People were definitely more ignorant, you couldn’t just drop a link to snopes or whatever to dispell the BS of the day. But society is getting less homogenous all the time as media splits up to cater to all the different niches and everyone has a blog to talk about their pet views. It gets more and more homogenous the farther back you go, where everyone was consuming the same TV or radio shows. So much media is being produced nowadays it’d be impossible to watch it all in several lifetimes. It’s hard enough just to watch the supposed best of the best.
This just reminded me;
In 1990 1Mb of RAM was about $50. Not a Gig, a Meg.
By '99 it was under a buck, but still, Gigs of RAM were just a daydream for most people.
Let’s see:
[ol]
[li]Laptops cost $4-6k and they had significantly less computing power than your current smart phone.[/li][li]CDs still cost an ungodly amount and most people didn’t have them in their cars. If they did, they’d have to worry about peopel breaking into them and stealing them.[/li][li]Digital cameras were also extremely expensive for laughable levels of resolution Only people with large amounts of cash had one (in the late 90s) and they guarded them with their lives.[/li][li]You could still find payphones[/li][li]People had beepers[/li][li]If you told people that you were a “gamer” they thought that you meant Dungeons & Dragons and that you were a “weirdo.”[/li][li]Pan-Am, Blockbuster, Circuit City, Arthur Andersen and Enron were all viable businesses.[/li][li]Newspapers were still important.[/li][/ol]
Basically watch the first nine season of Law and Order or all of The X-Files and you’ll have an idea of the 1990s were.
Visit Cuba now, I was there for new years and what struck me was the television was playing music videos, everyone was on a cellphone talking , and the few that did have more than SMS , were using blackberrys.
And I smoked in Bars, just say that Canada was cold and dreary when I returned in more than one way.
Declan
No you’re not the only one. For me, the 90’s were ages 18-28 and they do seem like last week.
The world doesn’t feel all that different now from the the late 90’s at least. As far as music and clothing, the differences between the 80’s and 90’s seem much greater than between the 90’s and today. Fashions from 1986 would have looked ridiculously out of place in 1999. But if I look at pictures of myself and friends taken in the late 90’s? Nothing in our clothing or hairstyles or home decor seems particularly dated. Just younger versions of ourselves.
Thanks for reminding me–you could still smoke in restaurants and bars.
Restaurants I can have sympathy with banning smoking. It drifts to the non smoking section. But city-wide bans in bars and clubs? While full time smokers may be getting rarer, people who smoke during a night out drinking is still common. The fact that whenever I go out downtown barhopping nearly everyone in the place is coming and going outside to smoke. Those that lobbied for the ban are at home in bed I presume. :rolleyes:
Agreed. When the banned smoking in restaurants I wasn’t opposed at all. When they banned it in bars I thought it was stupid. It’s fucking BAR!
True, but was a gig needed or even useful in 1999? If I remember correctly, 256MB on a desktop running WIN98 was more than enough. 128 was more common.
I started college in 91. We had full internet access which meant email and telnet. Email meant we could message all our high school friends and i guess technically all our friends we saw day to day, but hardly anyone including myself did that – I carried on snail mail correspondence with my still gf from high school, and nobody else outside of our school had email.
Telnet meant that you could visit MUDS (and let me tell you Nightfall 134.2.161 something something something rocked) and do local stuff to see what kind of porn was hosted on computers in other dorms.
Hardly anybody (me either!) had a computer in a dorm room, but each floor had one Apple. You checked it out for 30 minute periods and myself and all the other folks on MUDS hogged it – you’d get your buddies to sign it out with you for many hours, and after about 2 am it was all yours anyway. The worst was you’d get a full night signed out because you had to finish a big paper, but you could procrastinate on your MUD of choice for as long as you wanted. Like a crack addict being given a crack pipe as his writing utensil.
But fuck all that computing, the real thing about the computer rooms was when you checked them out you had a a key to what was essentially a private room. No roommates no nothing. So when you wanted to be able to spend a grown up night with your gf, that was your hotel.
Seriously, I hauled a mattress and cooler in there and lived fine for 3 days when the old gf from HS visited me – had to get all my friends on rotation signing out the room, and I’ll tell you that shit was worth it.
But as for the actual internet stuff, it is hard to describe. It didn’t seem like shit to us, and a lot of that was because it was so new and we were so young it was like yeah of course who gives a shit.
Bigger than that, I have to say it was pretty goddamn lame. But the novelty had a certain attraction… like I remember when the Nightfall MUD was down me and my buddies trying random telnet numbers – obsessively enough that we actually cold called several telnet connections.
But you know, all we did when we got through on these crazy long random numbers was, to use contemporary terms, troll the place we got into. There was this sense that we’d never visit the place again, and we were young dumb and full of cum, so we just went nuts till the various sites banned us. They were usually set up as MUDS but in a way were really chat spaces.
After about two years email picked up a bit, and I remember a basic knowledge of C (+ whatever… learned once I got code privileges on Nightfall from levelling up to Wizard hell yeah!!) allowed me to employ regular user commands to look at my now broken up with once high school now college gfs email. Seriously it was something like you just did ftp and asked for directories under the person’s user name and had to look at the email file in text and it was all there. No security back then, I guess nothing ever changes haha.
But my main memory of the internet was pretty much like this isn’t worth much, and to be honest since then all they’ve added is that, first, images are easy to download and then movies are able to stream. I guess wide spread email and web pages made it worth something, but that happened pretty quick – say ten years — and since then it really hasn’t been shit aside from download times being fast enough to see film. I look at facebook etc. and think what the hell everybody I knew in the late 90s already had their own web page so WTF.
