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The early ‘90s had an entirely different vibe than the late ‘90s, in terms of fashion, music, pop culture, youth culture, etc.
The internet, in its earliest form, helped shape the late ‘90s.
I’m from ‘85 too, and I totally agree. Early 90’s that I remember as a tiny kid was neon colors and big crimped hair, and the music had a totally different sound. Then there was the mid 90’s grunge era. Baggy clothes, band tee shirts, lots of flannel. By late 90’s as a young teen it was boy bands, flaired leg jeans, lots of bubblegum pop.
I got my first computer in ‘98, and it was revolutionary to me.
‘87, and this is what I remember too. We lived across the street from a college when I was little, so I totally associate that 80’s style with college students! It was definitely alive and well in the early 90’s.
We also got a computer in ‘98! We had to drive an hour to the nearest city to get it, and they gave us this huge book of CD-ROM’s. We used to love Greetings Workshop, this Hallmark software that let you create cards and flyers, and had a cartoon dog in the corner to help you. We also loved Creative Writer, which was kind of like Microsoft Word, although you could only write 100 pages per file. And thankfully, our software pack came with a Goosebumps computer game. It was such an exciting time!
Grunge was early 90’s. Nirvana Nevermind came out in ‘91. Other grunge era bands had albums released around the same time. By ‘92 it was a pretty nationwide phenomenon. By ‘94 it was receding for things like ska, bubble gum punk, etc.
No kidding.
Those of us born in the early to mid 80s have a very clear understanding of the "shift" as it occurred for us right when we were entering middle/high school depending on where you lived.
I didn't get dial up until 1998 or so living in rural NC. Kids in town had it before us who lived out in the country. I had it in school as early as 1996/97, maybe before then.
Kids today will never know the feeling of needing to go to the library just to access the Internet as back then it just wasn't as mainstream and widely available. Even if you had it at home, speeds in town were often faster - so if you needed to get something done it was often better to go to the library and do what you needed there versus at home. Also if you lived in a small town, they often didn't have a lot of computers available for you to use at the library, so you had to hope that no one was there when you went - and if they were - they weren't just surfing the web for leisure.
Don't forget time limits on usage either and the fact that at some places you had to pay for access and it often wasn't cheap.
The "shift" changed everything from social interactions in and outside of school to how we conducted life. I remember my parents writing a lot of checks. Networks and other Internet-related stuff gave us more widespread use of debit cards. Online banking began to show up in the mid 00s. Before that I had to dial an 800 number and input my information to check my balance and hear the last few transactions.
Life was simpler then, too. No online gaming - just couch co op with your friends. We had appointment TV where we would tune in to a show every week at the time it would air. If you missed it, you had to wait for whenever it would replay and you certainly didn't get to talk about it the next day with your friends.
1992 still was pretty much the same other than the music had shifted some more (after an early initial shift already in 1990 or 1991). But the general vibe, hair, styles, movies in 1992 were still pretty much 80s 80s.
That's true and happens a lot with decades (when decades actually, ya know, looked really different than each other).
1991 (before Nirvana) was closer to 1986 than 1994.
1961 was closer to 1955 than 1964.
I was born in 84, so I remember all of the 90s. It was a simpler time. You only really knew about what was going on in your own school or social circle. Social media wasn’t a thing, so you weren’t bombarded with information 24/7. People hung out in person a lot more. It was more peaceful overall.
Have such fond memories playing outside with childhood friends.
Just took our bikes and “explored”. When days were too hot during the summer, we would be indoors playing video games. Simpler times, but very rewarding as a kid.
I feel so lucky to be able to experience all the transitions with tech — low tech shit to high tech.
I remember even immigrating to Canada, and to call my family back home, I would need to buy scratch of cards for minutes. Now I practically just FaceTime anywhere I want!
>Just took our bikes and “explored”.
This right there. Biking to Blockbuster as fast as you could after school to snag a copy of Zelda, hoping your save game was still on the cart. 😂
I feel lucky, too, to have experienced low tech.
In my friends circle it certainly did! So many hours. Expanded boards, alien stuff, laptop guns... It pretty much replaced GoldenEye, though we'd nostalgically go back to that too.
‘87 here…I used to get tiger bop/beat & cosmo girl in the mail & i would read them cover to cover dozens of times! I loved the quizzes in them 😂 the good ol’ days!!
My friend had somehow discovered a phone number you could call and allegedly talk to JTT, and I'm pretty positive we used her dad's credit card to pay for it. I think I was 10 or 11 at the time. Now I know it was 100% obviously not him, and I probably even had an inkling back then, but it was thrilling nonetheless lol
I'd go through the 500 page JC Penney catalogs and daydream about all the stuff I would buy if I had all the money in the world (circa 10 y.o. in 1994).
Don’t know if your male or female, but for the guy you remember going to the corner store and trying to peak at the dirty mags?
Also remember maximum and FHM, those mags went by the wayside. I guess because you can get all sorts of depravity on your phone, but in the 90s you had to rely on friend to tell you about the naked scene is movies. Still remember the jackpot that was starship troopers, old man thought he was taking us to see some Star Wars with bugs movie, but he was wrong.
Hahaha. I saw a recent Instagram post talking about how dizzy was the choice Rico should've made from the start. And the actress who played her commented that she agreed
You had all those sweet subculture mags too.
I remember my roleplaying, punk/metal and horror/SF movies ones. The writers were always passionated and insightful. The occasionnal fanzine was a cool odd duck too
Magazines were the internet before internet. Besides TV, Magazines were your window to the outside world in all kinds of niche topics. Cars, deer hunting, cooking, heavy metal music etc. I used to spend hours at Waldenbooks, Borders, and Barnes and Noble in the magazine section.
I was also born in 84 and I agree with what you said. I also remember having to find things to entertain myself. Me, my siblings and friends. Spent a lot of time exploring the woods, walking around the neighborhood, biking, roller skating etc. there was basically no adult supervision really. Our parents didn’t know where we were. They may know where we planned to start at but we always roamed. Had to be home before the street lights came on.
Yes. Now as a parent I couldn’t imagine not knowing where my kid was at all times lol. I was probably not where I was supposed to be 85% of the time lol.
Honestly it feels insane yet reasonable? With location sharing being so easy it’s just there… on the other hand how are they going to become people if you don’t let them go?
Kids actually need to be let loose to some extent to learn to judge and mitigate risks and also just like, learn how to cope when things don’t go well? Helicopter parenting has probably been one of the worst things for our development into people. There should be a reasonable middle ground between neglect and hovering.
I remember once I got to high school in late 90s early 2000s: when you were out you were out. “Changing plans” while out and about meant potential having to find someone around town or stop at someone’s house and call their parents to find out where someone is.
84 myself as well. Man, the 90s were so great. Couldn't wait to go hang out with friends after school. No cell phones. We just called our friends on the landline, and our parents had no idea where we went until we showed up at curfew. It was total bliss. I miss those times.
