What was life in the 1990s like?

In My Humble Opinion
142

Even though I am not male, I would like to add some memories.

In the early nineties I was working, renting apartments. I remember BIG hair, all the time. People laugh now, but back then it was a pain in the ass to do your hair everymorning, using a curling iron and a can of aqua-net. They had really bad music too, as I recall. During the late nineties was a lot of fun. Rap music, country music, pop music, it was all good. We could finally put away our aqua-net. I remember going to clubs a lot. We would put two tables together, with three ashtrays, and have lots of fun dancing.:smiley:

The one thing that scarred me for life about the early nineties, was AIDS. Terrible, terrible, aweful times. :frowning:

143

Take into account that I’m English, from very near London, and born in 1975.

In London, the decade started with lots of bomb threats still in London, and a fair few real bombs. I worked in a large shopping centre near London at the very beginning of the decade (I started work younger than usual) and it got completely cleared out a couple of times due to bomb threats. Later, I worked at Victoria station and we could count on a few hours’ free pay once a month or so due to bomb threats.

At the end of the decade there was the Good Friday Agreement and then the Omagh bombing, and it almost all seemed to stop.

Drugs were mainly LSD, e, speed and dope. Cocaine was more for the rich and heroine was more for the desparate.

Music was grunge and indie bands like Pulp, Blur and, sadly, Oasis. Raves were what you did unless you were boring or old.

Mobile phones gradually decreased in size and increased in popularity over the course of the decade. Most people had Nokias - that Nokia ringtone is the sound of the nineties.

The internet was so new that, on my MA in 1998, I had to write my own protocol for how to cite websites.

Most people didn’t have the internet at home, even at the end of the decade. It was more common by then, but I would still get asked to do things on that internet thing by people who didn’t have access themselves.

Living away from my friends, to call them I would queue up to get to a phonebox, use a phonecard to call them, then have them call me back. When abroad I did the same or used friends’ phones, and I wrote a lot of letters. Personal letters were still fairly common if you were in another country for a while.

Fashions were similar to now, because the nineties is now long ago enough to be retro. I can actually still wear a skirt that I wore when I was 16, because it is fashionable again and I still fit it.

144

Yep, Yep, Yes, uh huh, check, indeed, Oh hell yeah, absolutely, definitely, right, correct, and … er, only wore a kilt at my sister’s wedding.

I was born in Epsom in '74, loved the London dance scene in '91/3 and had a wall covered in mad fliers with digital brains and lasers splattered all over them. We’d drive up on a Saturday night, park the car somewhere near Oxford Street and head to the Astoria (Camden Palace or The Brain on Fridays). After going for breakfast at an all-night rave cafe we’d pick the car up 6/7am Sunday morning - never got a ticket - and drive home in zero traffic. Almost everyone who drove had a hot hatch, either a Golf, XR2 or one of those mad, tiny 1.9 Turbos.

If we were short of cash we’d head to someone’s house or flat and party for 2/3 days, often just playing taped recordings of rave stations. Very silly times.

Fashion was very jeans-based, with the width of the leg dependent on who you identified with, some being ironed with a crease. There were a LOT of black clothes being worn, along with oversized metal rings shaped like skulls, sports wear was becoming more common, shoulder pads were for the guys, along with hairspray and, occasionally, eye liner.

Designer beers (if you weren’t driving), especially Grolsch bottles with the collectible caps, and alcopops (Lemon Hooch) were very popular, real ales were for old farts and spirits for card games.

145

The old farts and ghosts drank nut-brown ale while playing whist, I’ll wager.

:wink:

146

It sounds like the difference between the 1990s and 2010s is probably greater in England than it is in America.

147

In 1990 I had a computer that ran at 16Mhz, had 2mb of RAM, a 60MB hard drive and a 2400bps modem. There was no internet, but you could log into Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) by dialing in with a terminal program and it was all text-based. The good ones had multiple phone lines so several people (up to about 8, but usually just 2 or 3) could be connected at once. Sprint (I think) had a service that allowed you to call at 2400bps to anywhere in the country for lower-than-voice rates so that you could call a BBS long distance for not too much money.

