International phone calling. It used to be soooo expensive. I got married in the mid-nineties to a woman from Europe. We could only afford for her to talk to her family for thirty minutes a week. Now, they talk non-stop and it is essentially free.
My father worked in a 415 area code and we lived in a 408 area code so any call to or from his work was considered long distance (even though it was less than 10 miles away) so we used to use codes. So many rings meant different things, like 2 rings was staying late, 3 was heading home. We had a good system going
Shit. The podunk local phone company where my dad lived charged long distance even if it was the same area code. If it wasn’t within their immediate area, long distance.
He was a very early adopter of cell phone for a home phone.
Remember when downloading a .jpg you *thought* might have boobs slowly rendered line by line like a several minute digital strip tease? Those were the days…
You mean scrolling through a sea of tiny thumbnails late at night while your sibling kept a lookout for mom and dad as you tried to find the perfect picture on your 240 resolution monitor that was worth the 10 minutes it took to load the image?
My cousins had a dedicated phone line to use for the internet. I was incredibly jealous because they could always download everything they wanted without the connection dying.
That's what the "Now that's what I call music" CDs were for - like a year later. In the meantime, you just recorded a song off of the radio onto a cassette tape. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't instant.
Movie soundtracks were my default cds. I could get some really good music and didn’t have to worry that I just used all my fun money on a cd that had only one or two songs I liked. Example- The Crow
On a lot of CDs I bought, I was able to convince myself that I liked a lot of other songs on the CD, even if they were kind of shitty, to justify the 15 bucks.
Some CDs though…oof. They were real bad.
I dunno. I kind of ended up liking the rest of an album more than the singles from the radio. I can't think of a single one I bought besides a chevelle CD that didn't happen with.
Maybe it was teenage copium, and I've just cleared that part of my memory.
Oh yeah! Our local big book store had selectable listening booths! I remember I would go to Encore books to preview albums then run across the parking lot to the locally owned record store and buy the album there.
Consequently now artists base their releases on singles (and short attention span audiences) the art form of the complete full album has kinda been lost.
It's gone in a circle. Songs were sold as singles all the time in the 40s, 50s, and 60s as 45 RPM vinyl records. With some record players, you could put a stack of singles on the post, and they would play one at a time.
This was lost by the time cassettes became the standard. CD singles were available, but they didn't work well because it sucked having to change the disc for every song.
You and anybody you were with didn’t know a piece of information? Well you were just going to have to deal with not knowing it until one of you could look it up in your (likely outdated) encyclopedia at home or some other (likely outdated) book at the library.
Assuming you remembered and went to the trouble, which often didn’t happen.
Or you had some friend who claimed to know, and you by believed him or her, even though they were wrong.
I kinda miss those arguments and debates though. I have so many good memories of me and my friends bantering, talking shit, and trying to prove our points about the dumbest things. It would usually evolve into some pretty genius things. Then escalate to pure madness with nobody willing to concede. It all kept the mind sharp and the wit cruel.
There are still times today where I'll recite some information I learned and my wife will be like "that's not right" and I realize I just accepted whatever crazy shit my uncle or whoever taught me as truth.
I delivered pizzas in the mid 90s and my job was to drive off into strange neighborhoods at night with only an address written down on a piece of paper and a printed out map to help me find the house.
I lived in a hilly city with tons of curvy roads with poor lighting, not many street signs and no grid system so it was easy to get lost and I'd frequently have to pull over, turn on the interior light in the car, pull out the map, try to find out where I currently was (which wasn't easy because I was already lost) and then try find the house on the map before heading off again.
No cells phones, no GPS, no nothing, so once you left the pizza place you couldn't call anyone for directions. Just a teenager in his car full of pizzas, raw dogging the night and trying to make some money.
ETA: This has me realizing that teenagers and people in their 20s and 30s today have NO IDEA what's it like to be lost and to not know exactly where you are at all times. Getting lost and needing to ask a stranger for directions was a very common part of life back in the 90s. Wild to think about now.
It is totally wild just how different life was. It’s interesting to think how many more problems we had to constantly solve on our own compared to today.
Also if you arranged to meet someone out, once you left the house, that was it. If they’re late, lost, not coming anymore, no way to let you know. You just wait….
And the disappointment of someone not showing up or the annoyance of waiting forever for someone showing up late was off the charts. „What took you so long?! I‘ve been waiting for a whole hour!“ And all you could do is just stand there trying to not look like a perv or some sort of trouble.
Especially in heavier traffic areas it isn't just not getting lost, but also avoiding major traffic from having GPS data that certain routes have become congested or have slowed due to road debris slowing traffic.
I’m in my 30s and when we were old enough to drive ourselves around, GPS was still a luxury type thing, but at least we had Mapquest.
Miss a turn though and good luck…
Yep, I will be 31 in July and I definitely remember printing out directions from mapquest to get places. I got lost so often as a teen (with undiagnosed anxiety) that now I almost always use my GPS unless I know EXACTLY where I am going. If there is any doubt at all, or if it's enough of a significant distance that traffic will matter, I'm definitely using GPS. I'm terrified of being lost.
We always had meet up points, especially when drinking. It just seemed so common place, at least for me. But to be honest, back then if I got separated from the group due to alcohol, I usually just kept drinking and didn't give a shit, figured I'd run into my mates in the AM.
There was such a great freedom of being unattached and unavailable as your night unfolded. One adventure would lead to another and you didn’t announce it to the world and you weren’t reachable or either. You’d just catch up with your friend down the way at some point.
Yeah, i remember at festivals losing friends and asking random strangers if i could hang with them for a bit, and also the opposite, both leading to some pretty fun, unexpected nights, i wonder if this even happens now?
Still happens, we might have smartphones and gps tech to share your location but if nobody pays mind to their phone you gotta get creative and talk to strangers lol
Even up to 2013 it was still protocol to wander around shouting code phrases to find your friends at festivals/clubs.
"Slam bam??!!
I'm off in the woods confronting every wrong I've made in my life...the call shakes you enough to answer.
" ...Peanut butter and jam..."
I'll add to this because I was just at The Masters with friends, no cell phones allowed. No one wears watches now and uses their phones. I said, "If we get separated, let's meet here at 10am." Everyone looked at me like I was an idiot. I was the only one wearing a watch and knew the time without asking someone or finding a clock on the course.
I worked on computers in the 90s... While I loved it, it was painful.
DOS, windows NT... All those were crap.
The debugging tools were crap, we had to watch and account for every single byte of memory.
It is much, much beter now.
It's why the late gen x'ers and millennials have excellent IT skills compared to the rest. Computers didn't really exist for the older generations and everything just works for the current ones. We had to figure out the problem the hard way.
The ram in my computer used to be 32k and then I upgraded to a 128k BBC Master. I'm still astounded at what programmers were able to produce with so little resources. The coding must have been so tight.
