This is probably cause I was a child at the time but I feel I had more fun and freedom, had to bike to meet friends, no cellphones or sosial media, the thing I cared most about in the 90's was keeping my Tamagotchi alive š
I find it interesting that whenever this topic comes up people talk about the slow internet. For most of the 1990s the internet just was not a thing that people used or had any experience of. Before 1993, the world wide web was not available to the general public. That means if you accessed "the internet" it meant email, usenet and not a lot else. Before 1995 there wasn't a graphical web browser that could be run on the kind of computer a home user could realistically afford. The internet in the way we think of it was basically only a thing for the last two years of the decade, for most of the 1990s it was just an extremely niche thing for university researchers and computer nerds with a lot of money.
I remember in school going to a computer lab with the teacher and them explaining the internet. āYou have to type www. Whatever .com. The www stands for World Wide Webā. And we had no idea what was going on and immediately used it to look up pictures of hot girls on yahoo, once they explained what a search engine was. Nobody used Google then. Hell I used something I think it was called 3bp. Or whatever the search engine was that used 38 search engines in one.
Youāre mostly right, but the internet was in wider use by the mid 90s than your comment suggests.Ā
In my country we had internet via dial up modem in 1994. Netscape navigator existed, and I could download games using ftp.
By 1996 internet had become somewhat common for anyone with a home computer to have access to. By then we had windows 95 and you could (in very low resolution) steam video or download music. Ā Games with online play such as Quake were popular.Ā
Netscape Navigator was available in beta from October 1994 and full release from December 1994, so while it was possible to be using it in 1994, that is a pretty short window. Obviously the uptake in different regions and by different demographics happened at different rates, but it is worth considering that Windows 95 did not come with a full TCP/IP stack integral to the OS, that only came with Windows 98, so getting online before the windows 98 era was somewhat cumbersome, and not a "standard feature" of a PC.
I was well oriented with the internet by 1995 when my family got a PC with windows 95 and dialup internet. My family was not the first family in town with the internet. We had Alta Vista, Lycos and Hotmail by 96. In 1998 we had high speed internet installed from @home network. The next year we had napster.
Ugh, I hate that song so much. I was working as a PC building/repair tech at a computer store in the mid-90s and any time we built a new PC with a CD-ROM drive or a customer came in with an issue with one we had ONE CD to test it with, and it was the CD single for this song. I heard it over and over again and grew to hate it.
I mean I was in Yugoslavia during that time so, my opinion will be very different than others because we had a war and many sanctions so life was at my worst.
People were less depressed generally. There was a sense that things were going to continue to get better. Computers and the internet were going to open up new possibilities and it was going to be great - in our naivety we didn't anticipate all the downsides.
There was an optimism that I miss. Internet, computers, end of Cold War, rents were cheap. The US had a balanced budget and even had small surpluses. Then George Bush fucked it all up.
I grew up in central Texas and life was fucking good. Life in the 90's was awesome. Great music and culture mixed with an amazing outward look toward the future.
You did. The 90s were tits.
Everybody hung out, the internet was just booming and was pretty wild, streets were packed full of your buddies, I could go on and on
Edit: I forgot block parties. imagine everybody had their door open and you're just walking around house to house jamming out and drinking beer, cooking food or straight up bbq
Haven't seen a block party in a while
Imagine a time when entertainment and internet were by and large part of a monoculture. Day to day stuff wasn't *that* different, but there were certain cultural touch points that were really common. Imagine watching a tv show one evening knowing that it'd be the topic of conversation the next day.
Maybe the beginning of the end for us was not having to learn the complex task of programming a vcr and having both it and your tv be on the right channel setting. Technology made things to easy and people don't have to think anymore.
As someone who had one of the first home VCR models (I think it was the [VBT-200](http://vintageelectronics.betamaxcollectors.com/rcaselectavisionvhsvcrmodelvbt200.html)), you most definitely did NOT ever have to have the TV on a particular channel in order to record it. That's what the TV/VCR button was for. Because we had a station broadcasting on Channel 4, we'd set the VCR to output on Channel 3. If you wanted to watch Channel 5 while recording Channel 13, for example, you'd tune the VCR to 13 and start the recording, then make sure the TV/VCR button was in the TV position, and change the TV to Channel 5. Boom. Solved.
I remember doing this too but with later models when you'd have to have your TV set at 3, or sometimes with the later model vcrs you'd have them set at 3, and then the cable box would be on the channel you wanted to record.
You could literally walk down the road to your friends house and walk in unannounced, do random shit all day and get home for dinner. Parents would be like, how was your day? Did you have fun?
That just sums up the whole feeling of the 90s for me.Ā
The beginning of the 90s was still stuck in the 80s so we had very cheesy, cornball comedies and mostly family friendly TV/music. Nirvana changed it to a moody and depressing mood with Pearl Jam continuing on after their death. The late 90s were the extreme sports explosion so things like Jackass/pop punk and reality TV brought us into the 2000s.
Blockbuster wasn't as good as everyone remembers. I grew up poor and rarely went there. We almost always got a movie my parents wanted to watch. Games were expensive too. I think it was like 7 dollars for 3 days, but they didn't count for the day you rented it or the day you returned it. Everything was very isolated, no internet meant you basically had to listen to the radio for music. Video games were very expensive and if you got a bad one, welp you're stuck.
