What were the 90s like to live in?

In My Humble Opinion
61

Information access was shallower and narrower: You didn’t have as many topics to research, and you couldn’t do deep dives as easily. In theory, sure, the information existed, but so did Paris: You kinda knew it was out there, somewhere, inaccessible to your broke ass.

I remember the Internet before Web publishing as we know it became widespread. Web publishing is creating websites using pre-existing technology, which doesn’t remove the need for actual technical skill but typically means you spend less time out in the weeds making the tool to make the tool.

The point is, the amateurish websites of that era took longer to build than the bland-but-professional websites you can make over a weekend now, because back then practically every site was built from scratch, often with pixel-perfect screen widths in mind, such that it would break into a horrible jumble of nonsense if viewed on anything other than the screen size the original designer had. Heaven help you if you had a different browser, or different version of the same browser, or different fonts installed, or any number of reasons.

That, plus a general cluelessness about the Internet, had an impact on the kinds of sites that existed. They tended to be either extended advertisements or the equivalent of public-access cable shows, produced by individuals for a mostly illusory audience. (This was also the era of the webcounter, something now mostly lost to history, which purported to count the number of times a given page loaded. I never knew one which was credible.) Those kinds of pages certainly exist now, but back then, they were all that existed, and therefore the information you got was idiosyncratic. The modern Internet, which has broad and deep information about practically everything (certainly everything that’s made it into books), is a product of the last ten to fifteen years.

62

ZipperJJ did.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=19171806&postcount=28

63

Exactly. I was going to say it was simpler because I was ten to nineteen years old in the 90s but then I remembered it wasn’t because that’s when I first learned the hard way what autoimmune disease meant and had to go back and forth to the hospital on a regular basis. Times are easier now because I’m in remission and don’t have to get stuck with IVs every three months.

64

I was a teenager in New Zealand in the 1990s and it was good - the fact I had a happy childhood helped, but generally it was a prosperous time and as several people have mentioned, terrorism wasn’t a “thing” - that was something that happened in movies when swarthy gentlemen with political disagreements hijacked American airliners and demanded they go to somewhere tropical for discussions on resolving their grievances.

Cellphones only came in non-briefcase sizes from the mid-late '90s - I knew someone who had one in 1998/1999, a Nokia 2110 - and it was considered Extremely Cool.

If you wanted to watch a TV show, you had to do it when it aired or learn how to work a VCR. Also, because you could only watch whatever shows were on TV, there wasn’t a huge amount of “buzz” around other cool shows that existed elsewhere in the world that might also be worth watching. A family friend in the US sent us some Beavis & Butthead VHS cassettes before the show aired in New Zealand and my friends throught that was just awesome.

Funnily enough, the computer gaming world was a lot more connected - there were heaps of magazines and places on the web to talk about games and gaming, so there was a sense you were involved in a very cool (and large) club with other cool people (girls were allowed but I didn’t know many who liked games in the 90s - it was seen as a supremely nerdy thing to do and the nerds of the 90s hadn’t yet grown up and gone on to make the big bucks and invent Facebook yet).

The first digital cameras came in the late 1990s - we had one which my grandfather sent it; it was 1MP but even at the time we knew it was The Way Of The Future.

Also, The X-Files was hugely popular, but no-one took its conspiracy themes seriously (at least no-one I knew). The idea the government was spying on people was, while not patently ridiculous, just seen as pointless - what would they gain from that? (Remember: The internet was a lot smaller and lot less ubitquous back then, too).

Computer games were ludicrously expensive - I recall Dark Forces costing NZD$153 when it came out in 1995, which was just a mind-boggling sum. Console games weren’t cheap either, but you could rent them from video libraries which was often a much, much cheaper way to do it - or have some “try before you buy” time.

It was a good time for gaming (not as good as now, I’d suggest, though) - a lot of the classic series we enjoy today started in the '90s. I was absolutely blown away by the original Fallout in 1997 - it completely changed my view of what computer roleplaying games were, and could be. A lot of those classic games hold up really well in their own right today - people have been trying to “update” Jagged Alliance 2 for more than a decade now and no-one has managed to get it right - JA2 is still an excellent, fun game today.