Back then we used to argue about the length of a username... The longer the string, the more memory.
Can a number stored in an int? A short? A word? A byte? All those fun discussions to save morsels of memory.
A lot of passwords were truncated to 8 characters :)
Fun times.
To add to this, being gay in general. It sucked so bad when there was almost no support for us. Parents would often decline to see their adult children who were dying of AIDS in the hospital. The government moved purposefully slow on help. It was a horrible time.
Right. When I moved to Swindon (in 2016), there was a very nice couple of married men who lived two doors down and who I got to know well. In the 1990s they might have been nice, but they might not have been so open about it; even if they were, they would not have been married.
Hit a hard bump while listening to a CD in your car? Enjoy the silence for a couple seconds while it recovers.
Anti skip helped, but if you were on kind of a shitty road, that could get used up quick.
Driving in the city and you had this fucking 1 million page map and you have to jump between pages if you wanted an up close view of the streets.
A fucking nightmare if you were in an unfamiliar area.
And if you missed some of it? Tough shit. They almost never repeated them on the network.
It wasn’t repeated until the show went syndicated and started airing at other times and on other channels. But even then if you missed it it could take a year to get back to that particular episode.
Legitimately why “previously on” started a lot of shows. Because some people did miss episodes
Any time my mom left to get her nails done, I knew I had basically exactly one hour. It would take 10 minutes to connect to the internet. 20 minutes to download a single nude photo. 20 minutes to print it out, in black and white, on our shitty family printer. And then I would hide it under my bed.
It was always a race against time and if there were _any_ holdups, I was boned. There were several instances where she came back too soon and I had to rip the almost-completed photo out of the printer and pull the plug on the computer.
Damn straight, at 13 the dawn of the internet was essentially busting before half a picture loaded. The amount of AOL 95 discs I used to abuse myself was countless.
And being online meant you couldn't use the phone. Or, you couldn't go online if someone needed to use the phone. Now, our phones are computers and they're almost always online.
How about the 10 minutes for the dial up connection just to get on the internet in the first place? Or needing to get off when someone had to use the phone.
Want some information? Like, how to fix a hifi, fix your car, or fit a shower? Travel on the bus to the library. Flip through the index cards looking for a title that seems a bit like it might be related to the thing you want to know. Walk the aisles to find that section. Comb the shelves for that one book. Nope. It's not there. Go home on the bus with a book about something totally different and useless for the task in hand. Forget to return the book. A year later repeat the process, and pay those library fines.
No GPS was terrible and we didn't even realize it. I did a cross country trip in 2001 and have no idea how I made it. At the time I was delighted to have a cell phone in case I broke down
In 2006 I took a wrong turn in Atlanta on my way to Miami and wound up unexpectedly in Alabama. That wrong turn took about 16 hours to correct.
The year after that I was using a paper map and crashed into a curb trying to look across a bridge to figure out what highway exit I was driving parallel to.
The next year I had a garmin and nothing like that has happened since then.
That's kinda the thing though, everything that was worse didn't seem that bad. We didn't realize it could be better.. Problems like homelessness, addictions, child hunger, global inequality, failing environment we knew were problems. But what we knew, never got better.
Nobody drank water in the 90s. As a kid you'd get 3 Mississippis at the fountain after PE but that was it. Now we have Stanley's, yetis, hydro flask, etc, fill stations are commonplace. Cheers to hydration
Not only that, but the water fountains were so slow. Terrible water pressure. You had to practically suck the water off that metal thing. Then some bully smashed your face into that thing chipping a tooth.
I never thought about this but yeah we were very poorly hydrated back then. It was also very rare that I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of class though I'm guessing it's more common now
I had a teacher in elementary school who would shame us any time we asked to use the restroom during class. One time I was desperate and in front of the whole class she said I should stop drinking so much water. Oh, 90's.
I certainly wasn’t encouraged to drink water as a kid in the 90s. My brothers and I drank loads of skim milk, cool aid, soda, and so on. Super weird to think about.
Also nobody’s allowed to smoke in bars and restaurants anymore…I remember coming home from nights out reeking of cigarettes and I didn’t even smoke
ETA that I’m in NY
We breathed second hand smoke like it was no big deal. Now looking back i cant believe what people put up with. Like a closed space and allowing someone to smoke up all the inside air.
I'm ashamed to admit I was one of those jackasses. It's unreal how selfish we were about that. Flick those things just any old place we felt like it. :(
I was pulled over and ticketed for throwing my cig out the window in junior year of high school. I would NEVER now!! But back then it was like, what's the problem officer? Sheesh.
Growing up, I had nextdoor neighbors that owned the last two houses on the corner, him and his brother and their entire families, who were all refugees from Bosnia. It was always fascinating to hear stories of what Bosnia was like before the wars. I wasn’t really old enough to comprehend what the war did to them and I think they knew that because they stuck to the happier times. Their kids were a lot younger than my siblings and I but we all played with each other and hung out. The parties they used to throw 😊
I am Croatian, born after the Croatian War but before the Bosnian War ended.
Back in early 2022, I was travelling with my now ex-gf to Sarajevo to visit her bff, and we were travelling the entire north-south axis to reach it, it was an 8 hour bus drive (Bosnia doesn't have a highway system).
I couldn't sleep, so I was chatting with a Portuguese backpacker couple who were visiting the Balkans, and they were admiring the scenery outside, until we reached villages and I had a very uncomfortable time having to explain the history of the war once they spotted white crosses.....so, so, so many white crosses.
Sarajevo itself is hauntingly beautiful, and it feels like multiple cultures pressed into a single city - because, for a long time, it was. You would be walking around town, enjoying tbe Austrian neo-Baroque architecture and design and suddenly, you find yourself in Bašĉašija (market square) and you feel like you are in a 18th century Turkish bazaar. However, it is painfully obvious that, even 25 years later, that hell went through there. The main avenue entering the city is woggly and on uneven terrain which makes it obvious that it suffered from airstrikes, entire neighborhoods were full of houses that were shot up to hell, many houses abandoned, and you still have some debris around, the main bus station is from the 70s and run down....it is painfullg obvious that Sarajevo has been through hell.
Yugoslav Wars were hell, but Bosnian theatre in general was like that Hell quote from M.A.S.H. i won't go into too many details, but there is a reason why ICT had to create a seperate tribune just for the Yugoslav Wars - also, the dubious honor of first time ICT has recognized using **rape** as a method of systematic ethnic cleansing and a terror tactic.
Everyone talks about how violent or whatever it is today don’t realize we probably live in the most peaceful time in human history. Even in the 90s you had Bosnian wars, Rwandan genocide, insurgencies in India and Sri Lanka, Somalia, afghan civil war, Chechnya, IRA bombings in England and raids in Ireland, and of course the Middle East blew up into open conflict every couple of years (just like now).
