Then you read it incorrectly. I looked up the exact same graph before posting, and was careful to make sure what it was saying.
Take a sheet of paper, hold it along the x axis, then move it up to the data point representing “now”. You’ll see most of the graph for the 90s above the sheet of paper.
No one mentioned smoking - the 1990s is the decade where things switched from ‘they probably have a non-smoking area, unless it’s a bar’ and ‘this office might or might not allow smoking’ to the no-smoking-indoors default. The image of smokers huddled around outside of doorways to buildings didn’t exist before the 90s. It’s also the decade where it became expected for a person to have an email address (at least in the white collar world) and for businesses to have a web site.
Very slightly above it, yes. And parts of the graph are substantially below it. Hence “right on par.”
ETA: using this chart, we can calculate that the overall average for the decade plus one (I even included 2000 which was the ten year high) was $1.73/gal. in 2015 dollars. The AAA national average gasoline price today is $1.87.
No shit. My reaction to the thread title was “Are we talking about the 1990s?”
:smack:
OK, so not many folks around to discuss the 1890s any more. Still had to count a moment to convince myself that someone who had not been around to see the 1990s could conceivably be posting to the board. And not from some kind of Tommee Tippee / Playskool indestrucible-plastic laptop from their high chair or something.
Hi-jacking planes to crash them was uneard of before 9/11. In most people’s minds hi-jacking planes was something terrorists from the 70s would do and then have them flown to odd locations and keep the passengers as hostages while they made their demands.
When people ask about the 9/11 attacks with “Why didn’t the passengers fight back like they did on flight 93?” I honestly believe it was because none of them felt like they were in immediate danger. If there was any fighting back to be done it would be once they were back on the ground.
The '90s were good years for me. Both my husband and I had good jobs with companies that were thriving in a good economy. We had real raises every year and our raises exceeded the change in the cost of living. The economy was percolating along and it looked like the future would continue to be good. My boys were became teenagers in the mid-90s and although teenage years are never easy, they were good kids - busy, involved in sports and at school - making us proud for the most part.
The pace of technology change was accelerating. We had to make a conscious decision not to replace all of our tech every year. Yes, we may have been behind a bit, but by waiting until some of the kinks were worked out, we avoided some of the bigger clunkers of the era.
Music had gotten good again and Tuesdays were a big deal because that’s when the new music dropped and the new movies first came out for purchase. Movies were physically rented and returned - no Netflix yet. Cable TV was in the midst of its inexorable slide toward mediocrity, Monday Night Football was still on free tv.
Fitness was a growing trend. My fam was always sporty and physical, but now we found everyone else we knew getting on board. Instead of running alone after work, I joined a group of runners. We got a Y membership so we could use the gym and for the first time got trainers to set us up with specific programs and fitness goals. It was still pleasnt to fly - even for a family of tall folks like ours. We were able to take real vacations without it negatively impacting our job prospects at work. And we could afford them too because we got real bonuses.
You had to use your phone line to get on the web, and unless you got an extra line, your phone was usually busy. Anybody who picked up a phone kiboshed your connection.
Instead of the WORLD WIDE web, you had more of a regional community of online users. One of them was the sysop, and he/she paid extra for the privilege to host. Any long distance packets were on their dime.
Downloading files was usually a lengthy process, and best done overnight. Multitasking was not much of a viable concept because computers would run really sluggish while getting pr0n (if you were into that kind of thing). There were no previews except for a description provided by the sysop. Computer art was mainly ASCII based and GIFs were just emerging as the hot new technology. I don’t mean animated GIFs either; just single images usually 300 x 400 in size. Oh yes, aspect ratio was still 4/3.
I remember doing the same thing in the mid 1990s. I was a tennis fan, and the only way to get scores of matches without having to wait till the next day’s paper was to call the sports hot line. It was connected to the AP.
Most of my childhood took place in the 90’s, for me it was such a great time but then I also had a fun childhood for the most part. My parents were divorced by 95 and I lived with my Mother in a strictly middle class lifestyle so when some new technology came out it would usually be 2 or 3 years before we got the same things my richer friends already had. I remember when we first got a computer and connected to AOL with the 56k dial-up, seems so antiquated now, but if felt so high-tech.
