Sure, I lived through it. Unlike my cousin, who was killed by a damned Hercules graphics card.
Read the book years before the movie came out. I don’t remember having a high opinion of the movie (other than for the effects. I cringe at the dialogue in it now, I probably did then, too.
Still haven’t gotten around to watching it.
Wish I never had watched it.
Doom and Quake are among the very last video games I ever played. Not only did I simply lose interest in video games in general, but even Doom had graphics complicated detailed enough to give me motion sickness. I shudder to think what a modern FPS would do to me.
The 90’s was my last full decade working. My career was at the top of its game as was my compensation. My 401K had a gain of 800% allowing my early retirement in 2001. I was able to devote more time helping the people working with me and hopefully teach them something. Young Bush was not president and Trump was still a clown easily ignored.
Do you look back on the 1990s as a good time, both for your life, your country, and for the world in general? It was a great time, best years of my life. I met and married my wife. I began my professional career. The decade saw a moderate Democratic President working well with a Republican controlled congress and balancing the fed budget and fixing welfare and the world getting more peaceful for once. Bought my first house at a low interest rate.
Do you remember the Multimedia Revolution? Not 100% sure what you mean by this, but if it means a PC for watching DVDs and playing music then yes.
Jurassic Park when it came out in theaters? A great and classic movie, the special effects have held up well.
Titanic? Overrated and somewhat boring movie. Worst song ever.
The Phantom Menace? Terrible terrible crap.
Doom, Quake, and Myst? I liked Doom, played Myst but boring to me. Not into Quake.
Sonic, Super Mario, and the Bit Wars? No, PC games, not console in the 90s for me.
Trips to Blockbuster…or your local family oriented Video Store? Mostly the family video store, occasionally a different Video chain that is long gone.
Mall photo booths? This is a lot older than the 90s.
When did you first get a cell-phone? We got my wife one in 1996 when we found out she was expecting. I’m not sure when I got my first one, maybe 1999.
When did you first log onto the Internet? Could you ever imagine it would become as big and important as it is today? 1994 but I was a Computer Programmer already. I got on the old AT&T Worldnet in 1996 at home. And yes I did imagine how big the Internet would get but I am a Sci-Fi fan and a Computer Geek.
Home video was very inferior compared to today. You rented movies on VHS tape, and watched it on a 32 inch CRT TV or rear projector TV. (Speaking of which, people would rent porn on VHS.)
You had paper maps in your car.
Computer stores would have aisle after aisle of software. You loaded the software onto your computer using 3.5" floppies or CDs.
You still read the news in a paper newspaper, and you subscribed to magazines that were delivered to your home. If you wanted to buy or sell something, you used a local “trader” publication.
In most parts of the U.S., you couldn’t legally carry a concealed handgun.
A number of things were on the decline, e.g. TV repair shops, rock concerts in huge arenas, movie theaters.
For me? I was in high school so fuck no. My country is South Africa and the 90s saw the fall of apartheid, so yeah, definitely good for my country.
Vaguely.
Watched it
Didn’t watch it and haven’t to date
Yep. Didnt consider it as bad as i do now. Of course, I was 18 at the time and I did watch it in an altered state of mind…
Yep. First two still more playable than the Call of Honour games, IMHO.
No. Do remember Mortal Kombat
Yep. Quite a big store. Then it halved in size… halved again and has been gone for a while now
Don’t believe they were a thing here.
1998, i think. That Nokia brick with the aerial that preceded the iconic 3310 (which was my next cellphone)
1997, last year of high school. At that time, the internet was tipped to become bigger and bigger. Not the way it has played out what with social media but by then it was certainly regarded as something here to stay.
Consider yourself lucky - when you were a teen you could find a gazillion porn videos over a broadband connection. You know how long it takes for a single decent picture to download over a dial-up?
I don’t know about the world in general. Lots of serious, awful political stuff happened in the 90s. For me personally it was great. I was 10-20 years old and primed to appreciate all the consumer-oriented innovations. The internet, fancy coffee drinks, upscale stores.
Absolutely. I’m the Oregon Trail generation. I grew up with it. I remember the specific moments of wonder: first 16-color graphics card, first 64-color, first good sound card, first bubblejet printer, first bbs service.
Oh god yes. I was 12. For my friend’s 13th birthday we all went to see it. AMAZING.
Yep.
Unfortunately yep.
Yep. I spent lots of afternoons conquering Myst. When I went to college, where there was OMGETHERNET, there were weekend Quakefests.
Sure
Sure, and here’s what was really great: when tapes got a defect, they went into a discount bin. I bought The English Patient on two VHS tapes, with only a blip just at the end of the first tape, for $8!!!