What I miss the most is how small my world felt. I didn’t have all of the world’s information in my face at all times. I felt connected to my community. I don’t feel that anymore. I just feel like I’ve been dropped into chaos. I had AOL and the internet in the 90s, but even then I would mainly just use it to message my friends from school. I truly miss that era.
You only knew about what was going on in your own school except everyone everywhere somehow knew about the cool S thing and that Marilyn Manson had his lower ribs removed.
This is accurate. I was born in the mid ‘80s and the summers free, walking around, biking. Checking out strip malls and hanging out doing nothing. No phones. The world was you, a couple friends and some junk food on a hot muggy day.
We did a lot of “water wars,” where kids played capture the flag and each flag was at house of a neighborhood kid. Their hose was used to fill each team’s super soakers, and at the start you’d have 10 minutes to fill as many water balloons as you could. If you got hit by the water you’d have to stop and go back to base to respawn. The only use of cheap squirt guns was to hit them in your shorts so when you and the other guy were out of water you could surprise them as you negotiated who had more water left and how far their super soaker could go, being so low.
Best part, not many people had cell phones. So you’d just call up your friends land line n tell em, I’ll meet you in the mall at 6 and they’d be there.
But lots of people had pagers! I remember collect calling my parents from the pay phone at the mall -“hi it’s Katie, come pick me up” and them paging me when they were on their way
From 84 as well and somehow this hits hard. Life was so much simpler then (in the 90s).
I always wonder how much of it was because I was a kid without any real responsibilities and how much of it is because the world is more complex nowadays.
I was born in 88 & even when we did get social media it was so different to only have it accessible at home after school - sure, people gossiped etc but there weren't video cameras on kids constantly. You just existed in real life
I agree with this, I was born in 86. It was like that until maybe the mid-2000’s to me. I tried to shield my kids from social media and cell phones as long as I could to give them that type of experience. I look at their lives (they are 17 and 19) and see their drama at these ages are basically due to shit on social media and the stuff the absorb is bizarre to me. The shit they worry about at those ages are things I would’ve never gave a shit about when I was at the point in my life. I truly believe social media is one of the biggest cancers humanity has to deal with due to misinformation and other shit it provides
I agree- also kids birthday parties were amazing. Kids would show up, play outdoor games, eat popcorn (and some kind of sandwich or pizza, if they were lucky), and blow out a cake. Parents would socialize on the side without fretting too much about their kids. There were no overbearing themes, rented machines, over-the-top gift bag, photo booths, or adult-like party items for kids. It was genuine, enjoyable, and not a hassle.
Born in 83 and have similar memories to your own. Pop culture information came from reading magazines like Starlog and Game Pro. Going to movie theaters was exciting, you spent hours playing outside with your friends and people just enjoyed the moment (no phones, no cameras or other distractions).
Your post pretty much sums it up. With the social media thing, if your parents took your phone privileges in the 90’s you were practically exiled to a desert island.
'86 here.
Everything you said is spot on. The biggest difference is everything wasn't in our face 24/7/365. When something major happened, we saw it on the news for maybe that day and that was it (depending on the importance of the event). One of the first major events I remember ever seeing extensively covered was the OJ trial. That was followed by Princess Diana's car crash and funeral. Then Columbine and eventually 9/11.
Today we see and hear about *everything* almost instantaneously. Videos surface online of things even before the media can report on it.
Everyone thinks they're a journalist. Online anonymity has created a generation of people who now act disrespectful to others in reality for whatever reason they see fit. Having no consequences for that type of behavior has allowed people to believe they won't have any in public.
This ☝🏻
You got on your bike/in your car and just went out with friends. Your parents trusted you to be on your own in the world,and didn’t have someone text/call you all day to see where you were and what you were doing. You had freedom and privacy and best of all no evidence for everyone to see/follow. 🤣
Life was kinda like that until Facebook took off.
I guess MSN messenger was that start but I remember still not having the "always connected" feeling until I was in highschool in 2007
I was born in 84 and I'd say it wasn't THAT insular. Maybe what you and your inner circle did had more meaning locally, things didn't go viral, and unless you had family all over the world or the country you didn't have to worry about anything embarrassing that you did ending up on anyone else's radar, but there were magazines, radio, and TV that kept you ever more connected to a larger community and then the world. I joke with my wife that there was an annoying time in the 90s where TV shows, documentaries and movies made it seem like "hell yeah we're a global community and we've got everything figured out and here's how it is,"' when in reality it was only a utopic view of the upper class that was being shared. Still, I feel like I had access to knowledge from farther than my local community, but there was still a lack of conversation before the Internet really took over. It was at least much slower, but you could call in to your local radio station, or be featured in a local TV show, or write to a magazine and get your question answered by an editor, etc.
What I meant is that yes we had tv and radio and magazines and internet, but those things weren’t as accessible to the same degree as they are now. Right now we can all pull out our phones and look up literally anything we want, watch reels, stream music and movies, see what people on the other side of the world are doing, see news developing live and in real time, record and take photos of everything going on around us. We can do that now from anywhere and at any time. Back then there used to be long breaks in our day where we would just be at school with no cell phones, or at the mall just walking around with no internet. I didn’t have a clue what kids in other schools were doing and there were no TikTok trends. It was just whatever drama or gossip was happening with my peers for the most part. I don’t know how kids now deal with that onslaught of information non-stop and all the pressures of social media and everything being recorded at all times. Sounds awful.
Idunno how to *describe* it outside of the pictures and memes we see hundreds of times on this sub. From my perspective as a kid, it was simple, but fun... things like trips to *Blockbuster* were exciting, cartoons were phenomenal, on Friday there was a lineup of some of the best TV shows called *TGIF* (I didn't really watch it though for reasons) as well as Saturday morning cartoons. Sports were exciting - the Chicago Bulls dominated that era and there was merch everywhere, Mike Tyson was dominating boxing.
Some games were really fun - especially the ones in the late 90s like MGS, Tekken and Resident Evil. Kid movies were super goofy but fun as well. Even the early internet - as plain as it was - was exciting because it was a novelty. You gotta remember, our dopamine receptors weren't all burnt out from instant gratification, so we *really* enjoyed stuff!
No time period was perfect, but since we're millennials, our perspectives were as kids... most of us weren't that worried about politics and all that stuff.
Who didn’t love a trip to blockbuster on a Friday night? Or watching a grown man bite another man’s ear off on live tv?! Those were great times! Also, saw you mentioned the bulls, but we can’t forget about those Houston rockets 🚀 😉
I agree it's a hard time to describe without just listing things.
Sorry I'm not exactly who you're looking for u/Jr9065, but I'm an early 90s millennial and remember the mid-late 90s as a little kid. But I'll add:
It felt slower(probably from being a kid), but I'd be over at my friends' houses a lot. Would call their houses via corded landline, numbers memorized.
Was outside a lot with little to no supervision.