CNN and 24/7 news was a new thing that really came into its own during the 1991 Kuwait war. Prior to CNN, the news used to come on a local station - usually 5:30 for local news and 6:00 for world news.

TV shows could run for more than 1 minute without a bunch of fast camera pans and flashing graphics… people had longer attention spans.

The country was a lot more conservative in the wake of beating the Soviet Union into collapse.

Telegrams still existed (barely). You’d go to an office, write a short note (a couple of sentences) and they would send the message to a recipient, where it would be delivered to their door. I sent such a telegram from Uzbekistan to Nevada in 1998.

148

Geez, I remember asking my previous generation what growing up in the Great Depression was like. Now people are asking about the 90s, like it’s some kind of stone-age era where life without today’s comforts is unthinkable.

Social Networking actually began in this age, but it was more regional. I found friends through local bulletin boards (such as WWIV) that only used two colors and no pictures. You could use pictures actually, but they took too long to download, so their availability wasn’t that desirable. I remember the ah, adult sections required a queue to download pics, and I usually set those for overnight. Didn’t see what beauties I had till next morning.

It was possible to go long distance in BBS use, but somebody had to pay for the charges, which actually took distance into account. Usually, there was a server in the area owned by somebody who made boocoo bucks off emerging technologies such as AOL (don’t laugh… I knew a guy who worked for them and the bastard retired at 33) and sought constructive ways to spend money.

Size mattered back then, because big things look impressive. Stereo systems with amplifiers the size of car engines and speakers the size of coffins. V8 engines that didn’t give a shit about fuel economy. Bulky computer cases and monitors that stayed put and left indentions in the floor.

Coffee wasn’t as popular back then, and microbrews were starting to take off. Radio stations weren’t iPod play lists. DJs had to actually physically load music and use several machines simultaneously. Gosh, it all sounds so soul-crushing, but daily life was just as easy or difficult to maintain as it is today.

149

In the '90s, we couldn’t move threads.

Coffee culture (Starbucks, etc) didn’t exist yet. If you drank coffee, it was at McDonalds, Dunkin Donuts, or Denny’s.

I managed to buy an unauthorized South Park t-shirt prior to it being a full series. For a brief period of time, I was off the hipster-cool charts. I could say, without irony, “It’s an underground thing, you’ve probably never heard of it”

My university library got a few (finger quotes) “see dee rom” computer stations for the card catalog. It was still faster to just go the file card catalogs because there was inevitably a first-time computer user trying to figure it out.

150

I got every one of those references.

Riding bikes, and later driving, to the local stand-up video arcade smithie to play Double Dragon, Golden Axe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Saturday morning cartoons. Getting up at 6 AM and eating cereal and watching cartoons in my PJs until noon or 1 PM.

Having to go to the library to check out books for a History report.

Calling a friends house 200 times, until they finally got back home from where ever and answered the phone, to see if they wanted to come over to watch a movie.

Good times.

151

Depends on where you were! Starbucks was already making money in Chicago and Vancouver by 1990, but yes I wouldn’t say it went “global” until the very late 90s and early 2000s.

152

I remember when I discovered fire. That was in 1993, I think. Or was it 1994?

153

What you call “indie” we called “alternative rock” in the US. Specifically “brit pop” if you are talking about Pulp, Blur and Oasis. In addition to grunge, we in the States listened to a lot of jam bands (Dave Mathews, Blues Travelers, etc) and alt rock/pop like Smashing Pumpkins, Matchbox 20 or Live or new punk like Green Day.

The “rave” scene was sort of on the fringe. At least for preppy J.Crew frat guy types like me. Although during the summers off from college, my high school buds used to party all weekend at a club in the middle of nowhere in Westchester NY that played techno until 5am. In the mid to late 90s when I lived in Boston, that music was popular at several clubs on Lansdowne street we used to frequent.

Later the whole “nu-metal” or “rapcore” thing became popular. The second time they brought back the Woodstock thing in 99, it was a lot like I imagine the original Woodstock from the 60s might have been - if everyone attending had been a coked up Red Bull drinking, Limp Bizkit wanabe douche who decided to lose their shit and burn the place down.

154

Coffee culture definitely existed in the early 90s in the pacific northwest, and Starbucks was just one of several coffee shops.