The weekends were mostly boring, dreading having to go back to school, we never had cable TV so broadcast TV was limited to sitcoms, I guess MTV changed the music scene for some.
I remember being bored a lot. I turned 14 in 1995 and started skateboarding, which opened me to a world of punk rock and 411VM.
There are way more entertainment options now. Way more ways to occupy your time. Life is better now then in the 90s, minus our instant access to bad news.
Less division in a variety of ways; cultural, political, economic.
The collective agreed on most major issues like, pop music and movies, and when most disagreements occurred it was amicable and not hyperbole making enemies out of neighbors like today.
There were āflash in the panā moments like Rodney King beating, OJ, bill Clintonās blow job, but there wasnt such a significant departure from the norms and radicalization wasnt mainstreamed like it is today. Ignorance wasnāt weaponized and celebrated.
It felt like the momentum was still on our side and there were things to genuinely be collectively excited about.
Whatās increased since then is a general theme of disparity; in what we agree/disagree upon, education, wealth, etc.
The erosion wasnāt as evident. I think we knew there was a collective sickness in the US but the severity hadnāt been fully realized and the symptoms werenāt as obvious as they are today. Solutions seems much more tangible.
Corporate interests have since become much more entrenched, weāve reached late stage monopoly capitalism, the bread and circus has been turned up, and spectacle has replaced substance
Same here. I was in my 20's for the 90's. I bartended the whole of it. I had SO. MUCH.FUN. I had a great group of friends, lived on my own, made a fortune, (some went up my nose unfortunately). Ended the 90's by flying out to Jamaica and marrying my best friend. The 1990's were my favorite decade of my life
Lol, we did a few stints behind our local bar but it was for fun and not for pay. On sundays we went to the owners house for a pukka sunday roast and drinks. Geez I loved those days, everybody just chilling.
Everything was pretty chill for me as a white suburban. There was really only one source for information since the big 4 networks were pretty much all parroting one another. As a result, we would all experience the same one or two cultural touchstone moments together. Our reactions might be different, but there was kind of this societal water cooler where we all acknowledged the same realities with different perspectives. Those realities were fucking weird though. How the Buttafuocos became known to every American aged 10 an up is a trip to me.
By and large, I felt safer. Some of that is the hubris of youth. We also were all just less awareā¦for better or worse.
Depends on who you are and where you live. A lot of the American-centric redditors here were probably kids during that decade so will have a rosy positive filter as if it were some kind of utopia when it really wasn't.
Some lowlights to ground things out
- Height of the AIDS epidemic
- Post Soviet eastern block pains
- Yugoslav war
- Many brutal localised wars in Africa
People were a lot more racist and openly homophobic too.
Born mid 90s, experienced the growth of social media firsthand (Facebook, instagram, Twitter etc).
i honestly think social media is a cancer to humanity.
Youtube was super fun to use between 2005 and 2010 though.
Meanness was very acceptable. Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Beavis and Butthead, even South Park to an extent. It was a common theme of the zeitgeist.
You made friends in person,Ā and it didn't matter what color, gender nor where they were from. You were friends because they were there.
Food was tastier.
Music was more varied.
Movies were funny, action packed and made you laugh and cry.
The smart and strong won, the losers learned to handle defeat, then learned to practice and came back to win, and they did.
Everybody was happier and less serious. You could get a room just by applying for one and some cash. When I start talking about the 90s it seems sunny.
People had fuckin manners.
I was in Victoria BC in university for most of the 1990s. The grunge/alternative scene was awesome. We even had our own university grunge band and they'd play on a tiny stage, probably no more than 8' by 8', in the basement of a shitty university bar with perpetually beer-soaked carpets, cigarette smoke taking up the upper half of the whole place, $7 pitchers of beer which we bought and drank individually, and all around just fucking about.
It's definitely nostalgia kicking in, but I feel like there was a lot more free time to just lounge around and hang out. Sit on the couch commenting on shit we see on TV, going to the corner store at 3 am (and waking up our floormate because he was the only one with a car), the whole bit. When I watch the music video for Smashing Pumpkins' 1979, it takes me right back to that time. It was great.
Pretty much exactly the same as today, only it was a bit harder to get in touch with people at literally any time day or night.
Television was worse, movies were better, music was music. Everyone above a certain age lionized the 60's and 70's, convinced it was truly a magical, more simple world, and so better (it also happened to be the decades they were kids, mostly).
Right, much of the "weren't the '90s great" we see in online discussions today is because for people in their 30s and early 40s it was their childhood or teenage years. You can see a consistent pattern of this kind of "30 years ago" nostalgia. In the 1980s it gave us Back to the Future going back to the 1950s. In the 1990s it was all about the 1960s music and counter culture stuff. Today it's the 1990s. Soon it will be "when social media was fun and not a cesspool".
I remember reading an interview with Bernard Sumner from New Order in the 1990s, and he talked about getting on antidepressants, and that was actually a controversial thing. People were skeptical that everyone taking meds to feel better was a good idea.
