Flannel, lots of flannel.
I think this joke (or some of the variations of it) will always be seen as the quintessential 90’s joke. Compare it to what might be the quintessential 70’s joke: “Nixon had to see Deep Throat three times before he got it down Pat.” There are multiple references to important cultural or historical events / people, summed up in a very terse little bit of humor.
9.6 to 14.4 kbps telephone modems. No web GUI until halfway into the decade. Apple on the ropes. Interminable flow of AOL installation CDs. Books were on paper and no place had free WiFi. Want to watch movie at home? Rent a VHS tape or DVD from the local Blockbuster and remember to rewind before returning it.
No Google, no Wikipedia. USENET was the place for ranting, raving, information, misinformation, fandoms, fanfics, warez, SPAM and stupendous amounts of text pornography. For some reason developers of online services and web interfaces believed stock prices were THE most desired thing anyone wanted to access online.
You could wear your shoes and belt through the airport checkpoint, check two free bags, and domestic airlines actually provided free warm meals (two choices: chicken or pasta) and we all complained how terrible they were. For at least the first half of the decade you still had to have a set of actual printed contract-of-carriage tickets in your hand before checking in. During your travels you would document your whereabouts with a FILM camera; its batteries would last months.
Politically, “They” were already trying to [pick one or as many as you care] take our guns away, trade blood for oil, prevent us from raising our kids as we saw fit, kill babies/abolish choice, make us speak Spanish/forbid us from speaking Spanish, remove/impose the 10 Commandments, etc. The POTUS was elected on a platform of Health Care and all that got him within two years was a pasting in the Congressionals from a new generation of Conservatives who proceeded to have a federal shutdown… no big change there. Though those who felt the man had no right to be President thought so on the basis of evidence of past draft-dodging and proof of ongoing pussy-chasing, as opposed to imaginary tales of bizarre birth circumstances.
The 1990s sucked and was my least favorite decade! Everybody was angry as hell for absolutely no reason, and every dysfunctional violent creep got turned into a folk hero (much worse than today). The culture was a huge pile of low-budget grunge music, gangster rap, and Tarantino clones (for the guys) and cliched Celtic/Gothic/Anne Rice junk (for the girls). Bill Clinton was the only thing I remember fondly.
Computers advanced quite a bit for the general consumer.
Desert Storm was pretty big, and was live on TV.
You could live on student loans while going to college, don’t know if that’s true anymore.
I was just out of college and in my 20s. I graduated into a recession and many people I knew had a hard time finding a job. In the early part of the decade people my age were kind of bitter but got less so as the decade wore on and things got better economically.
The internet was new and relativity hard to use. I dialed in using what was called a Shell account that used Linux. I paid by the hour not because my ISP (which was a tiny company run by a handful of people) charged that way but because the only phone number I could dial into was long distance (I am pretty sure 90% of that sentence is alien to you :))
The internet had three parts, mainly, E-mail, something called Usenet Newsgroups which were kind of like Web message boards like this one) and something new called The World Wide Web. I browsed it using a text based browser called Lynx because that was all you could do with a Shell account.
Personally I spent the better part of the decade first in a long term relationship and then a few years getting other it when it went south.
That notwithstanding, all in all it was a good decade.
Like now except technology wasn’t as good. Plus we had to blow on the video games to make them work.
There was a period in the 90s where things were relatively calm and prosperous for the US. The economy was growing, we weren’t at constant war, Russia considered joining NATO, Islamic terrorism was a marginal threat, wages were going up, jobs were plentiful.
So it wasn’t all bad. The economic crisis, destruction of the middle class, endless war and fear, etc. weren’t there. Parents weren’t as terrified everyone was a pedophile back then, but the moral panic over drugs has gone down too. So its a mixed bag of fear and ignorance.
Watch the movie reality bites and go through this list of 90s problems memes.
The decade to me started with a war (gulf war) and a recession. I was a recent graduate and somewhat underemployed but I was content.
Computers were a novelty. Most offices didn’t have one and my office got one and didn’t know what to do with it. At home I either used a hand-me down computer but eventually bought an old Mac SE.
After the Gulf War I had resigned myself to Bush being President until 1996. But his general neglect of…everything along with his decision to go on the offensive against Ross Perot instead of Clinton lead to a surprise win for Bill C.
Bill C. then went around a lot talking to people until there was some griping “its the economy, stupid” and he stopped that. From his work or not the economy start to improve and would grow well for the rest of the 90’s.