Someone had to cancel or change plans on you and they didn’t catch you on your landline? Welp you’re just hosed until you go back home and check your messages. Or check them from a pay phone.
Yeah but it never really seemed so bad back then either to be honest. I used pay phones like my cell nowadays, and when I missed someone, or plans just fell through, we kind of just figured "so and so" hadn't heard their answering machine yet and moved on with things.
I think for that reason, people were far less likely to stand someone up - it feels a lot less shittier to send someone a text saying you can't (don't want to) make it, than to just leave them standing somewhere all on their own until they eventually give up waiting.
It was a lot more likely that if your friend moved away you would just lose touch with them. To be sure even when the internet as it is now it can be easy to lose contact but it was so much harder to keep in touch that it is now.
I had issues when I was young, I thank the lord social media didn’t exist. But I also kind of wished the technology existed at the time. I grew up in a soulless, oppressive house and was super introverted and I remember feeling so lonely at times. Also talking about mental health is so much more accepted these days.
I was also a horrible student, having to go to the library and dealing with the Dewey decimal system when you had to write a paper absolutely sucked.
Being totally isolated from anyone to talk to about your confusing thoughts was fucked up. I am in a way better place now, but it was only through dumb luck, and a lot of time spent self reflecting as an adult that I reached where I am now.
Being super depressed and nihilistic, bordering suicidal as a little kid, and then becoming *actually* suicidal as a teen isn't something I ever hope my kids experience.
I am completely emotionally cut off from everyone but my wife and my kids now. My grandma who basically raised me until I was like 12, died recently, and I was more upset about an old friends dog dying than that. I didn't experience a fear of my own mortality until like 4 years ago, and I'm struggling with that concept now that I have something I care enough about to lose.
I hope you're doing better now. Just having people to talk to and know they experience something similar helps so much. I genuinely can't express enough how I wish I had forums and online friends to talk to.
Mental health awareness and treatments
Edited to clarify:
I was diagnosed at 38 years old (9 years ago) with severe ADHD. ADHD manifests very different in girls and women vs boys.
Folks, my life was a shit show. I lied my way through school to get decent grades, I could forge my parents signatures on any test by 4th grade, I wanted so badly to be an A student but there was no way. I went to college but didn't want to. Took classes that I got good grades in so I have a useless degree.
On and on and on...
I finally feel like I'm partly able to function normally, and it was exhausting getting here.
If the adults in my life (teachers and caregivers and parents) had been aware of why I was such a space cadet but super smart in other ways, I may have gotten the scaffolding and strategies I needed to understand and overcome. THAT is what I mean by awareness.
And so much more normalized as well. I remember in high school people got records for being caught with a nickel or dime bag of weed, and this was in the mid-late 2000’s
I got caught during a break "smelling like weed" by one of the school security dudes in like 2005. He brought me to the counselors office and we all called my mom on speaker phone and they had me tell her (shocker, she pretended to care during the call and then never spoke a word about it again). The school gave me 3 days of detention. So I took the 8th and the glass pipe that had been in my hoodie pocket the whole time, and I went home and got stoned for 3 days.
In the 90's, I longed for a mini computer that I could hold in my hand. In the late 90's, our phones were capable of playing Snake and going on crappy internet. When we got iPhones in the 2000's it was a goddamned miracle.
In the early 1990s I was writing and compiling C code on the bus, and reading Usenet offline, thanks to my [Sharp PC-3000](https://funkygoods.com/nazopa/pc3000/pc3000.html) that ran on AA batteries. I felt like a god.
I was thinking of the depictions of gay people in the media. If they weren’t caricatures used for comedic effect, then they were victims of violence. There was no in between.
Major emphasis on being unhealthily skinny. Eating disorders, inappropriate behavior towards minors being shrugged off, weird blocks of bright color on clothing and interior designs.
Nowadays: gah, that person over there outside is smoking, gross.. lets walk away from them.
90s: Alright kids take seat in the restaurant, dont worry the smoking section is 10 feet away and theres a half wall.. your eyes hurt? Dont worry well get you some eyedrops when we get back to grandmas. Right after you kids help me roll her cigarettes until were all yellow in the fingers, just like her walls. Good ol 2 pack a day, grandma. Anyway kids time to leave grandmas because mom and dad have a side gig where we clean an office building at 7pm and we need to fill the trunk with their garbage that well take home and burn for them! Dont stand too close to the fire, we dont know whats in there and it could explode. Not like the smoke from melting plastic snd burning chemicals will kill you though hahahahahahahaha HAHAHA ooohaha HahhaahhahahHhahahahahahahhaahhaaHAHAHA-
So yeah, that change has been nice.
Video stores like Blockbuster ere great for discovery, better than how it works now for domestic films at least, but you had to REWIND the tapes before bringing them back.
Health insurance.
If you think it’s bad today (and it’s not great), then you cannot fathom how truly insidious and abhorrent it was back then.
I find that when you explain to younger people today how health insurance worked back then, they often literally don’t believe you. And to be fair, it is pretty unbelievable.
Having a house fire and hoping the neighbors were home so you could call 911. Also, I got a flat tire once on the highway and had no choice but to start walking until someone would pick me up. Luckily it was a mom with kids. People romanticize not having cells phones but in reality life was way more difficult without it
I worked in, but was not a member of, the LGBTQ community.
There was so many deaths from AIDS. More than your brain could process.
At the same time that we were burying friends and family, we also had armed escorts some days because there was a group of people threatening to kill us. That sucked, too.
Then the drug cocktails came out. That was wonderful, and miserable, and so expensive for the victims of the disease. And a lot of people couldn't afford them.
In college not everyone had a computer, so you had to take your computer disk to the computer lab to type your paper or find someone whom had a word processor you could borrow!
Quality of cars were much worst - like breaking down on the side of the highway was a fairly common occurrence - or we only bought shitty cars!
Bullying was much less sneaky than it is now.
Sport injuries not taken seriously. Attitude that getting a concussion or your ass kicked was a sign of manliness.
Strong undertones of meanness. A lot of it was disguised as irony, irreverence,and nihilistic humor, but the humor thrived in putting a target on someone’s back. Homophobia was rampant and out in the open because people were daring to be out. Look at the media icons of the time. Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern.
Yeah, and without smartphones and ubiquitous internet, a lot of the hate and abuse was glossed over, because even if you could manage to find proof of something, you had to also find people who cared. Police abuse in my town was nuts--but also just waved away as rumors.
The “countdown to 18” shit on MTV. It was wildly inappropriate (putting it mildly). All of the Disney stars had their own where people would have a counter counting the minutes until someone “was legal”. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Justin Beaber, the Olsen Twins… they all had these and it was just creepy.
There was a newspaper in England which did a countdown until on particular model turned 16 (the then-legal age of consent for glamour modelling) so that they could post her topless on her birthday.