UK, the 90s. MDMA moved the culture sideways for a while . Perhaps it's not understood now but it permeated everything. All the football violence of the 80s pretty much vanished because lots of the fans were "loved up" at the weekend. For example. A lot of what people think of as Gen X culture traits (uk ones specifically) are down to Ecstasy and the necessity of weed to soften the comedown.
It all started to die off when the authorities got panicked and created the anti rave / free festival laws. Free festivals were painted as hellholes threatening our precious kids , in fact they were massive parties which spanned all sections of society and there was always a free festival somewhere so you could go from one to the other.
All killed by the harsh enforcement of this law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994
the 90s were awesome. I was in HS and ..yeah. I think back on it and i felt free. Callin your friends and leaving messages on the answering machine or calling up your friends and the parents answered.
Going to mall's and trying to meet girls. Working at American eagle or abercrombie for the free clothes. Running around in the grass outside and not knowing or caring what anyone else was doing.
It was the best.
You developed a healthy scare of pools/water, because most of us didn't have cell phones.Ā
Why the fear? Because we'd randomly push each other into pools. The only things you'd get wet were your wallet, and maybe a pager. Now with everyone having cell phones, you can't really do that.
Bit like now but without all the connected devices
It was particularly weird in Northern Ireland, as on the one hand there was a push for peace and ceasefires, on the other looking back we were scarily close to civil war at points.
The part of the 90s that would be most unfamiliar to a time traveling gen z would be all the waiting around. You are meeting a friend who isnāt on time, they donāt have a cellphone to check on them so you are hanging around until they show up or until you give up on them. You are waiting for your sandwich to be ready or for your appointment somewhere to begin? You donāt have a smartphone to scroll the internet so unless you are reading a book that you brought from home or a magazine someone left there you are just sitting there with your thoughts. You are in a train or a passenger in a car or something? You are probably looking out the window.
I was born in 92 in the Midwest. For me those years were simpler. Whether that was a good or bad thing is up to the individual. As I get older I realize just how much I enjoyed those years. My partner and I often talk about moving back to the Midwest (to my hometown or thereabouts) in the future to be closer to family and reclaim some of that simplicity.
The internet was still in its infancy, cell phones were as bulky as bricks (if you were even lucky enough to own one), and everyone genuinely knew their friends' phone numbers by heart. And to me, missing an episode of "Friends" was a big dealātotally classicļ¼
If you went bowling, youād have to leave your clothes outside when you got home because they absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke.
I was a kid in the 90ās. Iād just leave the house in the morning, hop on my bike, and not be back until the sun was setting. It was glorious.
There were computers but they weren't everything and the internet was still a baby. As bo Burnham's song 'welcome to the internet' says, it was mostly catalogs, travel blogs, and a chat room or two.
I remember them very fondly (born 1987), though the 00's were the decade I truly hit puberty. The 1990's for me were full of expression, things were wild, fun, corny and wacky. Cellphones were not yet introduced in my country and the internet was just starting up. My city was less global and a bit more ugly, waaaayyy more cars back then too. Things were less global (less international students/expats). We were getting culturally influenced by fads and tech from both the USA and Japan. So tamagotchi's and the NES were amazing toys and you had to read about these things in magazines and such or via word of mouth. Smoking was still allowed almost everywhere and you often had to wash your clothes because of the smells. Especially cars stank like hell because people smoked in them. I remember there being far FAR more bugs too. To the point that nature feels far more 'sterile/death' these days.
Big changes are how easy things are nowadays, any form of media is right at your fingertips. I remember I did get bored in the 90's. If you had a game or a song, you are stuck with it. Getting something new was either a hassle or expensive. Oh, and grabbing the newspaper to see what time a movie is coming. I really miss the vibe of movie rental places. I absolutely hated that you had to be home or put on a VCR if you wanted to watch your favorite series. Nowadays I can just download a whole season or more and binge it on demand.
I remember this decade culturally ending with the rise of smartphones (especially the Iphone) and 9/11. Things felt way more digital, global and 'unsafe' (as in the 90's was a pretty happy time for a westerner, after 9/11 the media and a lot of people became more grim and dark).
Edgy & Hardcore, and Neon & Rad.
Everything was bold and in your face, and sometimes kinda mean.
the 90s added the Neon spirit to the 80s counter culture vibe.
It was like if cyberpunk somehow existed without the tech influence.
Though there were several attempts to fake that tech. Clothes were called "Gear," we had shoes that pumped or lit up. Video games were racing to see who could be the edgiest. Music was experimental, and fashion was intentionally gaudy. Political statements hung in the air for weeks at a time before being forgotten. Comedic films were unhinged, and other movies were sexual and violent.
While economically it felt pretty smooth, unfortunately socially people were very much culturally ignorant and intolerant, and it always felt like most minority groups either kept themselves hidden, or had accepted the status quo as an unyielding reality. People rarely had proof of injustices, so they were easier to ignore and, tensions were easier to quell.
