Society was less homogeneous and less informed because most people weren’t discussing issues with other people from all walks of life and from all over the world like they’re doing now, or getting immediate answers to most questions through an online query.
I was born in 1961 so I can offer memories of life before, during, and after the nineties.
My recollection was that the nineties were a good time. People my age had grown up during the Cold War - we had accepted the possibility that the world could end in a nuclear war at any point. Pessimists saw it as inevitable. Optimists hoped for nothing more than an ongoing holding of the status quo.
So the relatively peaceful breakup of the Soviet Union and its empire was an amazing surprise. Nobody expected the communists would just call it quits. The modern equivalent would be al Qaeda announcing “We’ve just be rereading the Koran and it’s made us realize we’ve been all wrong. Terrorism is bad. We completely apologize for all the terrible things we’ve done. We’re going to turn ourselves in to the appropriate authorities and accept the punishment we deserve.”
The other big thing was the development of computers and the internet. Every month you’d hear about new ideas and capabilities appearing. We could see we were living through a major technological revolution.
So the overall feeling was hope. Suddenly things seemed possible. We’d look around at what was happening right now and think that in ten years we might have things like world peace and nanotechnology.
Am I the only one who gets a nervous twitch whenever someone says this?
The 90s were just last week, weren’t they? Cripes, how did I get so old?
As for how I remember it? The internet existed (at least in the later 90s), but it wasn’t ubiquitous, and it was still pretty crap. I still had an apartment without internet access into the first couple of years of the 2000s (so, that was back when I still left the house). No iPods, which I can’t imagine how I survived.
I was a lot less fat, and girls liked me a lot more.
This might be a European thing, or just something weird about my particular life experience, but airplane travel wasn’t the obvious and default option when traveling, at least if the distances weren’t huge. I would go on buses and trains a hell of a lot more, even to places where that seems positively nuts now. These days there’s always a cheap flight.
Beyond that… nah, it’s pretty much the same. As for popular culture, I can see a very clean break between the 80s and the 90s, but everything since then just seems contemporary to me.
Oh, a couple more things.
People still smoked indoors. *That *was pretty nuts.
Pornography was harder to come by (see crapness of internet). If I’d had access to the amounts and variety of gentleman’s entertainment when I was 18 that a quick Google search will provide for you now, I imagine that I would have needed a full combined right hand, schlong and brain replacement within a year. So it was probably for the best.
Suddenly realizing that I’m talking to someone too young to remember the 90s. :smack: Fuck! Um… you didn’t hear all that.
In the 90s, young people were respectful of their parents, did their homework and only watched cartoons. Which is how it should be now! And never engaged in such activities as you absolutely did not hear me reference above.
Um… anyway.
The Straight Dope was on AOL. You could splurge and get a 15" monitor. There were 56Kbps modems but you were lucky to get 36Kbps speed. Lots of people wore pagers on their belts. People worried about Y2K. To back up your computer, you needed to buy a 25 pack of 3.5 floppies. A 5 gig hard drive was a LOT of storage. There were no USB ports.
South Park was new and controversial. Bevis and Butthead was popular. Grunge was popular. They had music videos on MTV.
Things that haven’t changed much:
Parents saw some sort of enemy lurking everywhere trying to get at their kids. With the Soviet Union and commies out of the picture it was Satan Worshippers, who corrupted kids by putting backwards messages in music.
Parents thought kids had horrible taste in music and fashion and at best were disrespectful, at worst sociopathic. Plus they watched too much TV instead of going out to play.
Politicians tried to skirt issues like the economy by jabbering about “family values” and the evil influence of Hollywood (Hollywood being any movie, TV show, book, or work of art they didn’t like.)
Things that have changed:
Widespread availability of the Internet after the mid 90’s and brick and mortar stores going out of business as people began to shop online. Older people complaining that kids spent too much time online instead of going out to play.
Old fashioned cartoons being replaced by CGI.
Practically everyone and his dog having a cell phone by the end of the decade.
Sending resumes in by e-mail instead of snail mail. Nowadays you can apply for 40 jobs without leaving your chair.
Gay marriage. In 1990 that seemed hundreds of years away.
A small point, but I think as part of that phenomenon it has gotten much harder for mystery/suspense novelists to adhere to genre expectations without becoming stale or farfetched.