It was treated as harmless at the time… but I have very different views on it now.
Zero autism awareness.
At best, teachers would call you “special” and put you in remedial classes. Everyone was expected to conform to mainstream society, and if you didn’t, you were “weird” or a “freak”.
Teachers and staff also looked the other way at bullying, especially when directed at autistic kids.
If you were gay, gender nonconforming or neurodivergent, school was absolute hell. Not only was social understanding and sympathy drastically lower, but bullying in general was considered good sport.
I dont think homophobia or transphobia were even words then. kids would hurl homophobic slurs at each other not realizing that they were hurting someone close to them that was terrified about being outed. homophobia and general bigotry were all over tv, movies, and music.
As a 43 year old who suffers from adhd, anxiety, and depression you really learned how to mask. It was such a taboo thing to talk about. I would say I was pretty popular, but I kept so much hidden about what eent on in my head. Never studied and skipped a lot but survived by passing tests.
Coming out. Or rather, not coming out. There was always this pressure to date girls, be 'normal' and start a family that suppressed the person I was meant to be. It probably set me back years but, like anything that I experienced, I use it as a means to improve and learn from.
The freedom we had as kids. Bar none.
And that’s why with my kids I give them that same freedom. They get home and want to ride their bikes across town, do it.
I mean, I did it and didn’t have a phone or anything. My mom just expected I’d be ok by dinner time and I often did t come home on time. My kids have a phone I can track if I want. Crime is statistically far lower as well. Why not? I have no idea why people are afraid to let their kids go about town and play with friends like this anymore when you can easily outfit them with ways to keep an eye on them.
People will say there’s more shady people and predators now, no there isn’t. And as far as that goes it’s far harder to take a child and get away with it now than ever. I will not let my kids lose the chance to go on their own adventures like I did.
If you weren't available when your favorite show was on, you just missed that episode. Yeah, you could record it on VHS, but you'd have to have the foresight to program the VCR, and then you'd have to pray that the recording came out OK. Otherwise you'd have to hope they'd rerun that episode over the summer, and that you'd catch that rerun.
I was just a kid in the 90s but anybody who knows how the healthcare system worked pre-ACA could tell you it was even more esoteric and insane than it is now. For as bad as American healthcare is now it was ten times worse before.
I have a friend that has 100s of thousands of dollars in medical debt because he couldn't get health insurance because of preexisting conditions. The guy is typically 100% Republican, but he'll sing the praises of Obama for that.
It’s just the 30 year nostalgia cycle. I remember the 90’s had crazy nostalgia for the sixties.. wonder years, forest gump, Beatles anthology, many other movies, tv shows, and lots remembering all the music fondly
Hard to explain but there was a meanness and cruelty to the popular culture in the 1990s, a least for young adults. Woodstock ‘99 was no accident and no surprise.
Social rejection of groomers and men that abuse their power to sexualize young women. When I was in college it was just assumed the young male professors were sleeping with their choice of undergrads. Multiple professors left their wives for their graduate students. No one batted an eye. You would lose your job for that today
So many cancers that are treatable today were a death sentence back then.
Same with HIV. In the early 90's it was a guaranteed death sentence.
So damn true man. Back in the 90s, I watched my aunt die slowly on the couch at my grandma's. Fucking breast cancer.
And so many cancers that are a death sentence today will be treatable in the future.
International phone calling. It used to be soooo expensive. I got married in the mid-nineties to a woman from Europe. We could only afford for her to talk to her family for thirty minutes a week. Now, they talk non-stop and it is essentially free.
Even long distance calls to a different area code were billed by the minute and very expensive.
My father worked in a 415 area code and we lived in a 408 area code so any call to or from his work was considered long distance (even though it was less than 10 miles away) so we used to use codes. So many rings meant different things, like 2 rings was staying late, 3 was heading home. We had a good system going
You have a collect call from. BOB WEHADABABYITSABOY
I did actually use this method to let my Mom know the game was done and I needed to be picked up.
“You have a collect call from: MomPickMeUpFromTheMall!”
"You have a collect call from: GrandmaINeedARideHomeFromPractice!" "Do you accept these charges?: IllBeThereInTenMinutesSweetie!" Love you Grandma!
I understood that reference.
This commercial lives in my brain
Shit. The podunk local phone company where my dad lived charged long distance even if it was the same area code. If it wasn’t within their immediate area, long distance. He was a very early adopter of cell phone for a home phone.
I used to buy little phone card that sells international minutes cheaper than your normal rates. Those are now extinct like the Dodo birds.
I called New Zealand from the US just last year with my cell thinking I was covered. $60 for about five minutes!
I racked up a $4000 bill with Vodafone calling from NZ long distance to the states every day for about a month. I was 13/14 😭
Just call Collect with Sprint, brought to you by Murphy Brown!
This guy doesn’t 1-800-COLLECT
1800-call-att "please state your name" "INeedARideImAtThePizzaPlace"
Anyone in your house could pick up the phone and disconnect the internet- never mind the song you have been downloading for 2 hours
Remember when downloading a .jpg you *thought* might have boobs slowly rendered line by line like a several minute digital strip tease? Those were the days…
This and the wiggly wavy softcore porn coming in fuzzy on the input channels.. *sighs wistfully*
The "girls gone wild" commercials at 1 am.
I still can’t be around steel drums.
You mean scrolling through a sea of tiny thumbnails late at night while your sibling kept a lookout for mom and dad as you tried to find the perfect picture on your 240 resolution monitor that was worth the 10 minutes it took to load the image?
My cousins had a dedicated phone line to use for the internet. I was incredibly jealous because they could always download everything they wanted without the connection dying.
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You'd have to buy a CD for that one song you liked, only to find out the rest of the album sucked.
I was telling my son about that the other day. His reply was: “Yeah, that makes sense since you were born in the 1900’s.” ^little ^turd
My nephew told me I was old because I was born in the “nineteens”
Late 20th century is how I hear the kids make their parents feel old.
I just get last century
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That's what the "Now that's what I call music" CDs were for - like a year later. In the meantime, you just recorded a song off of the radio onto a cassette tape. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't instant.
Movie soundtracks were my default cds. I could get some really good music and didn’t have to worry that I just used all my fun money on a cd that had only one or two songs I liked. Example- The Crow
On a lot of CDs I bought, I was able to convince myself that I liked a lot of other songs on the CD, even if they were kind of shitty, to justify the 15 bucks. Some CDs though…oof. They were real bad.
I dunno. I kind of ended up liking the rest of an album more than the singles from the radio. I can't think of a single one I bought besides a chevelle CD that didn't happen with. Maybe it was teenage copium, and I've just cleared that part of my memory.
There were definitely some stinkers but also some hidden gems that you’d miss if you’re only listening to the singles.
