The 90s were awesome. It was a lot like being kissed from a rose on the grey.
UUDECODE. That summons up memories of a cascade of crashing modem noises enabling a drip-drabbing of bytes over a telephone line for 10 or 15 minutes, followed by a flurry of ordered file concatenation and a cycle of running CPU-pegging translation software, … resulting in WTF.
As for “The Internet”, what you see going on here on the SDMB in terms of discourse would have been on USENET message boards, before the Spam Storms of the mid 1990s overcame it.
For some, it was a semi-charmed kind of life. You might as well as have been walking on the sun. Not for everyone, though. Some tried to rage against the machine, but despite all their rage, they were still just a rat in a cage.
And oh, the bitter loneliness of the 1900s! Even today, after all these years, what I wouldn’t give to find a soulmate, someone else to catch this drift. It’s been almost twenty-five years, and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of hope for a destination. But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo, and these foolish games are breaking my heart. But that’s all right - the more you suffer, the more it shows you really care.
Where have all the cowboys gone? I want to f*ck you like an animal! (Wait, strike that last one.)
Obviously all of the technological changes already mentioned. It’s funny, however, the negative comments about grunge as the one thing I think of about the 90s and music is that the electric guitar, as the default for rock music, ended in the late 90s (I happen to like hard rock, grunge, metal etc). I remember FM rock stations in the 90s playing new material. Now FM rock stations all play “classic” rock and to hear anything new in terms of heavy rock, it’s necessary to listen to alt rock stations (if there are any in your city) or internet radio. Everything else (to this 54 yr old) seems to be variations of hip-hop, rap, dance mix stuff etc.
From a fashion point of view, some of the stereotypical 80s stuff lagged a couple of years into the 90s but, otherwise I don’t think it was significantly different from today.
ATMs had already existed in the early 80s but my first use of a debit card was in a bike shop in Montreal in '91 or '92. When the cold war had ended I was still in the military and I can still remember the feeling of excitement and optimism, with lots of discussion about the “peace dividend”.
That just reminded me… back then, since downloading files was such a pain, we tended to share everything we got with our friends.
My roommate at the time (1991/1992 school year) was something of a porn fiend, and would always call me over or holler at me to check out whatever it was that he’d downloaded.
This one time, he had found what he thought was the holy grail- a HUGE high resolution file (at the time, 800x600 in 256 colors or something similar) of some actress or other that he thought was super-hot.
So after downloading all his nightly porn, and then running whatever the decoding software was for another hour on this one file alone, he yells at me as it’s about to finish decoding to come check it out.
So I get up from my desk, walk over to his, and look over his shoulder as he fires up his image viewer… to show a HUGE, high resolution photo of a blurry soft penis and nutsack.
He instantly turned red and started to stammer that he didn’t mean to download that, etc…
I haven’t laughed quite that hard since. You youngsters with your websites and broadband have it easy!
Um, you realize he has had a show in primetime the last 3 years, with an episode showing just Friday night?
As to the music. Too many people are forgetting Alternative Rock. (And it’s even better predecessor College Radio.) Only been mentioned once so far. But it didn’t take long before it became wholly ruined by the record companies forcing Nickelback crap down people’s throats.
The local “oldies” station now includes a lot of 90s stuff. E.g., I heard Candy by Iggy Pop with Kate Pierson the other day for the first time in a long time.
And UUEncode? That is so 1980s. USENET and all that.
Here’s a real retro Internet throwback. I didn’t have/need an ISP at home. I “merely” dialed into my computer at work (which was at a college on therefore on the 'Net) and started a SLIP connection thru it.
Of course, the kids needed to use that. So we got a second phone line and setup Internet connection sharing (remember Wingate?) thru the computer with the modem. (Leading to having an always on PC for the first time.)
Having 2+ phone lines became common. Each house in our neighborhood had by default two lines running to the box. But if you wanted a third (or fourth), the phone company had to dig a new line. I wonder how many of those are still used? Ours isn’t.
That was brilliant. I am really impressed. I think I caught most of those.
The music was often great. I graduated from HS in 2000, and was born in 1982. I have been thinking a great deal lately about getting ready for school early in 1993/1994, and having time to turn on MTV for a little while in the morning. I remember being riveted by several songs (and their videos) that were nothing like what I thought music was.
