe,” but you also know the big hits from 1050 CHUM during my salad days. We’d have plenty to discuss, and (I hate to sound mercenary) you’d be able to direct me to where I might be able to find more voice work. Well anyway, we’d have fun drinking beer and talking about the jocks we remember on CHUM. Terry Steele? Scott Carpenter? Jungle Jay?

28

Oh shit! Back to not having a computer! Back to 24% unemployment rate which did not include “people who have graduated college or other school in the last two years”! NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

grabs her laptop and wallet tightly and backs away from the madman, slowly
Mind you: if I was there knowing what I know now about the American school system, I would have chosen a different graduate school. Either I would have spelled it veeeeery clearly for MIT that “la Caixa fellowships are a slavery contract, I asked about your financial help, bubba” or Cornell.

29

1992 eh? Back to high school? Wohoo!

What would I miss… I would miss not having started diving yet, but that is only two years short.

All the technological improvements? Nah, we had fun with the Amiga 500 in those days too :wink:

30

I was using AOL back in the mid-90’s. It was still based on an hourly fee rate back then - you paid based on how much time you spent online so there were a lot of shortcuts based on preparing things like emails or download schedules offline so you could sign on, run through your to-do list quickly and sign back off.

I also remember that the big thing online back then were BBS’s (Bulletin Board Services). They were sort of like websites but they were run off of individual computers. You had to telephone the location of the computer and then link up directly modem-to-modem. This meant that long-distance fees applied for calls to most BBS’s. There were magazines that came out every month with listings of BBS’s broken down by area codes and what type of stuff they had available.

31

mmm, 1992… I’d definitely miss my cell phone and the internet. I’d probably spend the majority of my time stuck on the road somewhere with those really huge AAA maps. No Google Maps, no cell phone to ask for directions (or to find out if the party got relocated or canceled), and I’m famous for getting lost on the road.

Not having CDs are kind of annoying, but I’ve never been that big of a music fan - one thing that I really love doing with my tape player is that I can switch to record mode at the flick of a button. As a child I loved doing fake radio broadcasts on tape. I’m sure if I ever find one of those tapes now I’d embarrass myself to death, but those are good times. There’s something intangibly personal about recording your own tape that CDs, and even MP3 players, can’t quite replicate.

One thing that I don’t think I’ll miss are the video games. 92 is smack in the middle of the golden age of video gaming (well, IMHO anyway) - the 16 bit era, Wolf3D, and Doom to be followed the year after. In a way games are so much better than the recycled drivel of today - the Wii notwithstanding. I’d even be giddy enough to get those games on release date and experience that excitement all over again.

And who said that there had been no differences in the transportation field? Remember the gas prices back in 92?

32

Real OSes on affordable hardware. In the early 1990s, Unix on commodity desktop computers was doable but only just, especially compared to now. The GNU Project was still trying to put together a whole OS as opposed to focusing on creating a set of solid and featureful userland utilities (its current role), the BSDs were under the cloud of the AT&T lawsuit (not fully lifted until 1994), and Linux was in alpha or early beta stage at best. Disks were small, networks were slow, and memory was fairly expensive.

On the other hand, Softlanding Linux System came about in mid-1992, Debian came around in the middle of 1993, and Slackware a month earlier. The first Linux kernel capable of running X was released in March 1992, but the first 1.0 release wouldn’t be until 1994. (Interestingly, Tux wasn’t adopted until 1996.)

On the other side of the divide, 386BSD was first released in March of 1992 and BSD/386 was available to buy from the BSDi company at that time as well. (In fact, BSDi’s phone number, 1-800-ITS-UNIX, was one of the things to spark the lawsuit: Unix was and remains trademarked, a mark now owned by The Open Group.) So the pickings were not nil, just very slim, and they were going to get much better in a few years.

The Internet was a lot smaller then, but Usenet was more usable. The Backbone Cabal (There Is No Cabal!) was dead by that time, the Great Renaming had been done, and finding a well-connected site to get a feed from wasn’t a major problem, but the Endless September was still a year away and spam hadn’t become a major problem yet.