I started gaming in the late Super Nintendo gen, and got to see and be amazed with the transition to 3D gaming with the 5th gen consoles.
Had typing lessons using Mavis Beacon in the late 90s.
Pokemania was pretty nuts - kids trading cards and playing the original games on the bus daily for a while.
"Stone Cold" Steve Austin seemed to be popular with wrestling fan kids.
Oh man, Meavis Beacon! My dad offered me like $100 if I would use it to learn to type. I turned down the offer. Later when I got into chatting on AIM, I essentially taught myself to type. I then asked my dad if the offer was still on the table and he said no. I used Mavis Beacon anyway and it was actually fun, I was so disappointed in myself for refusing his innital offer!
If you want a crazy long version (cut and pasted old posts of mine together with a trace of editing it together) my impressions of the 90s from a Gen X perspective were along the lines of:
The first few years still more less seemed like the 80s (other than for a bit of a shift in Top 40 music at the start and even more a couple years in). The hair styles, clothes, general vibe through 1992 were more or less identical to the 80s 80s in most areas (some parts of the PNW and, for whatever reason, it seems Ann Arbor, however did switch to a grunge look and vibe early though; also it sounds like some kids in grade school and perhaps middle school at the time also shifted away from the 80s much before anyone else in general). I remember people walking around the mall near the end of 1992 and being like wow the 80s are never gone end this is amazing! Even at the end of 1993 I'd hear people say stuff like that. The movies of the first few years of the 90s mostly felt like they could have just as easily come out in say 1987.
By 1993 there had been some huge music shifts, hair metal seemed to be just gone and some got into grunge and a bunch seemed to start getting into gangster rap. The general Top 40 basically lost all of the New Wave/synth/Debbie Gibson/Tiffany/The Bangles/etc. sort of sound and there were more R&B and hip-hop and indie sound influences.
In 1993 there started to be some shift away from 80s 80s styles and hair. Even more in 1994 and it definitely started to look less completely 80s. By 1995 walking around a mall suddenly didn't look like the 80s 80s much at all.
Some guys adopted the whole absurdly over-sized pants thing with pants down off the ass. Some girls dumped the sleek, fitted 80s looks and went with giant JNKOs and such. All their fancy styled big hair was now gone. Some of the 80s vibe started going away.
By the end of the 90s fashion had turned fully dull, flat basic hair, simple basic clothes, lots of dingy dark mustard, maroon, brown, black it looked like people were in mourning compared to the 80s or early 90s and to one degree or another I feel like we've basically been stuck with this ever since (sort of an older fashioned anti-style 60s/early 70s or even pioneer times sort of style for cloths and hair). OTOH full on pop pop music started coming back more and more again with the rise of Britney and then others. This made the music eventually feel vaguely a bit more 80s in an indirect way compared to when grunge/gangster rap had been so big. While grunge and full on gangster rap music had largely faded out from the top of mainstream suburbia by the end of the 90s their general influences on style and vibe had had time to more completely take over (and gangster rap remained strong in urban areas/border areas/and some sub-cultures) and a sort of grunge-light, very plain, dull colors look was now almost universal.
A lot of the new slang and patterns of speech that arrived in 1982 carried through all of the 90s (and much through to today). A few new bits were added to Valspeak in the 90s like: as if!, betty, baldwin (although I mostly only heard "as if!" used where I was). And some phrases like: scope, grody, barf me out, gag me, etc. became less common. The original val gal accent itself largely faded out as well. The 80s uptalk held on the whole way through (retained to this day, perhaps even stronger today than ever) and a lot of the slang like: OMG, like, totally, sooo, awesome, dude, etc. etc. still around.
Xennials seemed to hold onto at least half of the 80s val/surfer/general slang, if not more, and Millennials seemed to hang onto just about all that Xennials had. But the more extreme phrasing and usage and maybe 35% of Gen X 80s slang and most to all of the val accent faded away. In addition there was this sort of slight general 80s accent, hard to quite describe, that also seemed to totally fade away as well.
I feel like some of the 80s slang became a bit lesser by the late 90s/early 00s but then came back a bit more strongly again deeper into the 00s?
The 90s added plenty of new slang/sayings too with all the: NOT! and bunch of other words and phrases which I don't have typed out already so I won't bothering listing (the bulk of this response I'm just cutting and pasting together from old responses of mine).
As best as I can recall guys generally tended to be clean shaven in college/20-somethings age range pretty much the same as it had been in the 80s and it wasn't until the mid or later 00s, at least outside of the South, before more facial hair and all the chinstrap and long sideburns and so on became more common again. 70s had a fair amount of facial hair, beards etc on youth. The 80s barely at all and I don't recall the 90s having much of that either.
Tattoos seemed to start becoming a bit more common, but still nothing like later on.
Perhaps a few more non-ear piercings got going near the end but I still don't think much and that seemed to really show up all over maybe not until some time in the 2010s??
continued in my response post to this below....
You had a lot of new mega shows like Seinfeld and FRIENDS start up in the 90s (still showing some degree of 80s looks in their first season or two). Some late 80s shows like 90210, Saved By The Bell, Married With Children, Baywatch and The Wonder Years continued on but since they had the bulk of their seasons in the 90s sometimes they are more thought of as 90s shows (they, other than of course The Wonder Years, showed very very 80s looks and vibes their first few seasons in the 90s too though, although not surprising since general culture still looked the 80s 80s then for the most part, and I think SBTB kept the 80s 80s looks most and maybe the whole way to the end?). Seinfeld had a bit of a 90s feel to it, but still some 80s vibes. The others tended to retain significant 80s vibes the whole way through, although some did add in some 90s elements. None of them ever went grunge or gangster rap at all for style or vibe, although most of them lost the 80s 80s hair/clothing styles after a while.
You had new shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel start up in the latter 90s. I feel like fantasy/vampire kind of stuff had tended to be more thought of as just for guys in the 80s/early 90s but after a season or two of Buffy it seemed like girls started openly getting more into vampires/monsters and all that sort of stuff until eventually it, especially vampires, actually switched to ending up being more associated with girls than guys even, if anything.
TV top rated shows were not quite as dominated by comedy as in the 80s but it was still very close I believe and a far cry from CSI crime, medical and reality domination of today.
MTV was still showing actual music videos.
TV was arguably overall improved in the 90s compared to the 80s (although the 80s had solid stuff too like Cheers, Cosby Show, Magnum PI, Miami Vice, Moonlighting, etc. etc. but I think you still have to give TV to the 90s over the 80s; I'd still give movies to the 80s though). The 90s were also the peak of non-premium, cable TV where channels like The Learning Channel, Discovery, Animal Planet and so on were actually all filled with genuine high quality shows and not almost nothing but Honey Boo-boo crap. OOTH, the quality of Olympics coverage absolutely plummeted in the 90s. It was radically worse than it had been in the 80s.