I also listened to my town’s modern rock station a lot as the decade went on, and it was great to encounter consistently released new, alternative music that always seemed credible and serious to me. It wasn’t totally underground, but it was innately more respectable than the debauched hair-metal types and teenyboppers and boring adult contemporary and whatever else.
I also loved to encounter new music by veteran musicians from the previous couple of decades. I noticed the twentysomething DJs would get excited about that sort of thing. It had a certain gravitas, or something like that.
I found a lot of friends on the airwaves; even if I could not speak to them, their music and lyrics spoke to me.
When I was riding my motorcycle I was run off the road by an asshole on a cell phone, so nothing much was different.
A few more things (upon reflection):
[ol]
[li]Energy drinks were non-existent in the early part of the decade - Red Bull came along later, but if you were dragging, you drank coffee. Or Mountain Dew.[/li][li]If you were African American male it wasn’t uncommon for you to drink beer from a bottle of 32 ounces or larger - The 90s were the heyday of the “40”[/li][li]Syndicated television reached its zenith - Before Fox and the CW essentially ended independent television stations, you could see numerous offerings from ***Babylon 5 ***to Silk Stalkings to Xena. When teh 90s ended, the bottom fell out of syndicated television in the US.[/li][li]Paying with cash wasn’t unusual - I don’t just mean daily amounts. Very few people in teh US would blink an eye if you came in bought items for hundreds or thousands of dollars in cash.[/li][li]Tabloids still ruled - Prior to TMZ,Facebook,Myspace or Twitter if you wanted to know the latest gossip, you went to the store and bought a National Enquirer or The Star.[/li][li]Informercials were still a unique form of advertising - People used to watch entire informercials to learn about products. For that matter….[/li][li]The Home Shopping Network was still relevant - People would spends hours a day viewing and thousands of dollars buying crap that they didn’t really want or need.[/li][/ol]
The universe was fifty percent spent gun shells by volume.
In the 90s, you often ran into the Blue Screen Of Death.
I started college in 1991. So for me, the zeitgeist of the 90s were well captured by Gen-X movies like Singles, Reality Bites, Empire Records, Chasing Amy, Clerks, High Fidelity, Office Space and Fight Club or TV shows like Friends or Party of Five. Basically there was this sense that the traditional lifestyle of career, house, mortgage, family, kids didn’t really apply to my generation. Mostly we assumed our future consisted of graduating college with a useless degree, taking up crappy jobs for which we were overeducated (if we were lucky, maybe they would at least be in a hip coffee shop, bar, comic or record store). We would probably hop from one dysfunctional romantic relationship to the next. Forget buying a house. We would probably live in some walk-up apartment with three roommates forever.
So not really that different from today.
There was no internet before 1995 or so. At least not in the sense that we have it today. I didn’t have a cell phone until 1995 when I started working - an old Motorola StarTAC flip phone. Some of my friends who did network support had those Nextel things. Someone mentioned it up-thread, but if we weren’t hanging out in a bar, we mostly just sort of sat around watching TV, reading or just being bored.
I have to say that not having Facebook and constant connectivity made things a bit “quieter”. You just didn’t have this constant noise of stupid memes and people bitching until later in the decade. There was a lot more talking to people face to face or over the phone.
Shortly after I started working was when the Internet hit and the tech bubble took off. It was kind of exciting for someone just starting their career. I had started working for a tech consulting firm up in Boston and it definitely had a sort of gold rush feel to it. It wasn’t like it is now though. Sure you had guys like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell and Jeff Bezos. But it didn’t feel like their success came overnight in the way that some of these post-Facebook startup guys are just falling into billions.
I feel we were a bit more cynical and sarcastic in the 90s.
Well rape me! That was a bittersweet symphony of sex and candy! You are my hero.
Oh yeah. Mix tapes / CDs were big. There were no iPods. We used to put groups of songs we liked on a tape or CD in sequence. There used to be an art to it.
They started off pretty rough, but my word we were fat and happy at the end of them.
Everyone had a good job with a nice income; civil liberties and privacy were still real; no-one took the whole anti-science thing seriously; women were expected to decide when to have children; we met IRL to talk with friends, but had the internet to talk with strangers a world away; people had stopped doing coke; smoking was trending down, but not in bars; hair and shoulders were much, much smaller.
The nineties were a good time.