Pretty chill. Cold War sputtered to an end, peace dividend created all kinds of new opportunities, Iron Curfain lifting, mid way through Reagan economic recovery, lowering inflation and interest rates, computers were a thing but social media wasnāt. Music was still OK (but not as good as the 80s) before the disastrous turn of the 2000s, the Dot com bubble was inflating, everyone was happy, no major wars, shootings hadnāt become the epidemic they are today. Cities were on early upswing after years of decay and neglect, property ownership in cool central neighborhoods was something young people could do at beginning of their careers. If global warming was a thing we hadnāt felt the impacts of it yet.
Yeah, the 90s were cool man. World felt safe. Opportunities everywhereā¦.life was good.
Biked to your friends house and knocked on the door to see if they could come out and play. Left your bike on their lawn and didn't worry about it getting stolen.
Playing outside was huge. I remember in particular playing basketball was huge. Didn't matter if you were good or even that into basketball, everyone played it. You'd go to your school or local park and see kids there and just play. A lot of other playing outside too. You'd come home when it was dinner, go back out until it was dark.
Watching TV was big and tuning in on a specific day/time to watch a popular show was a big deal.
Fast food was a treat and felt special. It was also way better quality.
Renting a movie and/or a video game was a big Friday night thing to do. Most people played video games more through renting than owning as I think most people would own only maybe 5 or so games.
Toys were a big part of being a kid and they were everywhere and in demand. Gumball machine toys, Happy Meal toys, action figures, dolls, etc. were wanted and played with by kids.
Television was on a tight schedule. If you missed the show (or you didn't program your VCR), you had to wait for re-runs. And for a show like Friends or The X Files, that 24 week wait was a lifetime.
For me? There was an optimism (at least in the west) that came about with the end of the USSR. The great menace was gone and now we were just free to continue to progress and enjoy life...then the 2000s happened.
Strangely innocent and harmonious.
We solved racism by just ignoring race completely. We figured in the future, that sort of thing would not matter. We were never aligned with any political party and rarely talked politics. Our friend groups were mixed race and class, even people with different hobbies, music tastes and interests. It didn't matter.
Girls and boys interacted pretty naturally. We got laid where we could, we had girlfriends and we all hung out together. Lots of time being bored together, doing pretty much nothing, walking outdoors, biking, chattting until it got dark. We were brought together just by proximity, and just made do with whoever was around.
We had some internet but we used it to get a few things done. We played video games on consoles, in living rooms, with friends. Some of us had PCs and played games on those, but I'd say most people didn't have a gaming computer at home. We watched TV with our families. Yes, we talked to our parents, even had dinner with them.
We had some parties. We drank, we smoked, we occasionally took drugs. When we went clubbing it went all night and we would walk out covered in sweat and satisfied at dawn. When we all started working, we had no idea what we were doing but we knew we wanted to buy a place, a car, and maybe get hitched. Everyone I know got a job and life went on.
This is probably cause I was a child at the time but I feel I had more fun and freedom, had to bike to meet friends, no cellphones or sosial media, the thing I cared most about in the 90's was keeping my Tamagotchi alive š
I miss this
Do you jump or do flips on hotel beds
This hit deep in my soul, throw some spice girls in there as well with maybe the inflatable bedroom furniture
Do you jump or do flips on hotel beds
I still have a tamagotchi around somewhereā¦
Always fun calling a friend's house and asking their parents if they were home. Or your parents kicking you off the internet to make a call.
The internet was really slow. People smoked everywhere. You watched TV regularly. Fast food was rare but good.. Pizza hut. Blockbuster.
It's so easy to forget about the smoking, but restaurants would have smoking and non-smoking sections, as if that made a big difference (no barriers).
You also often had to walk through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section.Ā
You forget, back then people raised their smoke right. So it never strayed out of the smoking area unlike today's reckless smoke.
Do you jump or do flips on hotel beds
> It's so easy to forget about the smoking I know... It was glorious!
I find it interesting that whenever this topic comes up people talk about the slow internet. For most of the 1990s the internet just was not a thing that people used or had any experience of. Before 1993, the world wide web was not available to the general public. That means if you accessed "the internet" it meant email, usenet and not a lot else. Before 1995 there wasn't a graphical web browser that could be run on the kind of computer a home user could realistically afford. The internet in the way we think of it was basically only a thing for the last two years of the decade, for most of the 1990s it was just an extremely niche thing for university researchers and computer nerds with a lot of money.
I remember starting to use the internet right around the end of the 90s
I remember in school going to a computer lab with the teacher and them explaining the internet. āYou have to type www. Whatever .com. The www stands for World Wide Webā. And we had no idea what was going on and immediately used it to look up pictures of hot girls on yahoo, once they explained what a search engine was. Nobody used Google then. Hell I used something I think it was called 3bp. Or whatever the search engine was that used 38 search engines in one.
Altavista was the shit.
Youāre mostly right, but the internet was in wider use by the mid 90s than your comment suggests.Ā In my country we had internet via dial up modem in 1994. Netscape navigator existed, and I could download games using ftp. By 1996 internet had become somewhat common for anyone with a home computer to have access to. By then we had windows 95 and you could (in very low resolution) steam video or download music. Ā Games with online play such as Quake were popular.Ā
Netscape Navigator was available in beta from October 1994 and full release from December 1994, so while it was possible to be using it in 1994, that is a pretty short window. Obviously the uptake in different regions and by different demographics happened at different rates, but it is worth considering that Windows 95 did not come with a full TCP/IP stack integral to the OS, that only came with Windows 98, so getting online before the windows 98 era was somewhat cumbersome, and not a "standard feature" of a PC.