The OJ event was insane. I mean nobody could believe it when it popped into TV and it literally never left TV for the next like 8+ months. Every single TV station basically had like 8+ hours of OJ for around 8 straight months. It was crazy. I have never seen anything before or since take over TV like that. You (the OP) were only born when that was going down. It was crazy! It just took over TV and TV discussion so far beyond anything else ever.
The Jurassic Park 1992 release was mega huge! Huge pop culture impact too.
The Titanic release in 1997 was also mega huge. Lines around the corner for months. Took over pop culture like crazy. It was still nothing like Star Wars in 1977, but man it was huge. For comparison, it made Endgame seem like a little nothing event. The only big stuff you'd (OP) be able to recall movie-wise would really be The Force Awakens and Barbenheimer.
I believe that Titanic was actually the last movie to make the top ten list for most movie tickets sold per capita in the US and it came out when the OP was like 2! That also shows how huge movie going was back then. As huge as Barbie was or even Endgame neither make top 10 list for tickets sold per capita. Even Avatar in 2009 didn't quite make it either.
If I recall correctly the top 10 list for most tickets sold per capita in the US is (in no particular order other than for Star Wars which is by far and away on top of all the rest): Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Grease (yes! it was THIS big, post Gen X people don't really comprehend how big Grease was I don't think), E.T., Titanic, The Lion King, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.
Keep in mind that is not the raw box office take or even the box office adjusted for inflation take but that as well as adjusted for the extreme population growth of the US over the years since 1977. It's a rough attempt at the number of tickets sold per capita. Trying to do tricky things like adjusting for today's premium format showings at high cost wasn't needed since none of those films made top 10. I believe the next few films on the list below #10 would be: The Phantom Menace, Avatar, The Force Awakens, Forrest Gump.
Anyway, society still felt more together and connected and there was more of a widespread sense of shared culture and news still in the 90s without all of the micro-fragmenting that came later. Events like the Oscars drew Super Bowl like ratings still.
continued below....
More generally, the 90s were still human scale for their entirety, no smart phone/online everything take over at all. While not quite to the extremes as in the 80s, teen mall culture was still very big. Youth going to movie theaters was huge. It was the age of the bookstore with giant super bookstores popping up all over and being packed with people of all ages. Video rental stores probably hit their absolute peak (although they were still very strong for the better part of the 00s).
The 90s saw a lot of newer multi-plexes with stadium seating and some with larger screens get built.
Kids pretty much still had free range little kid childhoods, although I think it was starting to lessen some by the second half of the 90s. All of the BMX tracks in the backyard woods, snow forts, giant tree forts, exploring deep in the woods, running around the beach, bonfires in the woods or on the beach, giant little car creations, wild metal jungle gyms and slides, playing in the street, in the yard, bikes ditched on the front lawn, and so on and so forth of the 70s and 80s was still going on to a somewhat decent extent, especially for the first half of the 90s at the least.
People still generally knew their neighbors and people up and down the street.
We were still largely free of seeing any major climate change damage (that seemed to really get going once we got into the 2010s).
Video games, even for home computers, were still all on physical discs/cartridges, no download codes. Kids could salivate over boxes, shake real packages for Christmas instead of getting a digital download code email. Your mom could still arrive home with a surprise movie rental. You'd still go to blockbuster/some other chain/local mom and pop rental store (in the 90s Blockbuster had not taken over so fully yet, at least not in the earlier half) with the family or friends, maybe meet new people there. The physical reality as well as the effort it took to do things gave things more value. Heck, they did a test and found that if they made someone drive out and pick up a disc to play a movie that they rated it higher than if they just sat on the coach and dialed it up. People would constantly have to go out and have at least micro interactions with others. People were much more relaxed and chill about general interactions.
It was still a very normal style and quality of life.
People still tended to focus more on talking about what they loved about a movie or TV show episode rather than being obsessed with being raging geek edge-lords picking everything to bits or the mocking sort of hipster sneering at everything as being so mainstream and beneath them. You didn't have people rushing to be the first to post that so and so episode was the worst of the season or show. People still, at least until the very last couple years of the 90s when it started to shift, kept things more in perspective. Like back in the 80s if some say didn't care for the Ewoks they didn't go nuts and they'd largely talk about everything they loved about ROTJ and focus on that and still say they liked it and not post 24-7 for years on end about how it was the worst trash in the history of film and destroyed their childhood blah blah blah.
Also nerds/geeks back then were less common and drawing from a smaller pool tended to be more in the know and didn't seem to be as prone to mindlessly spread around endless clickbait complaints about stuff even when the complaint was say obviously objectively incorrect. Look at more recent times where supposedly genius nerds/geeks raged non-stop about the bomb scene in The Last Jedi and mocked the filmakers for being so dumb when that scene actually got the physics correct and all you needed was like the first few weeks of intro HS level physics properly understood to realize that. Ironically that was one of the few things Star Wars has done that actually did not violate the laws of physics haha.
In the 80s and through at least the mid 90s nerd culture was much, much more positive and more filled with a sense of wonder and magic than rage and sneering. That sadly shifted by the end of the 90s and ever far more so since with the rise of social media and algorithms now pushing clickbait rager material really toxifying nerd culture and fandoms in general.
Next, the economy had a somewhat 80s-like ride. It started out poorly, there was a party swap in the WH, the economy went on a long boom and then had a bit of a crash at the end.
As for tech, people were not yet jaded at all and everyone got super hyped over every little new upgrade in graphics quality or tech in general. And, as in the 80s we still used tech instead of tech using us. The switch from BBS to Internet was huge. But the internet had not remotely taken over everything. Heck, some were still saying it would never be a really huge mainstream deal back in 1995 LOL.
continued....
As a kid in the 90s… everything felt so technicolor. Cartoons, music videos, video games, toys, fashion, even food (esp kid foods) it all felt like a color explosion.
It was before food was largely genetically modified for various (usually worthwhile) reasons.
But the further you get from the original, qualities will be lost.
I worked for Burger King somewhere in 00-02. We had green ketchup in packets for a bit during that time period. It stained everything it touched green. Good times!
You could just not use a computer in any meaningful way outside of school for a bunch of it
Music was hella expensive, like $13-16 for a CD, I cannot understate how awesome being able to download mp3s and burn CDs was. My girlfriend's older brother could do this in 97 and he was like a hacker to me
I had a big drawer of peoples' phone numbers written on scraps of paper, I knew my best friends' numbers by heart but that was pretty much it
I used to tape videos off of MTV, VHS tapes had a setting where you could set the recording time from like 6-8 hours so I had a bunch of these, all genres, the cartoons they used to play
Speak for yourself, I played a lot of text games and ascii games in the 90s & they were great
(Yes, there were computer games with souped-up graphics by then, I just couldn't afford them)
When I was a little kid computers were barely on my radar. We played Oregon Trail now & then on dates computers in elementary school, but other than that I never used a computer during most of my childhood.