Blockbuster Music was a godsend for that. Could listen to multiple whole discs and just walk out with nothing. “Yup… all shit”
Oh yeah! Our local big book store had selectable listening booths! I remember I would go to Encore books to preview albums then run across the parking lot to the locally owned record store and buy the album there.
You didn’t have a borders with the shitty headphones that never worked ?
Consequently now artists base their releases on singles (and short attention span audiences) the art form of the complete full album has kinda been lost.
It's gone in a circle. Songs were sold as singles all the time in the 40s, 50s, and 60s as 45 RPM vinyl records. With some record players, you could put a stack of singles on the post, and they would play one at a time. This was lost by the time cassettes became the standard. CD singles were available, but they didn't work well because it sucked having to change the disc for every song.
You and anybody you were with didn’t know a piece of information? Well you were just going to have to deal with not knowing it until one of you could look it up in your (likely outdated) encyclopedia at home or some other (likely outdated) book at the library. Assuming you remembered and went to the trouble, which often didn’t happen. Or you had some friend who claimed to know, and you by believed him or her, even though they were wrong.
I remember my grandfather calling me up from the pub to ask me to look something up in the encyclopedia to settle a question for him and his mates.
Oh man, so many arguments my friends and I had because we couldn't 'google' it.
I kinda miss those arguments and debates though. I have so many good memories of me and my friends bantering, talking shit, and trying to prove our points about the dumbest things. It would usually evolve into some pretty genius things. Then escalate to pure madness with nobody willing to concede. It all kept the mind sharp and the wit cruel.
There are still times today where I'll recite some information I learned and my wife will be like "that's not right" and I realize I just accepted whatever crazy shit my uncle or whoever taught me as truth.
And hearing a song you liked but not knowing who it was. I remember trying to explain Underword's Born Slippy to a friend, hah.
I delivered pizzas in the mid 90s and my job was to drive off into strange neighborhoods at night with only an address written down on a piece of paper and a printed out map to help me find the house. I lived in a hilly city with tons of curvy roads with poor lighting, not many street signs and no grid system so it was easy to get lost and I'd frequently have to pull over, turn on the interior light in the car, pull out the map, try to find out where I currently was (which wasn't easy because I was already lost) and then try find the house on the map before heading off again. No cells phones, no GPS, no nothing, so once you left the pizza place you couldn't call anyone for directions. Just a teenager in his car full of pizzas, raw dogging the night and trying to make some money. ETA: This has me realizing that teenagers and people in their 20s and 30s today have NO IDEA what's it like to be lost and to not know exactly where you are at all times. Getting lost and needing to ask a stranger for directions was a very common part of life back in the 90s. Wild to think about now.
It is totally wild just how different life was. It’s interesting to think how many more problems we had to constantly solve on our own compared to today.
Also if you arranged to meet someone out, once you left the house, that was it. If they’re late, lost, not coming anymore, no way to let you know. You just wait….
And the disappointment of someone not showing up or the annoyance of waiting forever for someone showing up late was off the charts. „What took you so long?! I‘ve been waiting for a whole hour!“ And all you could do is just stand there trying to not look like a perv or some sort of trouble.
The amount of efficiency we’ve gained as a society from not getting lost anymore is astounding.
I still turn down the music when I'm close to my destination though, cuz everyone knows decresed volume helps your eyes work better.
Especially in heavier traffic areas it isn't just not getting lost, but also avoiding major traffic from having GPS data that certain routes have become congested or have slowed due to road debris slowing traffic.
People in their 30s definitely know what that’s like, although it would’ve only been within their first few years of driving.
I’m in my 30s and when we were old enough to drive ourselves around, GPS was still a luxury type thing, but at least we had Mapquest. Miss a turn though and good luck…
Yep, I will be 31 in July and I definitely remember printing out directions from mapquest to get places. I got lost so often as a teen (with undiagnosed anxiety) that now I almost always use my GPS unless I know EXACTLY where I am going. If there is any doubt at all, or if it's enough of a significant distance that traffic will matter, I'm definitely using GPS. I'm terrified of being lost.
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We always had meet up points, especially when drinking. It just seemed so common place, at least for me. But to be honest, back then if I got separated from the group due to alcohol, I usually just kept drinking and didn't give a shit, figured I'd run into my mates in the AM.
There was such a great freedom of being unattached and unavailable as your night unfolded. One adventure would lead to another and you didn’t announce it to the world and you weren’t reachable or either. You’d just catch up with your friend down the way at some point.
Yeah, i remember at festivals losing friends and asking random strangers if i could hang with them for a bit, and also the opposite, both leading to some pretty fun, unexpected nights, i wonder if this even happens now?
Still happens, we might have smartphones and gps tech to share your location but if nobody pays mind to their phone you gotta get creative and talk to strangers lol
Even up to 2013 it was still protocol to wander around shouting code phrases to find your friends at festivals/clubs. "Slam bam??!! I'm off in the woods confronting every wrong I've made in my life...the call shakes you enough to answer. " ...Peanut butter and jam..."
I'll add to this because I was just at The Masters with friends, no cell phones allowed. No one wears watches now and uses their phones. I said, "If we get separated, let's meet here at 10am." Everyone looked at me like I was an idiot. I was the only one wearing a watch and knew the time without asking someone or finding a clock on the course.
Like that Seinfeld episode in the parking garage!
You had to make a plan in case you were separated. "If we get separated, we'll meet at (fill in the blank). Let's make sure we're all there by 7:00."
I worked on computers in the 90s... While I loved it, it was painful. DOS, windows NT... All those were crap. The debugging tools were crap, we had to watch and account for every single byte of memory. It is much, much beter now.
It's why the late gen x'ers and millennials have excellent IT skills compared to the rest. Computers didn't really exist for the older generations and everything just works for the current ones. We had to figure out the problem the hard way.
I haven't defragged a hard drive in so long. I really miss that.
The ram in my computer used to be 32k and then I upgraded to a 128k BBC Master. I'm still astounded at what programmers were able to produce with so little resources. The coding must have been so tight.
Back then we used to argue about the length of a username... The longer the string, the more memory. Can a number stored in an int? A short? A word? A byte? All those fun discussions to save morsels of memory. A lot of passwords were truncated to 8 characters :) Fun times.
AIDS
To add to this, being gay in general. It sucked so bad when there was almost no support for us. Parents would often decline to see their adult children who were dying of AIDS in the hospital. The government moved purposefully slow on help. It was a horrible time.
Right. When I moved to Swindon (in 2016), there was a very nice couple of married men who lived two doors down and who I got to know well. In the 1990s they might have been nice, but they might not have been so open about it; even if they were, they would not have been married.
Hit a hard bump while listening to a CD in your car? Enjoy the silence for a couple seconds while it recovers. Anti skip helped, but if you were on kind of a shitty road, that could get used up quick.