Music had sucked for a while in the late 80’s and grunge was something of a breath of fresh air, even if I didn’t like it very much. For every Nirvana there seemed to be a pair of Lemonheads just covering old tunes badly. But it gave rock music an enema.
Mid 90’s I discovered the internet. USENET was the thing for me until 2001 when it just became too much of a sewer to continue using it. Those days were brazen and many in the groups I haunted were feral. It was a harsh time when moderators were unknown to the land.
The internet grew in popularity and to this day I have a hard time putting into words what an internet that didn’t want to know what it wanted to be when it grew up was like. We get used to google and wikipedia that we forget when search engines used to advertise (yes, I know Google and Bing have done ads) - oddly enough the engines often bragged about how fast they were -not that they got good results with that speed. Some bragged about their results but they never came up to snuff once Google got in place.
Watch these search engine ads from 1998 to give some perspective.
Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.
With a few changes, this sounds like today.
Here’s a recent XKCD that’s very applicable.
I went to college in the late '90s. We only had dial up internet in our dorms. No wireless, no high speed and if you used the dialup it meant 3 of 7 people couldn’t use their phones (most people didn’t have cell phones yet).
I remember sitting around all day with friends, bored out of our skulls watching talk shows and Judge Judy and Passions…Passions!, just passing the time until 6 or 7 when regular TV came on. And kill yourself if you got stuck there on the weekend. The best you could hope for is that you could sleep through most of it.
At the beginning of the decade I read The Straight Dope in the local alternative newspaper while sitting in a locally owned coffee house. At the end of the decade I read The Straight Dope on my computer at home before going out to the Starbucks that had eaten my local coffee house. Other than that I mostly remember the '94 Northridge quake and my really great beach apartment.
Watch Daria.
Only after mom told us not to watch Beavis and Butthead.
A lot of these things were very dependent on where you were; my dorm was wired for ethernet, and by extension internet access in about 1994 at Texas A&M. Computers were hardly novelties- I had a C64 in the 80s, and a series of PCs in the 90s. In a “Ship of Theseus” way, I still have the final PC I ever bought in 1998. And my job at a rinky-dink engineering firm in 1992 had LOTS of old-school DOS PCs. They weren’t a novelty at all- I’d say that if your job didn’t have PCs by then, you were backward as fuck.
But for the most part, it’s not much different than it is now, with the big exception of the drastic expansion of computing and communications (WWW, ubiquitous computers, cell/smart phones, DVR/nifty cable boxes). Music isn’t much different- we listened to all the same stuff back then, just with maybe a slightly different sound.
I will say this- people are more socially liberal than they used to be. I’m not saying this was good, but you could call a gay man a “fag” or a lesbian a “dyke” in normal conversation without anyone batting an eye. Derogatory words like “retard” or “cripple” weren’t really so frowned upon as they are now. The idea of gay marriage would have made us laugh out loud when I was in college; I gather students these days are generally all for it.
We were just starting to see the ready availability of exotic foods and drinks from all over the world- I don’t recall seeing any craft beer in stores until the mid-late 1990s, and the number and types of imports shot way up from a limited set of Bass, Heineken, St. Pauli Girl and various Mexican beers, to a whole lot of stuff from all over.
Only the nerds, dweebs and weirdos were online. Then they made made The Internet and everyone else was allowed in and it got to be sort of a drag.
Yep. I was born in 1975 and, for me, the 10-year period that represented the biggest change to me was probably around 1993-2003, so mostly spanning the 90s for the reasons above.
As I remember, in the 90’s, people weren’t lawyers yet and had far fewer jobs to go to and responsibilities demanding their time and attention, spending much more time on their college classes and rock bands. Having fewer jobs and responsibilities, they also had more freedom in how they dressed, how they wore their hair, how late they stayed up at their parties and rock shows. Their comings and goings in general were much more free and easygoing; they were known to pick up at a moment’s notice and go couch surfing at music festivals in other cities for days on end in a manner that would be unthinkable in this day and age. As they had far fewer wives and children, they engaged in a lot more boozing, hooking up at parties and general crazy shit.
Jobs were hard to come by. for at least the first half.
Watching the internet evolve and HSI become available was mind blowing.
I was a student in the late 80’s and being able to connect to the university from home was a God send. It meant we no longer had to pull all nighters in the computer labs on campus. By the end of the 90’s it was just amazing how fast the internet had matured from command line - text only communication to full blown GUI interfaces with sophisticated (for that time) graphics.