I was born in 86, so I’m a child of the 90’s and remember it fondly. We grew up with great cartoons like Animaniacs and Tiny Toons, Ren and Stimpy and Rocko’s Modern Life (among many, many others).
I remember our family got a Packard Bell computer with a dial up modem in 1995 or so, running Windows 95. I remember logging into the internet via AOL and browsing all sorts of things I probably shouldn’t have. I remember many blue screens of death, and “It is now safe to shut down your computer.”
I grew up with a Sega Genesis and other Sega consoles, playing Sonic the Hedgehog and Phantasy Star and such. My friends all had Nintendo and I was jealous.
Parents were largely clueless on what the internet was actually used for, and I got away with a lot of crap that I probably shouldn’t have.
A neighbor gave me an old Compaq computer than ran Windows 3.1 and I had that in my room growing up! I didn’t have internet on it but I could play games and type papers and such. That was so awesome, even though 3.1 at that time was ancient and outdated.
I remember when Toy Story came out it was a BIG DEAL, and we were all blown away.
The pinnacle of portable music technology was a “skip proof” CD walkman. You see, back then, we had portable cd players used with headphones and batteries, but you had to keep them almost perfectly horizontal or they would skip horribly. The skip proof ones would actually buffer several seconds into memory, so if you shook it a little bit, it wouldn’t cause any problems. I remember being blown away when I got one as a kid. “Wow, this music doesn’t skip!” I was into Frank Sinatra and Mozart CDs (I was a weird kid). I also loved Weird Al.
I remember having a conversation with my parents about how in school I had learned about all these wars, and that it seemed like the US and the world was really peaceful now when I was growing up. They kind of laughed and told me about how things might be good in the US, but in the middle east there were lots of problems and violence, and in Africa and such. Still, it definitely felt very peaceful to me as a kid in the 90’s and I didn’t grow up with a fear of Nuclear Annihilation like my parents did.
I remember the year 2000 was a really big deal and we threw a huge party at my house.
Born in 72 here. The 90s really were my decade to come of age in, though I remember the 80s really well too.
I remember finding out that I was “Generation X”, and that I was supposed to be a loser…Boom, Bust, Echo.
What I remember most about pop culture was Grunge music and the X files. I remember the first time I heard Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy” and the first time I heard “Smells like Teen Spirit”.
It was a dreary time too - I graduated from university in 1994 right into an economic recession. It took me over a year to find a shitty job. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that I felt like the economy was coming back, or at least that young people in my area (Canada) would have it better than I had.
Computers were improving by leaps and bounds.
Quentin Tarantino blew us all away and resurrected Travolta’s dead career with Pulp Fiction.
For me, it was a tough, challenging coming of age decade. My life is now better in every measurable way, though I still feel pangs of some longing for those days when I hear certain songs.
The 90’s had the most science fiction shows that I ever saw scheduled together. Babylon5, Star Trek TNG, Voyager, and DS9, Star Gate SG-1, Lexx. Forever Knight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel were fantasy/horror.
Incredible decade for science fiction tv. I doubt there will ever be another that good in that genre.
I graduated in 1993…
I remember classmates sitting behind me in homeroom and talking about Nirvana for the first time. It seemed like only a few knew who they were, and fewer cared. I remember in art class a group of classmates talking instead about Pearl Jam. I also remember it seemed like every album they did went number one practically before release!
I missed the explosion of the internet. However, I remember sometime in 1994 my coworkers talking a lot about computers. I remember the seemingly unending race of processor speeds and people actually looking to upgrade a computer just months after purchase!
I remember real estate began to explode in the mid-90’s. It was common hearing coworkers talk about their home value increasing yet again, and them planning what to do with the new paper wealth.
What I remember most, which may just be nostalgia, was that there was a sense of excitement and enthusiasm. Nowadays, perhaps merely due to my age, it seems like more people approach life as though beaten down and just looking to get through.
When the iPod came out, it was a big deal. MP3 players existed, but they were tiny and nobody had ever thought to put your whole music collection on one. I was skeptical. I really thought MP3 CDs were the way to go. Who wants to carry around a hard drive?
I was a film major, and my school had recently switched to all digital, a controversial move. Everyone thought digital was hideously ugly, and we were skeptical that mainstream films would use it. The old film editing tables were still in the editing rooms.
To edit our digital videos, we had to use external hard drives. I sprung for a huge one- two whole gigs! It cost a fortune.
The first iPod was released in 2001 and was considerably crappier than what was already on the market. I had a 20 gig MP3 player (it was pretty unwieldy; it ran on 4 rechargeable AA batteries) in 2000, and it took Apple a couple years to catch up, memory wise.
Also it was normal for people to meet you right at the gate as you got off the plane.
You are right about that.
The music was terrible. The 1990’s saw the emergence of two trends that almost killed popular music: Grunge, and Gangsta Rap.
I graduated in 1991 and some things I kinda recall were…
-Alot of horrible pop music.
-heavy meteal was really thought of as a joke.
-alot of white kids started acting black.
-It did seem like jobs were easier to get.
-Arsenio Hall was cooler than Letterman. At least to most people I knew.
-By the end of the 90’s alot of clubs were filled with club kids.
-Seinfeld, Martin and maybe Friends were considered the funniest shows.
-I don’t think 90201 was as popular as you may have thought. Alot of people hated the show. Same with Doogie Howser and Melrose place.
-Hackey sack was pretty popular.
-I don’t hear guns being shot off like I did back then. I think the gangs were alot rougher back then.
- I do not remember any openly gay students at my high school.
-The Cowboys were hated by most of America. I think most people liked the Chicago Bulls though.