Disagree for me. I got my first phone a month after 9/11 (only on my 4th now). Out of my usual group of friends, I was the 2nd to have one. They were common enough that it wasn’t surprising if somebody had one, but you also wouldn’t be shocked if you didn’t run into a single person on a plane with a cell phone, either. I remember thinking it was lucky anybody had one at all on the planes. It certainly wasn’t a given.
By 2005 or so, it was getting rare for a person not to have one but by no means shocking, at least among the older set. Of course, now, just about everybody has one.
Wouldn’t agree with either of these, but it’s a common enough opinion. Certainly changes in fashion have been more subtle over the last 14 years than between '62 and '74 but other stuff is quite different. Depends on how you judge change.
I know I’d be very surprised by all the flat screen monitors/TVs everywhere. They just didn’t exist (figuratively, not literally) in 2000. It’s getting hard to find a CRT in the wild now.
It was predicted that stuff would go kablooey in 2000, because of computers whose date functions stopped at 99. The only thing I can recall of any circumstance was an elderly woman who turned 105 in 2000 and received a welcome notice to kindergarten.
Also… you probably had to use a land-line phone to dial up the internet, and it-was-slow.
Oh, yeah. All TVs were CRT, too. (Yes, I know it’s been mentioned since the quote. It’s still a significant change that I don’t think of often.) ((I’m old enough to remember TVs that were furniture.))
If they’d grown up with my father’s rants, they wouldn’t have been surprised. It had even been tried before with a truck. He’d have frothed about homeland security.
Housing prices were going up, up, up. I knew one person who said it was a bubble and to be wary. A lot of people decided that the way to get rich was to buy and flip houses.
The stock market was dropping, or had dropped. I remember learning in June that a couple of co-workers had stopped contributing to their 457 accounts because the value of the mutual fund shares was declining. I didn’t say anything, but, dude, that’s buying low. If you’re not retiring in ten years, now’s the time to stock up.
Researching it more, you seem to be right. There were already 110 million cell phone subscribers by 2000. In the mid 90s, cell phones were still fairly rare relative to population but by 2000 that number had gone up 200-300%.
Yeah it’s funny someone mentioned mullets. I was watching a Jerry Springer episode from 1998 and surprisingly a lot of people still wore “80s” fashions then. Mostly hicks and older people but it’s kind of like how now you’ll still see people who look like they’re from 1995 here and there. People have this idea that by 1990 everyone stopped looking 80s or by 2000 everyone ditched the flannel but of course it never works like that.
Still statistically cell phone users were a numerical minority throughout the 90s. Even if only 5 percent of people had them they’d seem to be “everywhere” but in reality most people in the 90s did not have them yet.
Replace smart phones with flip phones. The “Matrix” slide phone was a mind-blowing design. Otherwise, not really that much different from today, superficially.
The biggest changes are cell phones used to be mostly for talking and not for surfing the web or texting. Flat screens for tvs and computers were mostly for rappers and rich people. The internet from home was much slower. No youtube or facebook. Gas was cheaper. Beards were not very popular. Foodie culture was much more restrained. No yoga pants. Renting a movie meant going to a blockbuster and getting a dvd.