No, I think I get what’s meant here. My first several internet accounts simply consisted of a dial up account through a terminal window. Text and ascii art only. All apps ran on the hosting machine, nothing locally. It wasn’t until the mid-90s when I got my first true SL/IP or PPP account (can’t remember which) that my local machine was ‘on’ the Internet in such a way that I could run web browsers and stuff and see imagery.
Here in Germany, the phone card - credit-card-sized smart cards that you could buy with a number of credits on it that you could use for payphones - were introduced in (IIRC) the later 1980s and largely replaced coin-operated payphones in the early 1990s. For a while, a phone card would have been considered by many people to be an essential item that you should carry around in your wallet. Of course, that didn’t last very long, since by the end of the decade everybody would carry a cellphone around; payphones still exist in Germany (though there are way fewer of them than there used to be), but nowadays people use them so seldom that nobody would bother to get a phone card, so the phone-card-operated payphones have, in turn, been replaced with credit-card-operated or even coin-operated machines. I’ve always found it interesting how the phone card technology came just a tad too late to have any major impact; sort of a transitional stage between the coin-operated payphones of the past and the ubiquitous presence of cellphones today.
Oh yeah, that’s because cars in the 90s, even brand new ones, had really shitty stock stereos. I had one that you couldn’t hear if you cracked the window open. I made the mistake of trying to turn it up so I could hear the radio over the wind and it blew out the back speakers. I got a Saturn in 2001, and even though it’s nothing special, I remember thinking the radio sounded fantastic compared to anything I had in the 90s.
(And the custom audio usually wasn’t much better. It was louder, but it rattled the car and sounded like crap, and least for the relatively lower middle class people I knew. I’m sure rich people probably had great systems back in the day.)
Phone Cards were huge in New Zealand around then (very late '80s-mid/late '90s) - people used to collect them they way philatelists collect stamps and so on. The phone cards had all sorts of very cool and regularly changing designs on them - often pictures of NZ scenery and wildlife, from what I recall.
As you say, they were eventually rendered obsolete by cellphones and phones which accepted credit cards; when I was in NZ not too long ago the international roaming on my phone wasn’t working so I went looking for a phone card and couldn’t find anyone to sell them to me. Telecom NZ said they didn’t sell them and sent me to the post office. Post office said they didn’t have them and sent me to The Warehouse (a large retailer). The Warehouse said they didn’t sell them and suggested I try the local dairy (corner store). Local dairy didn’t have them, didn’t know who might, and said “Don’t you have a mobile phone?”
In the end I found a WiFi hotspot and sent the people I wanted to contact an email. From my phone. Which I couldn’t use to telephone anyone with. 
Software was huge. You would go into a big box store and see isle after isle of software. There was software for just about everything you can imagine: word processing, typing tutorials, film databases, math & graphing software, electronic phone books, etc. Most were on CD or 3.5" floppy.
Newspapers were still a popular thing.
There was no Craig’s List or eBay. If you wanted to buy/sell/trade stuff you would use the classified section of the newspaper or (more commonly) a paper publication called something like “The Trading Post.”
People still used the Phone Book.
Overhead projectors weer still in use.
Only criminals carried guns.
Meth and heroin weren’t everywhere.
The '90s were a banner decade for me. Returning to the US from Thailand in 1990, I lived in Albuquerque for a while, which I enjoyed the hell out of. Then I attended grad school in Hawaii from August '91 to December '93, and that was fantastic. Then back to Thailand in January '94, and I’ve been here ever since.
I have to say Thailand was a nicer place back then. The political strife that permeates Thai society today did not begin until that bastard Thaksin took office in 2001. In many ways it’s physically easier now, what with new mass transit and the Internet and such. But to tell you the truth, I liked the Thailand of the 1980s and '90s better than I do today. Even the bar scene was better, like night and day, which newbies moving here today just cannot understand. And that’s another thing – too many damn farangs (Westerners) here now, many more than before.
Yes they were. People just didn’t talk about it back then.
Yes, meth use actually skyrocketed in the 90s, there just wasn’t much said about it until the 2000s. Heroin was so widely used that the term ‘Heroin Chic’ for ultra-thin models became commonly used. OTOH, if you don’t work in law enforcement or medicine, and don’t run in circles where people use hard drugs, you wouldn’t experience this as part of your ‘like to live in the 90s’ any more than you would today.
Craigslist and Ebay were both started in 1995, so later in the decade, if you had access to the internet, you could use both of them (though I think Craigslist was San Francisco-only until around 2000).
I didn’t get a home computer until 1999, so I used a local free classified paper called the Thrifty Nickel in the 90s. I bought a cheap amplifier for my guitar that way and a friend used it to buy a used car.
But the late 90s was when everyone and their grandma tried to get rich using eBay to sell whatever junk they had in their garages (that they were sure would be the next Mickey Mantle card or Superman #1).
I beg to differ on both of these. I guess it depends on who you knew.
Certainly the right of citizens to carry firearms has been expanded since the 1990s. It’s certainly the greatest growth area in the field of civil rights over that period other than LGBT rights.
