Most “it was a simpler time” nostalgia is silly. This goes for any era, because what people are remembering is that it was a simpler time for them. The time before they were married, had kids, had a grinding 9-5 job and mortgage.
The late 90s really were a great time to find a job in technology. You’ve used a computer? You’re hired.
Green Day and Pearl Jam were not on the Classic Rock station.
The best part for me though was, like others mention, TERRORISM wasn’t being thrown in our face all the damn time.
Thanks, Derleth. I actually hadn’t thought about that first e-mail or the teacher’s rule until relatively recently, when Twitter came out and I started thinking about character limits.
This is a good point. My wife and I have discussed this at length and even fought about it. She was born in 1982 and grew up in Long Island and Florida. I was born in 1982 and grew up all over the world, though primarily in the south of England.
She grew up with almost no knowledge of terrorism. The “worst thing” that happened when she was a kid was the Challenger explosion; I don’t think she even knew about the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, though she’s very intelligent, reasonably self-aware, and takes a much greater interest in world affairs than the average American.
I grew up with terrorist attacks that seemingly happened almost daily, though none of them were very close to me (my brother narrowly escaped injury in the Canary Wharf bombing because he was visiting a client’s office that day).
To her, 9/11 was the new worst thing that had ever happened. It completely changed the way she thought about terrorism, from something that was essentially just a theoretical danger to “OMG WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE!” I’m not sure why the Oklahoma City bombing didn’t have this effect.
To me, 9/11 was not a particularly big deal. It was a tragedy, obviously, but it didn’t shake the foundations of my world view or seem like a paradigm shift in foreign affairs or anything. I mean, the WTC had been bombed just a few years earlier. When talk of the Iraq invasion began, I thought it was a joke. But obviously it really was a big deal, because of the way Americans reacted to it.
The 90’s were easier for me for the simple reason I was earning 3 to 5 times my current income - the Great Recession really kicked my ass.
Thanks to my expensive company provided alpha pager I was textin and driving long before it was cool 
Probably because the OKC bombing was a domestic attack carried out by two lone Americans without any ties to a terroristic organization. Most people regarded it as an isolated incident. 9/11 was a large-scale attack carried out by al-Qaeda, whose leader, Osama bin Laden, ran training camps for terrorists and had planned and launched previous attacks on U.S. installations.
Actually dial-up modem speeds maxed out at 56 kbps, because that is the theoretical maximum for a dial-up modem (even today). I got my first 56 kbps modem in 2000.
Earlier, I got a 2400 bps modem in 1991, and a 14.4 kbps modem in 1995.
Also, if you needed to get off at a rest stop that wasn’t pre-planned, the protocol was to zoom to the front of the caravan, pull in front of the leader, and put your right turn signal on. This told everyone that you needed to get off at the next exit.
You could still smoke in restaurants and bars, albeit in the smoking section (in restaurants). I was a smoker then and it seemed like AGES ago. I cannot believe we all put up with it, to be honest.
You’re right, my fingers put that ‘2’ there when I wasn’t looking. 
Regarding terrorism and security, I remember in the early '90s there was a travel board at school (a literal wooden-and-cork bulletin board, not an electrons-and-pixels board) where people could arrange to find travel partners or rides and so forth. It was not unusual for people to sell unneeded plane tickets. My freshman year, I got homesick and at the last minute bought a stranger’s plane ticket from Chicago to New York. It didn’t matter that it had someone else’s name on it - nobody checked your ID at the airport!
Gas is cheaper today than it was for most of the 90s. It’s been “cheap” for awhile now.
The Soviet Union was breaking up, and that dominated the Nightly News (we still watched The Nightly News back then) for some time. The beginning of the 90s would seem like pre-history to the internet generation, but the end of the 90s might not seem so different. The internet popped onto the scene for most of it right tin the middle of the decade, so it created a big gulf between 1991 and 1999. There were really no laptops in 1990, but decent ones in 1999. Cars would seem like technological dinosaurs from the early 90s.
Carbs were good. Fat was all bad. (That’s oddly similar to some of the stuff in Sleeper.)
I’ve been working at the same job since 1993. I was in my early 30s and did not take a single class related to a computer during high school or college. This was true of 95% of my office mates. We had these heavy monitors that were a cube about 12”x12”x12” that had a black screen and green letters. These were dedicated terminals that we used to perform most internal functions. We also had a Macintosh Classic each which was a BIG step up for me. At my previous job, we shared one between 7 people because no one saw any reason why we would need our own.
I absolutely love that I have so much entertainment available to me in terms of books, movies, music, and tv and it takes up practically no room at all. We thought we were so slick with our cds that took up SO much less room than records.
I, for one, welcome our technological overlords. I can’t help but enjoy the dichotomy of telling my TV to find me a Bob Newhart episode from the 70’s while I do the sort of hand embroidery my grandmother did in the 30’s while sitting on my couch in 2016.
Adjusted for inflation, gas prices are actually right on par with what they were in the 90s, but for the past decade and most of this decade they were substantially higher. And of course his point remains: $5 would actually get you a substantial distance back then.
That’s what I was going to say- there was the early part (1990-1995ish) and the latter half (1995-1999). The early part was mostly distinguished from the 1980s by the end of the Cold War, and the subsequent chaos involved with that. But technologically, socially and in pretty much all other ways, it was very much like the 1980s had been.
For me, the various phases rather conveniently coincided more or less with transitions in schooling; high school ended for me in spring 1991, and college ended in 1996. There was some overlap, but for the most part, I tend to think of the 1990s as breaking into 2 phases- college and after-college.