I first went into one of those in 2013, so no, sorry. I knew they existed but I had no money and my parents were no fun.
A friend lent me his previous phone for a trip to New York in 2002. Got my own phone probably a year later.
You mean the Information Superhighway? I watched a friend log into a BBS over Thanksgiving break in 1994. We got Compuserve in 1996.
I was 24 at the start of the 1990s, and had started working at my first real job in '89.
My recollection is that, at the start of the decade, there was a fair amount of pessimism, after the economic growth in the 1980s. I remember economists predicting that the 1990s would be a decade of austerity. They turned out to be very wrong…by the middle of the decade, there were economists who wondered if there would ever be a recession again, as the U.S. entered a long period of sustained growth. (Economists were wrong about that, too.)
The decade started with what Americans largely saw as a tidy little war in Kuwait – we went in, we kicked Iraq’s ass, we left as victors. Ohh, if we only knew.
Personally, for me, it was a good decade. I had two very good jobs over the course of the decade, and got married in '92 (we just had our 25th anniversary last month).
Yes to the former – I’d read the novel a year or so before. The CGI on the dinosaurs was very impressive for the time, and I really enjoyed the film.
No to the second. The subject matter didn’t appeal to me much, and it quickly became a film that teenaged girls went to see again and again.
Alas, yes. The hype was unbelievable, and even a good film (which it wasn’t) probably couldn’t have lived up to it.
I played a lot of Doom (and Duke Nukem, and Hexen). As someone else noted, I’d get motion sick if I played those for too long.
Never played Quake – my computer of that era couldn’t handle the graphics.
My wife loved Myst (and it was a stunning game), but I found it frustrating.
The computer games I really played a lot, however, were the Lucasarts Star Wars flight sim games (X-Wing, Tie Fighter, Rogue Squadron), and Lemmings.
I had a Nintendo, and a Game Boy (two of the first things I bought when I had real paychecks). Played those a lot.
Renting videotapes at Blockbuster was a big part of our weekends. There was always the debate of “what do you want to watch?”
'98 or so, making me a somewhat late adopter. It was a Nokia 5110. I didn’t use it often, as my calling plan of that era was limited to 60 minutes a month. It was mostly for quick calls to my wife, or my office voicemail.
I was using BBSes and dialup stuff as early as the mid '80s, for my college job (mostly downloading data from databases at my university). I bought a computer in '93, and got a modem for it (a pokey 14.4 dialup modem) in '94, then got onto AOL…which is where I found the Straight Dope boards there.
At the time, AOL was charging an hourly rate for using it…as with cell phones, that alone made it somewhat hard to see it as being as ubiquitous as it is now. AOL went to a flat monthly rate at the end of '96, which made it nearly impossible to get online for a while – they had a limited number of “ports” at each of their dial-in numbers, and once someone actually got through, they’d stay logged in for as long as possible.
I’m surprised your wife didn’t want to see Titanic. Yes, it may have been more popular with teenage girls, but wasn’t it being called the “best love story of all time”?
The 1990s were great, although I seemed to have a bad habit of making dumb career decisions in my 20’s then. I happily voted for Bill Clinton twice.
I don’t really remember a multimedia revolution until we get towards the end of the 1990s and getting online. I was on Prodigy and AOL as well as local BBS from about 1992 until 1996, I didn’t really get on the internet itself until around 1998.
Never cared for Titanic and all the hype. I enjoyed Phantom Menace for what it was. It wasn’t trendy for all the cool kids to hate it until much further down the road.
I never played video games and I’m still not a gamer.
I’m certainly familiar with Blockbuster although I was never a huge movie renter. Watching a VHS tape on a 32 inch tube tv was no substitute for a movie theatre and movie rentals were generally for weekends when I was broke or the weather was crap.
No real memory of mall photo booths. I assume they were for teens or younger. I first got a cell phone around 1998, I remember the very limited number of minutes and the introduction of free nights and weekends.
I got my first DVD player around 2004 and that’s also the first time I remember sending and receiving text messages.
I knew the internet was going to be huge and I remember taking some computer classes as I struggled to find my path in the adult world.
I have a great fondness for the 90’s. So many major milestones in my life in my life happened during the 90’s:
Graduated college
Started a really fun career in my field
Got married
Bought my house (that I still live in and love)
Changed careers to a more profitable, but also fun job
Traveled overseas for the first time
Had my son
I have very positive memories of the first half of the 90s, the second half not so much.
However I have nostalgia for every preceding decade in its own way. The 80s, the 90s, the aughts.