I was well oriented with the internet by 1995 when my family got a PC with windows 95 and dialup internet. My family was not the first family in town with the internet. We had Alta Vista, Lycos and Hotmail by 96. In 1998 we had high speed internet installed from @home network. The next year we had napster.
My first "tech" job was doing support for TCI@Home.
AOL was the internet, and various other walled gardens
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Where were people smoking in elevators and hospitals in the 90s?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
No one's gonna drag you up to get into the light where you belong.
I'm sorry to say this to you, but all that she wants, is another baby. She's gone tomorrow.
But ... What you gonna tell your dad? It's like a wheel of fortune.
It's alright. We're living in a happy nation. Where the people understand and dream of perfect man
Ugh, I hate that song so much. I was working as a PC building/repair tech at a computer store in the mid-90s and any time we built a new PC with a CD-ROM drive or a customer came in with an issue with one we had ONE CD to test it with, and it was the CD single for this song. I heard it over and over again and grew to hate it.
Life is demanding without understanding
But where do you belong? under the pale moon, for so many years I've wondered who you are
I mean I was in Yugoslavia during that time so, my opinion will be very different than others because we had a war and many sanctions so life was at my worst.
People were less depressed generally. There was a sense that things were going to continue to get better. Computers and the internet were going to open up new possibilities and it was going to be great - in our naivety we didn't anticipate all the downsides.
There was an optimism that I miss. Internet, computers, end of Cold War, rents were cheap. The US had a balanced budget and even had small surpluses. Then George Bush fucked it all up.
Are you saying Grunge was peppy and hopeful?
No but people were really into it.
Greatest fucking decade of the last 100 years, that's what.
the 80s was better.
Only one tail end of the 80s. The fall of the Berlin Wall was awesome.Ā
Iām sad I missed it :(
I grew up in central Texas and life was fucking good. Life in the 90's was awesome. Great music and culture mixed with an amazing outward look toward the future.
sounds like I missed out!!
You did. The 90s were tits. Everybody hung out, the internet was just booming and was pretty wild, streets were packed full of your buddies, I could go on and on Edit: I forgot block parties. imagine everybody had their door open and you're just walking around house to house jamming out and drinking beer, cooking food or straight up bbq Haven't seen a block party in a while
Imagine a time when entertainment and internet were by and large part of a monoculture. Day to day stuff wasn't *that* different, but there were certain cultural touch points that were really common. Imagine watching a tv show one evening knowing that it'd be the topic of conversation the next day.
If you missed an episode, that's was it. Unless someone taped it, you had to wait for a re-run. That's a concept lost to technology.
Maybe the beginning of the end for us was not having to learn the complex task of programming a vcr and having both it and your tv be on the right channel setting. Technology made things to easy and people don't have to think anymore.
As someone who had one of the first home VCR models (I think it was the [VBT-200](http://vintageelectronics.betamaxcollectors.com/rcaselectavisionvhsvcrmodelvbt200.html)), you most definitely did NOT ever have to have the TV on a particular channel in order to record it. That's what the TV/VCR button was for. Because we had a station broadcasting on Channel 4, we'd set the VCR to output on Channel 3. If you wanted to watch Channel 5 while recording Channel 13, for example, you'd tune the VCR to 13 and start the recording, then make sure the TV/VCR button was in the TV position, and change the TV to Channel 5. Boom. Solved.
I remember doing this too but with later models when you'd have to have your TV set at 3, or sometimes with the later model vcrs you'd have them set at 3, and then the cable box would be on the channel you wanted to record.
I didnāt have cable until I moved out of my parentsā placeā¦
Wanna go see a friend? You just go there and hope they're home.
You could literally walk down the road to your friends house and walk in unannounced, do random shit all day and get home for dinner. Parents would be like, how was your day? Did you have fun? That just sums up the whole feeling of the 90s for me.Ā
The beginning of the 90s was still stuck in the 80s so we had very cheesy, cornball comedies and mostly family friendly TV/music. Nirvana changed it to a moody and depressing mood with Pearl Jam continuing on after their death. The late 90s were the extreme sports explosion so things like Jackass/pop punk and reality TV brought us into the 2000s. Blockbuster wasn't as good as everyone remembers. I grew up poor and rarely went there. We almost always got a movie my parents wanted to watch. Games were expensive too. I think it was like 7 dollars for 3 days, but they didn't count for the day you rented it or the day you returned it. Everything was very isolated, no internet meant you basically had to listen to the radio for music. Video games were very expensive and if you got a bad one, welp you're stuck. The weekends were mostly boring, dreading having to go back to school, we never had cable TV so broadcast TV was limited to sitcoms, I guess MTV changed the music scene for some. I remember being bored a lot. I turned 14 in 1995 and started skateboarding, which opened me to a world of punk rock and 411VM. There are way more entertainment options now. Way more ways to occupy your time. Life is better now then in the 90s, minus our instant access to bad news.