Yeah, but the funny thing is that it didn’t work out that way for us; it took another generation or so for that to actually pan out. I mean, I didn’t know ANYONE graduating from college who didn’t have a job. That is, who wanted one- I knew plenty of people going further on in the academic world.
Office Space was THE zeitgeist movie for a lot of us who went to work in the mid-late 90s in the technology industries.
Although I was born in the '60s, the '90s were mostly a blur. By the late '80s I’d met my wife and finished uni. I wasn’t much into pop culture or music so I just kind of waded through the entire decade working and doing not much else. Other than the IT boom others have already mentioned, nothing about the '90s really stands out for me.
For me, the 90s come in two parts: the 1991-1993 period and then 1993-2000. The first part involved a recession and really horrible music. The latter period involved still pretty bad music(although not as bad), and a booming economy which created a lot of opportunities, plus daily headlines that involved personal scandals of individuals we’ve never heard of rather than useful world or national news.
There was Clinton/Lewinsky, obviously, but also OJ, the Menendez brothers, JonBenet Ramsey, John Wayne Bobbitt, Amy Fischer, Kerrigan/Harding. Of course, those things still go one at the same frequency as they did before, but during the 90s there wasn’t much else the media found worthy of reporting on. “Yay, the stock market hit new highs! Unemployment hit new lows! But an ice skater was attacked by a mysterious assailant! we can ride this story for months!”
Yup. But it’s amazing how people still worship those styles. Most pop music styles become punch lines, or something you used to listen to, but for whatever reason the people who grew up with grunge and gangsta rap still regard it as the greatest thing ever.
The funniest part is that there was some theorizing going on in the musical press that the music was popular because of the times, that teens and young adults were angry, disgruntled, and wanted social commentary and shoe gazing rather than partying. This was a pretty mild recession. The greatest recession since the great Depression though, saw the chart dominance of Hannah Montana, Rihanna, and Beyonce. You’d think youth would be REALLY angry and emotional around that time, but nah, they just wanted to dance.
Same here. Most of my class mates had jobs within a year of graduation or went on to grad school. But working in tech was definitely more Office Space than The Social Network.
I got my first email address on the campus of the University of Michigan in the fall of '93. My friends and I would waste time between classes insulting each other’s mothers via email. It was new and exciting.
Pagers/beepers were the amazing way to keep in touch when you weren’t at home. You went to the pager place to pay your bill every month.
MTV was adding more non-music programming, like Real World, Road Rules, Singled Out (Jenny McCarthy’s introduction to America), Beavis and Butthead, Daria, Loveline and Liquid Television. But there was still a little bit of music programming, mostly packaged into shows like Alternative Nation, Headbanger’s Ball, Yo! MTV Raps MTV Jams, 120 Minutes and Total Request Live.
There were two cable comedy networks competing for your laughter at one time: The Comedy Channel and Ha! However, in the early 90s, there was only so much laughter to go around, so they combined them into Comedy Central. Craig Kilborne was the host of The Daily Show.
Puff Daddy, the Notorious BIG and Mace dominated the Top 40 and Hip-Hop airways in the late 90s; Snoop Doggy Dogg, 2Pac and Dr. Dre dominated in the early 90s. Rappers from the west and east coasts were at war with each other.
Popular music could be divided thusly: Gangsta rap (Snoop, Dre, 2Pac, Biggie), alternative rock (Nirvana, Pearl Jam, REM, Garbage, Breeders, Liz Phair, Jane’s Addiction), and pop (Backstreet Boys, NSync, 98 Degrees, Spice Girls, Britney Spears). Oh, and country music had a major renaissance thanks to artists like Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, Tim McGraw and Alan Jackson.
DVDs were introduced in the late 90s. My first DVD player actually came with 10 DVDs (movies like Stepmom, Six Days Seven Nights and Stargate). Blockbuster initially allowed one wall to be the DVD wall.
And finally, girls were really in to breaking nice guys’ hearts for no fucking reason whatsoever, by doing things like having their moms lie about where they were on, say, a Wednesday night, while they were really at a frat party with some Russian exchange douche, drinking kamakazes and doing who-knows-what with him. And then the nice guys who had their hearts broken would hole up in their sad studio apartments for days on end drinking Busch Beer, smoking Marlboro reds, listening to the Beatles and eating beef pot pies they bought at Kroger for 99 cents. This was mostly in the mid-90s. By the late 90s things were much better.