Just to round this out, I think if you want to get a really good snapshot of 90s zeitgeist - go and browse through the ClipArt gallery in a copy of Microsoft Word or PowerPoint (even a modern edition). The art style, the way things look (CRT computer screens!) is extremely 90s, but in a good way, I think.

65

I dunno, I remember the 90s as a time where it could have been acceptable to be an unironic UFO freak (maybe not a huge surprise, even people like Spielberg seemed to semi-believe in aliens through the 70s and 80s). Before the internet, it was pretty common for college students and crazy aunts/uncles to pass around slim photocopied booklets by crank UFO scientists.

66

And airplanes and airports and malls. My friend’s college banned smoking IN CLASSROOMS the year before she went.

AND “expensive” ones where I was were $2/pack, but no one paid that anyway with all the buy-one-get-one deals.

67

Until say 95/96 most of the kin and friends still had hope that the future would be better than when we were growing up; after 96 not so much so. But that could have been a effect of our ages rather than the times themselves.

68

Jerry was still alive … but he died … so I got a job.

69

I drove a 1983 Datsun Nissan Sentra Diesel for seven years and seven months in the nineties, and diesel fuel was less than a dollar a gallon all those years, so I strongly disagree with you, Voyager. That car got 43 mpg in town and 50 on the highway.

As for other 90s issues, my salary doubled in those years. Unfortunately, the marriage from hell ('92-'97) left me in deep debt, so '98-'99 were recovery years (along with 2000-2002, after which I was out of debt).

70

Ok, I think it’s kind of sad you nerds view decades in terms of the level of web technology available.
I graduated college in 1995, so I tend to view the 90s as 2 time periods. It wasn’t always the “dot com bubble”. I remember watching the movie Falling Down in 1993 and finding the idea of being a laid off and unemployable middle aged engineer somewhat terrifying.

A bunch of white fraternity guys sitting around in baseball hats and baggy jeans watching Boyz in the Hood, drinking 40s and playing domino wasn’t considered a “hate crime”. Then again, we weren’t doing it to make fun of black people. We were doing it because we thought it was “cool”.

Men and women kind of dressed like slobs. I was looking at some old college photos and it’s all baggy jeans and oversized white t-shirts

I frequently got lost while driving.

My wife and I were watching that Jersey Shore show with Snookie and The Situation (as in they were in the show…we weren’t hanging out with them watching their own show). We talked about how when we were that age, we did the Jersey Shore thing after college (Belmar for me, LBI for her), but back then, getting drunk every weekend and hooking up with bar skanks was not something one could make a multi-million dollar career out of.

71

It was simpler time indeed!

Computers didn’t even exist in the 90’s. The new rage among the wealthy elite was the horseless carriage! Telephones were still rather new-fangled and only in the hands of the elite few – mostly a business tool rather than something in every home. The Democratic Party was the conservative party in those days, while the Republicans were the progressives. Roosevelt was a Republican, and look at all work he did for conservation! (Okay, that was the early 00’s already.) The nation was consumed with war fever, and itching to give Spain a whupping, heavily egged on by the press (for whom it just sold more newspapers).

“Modern medicine” (such as it was at the time) was simpler too. If you got sick, you usually died, often horribly. Antibiotics hadn’t been invented yet. The mid-90’s saw the first use of X-rays as a medical diagnostic tool, but it certainly didn’t become a widespread tool until much later.

The OP asks how life was in the 90’s, and that just a few vignettes that come to mind.

72

Oh, but there was such a horrible hullabaloo about the money! Sound money versus Free Silver, all the talk of the Crime of '73, and Bryan thundering against the Cross of Gold. McKinley won, ultimately, and I wonder what happened to that Bryan fellow. Probably got himself set up in a galvanized iron tabernacle behind a railroad yard in the Coca-Cola belt, but I’ll be a monkey’s uncle if he didn’t almost win it all.