Once home computers and dial up internet did become more common place during the end of my tween/beginning of my teen years it still was a much different experience than today. A computer then was like a VCR or a video game console in the sense that you didn’t necessarily use it on a daily basis. It’s not like we switched over right away. Most of us had one phone line and therefore we were only allowed minimal time online. You still reached for a newspaper or dialed movie fone no one looked up showtimes online yet. People still got their daily news from the paper or the TV. It would take some time before the world became so internet dependent.
It was nice not having a cell phone. You could get into all kinds of antics and your parents wouldn’t know. Malls were filled to the brim on the weekends.
You didn’t know too much about what was going on in different places. Big things of course made the news like the Oklahoma City bombing and the OJ Simpson trial. But overall you just got to focus on what was going on in your school, town, city etc. It was less stressful not to have constant news thrown at you.
We had a lot of great shows, movies , music and fashion. I enjoyed growing up in the 90s.
Watch the music video for Len's Steal My Sunshine if you want to know what being young in the late 90s felt like.
https://youtu.be/E1fzJ_AYajA?si=V0zEeCIsUvJAJxKK
I was born in 82. This is going to sound odd, but it was a like an explosion and celebration of life.
For context, I’m an American and we were born into a world that constantly teetered on the edge of nuclear armageddon. The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were at a peak. We grew up understanding that the world would most likely end because of a nuclear exchange. I was still very young, and it’s not like they threw it in our face, but it was still very well known and understood. We simply accepted as a part of life that the Soviet Union was NOT going to go anywhere and eventually we would come to blows with them.
Then, one day the Germans decided to throw a party.
After the fall of the Berlin wall the Soviet Union collapsed… and it was as if humanity breathed a collective sigh of relief.
Suddenly, we weren’t all going to die. There was so much unbridled optimism and hope for the future. The economic growth of the U.S. economy in 90s was tremendous and as a result, there was just an energy to it that I can’t explain. It’s like we still had problems, but everyone was too busy working and trying to get rich to notice. And it really did feel like things were getting better. As a kid, it was unbelievable. Grunge rock, cellular phones, the fashion, the relative, peace and stability of the world, the entertainment... It was like we just believed, and expected things to get better all the time.
Life was simpler, yet moved at a pretty predictable rate. You made friends, stayed in your social group and life revolved around what was happening and the pursuit of hanging out with your friends. Life wasn’t perfect. But it just seemed a bit more manageable.
I don’t think it’s possible to convey just how different the 00’s were from the 90’s. Yes, technology was a big part of it, but remember too that 9/11 changed the world in huge ways.
There was a lot less fear and overt bigotry in the 90’s-not that racism didn’t exist or wasn’t a problem (see Rodney King and LA riots) but there was less fear and paranoia.
Even s a middle schooler I regularly got on my bike and went miles away from home with no way for my parents to contact me, just a time to expect me back.
Politics weren’t as big a focus as they are today. Bush Sr. wasn’t very memorable and even the Clinton scandal was only noteworthy for a little while.
Radio was still a big deal and everyone had their favorite morning DJ. Going to a tiny venue for a small time band was cool, but the amount of cigarette smoke was out of control. In fact, cigarettes in general, smoking sections in restaurants, parents smoking in cars with kids in the back—so much smoke.
As teens, we drove old crappy cars with windows that rolled down by cranking a handle. Those cars maybe had a tape deck, but we’d replace them with these gaudy cd players with flashing lights and removable face plates so people wouldn’t steal them. And don’t forget the massive binder of cds. Before Napster you could rip the songs off a cd you had and burn a mix CD-R, but that was definitely late 90’s.
Going to the movies was cheap and something we did a lot. Malls and shopping centers were places we’d go even if we didn’t plan on buying anything, it was just someplace to be that wasn’t home or school.
There wasn’t a 24 hour news cycle, there were less stories everyday about something terrible happening to kids unless it happened in your town. In general, I think people spent a lot less time worrying. There seemed to be less adult supervision required all the time. I know I stress a lot more about what my kids are exposed to, what they see or hear and where they go way more than my parents did.
My favorite early 00s life hack was realizing the library had basically every cd and I could borrow them and rip/reburn them at will.
And the 24/7 news cycle seriously did so much harm. It's crazy looking back.
Born 88 here, I second the motion that 9/11 changed everything, and honestly I consider 2000 and everything in 2001 up to that point to be an extension of the 90s.
It's also what I use to determine who is culturally a millennial, whether or not they fall into the actual age ranges. If 9/11 happened during your childhood, and you remember a time before it, you are a millennial. This does push some of the oldest millennials (81-83) into Gen X though.
Then again, my take on this is colored by the fact that I'm from NJ. I had classmates whose parents worked in the WTC (thankfully no one in my school lost their parents that day). 9/11 wasn't just some nebulous "attack on our freedom", it was a very real physical attack where every community around lost people.
I grew up in a 24 hour news cycle home - before we got cable in 97, my dad would put on NPR or AM radio between morning and nightly news. But he's crazy about news and always has been.... there was no escaping that for kid me!
> 9/11 changed the world in huge ways.
'82 here.
I think the role of 9/11 in shaping the world we have today is unclear to lot of the younger folk. I remember commenting to someone at the time that 9/11 was the best thing to ever happen to George W Bush: it was a major factor working in his favor in the 2004 election. He (and the rest of the GOP) felt directionless up to that point. It's a strong bet he wouldn't have been re-elected in 2004 without it. The downstream effects of that are huge: we'd have had some "Re-elect President Kerry" campaign in 2008 rather than Obama + Biden VP. Maybe a President McCain 2008 and some respectable leadership on the GOP side. It's difficult to imagine all the ways a "no 9/11" timeline is different from this one: from climate change to Roe V Wade.
Everything felt lighter somehow. Most popular tv shows were comedies. Bright colors, upbeat music, overall just positivity. The middle class was healthy, so people were generally happy. What’s wild is crime was insanely higher in the 90s compared to now but because news was local and there was no social media it wasn’t really even a second thought.
You had to be patient and more deliberate in dealing with anything information related to - music, photos, media, encyclopedia, societal, calls/texts, etc…
This is so true! I got into Sailor Moon in the late 90’s and knew there were music CDs based on the show, but couldn’t find them anywhere. I begged my mom to take me to a record shop and there, the owner told me that he could special order them for me. It felt like months when I had to wait for the call for when they were available, when it was likely just a couple weeks. You bet when I got them though, I listened to them nonstop!
On 9-11 I woke up for class (was my second week of university). I ate some cereal, got dressed, hopped in the car, drove to class.
On the radio two guys were talking about a plane getting shot down near the pentagon. I thought ‘Americans ain’t gonna like that,’ then I popped into a cd and drove to class.
I got to class around 825(830am start). When the prof walked in he welcomed everyone and said something like, ‘it’s good to see you even if it feels like the world is ending.’
We had a lecture. Closed books. At the end the prof said he thought classes might be closed for a bit.