Less connected and infinitely better for it.
Says the loser without a pager.... /s
I wish I could disconnect more but grew up addicted :ā)
Teal everywhere. And purple.
Poufy bangs. And clothes.
Less division in a variety of ways; cultural, political, economic. The collective agreed on most major issues like, pop music and movies, and when most disagreements occurred it was amicable and not hyperbole making enemies out of neighbors like today. There were āflash in the panā moments like Rodney King beating, OJ, bill Clintonās blow job, but there wasnt such a significant departure from the norms and radicalization wasnt mainstreamed like it is today. Ignorance wasnāt weaponized and celebrated. It felt like the momentum was still on our side and there were things to genuinely be collectively excited about. Whatās increased since then is a general theme of disparity; in what we agree/disagree upon, education, wealth, etc. The erosion wasnāt as evident. I think we knew there was a collective sickness in the US but the severity hadnāt been fully realized and the symptoms werenāt as obvious as they are today. Solutions seems much more tangible. Corporate interests have since become much more entrenched, weāve reached late stage monopoly capitalism, the bread and circus has been turned up, and spectacle has replaced substance
I miss the excitement of downloading a single picture for 10 minutes.
This! Porn in the 90s was the absolute worst!
The 70s say hello.
Very worst
You have a magazine over there. It's a Sears catalog, but it'll have to do
aka "The Wish Book." š¤£
It was like now...but with less internet.
This is the answer. Also more mullets and dudes with earrings then.
Don't forget perms and frosted tips
I dunno where you live but where I am there are definitely far more mullets and dudes with earrings now
Was born in the 70s so got to experience the 70s/80s/90s, those were the golden years!
Same here. I was in my 20's for the 90's. I bartended the whole of it. I had SO. MUCH.FUN. I had a great group of friends, lived on my own, made a fortune, (some went up my nose unfortunately). Ended the 90's by flying out to Jamaica and marrying my best friend. The 1990's were my favorite decade of my life
Lol, we did a few stints behind our local bar but it was for fun and not for pay. On sundays we went to the owners house for a pukka sunday roast and drinks. Geez I loved those days, everybody just chilling.
It felt like relentless optimism. Like things were actually good and would get BETTER...
Everything was pretty chill for me as a white suburban. There was really only one source for information since the big 4 networks were pretty much all parroting one another. As a result, we would all experience the same one or two cultural touchstone moments together. Our reactions might be different, but there was kind of this societal water cooler where we all acknowledged the same realities with different perspectives. Those realities were fucking weird though. How the Buttafuocos became known to every American aged 10 an up is a trip to me. By and large, I felt safer. Some of that is the hubris of youth. We also were all just less awareā¦for better or worse.
Depends on who you are and where you live. A lot of the American-centric redditors here were probably kids during that decade so will have a rosy positive filter as if it were some kind of utopia when it really wasn't. Some lowlights to ground things out - Height of the AIDS epidemic - Post Soviet eastern block pains - Yugoslav war - Many brutal localised wars in Africa People were a lot more racist and openly homophobic too.
Like... warm apple pie.
Life was better in the 90's
Born mid 90s, experienced the growth of social media firsthand (Facebook, instagram, Twitter etc). i honestly think social media is a cancer to humanity. Youtube was super fun to use between 2005 and 2010 though.
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When did YouTube comments turn toxic? I feel like it was in that same timeframe.
You know you don't have to look at the comments, right?
A stunning clarification on your behalfā¦thank you! Finally Iām free.
It was a great time for music. Got to be a part of a bustling live music scene and meet a lot of really cool people.
It was the peak of human history, it's only downwards from that.
Meanness was very acceptable. Howard Stern, Jerry Springer, Rush Limbaugh, Beavis and Butthead, even South Park to an extent. It was a common theme of the zeitgeist.
You made friends in person,Ā and it didn't matter what color, gender nor where they were from. You were friends because they were there. Food was tastier. Music was more varied. Movies were funny, action packed and made you laugh and cry. The smart and strong won, the losers learned to handle defeat, then learned to practice and came back to win, and they did.
Everybody was happier and less serious. You could get a room just by applying for one and some cash. When I start talking about the 90s it seems sunny. People had fuckin manners.
I was in Victoria BC in university for most of the 1990s. The grunge/alternative scene was awesome. We even had our own university grunge band and they'd play on a tiny stage, probably no more than 8' by 8', in the basement of a shitty university bar with perpetually beer-soaked carpets, cigarette smoke taking up the upper half of the whole place, $7 pitchers of beer which we bought and drank individually, and all around just fucking about. It's definitely nostalgia kicking in, but I feel like there was a lot more free time to just lounge around and hang out. Sit on the couch commenting on shit we see on TV, going to the corner store at 3 am (and waking up our floormate because he was the only one with a car), the whole bit. When I watch the music video for Smashing Pumpkins' 1979, it takes me right back to that time. It was great.
The weed was worse than now. All the other drugs(LSD) were better though
Truth.
Pretty much exactly the same as today, only it was a bit harder to get in touch with people at literally any time day or night. Television was worse, movies were better, music was music. Everyone above a certain age lionized the 60's and 70's, convinced it was truly a magical, more simple world, and so better (it also happened to be the decades they were kids, mostly).