155

My dad was an elementary school principal. One Saturday morning circa 1991, he brought my sister and me over to his school so he could show us something that would totally blow our minds. Of course when he sat us down in front of a computer, we rolled our eyes. We used computers all the time at school. We knew all about the giant floppy disks and everything. How did Daddy think he could ever blow our teenaged minds?!

Suddenly this “Microsoft Works” thing comes up on the screen, which was white. Not black. Already, my mind was kind of cracking open. Daddy then showed us all the options for font style and size. We spent the next two hours typing our names in all the pretty fonts and printing them out. We would have been 13 at the time. Our minds truly were blown as we realized all of the cool school reports we would be able to turn in. But it would be a couple of years before Daddy finally replaced our Brothers word processor with an actual PC.

I was the one who first discovered that the computer had the capability of hooking up to the phone line. To do what, lord only knows, but I knew it did something interesting! I asked Daddy for permission to try it out, and he shot me down because it would cost money. Shortly afterwards, I would visit a classmate’s home and he would show me his “Prodigy” connection, which I thought was something so rare and expensive that no regular people had it. Which meant my classmate was not “regular people”, in my mind. That would have been about 1994.

I was a college freshman in 1995. Email was such a new thing that the school provided special training to show you how to connect to Telnet. Back in those days, your email account was the same as your box number in the school post office. The only emails I got were from my twin sister (who I saw all the time because she lived with me) and the usenet subscription that I belonged to through one of my classes. I discovered hotmail around 1998. I still have all those old emails.

I didn’t own my first PC with an internet connection until 1999. Earthlink, dial-up. I think I paid something like $9.99/month for some ungodly small amount of data (or maybe they sold it by minutes at that time…I can’t remember). Which is why I would only “surf the web” when I was in the computer lab at school. Also around this time I discovered Audiogalaxy, which preceded Napster. Using an ftp client, you could trade mp3s with people. But it was…strange. Like, some people’s account settings require you to upload four songs for every one you downloaded from them. I believe the very first mp3 I ever downloaded from the internet was “Bridge Over Troubled Water”. When I opened it up and listened to it for the first time, my mind. Was. Blown.

My mind has not stopped being blown.

156

It was going strong in New Mexico back as far as the 1970s. Hawaii too.

157

It was quite strong in 1688, when Lloyd’s of London began in a coffee shop.

158

Dark times.

We had to go to blockbuster or Hollywood video for movies and sometimes they didn’t have the movie you wanted. Sometimes, you had to rewind the movie because the person who rented before you forgot to rewind the tape.

We read newspapers, no smartphones for weather updates and traffic updates.
It took five minutes to download ONE SONG.
Jelly shoes were tacky and gave your feet blisters.
Internet was very slow and you couldn’t use the phone at the same time.
We had to program our VCR to record our favorite shows. Sometimes you recorded the wrong show and had to wait for a rerun.

Sometimes you forgot to feed your tamagotchi and you had to put it to sleep.

This is the start of “reality TV”.

Also I was a kid in the 90’s so basically I was under parental dictatorship. 7 pm bedtime my foot. :stuck_out_tongue:

159

Oh, the humanity.

The tape-machine hawkers flogged separate rewind machines so your snowflake VCR would be protected from the barbarity of having to rewind the tapes itself.

160

Like others, I would disagree with this. If anything the whole “hang out in a coffee shop” feels very very 90s. It’s not a coincidence that two of the biggest shows of the 90s, Friends and Frasier, had coffee shops as one of their primary locations.

161

Heh. One of my friends still has his Prodigy email address from something like 1991. (Although at the time I’m not entirely sure if Prodigy was accessible via regular email or if it had to be done within the service. By 1993/94 it was, as I remember emailing him from my university account using elm or pine back then.) He used to buy/sell/trade cassette tapes of Pearl Jam and Nirvana bootlegs via Prodigy. Now, it’s a couple clicks and a couple seconds or minutes, and you have access to a mountain of bootlegs. Back then, we had to use the post office and wait, imagine that! Taped everything on metal or CrO2 tapes to preserve quality, because digital for home recording wasn’t really quite mainstream yet.