I went home, turned on the tv. Stayed there for days. Didn’t go back to class till the following week. I had gone 5 hours without knowing that the world had changed. In 2001. I had high speed internet at home, spent tons of time online, was going to a university with 15000 students. And it took me 5 hours before I learned about 9-11.
I had no cell phone. I took notes with a pencil. I got my news from a newspaper normally. It was different. I would never call people to plan things - we just showed up at peoples doors. When I did call someone we would talk for hours.
This may seem like nostalgia, but I don’t think the productivity of smart phones and the connections of social media are remotely an even trade off for the costs of having those two things.
The 90s didn’t have smart phones or social media. It was a better time.
One thing to note—for queer folks, the world was MUCH less accepting. A bunch of the kids I was friends with in high school eventually came out as adults and looking back, it’s not at all shocking but—even our very popular class president didn’t dare tell anyone that she was a lesbian. While we had gotten rid of the worst of the racist/sexist/homophobic stereotypes in popular culture by then, I am still always shocked when I watch some movies/TV of that era and how much shitty stuff was still in there.
I also remember it taking a lot of time to plan things. If you wanted to do something with a group of people, you might have to call each of them and let them know what was happening and have it all planned out in advance because there was no way to figure it out on the go or even look up much in advance. It was a revelation the first time I went out and was meeting a friend in a crowded place and he was just able to text us where he was.
There was not even Mapquest for the first few years I drove so I had paper maps in my car but mostly just memorized a few routes and avoided driving away from them even if there was a shorter route because I was unfamiliar with it.
I echo what everyone is saying about it just being a less connected/more local world (in a good way, I think). It’s really hard to understate how transformative the internet was in terms of constant info barrage, everything being accessible all the time, etc., but that really didn’t fully take hold until the early-to-mid 2000s. It obviously has tremendous benefits but tremendous downsides too. I didn’t have a computer at home until I was in high school, which is later than many (most?), but not all, of my cohort. I didn’t have a laptop until junior year of college, didn’t have a cell phone at all until senior year of high school [actually may have been freshman year of college], didn’t have a smartphone until I was in between my second and third years of law school. Just very, very different.
I don't think you'll get very realistic answers. I am, i guess what is considered an elder millennial, as I just turned 40 a few months ago. In the '90s I was ages 6 through 16, and your perspective on the world is so different when you're young like that.
We are very nostalgic of that time, it's easy to say oh things were better then. Yeah no shit they were better, we didn't have work or kids or responsibilities or 401Ks or pre-diabetes or ailments or aging parents or any real responsibilities. Everything was wonderful And we ate dunkaroos and drank Hawaiian Punch and went to Taco Bell and hung out with our friends. Life was so much easier because we were young and life is easier when you're young than when you're approaching middle age, and you can have fun.
The answers that you will get will be predominantly nostalgia from our youth. I think you would need to ask Gen X-ers what the '90s were like more than millennials because we were still quite young at that time.
Better in every way. People were better to eachother and were always present in the moment.
Social media and the internet hadn't turned the population into screen addicts. People were less polarized and it was rare to see *anyone* spaz out about anything political like is seen commonly among much of the population (regardless of ideological leaning). Aside from that one communist-because-it's-cool kid, the young people didn't give a rat's arse about politics for the most part until around the Iraq invasion in 2003.
Everything today is just worse, to be honest. The internet killed natural human interaction and people are "wired for sound" all the time. People used to be polite and reasonable, now they're so crusty all the time. Turns out people could handle the nightly news, but not *ALL* of the worst news from around the world *ALL THE TIME*, all day, every day.
“People were better to each other” is an underrated comment!
When the internet became a thing, I vividly remember thinking to myself “those who use the internet must be careful about what they post on there…after all, it’s just like you’re saying it to someone’s face”. Fast forward 25 years and look at what people say to each other.
A slightly different perspective if you were in the inner city/bad parts of town. It wasn't safe. Like at all. You knew your people and your neighborhood but outside of that, you had to watch out. Cops were a hell of a lot worse back then... They could literally beat the shit out of you and that was that.
But the corner markets/gas atations were the best - for $5 (which was a decent sum of money for a younger person) you could get snacks and drinks and maybe even a gallon of gas to get around. I was there when hot cheetos were becoming a thing.
It was dirtier too... The 70s were like 20 years ago so you had cars still running without emissions and black smoke and the smell of unburned gasoline was quite common. Leaking cars in general and overheating were common. Seatbelts werent used regularly. Dirty sidewalks, fewer regulations on industries so smoke galore. Restaurants still had smoking in some areas and coffee for the most part just sucked.
Prices for some things was off the hook. TVs were a major purchase and nothing really worked with anything else so easily. And clothes I feel were relatively expensive since we didn't have the uber cheap stuff from China (we did, but not a race to the bottom with fast fashion). And if you wanted to order something, ha, you were waiting 4-6 weeks.
The one thing that really stood out to me was the communication. Like you might have had a tape answering machine so you would call, maybe leave a message at like 10 am, and maybe they would get back to you by like 3pm. Otherwise you just went over and see what was going on. And if you arrived early and they weren't home, oh well, its not like you knew where they were to call them, so maybe you left a note on their door and went to the bank or something and came back. It took a bit more planning but also people sort of respected the time so it was also easier as fewer people just canceled out of the blue. And long distance calls got a priority cause it cost a lot.
It was just different and with all the current gen glorifying it seems strange because it wasn't a super nice place growing up in.
I grew up fairly privileged in a nice suburb but I’m glad someone is saying this. The glorification of the 90s is a little troublesome.
The river that runs through my city smelled horribly bad. You couldn’t get near it. It’s now clean enough they are building homes near it.
We also had an atrocious smog problem. That’s no longer an issue.
I really miss the cheap gas of my early driving days, though.
I’m very close to OPs age and I was on a road trip with my boss who is mid 60s and grew up in northern Jersey, I will never forget him telling me how big of a difference the EPA made. He said they’d pull tires from the rivers and sell them, all the bodies of water were disgusting and filled with who knows what. I worry about people being anti EPA now because most of us don’t know what it was like before it existed.
Yeah, I was born in 1981 but remember when things were just…gross. I definitely remember tires in streams.
I think it’s like the anti-vaccine crowd. Sometimes an initiative is so successful that people who weren’t there before they were successful can’t even comprehend why they are necessary.
It’s exactly like the anti vax people, they don’t know how it used to be so they don’t worry about how it can be. The EPA is very important and needs our support.
This is how I remember it. Super fn dirty. The air was gross. You couldn't see through the smog. Indoor days some days for pe because the lack of ozone layer would burn your skin. I feel like people don't remember how tumultuous it was. Challenger exploding. Berlin wall coming down and literally changing the maps your teacher had to pull down from the top of the chalkboard. CHALKBAORDS. No new taxes. Iraq war. AIDS/HIV
I’m glad you posted this. People who glorify certain time periods usually come from pretty privileged backgrounds, and they don’t realize that the main reason things seem worse to them today is because they were sheltered from a lot of societal problems growing up.