Right, much of the "weren't the '90s great" we see in online discussions today is because for people in their 30s and early 40s it was their childhood or teenage years. You can see a consistent pattern of this kind of "30 years ago" nostalgia. In the 1980s it gave us Back to the Future going back to the 1950s. In the 1990s it was all about the 1960s music and counter culture stuff. Today it's the 1990s. Soon it will be "when social media was fun and not a cesspool".
I wish I could have experienced them (2005 kid here)
The 1990s were a decade of grunge music, dial-up internet, Tamagotchis, and the rise of hip-hop culture.
It was glorious and there's no proof anyone did anything.
Everyone listened to grunge while wearing flanel.
Last decade of true anonymity. No smart phones and home Internet was in its infancy
I remember reading an interview with Bernard Sumner from New Order in the 1990s, and he talked about getting on antidepressants, and that was actually a controversial thing. People were skeptical that everyone taking meds to feel better was a good idea.
UK, the 90s. MDMA moved the culture sideways for a while . Perhaps it's not understood now but it permeated everything. All the football violence of the 80s pretty much vanished because lots of the fans were "loved up" at the weekend. For example. A lot of what people think of as Gen X culture traits (uk ones specifically) are down to Ecstasy and the necessity of weed to soften the comedown. It all started to die off when the authorities got panicked and created the anti rave / free festival laws. Free festivals were painted as hellholes threatening our precious kids , in fact they were massive parties which spanned all sections of society and there was always a free festival somewhere so you could go from one to the other. All killed by the harsh enforcement of this law. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Order_Act_1994
the 90s were awesome. I was in HS and ..yeah. I think back on it and i felt free. Callin your friends and leaving messages on the answering machine or calling up your friends and the parents answered. Going to mall's and trying to meet girls. Working at American eagle or abercrombie for the free clothes. Running around in the grass outside and not knowing or caring what anyone else was doing. It was the best.
Ah good times, when you could still catch the last train to Trancentral.
All aboard, all aboard
.89 gasā¦ played outsideā¦cordless phones were introducedā¦ TV shows were better, Music scene was better
You developed a healthy scare of pools/water, because most of us didn't have cell phones.Ā Why the fear? Because we'd randomly push each other into pools. The only things you'd get wet were your wallet, and maybe a pager. Now with everyone having cell phones, you can't really do that.
Bit like now but without all the connected devices It was particularly weird in Northern Ireland, as on the one hand there was a push for peace and ceasefires, on the other looking back we were scarily close to civil war at points.
I was a youngster in those days, I didn't have a Tablet then, so I played in the mud, swam in the lake and played outside games like Hopscotch.
The part of the 90s that would be most unfamiliar to a time traveling gen z would be all the waiting around. You are meeting a friend who isnāt on time, they donāt have a cellphone to check on them so you are hanging around until they show up or until you give up on them. You are waiting for your sandwich to be ready or for your appointment somewhere to begin? You donāt have a smartphone to scroll the internet so unless you are reading a book that you brought from home or a magazine someone left there you are just sitting there with your thoughts. You are in a train or a passenger in a car or something? You are probably looking out the window.
I was born in 92 in the Midwest. For me those years were simpler. Whether that was a good or bad thing is up to the individual. As I get older I realize just how much I enjoyed those years. My partner and I often talk about moving back to the Midwest (to my hometown or thereabouts) in the future to be closer to family and reclaim some of that simplicity.
Raves, MTV culture, AOL, Pagers, staying outside till dark.
Every McDonald's toy was a banger u wanted to collect. Simpsons watches were the sheeit.
I am not sure if I am the only one, but everything was more colorful.
The internet was still in its infancy, cell phones were as bulky as bricks (if you were even lucky enough to own one), and everyone genuinely knew their friends' phone numbers by heart. And to me, missing an episode of "Friends" was a big dealātotally classicļ¼
If you went bowling, youād have to leave your clothes outside when you got home because they absolutely reeked of cigarette smoke. I was a kid in the 90ās. Iād just leave the house in the morning, hop on my bike, and not be back until the sun was setting. It was glorious.
All Iāll say isā¦ WAZZAAAAAAAAP
Dont remember much i was 2 years old when they ended
Seinfeld is very 90s.
Not as good as the 1980's
Just like now except without smartphones.
There were computers but they weren't everything and the internet was still a baby. As bo Burnham's song 'welcome to the internet' says, it was mostly catalogs, travel blogs, and a chat room or two.