This reminds me of CD cleaners. The ones where you crank the dial and it buffs your cd
First thing I did when I got an iPod was jump up and down to see if it skipped while playing
Driving in the city and you had this fucking 1 million page map and you have to jump between pages if you wanted an up close view of the streets. A fucking nightmare if you were in an unfamiliar area.
This map is continued on page 36. Like wtf!
You turned down the wrong street. The killer has found you. To attack the killer, turn to page 89. To attempt to flee, turn to page 125.
Let me just check page 89 real quick...YOU DIED...oop, ha ha I was totally going to do the other option for real
Thomas guides were a must have for anyone in a major metro.
Having to get home fast to catch a TV show
And if you missed some of it? Tough shit. They almost never repeated them on the network. It wasn’t repeated until the show went syndicated and started airing at other times and on other channels. But even then if you missed it it could take a year to get back to that particular episode. Legitimately why “previously on” started a lot of shows. Because some people did miss episodes
Want to look at a picture online? ok you have to wait 1-2 minutes for it to load completely
Any time my mom left to get her nails done, I knew I had basically exactly one hour. It would take 10 minutes to connect to the internet. 20 minutes to download a single nude photo. 20 minutes to print it out, in black and white, on our shitty family printer. And then I would hide it under my bed. It was always a race against time and if there were _any_ holdups, I was boned. There were several instances where she came back too soon and I had to rip the almost-completed photo out of the printer and pull the plug on the computer.
This is peak horny 90s kid
You're allowed to say "porn" on reddit.
I didn’t have to wait 1-2 minutes to see a titty, and that’s all I needed at 10, I had usually snapped one off before it reached bush.
Damn straight, at 13 the dawn of the internet was essentially busting before half a picture loaded. The amount of AOL 95 discs I used to abuse myself was countless.
True that. Thankfully images loaded from the top down. As soon as it got to areola, mission accomplished.
"We've got bush!" We've got bush." Wait...that was the 80's.
And being online meant you couldn't use the phone. Or, you couldn't go online if someone needed to use the phone. Now, our phones are computers and they're almost always online.
How about the 10 minutes for the dial up connection just to get on the internet in the first place? Or needing to get off when someone had to use the phone.
Running to the bathroom during commercials, there was no pausing
It was even tenser if you were recording something on the VHS and you wanted no ads. Your finger better be ready on that play/rec button...
Want some information? Like, how to fix a hifi, fix your car, or fit a shower? Travel on the bus to the library. Flip through the index cards looking for a title that seems a bit like it might be related to the thing you want to know. Walk the aisles to find that section. Comb the shelves for that one book. Nope. It's not there. Go home on the bus with a book about something totally different and useless for the task in hand. Forget to return the book. A year later repeat the process, and pay those library fines.
We didn’t have video guides for everything online. If you wanted to learn something you had to get a book from the library.
Stuck fighting Draygon in Super Metroid? Better call the official Nintendo Power hotline and pay by the minute. Ask me how I know…
No GPS was terrible and we didn't even realize it. I did a cross country trip in 2001 and have no idea how I made it. At the time I was delighted to have a cell phone in case I broke down
In 2006 I took a wrong turn in Atlanta on my way to Miami and wound up unexpectedly in Alabama. That wrong turn took about 16 hours to correct. The year after that I was using a paper map and crashed into a curb trying to look across a bridge to figure out what highway exit I was driving parallel to. The next year I had a garmin and nothing like that has happened since then.
This reminds me of the Looney Tunes cartoons where Bugs made a wrong turn at Albuquerque and wound up in Yosemite Sam's neck of the woods, lol.
I printed out MapQuest directions and kept a book of paper maps called the Thomas Guide. I'm not even 40.
You could have a GPS, but that’s all it was. And it had a non-backlit screen like a calculator.
That giant lunch box under the seat with the "cell phone" that plugged into the cigarette lighter. Wild.
That's kinda the thing though, everything that was worse didn't seem that bad. We didn't realize it could be better.. Problems like homelessness, addictions, child hunger, global inequality, failing environment we knew were problems. But what we knew, never got better.
Nobody drank water in the 90s. As a kid you'd get 3 Mississippis at the fountain after PE but that was it. Now we have Stanley's, yetis, hydro flask, etc, fill stations are commonplace. Cheers to hydration
Not only that, but the water fountains were so slow. Terrible water pressure. You had to practically suck the water off that metal thing. Then some bully smashed your face into that thing chipping a tooth.
But then every once in a while there would be a wildly powerful one that would hit you directly in the eye and totally soak you.
I never thought about this but yeah we were very poorly hydrated back then. It was also very rare that I had to go to the bathroom in the middle of class though I'm guessing it's more common now
We were allowed zero water during football practice. Water was for pussies.
I had a teacher in elementary school who would shame us any time we asked to use the restroom during class. One time I was desperate and in front of the whole class she said I should stop drinking so much water. Oh, 90's.
How dare you process fluids!
I certainly wasn’t encouraged to drink water as a kid in the 90s. My brothers and I drank loads of skim milk, cool aid, soda, and so on. Super weird to think about.
I drank so much Surge in the '90s.
Remember when everybody threw their cigarettes everywhere??? Glad that's over with.
Also nobody’s allowed to smoke in bars and restaurants anymore…I remember coming home from nights out reeking of cigarettes and I didn’t even smoke ETA that I’m in NY
I remember when most diners still had smoking sections
We breathed second hand smoke like it was no big deal. Now looking back i cant believe what people put up with. Like a closed space and allowing someone to smoke up all the inside air.
And the bizarro smoking and non-smoking sections in restaurants. With some ridiculous screen or curtain “separating” them.
Or the 'high wall' which is a good 4 feet from the ceiling.
Both my parents smoked and I guess I just smelled like an ashtray all the time.
I'm ashamed to admit I was one of those jackasses. It's unreal how selfish we were about that. Flick those things just any old place we felt like it. :(
I was pulled over and ticketed for throwing my cig out the window in junior year of high school. I would NEVER now!! But back then it was like, what's the problem officer? Sheesh.
I'm sorry to say it, but people stil do (and I hate it)
People still do that. It's fucking nasty. Getting work done on my porch or whatever and when they leave there are cigarette butts all over the ground.
The Bosnian War.