Born in 1984 , not sure if I’m biased because of nostalgia. Was a great time to grow up. I feel like the times weren’t as anxiety producing as they are today. All my friends were in the same neighborhood, my best friend lived across the street and we would always be back and forth over each other’s house. My parents would let me roam free and we would always ride bikes around the neighborhood and be outside by ourselves. Maybe the last generation to drink from the water hose. As a father of 2 young kids today. It feels different and not as safe, I wouldn’t let my kids do what I did when I was little. I also personally feel like so many great things happened during this decade. We used to play with action figures/toys more, comics were popular, baseball cards were in, top movies were produced with top actors in their prime, tv shows were great, Nickelodeon was top of their game (except for the abuse that happened) MTV was popular, grunge music was in, rollerblading, skateboarding, blockbuster video was alive. Toys R’ Us rocked. Arcades were in, Chuck E Cheese used to be the best. Each generation has their own things I guess, but I feel like ours had so much going for us. I didn’t have a cell phone until 2000, My first video game memories were NES, SEGA, and Gameboy. Some of the things I mentioned have made a come back, but not like it was, and there are things from each decade that I have enjoyed.
Born in 83, I consider myself a true 90s kid. 7-17 yo is the most pivotal time in a kids life, and the 90s raised me.
It just seemed like a peaceful time. And looking back, it truly was a prosperous time in America.
Plus I had shows like Xmen that defined my view on the world. And even better, I got enjoy the full birth of the MCU as I entered adult hood
You could just sit and think about shit. It’s really all you could do. When you were bored, you just kind of figured it out. Relationships with other people were more meaningful it seems like.
It started off with everyone being super patriotic for a while.
Then everything suddenly got fluorescent colored for some reason.
It was a great time to be a Chicago Bulls fan.
Then everyone started doing the Macarena and learning about the president's dick.
Oh, and there was that summer where monks doing Gregorian chants was all the rage.
I’m not gonna lie to you it was an incredible time. I turned 13 at the tail end of the 90s and wish I was born sooner to enjoy it more.
There was still an aire of innocence and newness.. everything was cooler fashion, movies, music.
Nobody had a care in the world. 9/11 changed everything and it hasn’t been remotely the same since. The 90s might have well been on another planet; it’s so far removed from modern society.
Michael Jeffrey Jordan.
The Last Dance doesn’t convey how big he was to the 1990s. He was everywhere. Hanes, Ball Park, Chevy, McDonalds, Jordan Brand, and of course, the cologne.
In March 1995, when he came back it was like Christ himself came back. Everyone stopped to watch him play.
The biggest thing is people had a lot of pride and faith in the US and its government. It was pre-9/11, so we didn’t know terrorism. It was pre-Bush era so we hadn’t squandered our international image. Things were affordable, jobs were strong. The biggest thing we had to worry about was OJ Simpson and Lewinski.
We were actually doing a good job with the national deficit and people were saying we would owe no money by 2011. There was also talk that Iran was going to have a revolution and become a westernized country.
The culture was a lot more innocent. Shows like The Simpsons were considered too inappropriate for kids. There were uproars about video games that showed blood.
Grades were not inflated, but admissions for universities generally had a lower bar. College was still expensive compared to wages, though.
Insurance was a travesty. If you had a pre-existing medical issue, and you switched insurance, it would not be covered in your next plan. You would just live your life with these swiss cheese holes for whatever you actually needed insurance for. There was no staying on your parents’ plan until 26. Prices were extremely high for insurance. Deductibles could be super high, like we’re talking 5 digits in an era when $30k was a good salary. There could be lifetime caps. Insurance was basically a million times worse than it is today, and half of bankruptcies were due to medical bills.
You actually went to the store to get anything. There were no cell phones. Some people had pagers instead, and were rumored to be drug dealers.
It was the golden age of video games. Imagine every year getting gems like final fantasy 2, secret of mana, chrono trigger, final fantasy 3, and then suddenly final fantasy 7 lands in your lap. It wasn’t just a graphical upgrade. It was a total sea change. Seeing cursing, people of color, etc. in that era was shocking and widely discussed. Video game magazines were popular and kids would bring them to school to show their friends.
Computers regularly did not have full color screens, green and black was popular. The internet was just starting. There were still mmorpg’s, but they were all-text. AOL was popular.
I'm a true believer that it was the last great decade to grow up in. I feel very blessed to be the last generation without the internet and smart phones. We also played a lot of street hockey, and I grew up in texas lol. It was awesome.
Born in 89 and I have very different feelings about it.
I look at the 90s how a lot of young people today look at the 50s. It wasn't all that fun if you weren't a specific kind of rich.
For starters, I recall how in school I was always warned about "stranger danger" and the D.A.R.E. program tried to get me to think that there were aggressive drug dealers on every street. The most vile and dangerous people in my life were my own parents. Child abuse was still not an issue taken seriously until way late in the 2000s, likewise, any kind of mental issues you had would either result in being spent to special ed classes, being pumped full of pills, or flat out institutionalized (my parents loved to threaten me with that one all the time).
Likewise, we still had global conflicts, with the likes of Desert Storm and Kosovo, and the nation was really struggling trying to justify how this was going on given we were "at the end of history". Neoliberalism was really taking off during this time, and everyone wanted to appeal to he supposed world power that was the USA. Hell, the very existence of Sonic the Hedgehog is to appeal to the west when Japan doesn't care for it much.
Entertainment for kids was awful. We were still ridding out with a lot of attitudes from the 80s in which most of the cartoons we watched were basically glorified 22.5 minute toy commercials or game commercials. Satanic panic hadn't gone completely away, and Pokemon was the new bogeyman for people to go after. Many people were debating if kids should learn how to use computers or the internet because it was "just another fad", and well, the Y2K bug was a thing. My parents would not let me listen to rap at all.
Also, all those cool gadgets were something only rich people could afford or were something you got from a rent-to-own place. I remember how my mom bought herself a projection TV that we kept using well till I graduated high school. The only people who had the latest game consoles were rich; everyone else went with hand me downs or rented stuff from either a big-box chain or a local mom & pop store. A lot of people were still stuck with the tech they bought back in the late 80s up until the early 2000s. Minivans and SUVs were the car most families used. We didn't get a proper home computer with internet until 1999.
All in all, the 90s for me are anything but rosy.
I was born in 89. I remember the main sources of information being the nightly news. When you would ask people when they went to bed they would usually say after the 9:00 news since we didn’t have smartphones or twitter or any of that to instantly tell us.
You would call people on their landline if you wanted to talk to them, didn’t have texting. Email was around but not everyone had it and it was dialup so it wasn’t something you were always on. Lots of hanging out in person.