I tell my kids that when I was there age if I wanted to learn about something I had to get on my bike and go to the library and hope they had a book on the subject and then pray it wasn’t 20 years out of date. The vast amount of information we have at our fingertips today is truly a paradigm shift.
So, here’s a run-down of what I remember about 1990, technologically. I would have been 14-15 at the time.
The computer market wasn’t consolidated behind two main operating systems/manufacturers. Today, it’s pretty much Windows vs OS X (and Linux.) And now they all run on pretty much Intel chips. Back then, Commodore was still a fairly big player in the affordable computer market. In fact, most my friends with computers pretty much had Commodores, with the exception of a couple that had Apple IIes or IIgses. If you were involved in electronic music, you might have an Atari ST (which came with built-in MIDI support). For video production, maybe a Commodore Amiga. My recollection is the stereotypical breakdown was IBMs for business, non-Macintosh Apples for eduction, Commodore 64s for games and general affordable home computing, Apple Macintoshes for desktop publishing, Atari STs for MIDI, Commodore Amigas for video. So there were a lot more differences between platforms.
Computer monitors were big, bulky CRT things. Graphics were getting better, but high-resolution color support wasn’t something expected. If you’ve seen NES or SNES graphics, that’s what was fairly normal. There were better graphics at the time, but the average personal computer you might come across was something in that general range.
Photo quality printers were non-existent. Laser printers were big for home publishing, but us middle-of-the-road computer users were generally stuck with noisy, slow dot matrix printers. You still see these in the wild, because they can write on carbon copy paper (I seem to find auto repair shops everywhere using dot matrix to this day.) And, yeah, carbon copies. Those were around everywhere. Speaking of, even in the late 80s, our school used ditto machines to make copies.
The internet existed, but not in the popular sense. Online services had a presence via Compuserve, Quantum Link (related to AOL), Prodigy, etc., but the general populace had no interaction with going online or the internet. You might find a local BBS (bulletin board service) to dial into and chat with people and (illegally) download files/warez, but that was for the more tech-oriented types. And online speeds would be so slow that you can see each line of text scroll across the screen as it’s being transmitted. The vast majority of people I knew with computers had no modems to connect with the outside world. No networking, they were completely used as independent machines.
Writing papers for school or doing any kind of research involved getting your ass off the couch and tracking down sources. Every paper I’d ever written in high school and even college (I graduated in 1998) required extensive time at the library, poring through books, newspapers, microfilm and microfiche to get the information I needed that I can now get with a Google search in approximately 0.0002 seconds. (Well, some of that info is still only available in those forms, so it’s worth knowing how to find them.) However, things changed a lot from 1990-2000. By around 1994-1995, the Internet started to make headway. The WWW (what you’re looking at right now), was developing quickly. I remember being in college in 1993 and the only interface to the internet was a text prompt. You could telnet places, ftp (to download files), and gopher (which was a menu-driven way of navigating the internet). Yahoo! at that time was still just a collection of favorite websites–I recall you could buy books at the time which generally served as directories where to find various internet destinations for topics that interest you. There weren’t really search engines as you know them today. It took a good bit of digging to find the information you wanted. By 1994 to 1995, with Mosaic and Netscape, the WWW and internet as we know it today really started coming together. I still remember the first few times I saw the graphical web browsers and being annoyed at how “dumbed down” they looked for me, how slow they were vs. accessing the internet text-only, etc. I quickly grew out of that. By the end of the decade, especially with Google (I believe 1998 or 1999), the internet became incredibly accessible, easily searchable, and an important academic tool. I’m sure it was before, but I never really had a chance to use it in an academic sense until after I graduated.
Email as a method of communication grew in popularity in the 90s. Nobody except for one person I knew had an email address in 1990. In 1996 when I worked and lived abroad for a year, I still hand wrote letters to pretty much everyone. Most of my peers did have an email address, but it wasn’t easy finding a way to get an email to them. I’d have to find a university or a library. Internet cafes were only just starting to take off then. By the end of the 90s, email was my primary method of communication with friends.
Nobody I knew had a cell phone in the early to mid 90s. Even by the late 90s, it was still rather unusual to have a cell phone. I knew far more people with beepers/pagers (remember those? Still used by some professions) than cell phones. (In fact, I can’t think of a single friend with a cell phone until about 1998 or so).
Photography? All film (except for some professional uses.) Shopping? All done in-person. Books? All on paper.
And so on and so forth. I can go on for many, many, many more paragraphs. It’s just simply inconceivable to me how much technology and life progressed and changed my life from 1990 to 2000.