Ha! Looking at the personal ads in the back of your local alternative paper was almost always good for a few laughs back then.
I think what I remember most is that it was a happier time- more optimistic and less fearful. I attribute this to the sort of collective deep breath and smile that happened after the Cold War ended, and before the collective tooth-gritting and anus-puckering that happened on 9/11.
Between about September of 1991 and September of 2001, there was a stretch of time when the economy was on a steady rise after the recession of 1990, and when the US was on top, with no serious threats. I think that’s the main difference that I see, other than the technological changes. Outside of technology, the general public feelings of the past 15 years have been more or less consumed with paranoia and worry about economic downturns, ongoing foreign wars and mysterious Islamic terrorists who might strike with no warning.
It makes for a more nervous public feeling for sure…
I turned 18 in 1999. A few observations.
Places seemed more different, Ireland different from England or America than nowadays. There are still differences but instant global culture means people of a similar background across 1000s of miles have little problem communicating about pop culture and brands like Starbucks, which was a novelty to me when I visited NYC in 1999 are now ubiquitous across Europe. You still get threads here asking about Britishisms or clarifying other regionalisms but back when I was a kid it often took many months, sometimes years for a film to be released here. Currency-wise, although the UK still has Sterling, I can use my Euro across much of Europe, no more coming home from holidays with exotic looking loose change.
Ireland at the time was far less diverse than it is now. In terms of multiculturalism, inside 25 years it seems to have almost caught up with traditional immigrant nations like the US.
I remember staying up late at night to catch a film, thinking I’d never have a chance to see it again if I missed it. Lots of people I know had vast collections of films taped off the TV but pre-recorded videos never seemed to be as popular as DVDs became from '98/'99 on.
Buying live bootleg tapes of favourite bands, Oasis, Radiohead, Blur, the Prodigy etc. off street vendors.
Blowing £17.99 on a CD and realising you only liked 1 song on it.
For a while during the mid - '90s youth fashion seemed to change at a bewildering rate. When I look at photos of my sister and her pals around the time of Kurt Cobain’s death versus what my friends and I wore a couple of years later, it boggles my mind, although the rocker/grunger look has never totally died out.
Infrastructure-wise, Ireland was still very backwards, with few motorways.
Everyone in Japan and America lived in the future.
I know this is partly a function of growing older, getting educated but my frame of reference was minuscule by comparison with what it is now.
All all my friends talked about for much of high school was starting bands, being in bands, and the Simpsons.
Towards the end of the '90s there was an optimism in Ireland related to the Celtic Tiger that I suspect will not be felt again in my lifetime. My generation was perhaps the first since the state began to feel like their future was here at home, not in Britain, America or Australia. Then a few years later the wheels came off the cart and half my friends emigrated!
The good one was always track nine.
CDs didn’t get popular until the mid-90’s. Around '94 or '95, I bought a copy of Microsoft Visual C/C++, and it came on twenty 3.5" floppy disks.
I was digging around through my office’s inventory a year or so ago and ran across a copy of Windows for Workgroups 3.1.1 from 1991. I think it was 6 floppies to install DOS, and 10-15 more to install Windows itself. We don’t have any floppy drives anymore, but I didn’t throw the disks away, who knows when we’ll need them again!
I had a portable CD player and a pull out one in the car. CD’s were typically $10-$13. Maybe they hit $17 if you went to a mall to buy them but every record store in my area averaged $12 for the latest ones.
I never once thought it was inconvenient to physically buy CD’s, doubt most people did back then. Looking back it seemed inconvenient but not when everyone was just used to physical copies of everything.
It wasn’t inconvenient when it was all you knew, but it’s horribly inconvenient relative to the number of instant buying options we have now. I for one do miss physical music media a little. There was an excellent used record store next to my university.
I’ve been a working, self-supporting adult since the early 1980s.
Things are, for the most part, much easier now:
- Better access to transit (where I live, anyway)
- Shopping much easier
- None of this “wait until I have time to go to a bookstore” malarkey if I wanted to read something new
- Any kind of information I might want, quite literally at my fingertips
- My kids were born in the 1990s. They’re quite a bit more self-sufficient now!!
- If I need to work crazy overtime, I can - no need to be in a deserted office at 3 AM.
- My big tv was a whopping 19 inches and that seemed a pretty good size at the time!
- I’m able to communicate with anyone at any time due to the cell phone
On the down side:
- I’m older and tireder
- Money - despite absolute and relative increase in salary - is tighter due to being in the sandwich generation
- People can reach me at any time due to the cell phone!
Not wanting to hijack the thread, but I have a lot of shooting magazines and reference books from the 1950s and 1960s and it’s fascinating to note the topic of concealed carry almost never comes up - and when it does, there’s frequently some connotation of “Sure, you can, but unless you’re a banker/jeweller/private eye, why would you want to do that?”
Another particular thing about the '90s versus now that is featured in the film “The Perks Of Being A Wallflower”, hearing a great song on the radio but not catching who it was by and spending ages trying to find out who the hell it was. I think I spent 5 years trying to find “Don’t Fear The Reaper” again after hearing it on the soundtrack to The Stand Miniseries.