The latter half was defined more by the rise of home computers and the public/commercial use of the World Wide Web. Prior to about 1995, plenty of people had computers, but they were either for students / businesses to do number crunching, programming, or word processing , or they were game machines. There just wasn’t much else to do. So unless you needed one for work, or you were a student, or you were a gamer, you didn’t necessarily have or need one. The internet was around (although not the WWW), but was almost completely an academic network.
That all changed with the rise of the Web in about 1993 or so. Suddenly everyone wanted a PC to go online and send emails, chat and view web sites (probably mostly to download porn, if truth be told). So they took off starting about that point- that’s when Dell got big, and several other manufacturers as well. As an associated phenomenon, the economy flared up very hot, and times were good- jobs were plentiful, people had money, etc… until about 2001 or so, when the internet bubble popped.
Politically, it all seemed to really change with the rise of the Web, as it allowed for the nutters to seek each other out and interact easily, and for minor things to become amplified and disseminated much faster. I mean, people didn’t like Reagan or Carter, but there wasn’t the same absurd level of partisanship that you started seeing in Clinton’s administration.
Probably in a day-to-day sense, there are three things that stand out to me when comparing nowadays to back then. First, there weren’t smartphones, or even cellphones in common use back then. So you kind of had to plan ahead, and there wasn’t the latter day flash-mob style behavior of texting around 30 minutes before a bunch of people decide to meet at a bar. It was more like you’d start talking to someone earlier in the day, and phoning around, and getting the plan set hours ahead of time. Or in the era of email, but not ubiquitous cell phones, you’d start emailing your friends after lunch about where you were going to get together after work for happy hour. And you’d stick to it until most everyone got there.
The second thing that strikes me as interesting is that credit cards weren’t as universally accepted. I remember having to go get cash with my ATM card or cashing a check. If I planned to go buy any retail stuff, I had to remember to take the checkbook or enough cash with me. Nowadays, i just have my credit card and my debit card, and I’m set to buy damn near anything I can afford, nearly anywhere. I actually heard of a cash-only restaurant near me and thought “What a pain in the ass.” when in fact that wasn’t uncommon back then for fast-casual local places.
The third is even more lame, but the repeal of the 55 mph speed limit law in 1995 meant that you could actually get places a lot faster. Prior to that, the law of the land was 55 mph on all highways, and a lot of people stuck to it like glue.
Gas prices weren’t much lower then than they are now, and I think that adjusted for inflation, they might actually be cheaper right now (march 2016) than they were in about 1997-1998 when I recall $0.87/gal prices.
You could meet/see off loved ones at the gate of the airport.
I carried a copy of the yellow and white pages and a couple dozen roadmaps in the trunk of my car in case I decided to go somewhere unplanned.
You had to carry change for pay phones, tollways, and other small purchases.
You spent a lot of time wondering what was taking people so long to arrive.
If you had to find something out, you needed to visit the library.
If people didn’t answer your calls it was because they weren’t home, not because they were avoiding you.
If you took photographs, you had to take them to a photo shop to get them developed.
If you wanted to buy something, you had to find a store that sold it ir would get it for you.
No, they are lower now. Read the graph you linked to.
How silly. Of course that poster implied “as compared to now, when it does’t.”
I did read the graph I linked to. That’s why I linked to it. And I understand the implication he made, and he is right. He was commenting on inflation really.
I can give a quick perspective of the late 90s from a consumer electronics point of view as having been a BestBuy employee at that time.
Home computers were a hot item and the internet was just getting started. Since tablets and smart phones weren’t around yet it was either a desktop or laptop. AOL was a major service provider and computer packages (pc/monitor/printer) were getting dirt cheap if you agreed to sign up with AOL for a year or two. Apple still had not made its big comeback yet so everything was Microsoft.
Flat panel tvs were just starting to be seen but were way too expensive for the average consumer. Tube tvs were getting larger, 32”-36”, and folks with money were buying rear projection sets. The pictures still sucked though since the market was dominated by the VHS format. DVDs were also in their infancy, there was no such thing as streaming, or HD, or widescreen, and movie rental places were all VHS. If you wanted to watch a movie in widescreen you had to pick the VHS box labeled “letterbox” and then see black bars on the top and bottom of your 4:3 tv.
Since nobody was taking pictures or videos with their smart phones yet the digital camera business was booming while people watched the film camera business die. No more fuji, Kodak, or polaroid.
Camcorders were becoming smaller but still needed tapes, 8mm or VHS-C.
Home theatre and home stereo systems were a lot more popular back then. Whole rooms dedicated to displaying tower speaker systems. 5.1 channel dolby pro-logic was hot.
Car audio was a bigger thing. Auto makers were still putting crappy radios in vehicles and everybody wanted a cd player. Multiple CD changers were extremely popular. 5-12 disc changers that went under your seat or in the trunk and hooked up to your car stereo.
Since CDs were the dominant form of music and there was no such thing as downloading tracks, CD sales were through the roof. Rows upon rows upon rows of cds. Those little cd sections you see now days at Target and BestBuy are a fraction of what music stores once were.
And with no ipods invented yet everybody’s music collection was their cd collection and they liked to show them off. CD storage towers, huge cd binders, cd visor clips for your car, etc. Portable music was considered a portable cd player or Discman. And because a cd laser mechanism does not make for good jogging, terms like “10 second buffering” were a big selling point.
Cell phones were just getting popular. Since they didn’t use data yet everything was sold by airtime. So many $ per month got you so many minutes. Long distance and roaming was never included. And they had separate minute charges for “non-peak” and “peak” times like nights and weekends.
That’s all I can think of right now.
Living in Indianapolis and growing up a Pacers fan, I used to call the newspaper’s free NBA hotline to get updated scores and standings.
I don’t know about that. Plenty of people had been using answering machines to screen their calls since the 80s.