In the old days, the private dick could easily be kidnapped or harmed by the bad guy. She’d be thrown into the locked warehouse or followed by another car trying to force her off the road, and that would be a scary situation. Now, she’d just have to whip out her cell phone and call for help.
As a consequence of this, private eyes and other mystery-solvers now have an amazingly large tendency to lose, break, or forget to charge their phones.
I don’t remember much. Our first daughter was born in 1991, and everything since then has just been background noise until she graduated last year. As soon as we get daughter mark 2 launched next year, I can start paying attention to the world again.
It was just like today, except less internet, the dire fashion you see today was popular for the first time, and the music was better.
Gay rights was still very controversial, and things like same-sex marriage and adoption were considered extreme. Transgender issues were not even on the radar. I think things, especially in high school, have changed dramatically.
Crime was higher and gang violence was a major concern. When asked to name a place that epitomized violence and urban decay, people would say “New York City.”
Indie media was hip, and it took some work work to produce than writing a blog or putting a song on iTunes. Zines, indie record labels, and film festivals were some of the only ways to get out of the mainstream. The indie bookstore and record store was a big deal, because otherwise you just wouldn’t be able to get rare items.
Organic food was barely a thing. If you wanted hippy food, you had to brave the hippies at your local natural foods co-op.
Telework was rare.
Travel was WAY different. You would take lots of travelers checks. Planes has paper tickets, and if you lost your return ticket you were screwed. Keeping in touch with home was expensive. You had to put a lot of trust in your guidebooks, as otherwise travel advice was hard to find. If you kept a travel journal, it was on paper.
Data analytics wasn’t a huge thing. It happened, bit not to the degree it does now. Companies had a harder time predicting demand, routing things the right place, and measuring performance.
To pay bills, you had to go to a physical location and hand over a check. Checks were used often, even at supermarkets
Not most places, but in Michigan they did still have smoking sections. Actually, we only got rid of smoking sections of restaurants a few years ago.
I remember in Fall 1996, I picked up a can of Coke and was amused to see “www.coke.com” on the can. I remember showing my friend and saying, “Look, even Coke has a website now. Pretty much everything is getting one now.”
Guess its time to die.
I started the decade in the Army. Ended the decade with a 1 week old daughter.
Oh and porn took forever to download. Pictures mostly. And they downloaded from the top down so it took a while to see if it was going to be something you like or something that disgusted you. The world is a much better place now.
That reminds me…
CGI developed massively during the 1990s. In the 80s, CGI was something that cost a LOT of money and a lot of time, and required some of the most powerful computers and specialized hardware/software. Even at that, it was kind of rough-looking. See TRON and The Last Starfighter for examples.
By the early 1990s, it was much better, although still requiring serious big iron and specialized stuff to edit. See Terminator 2’s T-1000 and Jurassic Park for examples.
However, by the middle of the decade, CGI slightly better than Last Starfighter was within the reach of a syndicated TV show (Babylon 5), and the big productions using more expensive and capable hardware were doing things like Toy Story.
By the end of the decade, more or less modern CGI was available to shows like Babylon 5, and big productions using the serious equipment started doing some really interesting visual effects unheard of until then. Think The Matrix, Phantom Menace for large scale stuff, and Fight Club for little CGI tweaks, which were then cheap and fast enough to edit in.
Yes, and teen smoking was HUGE - it was universally considered cool and sophisticated by that age group. My high school had a smoking section.
I remember fondly not having to be strip searched every time you wanted to get on a plane for travel. I remember less fondly having to put in long hours at the office because PCs were hella expensive and it really didn’t matter if they weren’t because half the stuff one needed was still hard copy.
Ah, those were the days, when you could actually get away from it all. I lived in a foreign country for about a year not too long after high school. I didn’t even have a cell phone, and this was before my parents knew that there was such a thing as e-mail. I could only be reached by a land line that was freakishly expensive to call me on from back home (and just as expensive the other way, obviously, so had I an excuse not to use it), and which I was away from a lot of the time anyway. Oh, man, the feeling of freedom I had was beyond belief!
I similarly remember being able to travel for months without the expectation from anyone back home that I stay in touch all the freaking time.