It seemed at least to me such an optimistic time in America, but again I didn’t live in poverty or anything. My Mom worked full time so I was pretty much able to roam around the neighborhood or the woods with my friends any time I wanted. I do notice that a lot of kids today don’t seem to be outdoors as much as I was when I was a kid. My mom let me get a cell phone in 8th grade, an old-school Nokia.
It seemed like the cops and surveillance were less ubiquitous then than they are now, and we did a lot of stuff that today we would probably be met with zero tolerance and instant arrest, but that is probably true of any time period when looking back at the past. Sometimes I long for those days before cell phones when you could just get in a car and drive off without having someone calling you asking you where you are and what you’re doing.
Actually, given that cars get better mileage now, $5 will get you even further today than 20 years ago. so you’re doubly right.
No DVR or Tivo. You either watched **Friends **and ER at the appointed times, or you recorded them with a VCR. It was a pain in the rear. I had a huge collection of videotapes and I’d have to figure out what could be recorded over and what couldn’t.
Entire relationships were built on mix CDs. They were an art form. 
I’m so glad I was in high school before the rise of social media. Being a teenager was hard enough without having to deal with Facebook and Twitter bullying.
That depends on the car. In the 90’s several of my friends bought tiny Honda Civic CRXs(though the cars were from the 80’s) that would do 55 on the highway, 75+ if you drafted up a semi’s ass. Hard to get that with anything with 4 wheels for 500 bucks these days.
Minor nit pick: TIVo was introduced in 1999, so it just barely makes into our decade of discussion. But you’re right in that few people had one in that year.
Wide screen TVs were as big as pinball machines, and there was no HD programing content to watch. My “large screen TV” was 32" baby took 2 people to move from one place to another. I bought it for about $1,000 and then gave it away about 10 years later.
Along with the internet, cell phones were transitional. Few people had them in 1990, but most people (at least most people I knew) had one by 1999.
In 1990, Japanese food (“sushi”) was exotic in many parts of the US. Now, it’s everywhere.
Cordless phones were around in the 80s, but I don’t remember them becoming ubiquitous until the 90s. They were great because you could change rooms or check the mail while talking on the phone, or just move around freely without getting tangled up. There was a time when I thought “why does anybody need a cell phone when you can walk all around your property talking on a cordless?” The idea that you could call someone at the grocery store or while they were driving never entered my mind until I got a cell phone around 2000.
Also, you had a personal phone book with all your friends’ numbers in it, and memorized the ones you called most. Nowadays you just click someone’s name in your phone and it calls them. You don’t need to know any phone numbers now except your own (to give out) or 911.
Speaking of which, 911 was pretty new in the 90s. Most people had the local police, hospital and fire departments’ numbers hung on the fridge or a cabinet by the phone in case of emergencies.
… really?
No way. My Dad slipped on a hardwood staircase step in sock-feet one morning and slid down ka-BLAM into the landing wall and broke his back (compression fracture) in the middle 1970s and we called 911.
Maybe it wasn’t universal, I don’t know. This was New Mexico.
We didn’t have 911 in my little central Illinois village in the early 90s. It came online in maybe 93.
Macintosh computers used System 7 in the beginning of the 1990s. Pretty early in that decade they switched from the Motorola 68000-series processor to the PowerPC. Windows 3.1 was the primary PC operating system at the begininng of the decade (we laughed our heads off at it) and many PC users still used MS-DOS.
All computers used floppy disks but they had become pathetically small for removable storage, so there was a removable-storage competition going on. Older technologies such as the SyQuest and Bernoulli drives, along with newer technologies such as magneto-optical drives and whatnot, were on the verge of getting their butts kicked by Iomega’s Zip drive.
Automatic teller machines (ATMs) were now ubiquitous although they weren’t all as of yet on the same system. Around New York, the primary network was NYCE although one of the biggest banks (maybe THE biggest), Citibank, had their own proprietary incompatible network; outside of New York there were other systems and your bank card might or might not work with them depending on what ELSE your bank card was set up to be able to network with: I had one that would do Cirrus and a different one that would do Plus. At the begining of the decade there was no charge for using another bank’s ATM (or at least not in New York City metro region).