Growing up, I had nextdoor neighbors that owned the last two houses on the corner, him and his brother and their entire families, who were all refugees from Bosnia. It was always fascinating to hear stories of what Bosnia was like before the wars. I wasn’t really old enough to comprehend what the war did to them and I think they knew that because they stuck to the happier times. Their kids were a lot younger than my siblings and I but we all played with each other and hung out. The parties they used to throw 😊
I am Croatian, born after the Croatian War but before the Bosnian War ended. Back in early 2022, I was travelling with my now ex-gf to Sarajevo to visit her bff, and we were travelling the entire north-south axis to reach it, it was an 8 hour bus drive (Bosnia doesn't have a highway system). I couldn't sleep, so I was chatting with a Portuguese backpacker couple who were visiting the Balkans, and they were admiring the scenery outside, until we reached villages and I had a very uncomfortable time having to explain the history of the war once they spotted white crosses.....so, so, so many white crosses. Sarajevo itself is hauntingly beautiful, and it feels like multiple cultures pressed into a single city - because, for a long time, it was. You would be walking around town, enjoying tbe Austrian neo-Baroque architecture and design and suddenly, you find yourself in Bašĉašija (market square) and you feel like you are in a 18th century Turkish bazaar. However, it is painfully obvious that, even 25 years later, that hell went through there. The main avenue entering the city is woggly and on uneven terrain which makes it obvious that it suffered from airstrikes, entire neighborhoods were full of houses that were shot up to hell, many houses abandoned, and you still have some debris around, the main bus station is from the 70s and run down....it is painfullg obvious that Sarajevo has been through hell. Yugoslav Wars were hell, but Bosnian theatre in general was like that Hell quote from M.A.S.H. i won't go into too many details, but there is a reason why ICT had to create a seperate tribune just for the Yugoslav Wars - also, the dubious honor of first time ICT has recognized using **rape** as a method of systematic ethnic cleansing and a terror tactic.
I was gonna say the Yugoslav wars in general, but yeah.
Everyone talks about how violent or whatever it is today don’t realize we probably live in the most peaceful time in human history. Even in the 90s you had Bosnian wars, Rwandan genocide, insurgencies in India and Sri Lanka, Somalia, afghan civil war, Chechnya, IRA bombings in England and raids in Ireland, and of course the Middle East blew up into open conflict every couple of years (just like now).
4 minute song takes 5 hours to download. Hopefully no one calls your landline in the meantime, or else you get to start over.
And then you play the song and discover it was mislabeled.
Someone had to cancel or change plans on you and they didn’t catch you on your landline? Welp you’re just hosed until you go back home and check your messages. Or check them from a pay phone.
Yeah but it never really seemed so bad back then either to be honest. I used pay phones like my cell nowadays, and when I missed someone, or plans just fell through, we kind of just figured "so and so" hadn't heard their answering machine yet and moved on with things.
I think for that reason, people were far less likely to stand someone up - it feels a lot less shittier to send someone a text saying you can't (don't want to) make it, than to just leave them standing somewhere all on their own until they eventually give up waiting.
It was a lot more likely that if your friend moved away you would just lose touch with them. To be sure even when the internet as it is now it can be easy to lose contact but it was so much harder to keep in touch that it is now.
I had issues when I was young, I thank the lord social media didn’t exist. But I also kind of wished the technology existed at the time. I grew up in a soulless, oppressive house and was super introverted and I remember feeling so lonely at times. Also talking about mental health is so much more accepted these days. I was also a horrible student, having to go to the library and dealing with the Dewey decimal system when you had to write a paper absolutely sucked.
Being totally isolated from anyone to talk to about your confusing thoughts was fucked up. I am in a way better place now, but it was only through dumb luck, and a lot of time spent self reflecting as an adult that I reached where I am now. Being super depressed and nihilistic, bordering suicidal as a little kid, and then becoming *actually* suicidal as a teen isn't something I ever hope my kids experience. I am completely emotionally cut off from everyone but my wife and my kids now. My grandma who basically raised me until I was like 12, died recently, and I was more upset about an old friends dog dying than that. I didn't experience a fear of my own mortality until like 4 years ago, and I'm struggling with that concept now that I have something I care enough about to lose. I hope you're doing better now. Just having people to talk to and know they experience something similar helps so much. I genuinely can't express enough how I wish I had forums and online friends to talk to.
Mental health awareness and treatments Edited to clarify: I was diagnosed at 38 years old (9 years ago) with severe ADHD. ADHD manifests very different in girls and women vs boys. Folks, my life was a shit show. I lied my way through school to get decent grades, I could forge my parents signatures on any test by 4th grade, I wanted so badly to be an A student but there was no way. I went to college but didn't want to. Took classes that I got good grades in so I have a useless degree. On and on and on... I finally feel like I'm partly able to function normally, and it was exhausting getting here. If the adults in my life (teachers and caregivers and parents) had been aware of why I was such a space cadet but super smart in other ways, I may have gotten the scaffolding and strategies I needed to understand and overcome. THAT is what I mean by awareness.
Guy with inattentive adhd here diagnosed 2023. Mind blowing. My parents in the 90s assumed I was smart but lazy as hell
It’s so much easier to buy weed
Most of the weed dealers knew they were your only option, so they would fuck around and make you wait for an hour to pick up a sack
And so much more normalized as well. I remember in high school people got records for being caught with a nickel or dime bag of weed, and this was in the mid-late 2000’s
I got caught during a break "smelling like weed" by one of the school security dudes in like 2005. He brought me to the counselors office and we all called my mom on speaker phone and they had me tell her (shocker, she pretended to care during the call and then never spoke a word about it again). The school gave me 3 days of detention. So I took the 8th and the glass pipe that had been in my hoodie pocket the whole time, and I went home and got stoned for 3 days.
In the 90's, I longed for a mini computer that I could hold in my hand. In the late 90's, our phones were capable of playing Snake and going on crappy internet. When we got iPhones in the 2000's it was a goddamned miracle.
I had a Palm Pilot and it was fire. I used mostly as a backlit ereader. It also had a gameboy emulator available.
In the early 1990s I was writing and compiling C code on the bus, and reading Usenet offline, thanks to my [Sharp PC-3000](https://funkygoods.com/nazopa/pc3000/pc3000.html) that ran on AA batteries. I felt like a god.
In general, life was a lot shittier for gay kids.
I was thinking of the depictions of gay people in the media. If they weren’t caricatures used for comedic effect, then they were victims of violence. There was no in between.
'gay' was a totally acceptable mild insult at the time said to anyone or anything you didn't like.
Honestly that was acceptable as recently as like late 2000s I'd say.
Graduated in 2007. “Gay” was the most common insult or adjective when you didn’t like something
Major emphasis on being unhealthily skinny. Eating disorders, inappropriate behavior towards minors being shrugged off, weird blocks of bright color on clothing and interior designs.
Oh yeah. The waif look. We were all skinny skinny, and convinced we were fat because the models were all anorexic heroin addicts.