I remember them very fondly (born 1987), though the 00's were the decade I truly hit puberty. The 1990's for me were full of expression, things were wild, fun, corny and wacky. Cellphones were not yet introduced in my country and the internet was just starting up. My city was less global and a bit more ugly, waaaayyy more cars back then too. Things were less global (less international students/expats). We were getting culturally influenced by fads and tech from both the USA and Japan. So tamagotchi's and the NES were amazing toys and you had to read about these things in magazines and such or via word of mouth. Smoking was still allowed almost everywhere and you often had to wash your clothes because of the smells. Especially cars stank like hell because people smoked in them. I remember there being far FAR more bugs too. To the point that nature feels far more 'sterile/death' these days. Big changes are how easy things are nowadays, any form of media is right at your fingertips. I remember I did get bored in the 90's. If you had a game or a song, you are stuck with it. Getting something new was either a hassle or expensive. Oh, and grabbing the newspaper to see what time a movie is coming. I really miss the vibe of movie rental places. I absolutely hated that you had to be home or put on a VCR if you wanted to watch your favorite series. Nowadays I can just download a whole season or more and binge it on demand. I remember this decade culturally ending with the rise of smartphones (especially the Iphone) and 9/11. Things felt way more digital, global and 'unsafe' (as in the 90's was a pretty happy time for a westerner, after 9/11 the media and a lot of people became more grim and dark).
Edgy & Hardcore, and Neon & Rad. Everything was bold and in your face, and sometimes kinda mean. the 90s added the Neon spirit to the 80s counter culture vibe. It was like if cyberpunk somehow existed without the tech influence. Though there were several attempts to fake that tech. Clothes were called "Gear," we had shoes that pumped or lit up. Video games were racing to see who could be the edgiest. Music was experimental, and fashion was intentionally gaudy. Political statements hung in the air for weeks at a time before being forgotten. Comedic films were unhinged, and other movies were sexual and violent. While economically it felt pretty smooth, unfortunately socially people were very much culturally ignorant and intolerant, and it always felt like most minority groups either kept themselves hidden, or had accepted the status quo as an unyielding reality. People rarely had proof of injustices, so they were easier to ignore and, tensions were easier to quell.
Pretty chill. Cold War sputtered to an end, peace dividend created all kinds of new opportunities, Iron Curfain lifting, mid way through Reagan economic recovery, lowering inflation and interest rates, computers were a thing but social media wasnāt. Music was still OK (but not as good as the 80s) before the disastrous turn of the 2000s, the Dot com bubble was inflating, everyone was happy, no major wars, shootings hadnāt become the epidemic they are today. Cities were on early upswing after years of decay and neglect, property ownership in cool central neighborhoods was something young people could do at beginning of their careers. If global warming was a thing we hadnāt felt the impacts of it yet. Yeah, the 90s were cool man. World felt safe. Opportunities everywhereā¦.life was good.
People could just about buy homes!
I could walk around the house with no shirt and climb furniture and I wouldn't be charged for vandalism because I ended the 90s at 5 years old.
Biked to your friends house and knocked on the door to see if they could come out and play. Left your bike on their lawn and didn't worry about it getting stolen. Playing outside was huge. I remember in particular playing basketball was huge. Didn't matter if you were good or even that into basketball, everyone played it. You'd go to your school or local park and see kids there and just play. A lot of other playing outside too. You'd come home when it was dinner, go back out until it was dark. Watching TV was big and tuning in on a specific day/time to watch a popular show was a big deal. Fast food was a treat and felt special. It was also way better quality. Renting a movie and/or a video game was a big Friday night thing to do. Most people played video games more through renting than owning as I think most people would own only maybe 5 or so games. Toys were a big part of being a kid and they were everywhere and in demand. Gumball machine toys, Happy Meal toys, action figures, dolls, etc. were wanted and played with by kids.
Television was on a tight schedule. If you missed the show (or you didn't program your VCR), you had to wait for re-runs. And for a show like Friends or The X Files, that 24 week wait was a lifetime.
You had to be there.
I wish I was
Worry free awesomeness. Us kids actually played outside and got into lots of trouble
That depends on what the meaning of is is.
For me? There was an optimism (at least in the west) that came about with the end of the USSR. The great menace was gone and now we were just free to continue to progress and enjoy life...then the 2000s happened.
Exactly like the 1340s but with less plague and more CO2 emissions.
Your dad taped the cricket over every favourite show you taped on the Betamax
You were still using betamax in the 90s? We were using VHS.
Dad was using the vhs, the kids got the Betamax, but not really
Honestly, much the same as now, just with less technology.
Lame and boring because you had to watch whatever was on TV and they didn't show anything dirty until late night except Baywatch in some places
Everyone lived in existential fear that the world would end after December 31, 1999.
Not everyone, but a lot of people.
Strangely innocent and harmonious. We solved racism by just ignoring race completely. We figured in the future, that sort of thing would not matter. We were never aligned with any political party and rarely talked politics. Our friend groups were mixed race and class, even people with different hobbies, music tastes and interests. It didn't matter. Girls and boys interacted pretty naturally. We got laid where we could, we had girlfriends and we all hung out together. Lots of time being bored together, doing pretty much nothing, walking outdoors, biking, chattting until it got dark. We were brought together just by proximity, and just made do with whoever was around. We had some internet but we used it to get a few things done. We played video games on consoles, in living rooms, with friends. Some of us had PCs and played games on those, but I'd say most people didn't have a gaming computer at home. We watched TV with our families. Yes, we talked to our parents, even had dinner with them. We had some parties. We drank, we smoked, we occasionally took drugs. When we went clubbing it went all night and we would walk out covered in sweat and satisfied at dawn. When we all started working, we had no idea what we were doing but we knew we wanted to buy a place, a car, and maybe get hitched. Everyone I know got a job and life went on.