I had an internet email address in 1991, courtesy of SUNY / Stony Brook, but to use it I had to be connected to the university’s IBM mainframe, a 3090 that ran CP and had an extremely primitive (by my snobby Mac-centric standards) interface when you terminal-connected from one of the slave PCs in the computer room. Internet was ONE network but not the only one for things such as emailing and messaging — we also had BitNet and had no sense of internet as The Big Thing. And off-campus no one had heard of it.
Between 1993 and 1997, The Internet became a very big thing, a trendy thing that everyone was talking about. It was the World Wide Web. You used a browser, like Mosaic, to get to it. There was text and some of the text was actually a hyperlink — you knew this because all hyperlinks were blue until you had clicked on them; those you’d visited (well, recently at any rate) turned purple. People were putting up their own web sites. PageMill was popular among early homesite creators.
Windows 95 arrived in 1995 (duh) and just about killed the Macintosh. It was a huge leap forward although many of us Mac users still found it inferior to what we had in many ways. The demise of Apple was widely predicted for the rest of the decade.
After 12 years of Republicans being in office, the US elected a Democrat, Bill Clinton. Republicans collectively went apeshit: prior to those 12 consecutive years, there had been one 4-year Democrative presidency, Jimmy Carter, and lot of folks felt like that was an anomaly, a rebuke to the Republican party for Nixon’s sins. (Carter had beaten Ford who had pardoned Nixon) (and he hadn’t been elected himself, he’d been Nixon’s veep). Before Carter had been the 8 Nixon years (completed by Ford after Nixon’s resignation). Bill Clinton’s wife, a headband-wearing feminist with bangs and political interests of her own, evoked a lot of right-wing wrath.
The economy got strong along with the internet and there was a “dot com bubble” where stock prices in internet sites flew sky-high although they provided no paid services whatsoever, just free sites that had a lot of visitors. People kept asking “So how are they going to make MONEY?” but the IPOs kept taking off like wildfire.
• Step 1: create an internet site
• Step 2: {redacted}
• Step 3: profit!
Towards the end of the decade, Apple came back off the ropes with the iMac. (MacOS X came along then too but it was more of a harbinger of good things to come than something very useful for a while. 10.0 was dog slow and lacked essential features).
Gay rights grew during the 90s but far fewer people had ever even heard of transgender or other gender-variant issues. Bisexuals were largely regarded as confused people or liars who were still halfway in the closet.
Sushi was trendy.
Movie theatres were carved up into multiplexes and Blockbuster had locations everywhere. You’d rent VHS tapes and watch them at home and it was eating into movie-theatre profits. DVD players existed and became more common and VHS faded during the decade. Movie-rental joints continued to proliferate though, with little niche places specializing in various types of movies. Blockbuster increasingly moved towards 237,000 copies of the 10 most recent big hit movies and not much depth of choice aside from that. The smaller non-namebrand video rental joints would have obscure titles and old stuff.
MP3 files came along in the early 90s. Before that, digital music was in WAV or AIFF format, huge files, 50 MB files, that kind of thing. (yes, 50 MB was huge. one side of an album would eat your entire hard drive!) Napster, a sharing service for exhanging MP3 files, almost killed the recording industry.
This makes no sense from a technical perspective. It’s like saying your car is physically incapable of carrying five pounds of wood but is capable of carrying five pounds of flax. Data is data, unless it wasn’t actually an ISP, but some other kind of network “service” which would later be killed off by real ISPs.
Bill Clinton was cool. But otherwise, my overwhelming impression of the '90s was that it was the mostly pointlessly angry time I’ve ever seen - it was basically required for everyone to have a huge chip on their shoulder for no apparent reason (a Dennis Leary or Bill Hicks routine from that time provides a taste of it) and no higher motive than ME ME ME. Most people around me seemed hypnotized by either gangster rap, death metal or (god forbid) “Goth”. This was a time when OJ Simpson and Mark Furhman were dueling cult heroes for a while, for god’s sake.
At least the 2000s were entertainingly annoying and had cartoonish villains running around. The 90s were just sludge.