Even more interesting was that a lot of also-rans were still running fairly hard back then, including the Gopher protocol and, to move away from the Internet, Fidonet was still fairly active in this country. (Yes, Fidonet does still exist here. Echos are still gated to Usenet. Pointers available on request.) The Web was in its early phase, though, and there wasn’t very much of interest on it. I would miss a lot of my favorite sites and cultures, including most webcomics.

Politically, people were sick and tired of being sick and tired. I could go through the 1990s again, especially compared to the last six years, but I’d miss the unofficial news spread by blogs. Usenet and other discussion boards never quite had anything to compare with that. As a side note, I’d anonymously mail copies of the 9/11 Commission Report to the Pentagon, the White House, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the London Times, and Osama bin Laden. I gotta have some fun with my Unholy Knowledge.

33

We didn’t have cable TV in Australia in '92. We have it now, and I stilll have no urge to get it. It’s utter crap.

34

1992 … I was king of the hill

  • it was that year that I got shot down by ‘neuralgia of the trigeminal’, and my spiralling descent might yet be averted by some subtle aeronautics even 15 years later.

It was April 1992 that I first told anyone that there was something wrong, it was after a piss up in the basement of the German embassy in Moscow. A Kuemmeling to be precise.

I liked the computers, I had them pinned down to Device Driver and TSR level. I liked the clients, I had got them docile years before (used to have a letter from a major German Bank bluetacked over my desk saying ‘Please remove FRDE from our account’)

Early 1992 was a good year for me, If I went back then I would not be plagued with trigeminal pain and I would have retained options in a company that I liked (but would now kill - because arseholes run the show) and would be … well rather affluent.

The Intrawab is no substitute for my hardened team of fanatics.
Aye - they were grand days.

35

The biggie is computers and the internet. Sure, the internet was technically around in 1992, but it was nowhere near the repository of knowledge it is today. These days, when I want to know something, I know it a minute later. Back then, I kept wondering or spent a lot of time at the library, and I only did the latter for stuff I really really wanted to know. I keep in touch with friends over the internet. I order stuff over the internet. I learn and teach and find over the internet. The internet would be a pain to lose.

I’d miss text messaging, which has really changed the way I communicate.

Apart from text messaging, cell phones would be no big deal to lose. Digital photography is nice, but not essential. Digital music is very nice, but I got by fine without it and could again. DVDs are no big deal to me (I still don’t get what the big deal is supposed to be), mainly because over here video tapes were always widescreen. I found out on these boards that this wasn’t the case globally when people kept referring to widescreen as if it were a DVD feature. The additional TV channels are once again nice, but I could live without them (and probably get a lot more reading done).

36

As a Peace Corps volunteer, I often thank my lucky stars that I live today and not in the past. Now I keep in touch with my family by Internet and with other volunteers and my friends here with my cell phone. Just a few short years ago, I would have been relying on takes-two-months snail mail and would have no reliable way to have casual communication in country.

37

I’d miss my four door pickup truck.

38

Definitely cheap and easy internet access. We were still using a Spectrum 48k+ back in 92 (when it worked!) I can look forward to seeing The Next Generation all over again, but without the means to comment on episodes!

39

I miss times when every other vehicle wasn’t a faux personnel carrier or hunk of farm equipment. You bastards have bid up the price of gas and made my commute much more expensive than it has to be.

In 1992, my father died–a blessing,really, since he had both a failing heart and prostate cancer that had advanced into his urinary system.

His old house, which my sisters and I sold, was < 1mile from the job I was forced to take in 2000, when the Canadian Invaders took my job of 24 years away 4 years away from early retirement eligibility. If I’d only known then what I know now, I’d have bought that house for myself and saved huge amounts of gas over the past 7 years.

My finances were in much better shape then than now. Other than a few neat gadgets like mp3s and digital photography, materially, nothing’s gotten better since then.

40

:confused: CDs became available in the U.S. in 1982. By 1988 they were outselling LPs.

For those of you who keep talking about “missing the Internet”, did you read post #17 above? The Internet was around in 1992, the year we’re talking about.