I find it hard to imagine that young people can even have that experience now, with the ubiquitousness of e-mail and texting and the expectation that you twitter and instagram your every move. Although, on the other hand, maybe people don’t generally want that experience anyway. I admit to being a bit of a recluse and a freak.
Graduated '91 in the UK. Things were considerably different there than in the US. There was a counterculture movement that led to ‘new age travellers’ - hippies who lived in vans and mooched around outside society. There was a psychedelic revival, encapsulated in bands like the Ozric Tentacles, and an anarcho-pastoralist movement represented by bands like The Levellers. Remember the surprise hit that Chumbawumba had in the US? That arose from this movement.
These all combined into peripatetic music festivals that sprung up illegally in parks and on unsuspecting farmers’ fields. Then rave culture started to combine with this, and with it ecstacy. Urban and moneyed types started to be involved in bigger and bigger illegal raves, and the new-agers started to become a refuge for criminal elements and people on the run. Then they started becoming scumbags, scroungers and dealers, and then you’d see their little kids selling drugs at festivals.
Simultaneously the ‘Madchester’ scene was starting up with bands like Happy Mondays, the Stone Roses, and eventually Oasis.
There was a recession and the only work I could get was driving a van. I got given a mobile phone to communicate with base. It was a vast thing with a car battery attached that was so heavy I had to strap it into the passenger seat so it didn’t damage the dash if I stopped suddenly.
Then I left the UK and kind of dropped out of what was going on there. Went to Lollapalooza in 1992 and saw Soundgarden, but didn’t know what I was listening to. Got introduced to grunge properly about a month before Kurt Kobain killed himself.
I first encountered the Internet in 1994 when visiting my brother, who worked at London’s first ‘Cybercafe’, as a ‘Cyberhost’ (cringe) - basically a barista who also knew how to show people how to use the Web and email. He once encountered Kylie Minogue there, who had come in to find out how to get an email account.
I travelled around Asia for months with NO COMMUNICATION AT ALL. My family had no idea what I was doing - whether I was lost on the Tibetan plateau, riding a motorcycle 2,000 miles through Vietnam, desperately ill in Thailand, or having an accident whitewater rafting in Nepal (all of which happened, but my family didn’t need to know).
Listen up youngsters, when we travelled, we wrote letters. By hand, and mailed them around the world. If my family or friends wanted to contact me, I’d include in a letter the address of a Poste Restante (like a temporary PO Box) in a city I thought I might be in at some point in the future. Weeks later I’d go to the post office in Chengdu or Hanoi, hand over my passport and they’d come back with a pile of letters for me, some of them written weeks or months before.
I called home precisely once from China during a year of travelling, and I had to book the call a day ahead and turn up for an appointment with the phone. It all seems so antiquated now, but it really wasn’t that long ago. Travelling with the internet is a huge improvement, though the idea of being contactable all the time is perhaps a little sad - but I believe the practicality outweighs it.
Mid-90s started working in the web field, using a T1 line - amazing, I once downloaded the exploding whale video in less than an hour! Email kind of changed everything, and then the beginning of the bubble started up and money became good. Was living in the States earning a huge salary and driving a sports car. It all went tits-up eventually, but it was fun while it lasted.
You could convince venture capitalists to give you a couple million for an internet company that followed the South Park underwear gnome business plan.
This was the greatest sound in the world. And this was a thing.
VHS tapes took up a ridiculous amount of space.
Moral guardians blamed video games and violent media for all social ills even more than they do now.
Kids went outside without parental supervision. Rode bikes. Played basketball. Even used their imagination. Crazy stuff like that. Moreso the early '90s.
There were less fat people.
Michael Jordan was a god.
Everyone pretended against all evidence that baseball players in particular and athletes in general weren’t doped full of horse 'roids and rhino horn or whatever.
The Titanic movie made women flip their shit. Especially teenage girls. They’d go and see it 3-4 times a week, making it the first movie to literally make a billion dollars.
The PlayStation kick started the downfall of the video game industry by successfully selling to the masses pre-rendered cinematics, “story,” and immature maturity as a replacement for engaging gameplay. I only half kid.
The worst thing to ever happen in the history of Western civilization was Clinton getting his dick sucked and playing hide the cigar with Monica and then lying about it. The devastation was incalculable.
From my perspective, pretty much like it is now, only I was a lot thinner and had no gray hair. 