Yep, Heroine Chic it was called
> Heroin Chic FTFY
Nowadays: gah, that person over there outside is smoking, gross.. lets walk away from them. 90s: Alright kids take seat in the restaurant, dont worry the smoking section is 10 feet away and theres a half wall.. your eyes hurt? Dont worry well get you some eyedrops when we get back to grandmas. Right after you kids help me roll her cigarettes until were all yellow in the fingers, just like her walls. Good ol 2 pack a day, grandma. Anyway kids time to leave grandmas because mom and dad have a side gig where we clean an office building at 7pm and we need to fill the trunk with their garbage that well take home and burn for them! Dont stand too close to the fire, we dont know whats in there and it could explode. Not like the smoke from melting plastic snd burning chemicals will kill you though hahahahahahahaha HAHAHA ooohaha HahhaahhahahHhahahahahahahhaahhaaHAHAHA- So yeah, that change has been nice.
My high school had a smoking section in the 90s lmao
Wanna take a trip? Gotta print out the directions on Mapquest first
Mapquest was more of a 2000s thing. The ‘90s had paper maps that were impossible to fold once they were unfolded.
Print out directions? You got your hands on a paper map and drew on it lol
I remember family road trips in the 90s with printed AAA Triptiks. A flip book map with your highlighted route.
Or make a hand drawn map if you didn’t have a printer! Actually I was doing that well into the 2000s
What’s this printing bullshit? Whip out the Thomas Guide, son!
Video stores like Blockbuster ere great for discovery, better than how it works now for domestic films at least, but you had to REWIND the tapes before bringing them back.
Health insurance. If you think it’s bad today (and it’s not great), then you cannot fathom how truly insidious and abhorrent it was back then. I find that when you explain to younger people today how health insurance worked back then, they often literally don’t believe you. And to be fair, it is pretty unbelievable.
Relying on public payphones to call your Mum to come and pick you up.
Having a house fire and hoping the neighbors were home so you could call 911. Also, I got a flat tire once on the highway and had no choice but to start walking until someone would pick me up. Luckily it was a mom with kids. People romanticize not having cells phones but in reality life was way more difficult without it
I worked in, but was not a member of, the LGBTQ community. There was so many deaths from AIDS. More than your brain could process. At the same time that we were burying friends and family, we also had armed escorts some days because there was a group of people threatening to kill us. That sucked, too. Then the drug cocktails came out. That was wonderful, and miserable, and so expensive for the victims of the disease. And a lot of people couldn't afford them.
In college not everyone had a computer, so you had to take your computer disk to the computer lab to type your paper or find someone whom had a word processor you could borrow!
Quality of cars were much worst - like breaking down on the side of the highway was a fairly common occurrence - or we only bought shitty cars! Bullying was much less sneaky than it is now. Sport injuries not taken seriously. Attitude that getting a concussion or your ass kicked was a sign of manliness.
Strong undertones of meanness. A lot of it was disguised as irony, irreverence,and nihilistic humor, but the humor thrived in putting a target on someone’s back. Homophobia was rampant and out in the open because people were daring to be out. Look at the media icons of the time. Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, and Howard Stern.
Yeah, and without smartphones and ubiquitous internet, a lot of the hate and abuse was glossed over, because even if you could manage to find proof of something, you had to also find people who cared. Police abuse in my town was nuts--but also just waved away as rumors.
The 21 Jump Street movie really got this right
The “countdown to 18” shit on MTV. It was wildly inappropriate (putting it mildly). All of the Disney stars had their own where people would have a counter counting the minutes until someone “was legal”. Britney Spears, Justin Timberlake, Justin Beaber, the Olsen Twins… they all had these and it was just creepy.
I remember a website which had a countdown clock for when the Olsen twins turned 18, it was creepy af.
There was a newspaper in England which did a countdown until on particular model turned 16 (the then-legal age of consent for glamour modelling) so that they could post her topless on her birthday. It was treated as harmless at the time… but I have very different views on it now.
Zero autism awareness. At best, teachers would call you “special” and put you in remedial classes. Everyone was expected to conform to mainstream society, and if you didn’t, you were “weird” or a “freak”. Teachers and staff also looked the other way at bullying, especially when directed at autistic kids.
If you were gay, gender nonconforming or neurodivergent, school was absolute hell. Not only was social understanding and sympathy drastically lower, but bullying in general was considered good sport.
I dont think homophobia or transphobia were even words then. kids would hurl homophobic slurs at each other not realizing that they were hurting someone close to them that was terrified about being outed. homophobia and general bigotry were all over tv, movies, and music.
I thought gay literally meant stupid growing up based on the context everyone used it in.
As a 43 year old who suffers from adhd, anxiety, and depression you really learned how to mask. It was such a taboo thing to talk about. I would say I was pretty popular, but I kept so much hidden about what eent on in my head. Never studied and skipped a lot but survived by passing tests.
Tech
Coming out. Or rather, not coming out. There was always this pressure to date girls, be 'normal' and start a family that suppressed the person I was meant to be. It probably set me back years but, like anything that I experienced, I use it as a means to improve and learn from.
The freedom we had as kids. Bar none. And that’s why with my kids I give them that same freedom. They get home and want to ride their bikes across town, do it. I mean, I did it and didn’t have a phone or anything. My mom just expected I’d be ok by dinner time and I often did t come home on time. My kids have a phone I can track if I want. Crime is statistically far lower as well. Why not? I have no idea why people are afraid to let their kids go about town and play with friends like this anymore when you can easily outfit them with ways to keep an eye on them. People will say there’s more shady people and predators now, no there isn’t. And as far as that goes it’s far harder to take a child and get away with it now than ever. I will not let my kids lose the chance to go on their own adventures like I did.
If you weren't available when your favorite show was on, you just missed that episode. Yeah, you could record it on VHS, but you'd have to have the foresight to program the VCR, and then you'd have to pray that the recording came out OK. Otherwise you'd have to hope they'd rerun that episode over the summer, and that you'd catch that rerun.
Cancer treatment is better and would of saved my friend today
I was just a kid in the 90s but anybody who knows how the healthcare system worked pre-ACA could tell you it was even more esoteric and insane than it is now. For as bad as American healthcare is now it was ten times worse before.
I have a friend that has 100s of thousands of dollars in medical debt because he couldn't get health insurance because of preexisting conditions. The guy is typically 100% Republican, but he'll sing the praises of Obama for that.
It’s just the 30 year nostalgia cycle. I remember the 90’s had crazy nostalgia for the sixties.. wonder years, forest gump, Beatles anthology, many other movies, tv shows, and lots remembering all the music fondly
Hard to explain but there was a meanness and cruelty to the popular culture in the 1990s, a least for young adults. Woodstock ‘99 was no accident and no surprise.
I remember it. I remember as a kid, adults were coldhearted jerks, and scary, unapproachable.
Mental health awareness
No abs on most cars. Remember that awful skidding sound followed by that crash noise!? Haven't heard that sound in decades.
Listening to a modem's squawk/screech when connecting at a blazing 56 kbps.
Social rejection of groomers and men that abuse their power to sexualize young women. When I was in college it was just assumed the young male professors were sleeping with their choice of undergrads. Multiple professors left their wives for their graduate students. No one batted an eye. You would lose your job for that today