But don’t forget the Northwest Indian War and how Mad Anthony lead our brave boys to victory over Blue Jacket after St. Clair suffered his horrible defeat. Our position as far west as Lake Superior was assured!

73

Oh, the unironic UFO belief definitely was (and still is) a thing, but I don’t recall the faint whiff of conspiracy often attached to it being taken seriously, at least in NZ. The attitude seemed to be that while it was quite probable aliens may have visited Earth, the lack of conclusive proof wasn’t due to a Government cover-up, if that makes sense.

74

The idea of 911 has been around since the late 60s, but even in 1987 only 50% of the population had it.

I’m not old enough to really remember it, but I think my town had the general idea but implemented it strangely. It was something like 912 for the police department and 915 for the fire department.

75

Godzilla (1998) was a documentary, don’t let anybody tell you otherwise. :wink:

76

This was (mostly) my response from the other thread. i think it still applies:

I was just out of college and in my 20s. I graduated into a recession and many people I knew had a hard time finding a job. In the early part of the decade people my age were kind of bitter but got less so as the decade wore on and things got better economically.

The internet was new and relativity hard to use. I dialed in using what was called a Shell account that used Linux. I paid by the hour not because my ISP (which was a tiny company run by a handful of people) charged that way but because the only phone number I could dial into was long distance (I am pretty sure 90% of that sentence is alien to someone who is now in their 20s :slight_smile: )

The internet had three parts, mainly, E-mail, something called Usenet Newsgroups which were kind of like Web message boards like this one) and something new called The World Wide Web. I browsed it using a text based browser called Lynx because that was all you could do with a Shell account.

Personally I spent the better part of the decade first in a long term relationship and then a few years getting other it when it went south.

That notwithstanding, all in all it was a good decade.

77

This is why major cities still spray for Matthew Brodericks every summer.

78

Let me sum up the 90’s from my perspective. I was in HS throughout the first half of the 90’s.

  1. Jobs. Jobs everywhere. You couldn’t walk outside the house without stepping into a job. I was a teen in the 90’s and man was jobs ever plentiful even for me. I started working at 13.
  2. Street Fighter 2 was pretty much the only video game. If there were more, no one noticed.
  3. you could still walk out in public without seeing everyone focused on their mobile phones…which was nice. We had something called eye contact back then.
  4. Kids still played outside. You could get into mischief as a kid without the world making a huge fuss over it and wanting to put your parents in prison for disciplining you…not this Dr. Phil BS.
  5. Car Audio was all the rage, seemed everyone had a system in their car.
  6. 60’s/70’s cars were cheap, plentiful and easy to get parts for.
  7. Ren and Stimpy, Rocko’s modern life…you know, decent cartoons with humor, not this LSD seizure that they are today.
  8. Saved by the Bell did not represent teen life whatsoever…it was cheesy then too.
  9. You could cut school more often and still pass just fine, I used to just walk out in the middle of the day and go wherever at random times.
  10. Most kids were not still attached to their mother’s umbilical cord at the age of 24. Shocking I know.
79

I think to compare the 90s against today, the best example I can think of is how we listened to music.

Music was most commonly played on little plastic disks called CDs. These CDs were relatively expensive (about $17 for a new one), so you tended to only purchase those CDs you really liked. To do that, you had to physically go to the music store, often sifting through piles of crappy CDs no one wanted to buy in order to find great bargains. Sometimes you waited for your favorite radio station to play a song you liked and then recorded off the air. People amassed large collections of these things that often reflected their personality. And typically the only way to listen to them was on an oversized component stereo system that people could hear halfway across the quad (if it was any good). People often traded or loaned out CDs or made “mixes” to give to friends or girl/boyfriends.
In contrast, now you have the convenience of downloading or streaming whatever you want to listen to whenever you want and then listening to it wherever you want with your iPod.
I guess the main difference is the modern method is a lot more convenient and
cheaper, but it also feels more superficial and disconnected from other people.

80

Technology was primitive. infrastructure sucked. More poverty than today. Terrorism was here during 90s as well .

But Hindi music was brilliant. Sample -