I remember being able to rip a CD as MP3 files, then burning it onto a blank disc and listening to that in my car’s CD player. Much of the multimedia revolution is ongoing, and a lot of the aspects of the revolution didn’t happen until later (smartphones, everpresent cell phones, flash storage devices to listen to MP3s on the go).
My first MP3 player was $120 and only held 128MB of songs. I got it in 2004.
Saw it in theaters! Along with A bunch of other 90s films. Groundhogs day, Forrest Gump, Mrs. Doubtfire, Alive, Schindler’s list, Fight Club, Independence Day, American Beauty, Halloween 6 (I could go on obviously).
That is one thing I miss, going to movies. I guess I still can, but its not the same as when you were a kid and going with family or friends. Now I can just stream it in my apartment. More convenient, but not the same.
Never saw it.
Saw it on DVD years later, I was never a star wars fan.
Hell yes! I loved Quake multiplayer, and Doom was the first great FPS.
Also age of empires II, civilization II, Duke Nukem, etc. were great 90s games.
Yup.
Yes, but this wasn’t strictly a 90s thing. I was making trips to the video store in the 1980s, and I was still making them all throughout the aughts. It was around 2010-ish (give or take a few years) when streaming services became good enough to replace trips to the video store.
Didn’t really use them.
I was a late adopter. I got the AK-47 of cell phones, the Nokia 1100.
Maybe 1994. Yeah, I can imagine it. It really isn’t that different now, just bigger and better.
Why is Super Mario specifically relevant to the '90s? He was a household name since the dawn of the '80s when Donkey Kong exploded in the arcades, and he still is one to this day even if Nintendo hasn’t had quite the stranglehold it once had on the industry.
The 90s were good. I enjoyed them.
I started using BBSs in the late 80s and the internet (gopher and telnet mostly) by 1991. I was working at a NASA base.
Work was good. Family was good. We were at peace.
Whats not to like?
Honestly, she wasn’t interested in it (I don’t think that she’s ever seen it, either). While she loves romantic films (“Chocolat” and “A Walk in the Clouds” are among her all-time favorite films), I guess it just didn’t appeal to her. I do know that she doesn’t care for movies in which main characters die, so that may have been part of it.
I began the 90s in middle school and graduated college in 2001 so as the kids say, the 90s was my jam!
My dad stopped drinking for a second, went to trade school and became skilled trade at Ford. Mom moved from the lunch room to the central office. We got cable and air conditioning in 1991. LIFE WAS GOOD.
I’ll be honest I wasn’t all that connected to the world. I was by college and the 2000 presidential election.
Yes? I guess? My brother always had vinyl and we both always had tapes but we definitely binged on CDs. And I was there for 8-bit video games and ANSI art.
I have never seen Jurassic Park cuz I’ve never been in to dinosaurs. I saw Titanic at the theater and cried. I was sick of “My Heart Will Go On” and still think of Leo as that retarded kid from Gilbert Grape.
My brother and I went to the midnight showing of Phantom Menace. First midnight showing for me (but I had been to the midnight sale of Vitalogy). It was fine. I was not fangirlish enough to be offended.
No. Either too young or too female. My brother didn’t play any of them. However we were big in to Castle Wolfenstein.
We had a Commodore 64 with a pirated copy of Super Mario so we played that blissfully unaware of our lack of NES until 1992 or so. My cousin had Sega and we played a ton of Sonic and Toejam & Earl. Now I have all those games downloaded to my Wii and play them more than Wii games.
We won a set of Bonk’s Adventure stickers in a radio contest once. So we had knowledge of TurboGrafix but never played one.
Family store down the street, conveniently placed next to the pizza shop. They had an “adults only” room in the back. I think it may have burned down by the 90s tho.
At some point I think everyone in the family had their own Blockbuster cards because you couldn’t trust my brother not to get us stuck with late fees that had to be paid before we could get more. We got a lot of video games from there too.
The BBV building is still there. For a while it was a seasons Halloween store then a mattress store now an eye doctor.
Hmm? More like Spencer Gifts and Hot Topic at the mall.
In 1997. Not sure if it was before or after I graduated school. Before that it was all calling cards all the time. Well also 10-10 calling prefixes.
I am not sure when I was first on the WWW. I was on BBSes and Usenet every day all day from 1992 on. Sometime between then and 1997 I was on the net. By 1998 I was a web developer.
I do remember when I was hot shit on the dating sites because I was one of few girls and all the boys were nerds. I had dates all the time. Then the Normals got online and diluted the pool and I was a small fish in a big pond.
I am not one for predictions but I am glad it got so big. It is my profession.