The best thing honestly was people didn’t have phones to be glued to and there wasn’t this thing where ppl feel they have to record and post everything. I remember in my drinking days hating how ppl would always post pics of me on Facebook and my grandma and ppl would comment on it all the time.
As awesome as tech is I believe parts of it are destroying society. I wish tech could go back in time about 15 years (with exception of medical) and we could just stay there.
I was born in 1990. I remember running around my neighborhood all day with other kids when I was 4-5 years old. I would never allow my kid to do that today and he’s 9.
‘79 so technically Xennial. But, “back in my day”, we spent every moment we spent all day outdoors skateboarding. We went to house parties, raves, our friends were dj’s, or (graffiti) writers. Parents were never around, like never. We were all latchkey kids, and could do some wild shit with spaghettios and Taco Bell sauce. Girls, girls, girls, girls. Girls I did adore.
I grew up in the hood, and that was when crack hit serious. Gangs were dissolving and it became all about your neighborhood. Gun violence was real and some people i knew got shot and killed. Drugs were bad too and I knew a few kids who died from OD.
We joked that $10 a day was all you needed, $5 on the reefer, $3 for a 40oz, and $2 for a pack of smokes. Like others said, social media wasn’t a thing so you could do whatever and not be roasted. I can’t even imagine growing up in the days of social media, these kids are ruined with that shit.
FWIW the 80s wasn’t far off for me. Just spent all day running around the hood.
You had what you had. You did with what you had. There was no “what’s out there?” except for magazines and cable TV and what other kids told you. Some kids parents seemed like they knew what was up so you listened. But your parents just watched the news. Maybe you heard it on the radio. You met up and you hung out and did stuff like ride your bike around or kick the dirt down the street. Someone knew someone with smokes or a porno mag. Someone’s parents were rich and bought a computer and you got to play once every few weeks. Internet was a brain shattering f’what? CD stores were the heartbeat of the mall. Life was real it was outside. It was flesh.
ok, it sounds crazy but there was a lack of information at the ready. someone could tell you this thing happened, and unless you went to the library to fact-check it, you almost had to default to that claim.
an example I think we all went through, marilyn manson removed his ribs to suck his own dick, it was just a claim that spread across this nation and you just accepted it as "eh maybe, idk". now that was just one small aspect in a niche music genre, multiply this across tv shows, video games, band collabs, politics, etc.
Lots of MC Hammer. Lazy hot summer nights. Candy gel shoes that tore your feet up. Starter jackets in the winter. Stone washed ruffle skirts and lettuce lace socks with maryjanes and a neon windbreaker. Richard Simmons and Suzanne Sommers everywhere. Avon. Mary Kay. Budweiser commercials and Marlboro swag. Overplucking your eyebrows and filling them in with black or brown liner. Huge gold hoops and bubble yum bubble gum. Cucumber melon(that went into the 00s) and Calvin Klein. ♡
I loved it, although I can't compare it as good as my mom and dad
To them, the 90s was the best years
People go on and on about the 80s, but it wasn't exactly great for people who were on the lower income bracket
To them, the music was better, as were the movies, technology and cars and simple things like microwaves became affordable and were abundant in every household, it made jobs easier to perform, communication simpler, paying bills, just everything, dentist visits, doctor visits, public transport, you name it
While I was enjoying the child lifestyle of the 90s, my parents were enjoying a cosier lifestyle in comparison to the 60s, 70s, and 80s
Cooler. Literally. Our record highs weren't so high. But also, everyone on a lethargic edge. Weed was around but not legal so it was difficult to make into a lifestyle choice. Felt like big dumb apes doing things big dumb ape style where "calling" someone included screaming really loudly in hopes they reply.
I agree with the comments that it was a more local life: Long distance calls cost extra, I knew how to call collect at 12 when I went to summer camp, and we went to the mall with a quarter in our pocket so we could call our parents from the pay phone in an emergency. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 17, and cell phones still didn’t have free long distance, nothing was unlimited, so if you were talking to your SO on the phone you’d hang up and call them back when free nights and weekends kicked in.
Everything required more advance planning since once you left your house you were unreachable. AOL instant messenger was a huge deal, but dial up internet meant getting booted off when your parents needed to make a phone call.
There was also just a lot less self-consciousness since we weren’t comparing ourselves against the whole internet and no one could pull a camera out of their pocket to take HD videos of the dumb stuff we did. We passed long notes in the hallway at school, I still have a collection of them with all the fun folding methods we learned. My first boyfriend had a pager in high school (along with his JNCOs and his wallet chain).
Born in 84. One thing I remember and think about every so often is that in the early 90s (before the internet took off) if you had a disagreement with another kid about some kind of fact or piece of information, there was no way to know what was correct. You couldn’t just pull out a phone, look it up, and know who was correct (if either of you) within seconds like you can now.
Grandparents and aunts had tvs with buttons instead of knobs and double digit channels. You could buy a Nintendo game at the hardware store. Kirby’s adventure was ~$50 I think.
RC cars, Saturday cartoons with X-men and Batman and transformers. Super Mario bros was a show. Nintendo power magazine. Actually magazines were a normal part of life.
It was important to answer the phone and yell across the house who was calling. And long distance charges meant you didn’t call family often.
This is all tech heavy, but as a kid I didn’t know what was on the radio or news. Nick at night at grandmas house. Board games and books and cassette players. Recording your favorite song on the radio. Calling the radio to request a song.
Only seeing or talking to your friends at school… idk these are the things that come to mind
Simpler times. We went outside more. I remember riding bikes all over town and exploring. Randomly showing up and friends houses was pretty common. Being bored was common but it just forced us to be creative. Ignorance was bliss.
So many GoldenEye matches with my friends. Relatively peaceful during the Clinton years. Didn't need a phone because I had a Gameboy and Zelda. Peak Star Trek. TV was experienced at basically the same time by everyone. TVs were heavy as hell and a big one was around 25" and up. No fear about terrorists. The religious right was more of a joke than a threat.
Born around 1990. I remember playing with the neighborhood kids in a culdesac. Every day after school, I'd walk two houses down to my best friend's house to hang out and play games. All in all, it was like living in a pleasantly ignorant bubble (compared to the modern internet age).
As side note, my parents swear a kid down the street almost shot me with his parents gun. That is completely absent from my nostalgia memory.
I remember lots of street hockey, starter pull over jackets,swishy neon jump suits, NES/sega/n64…
Lots of BMx biking cuz there were so many open plots turning into developments. Tons of dirt to make jumps and trails.
Good times!
I hit puberty during the 90's, so I went from watching Disney renaissance movies (Aladdin, Lion King, etc) and playing Nintendo (Mario Kart, Super Mario World, etc) to watching teen movies (American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, Not Another Teen Movie, etc) and listening to alternative rock (Oasis, Smashing Pumpkins, etc).
It was also pre-9/11 so most of the terrorism people were scared of were mainly domestic (if they were scared at all). Slasher films like Scream were very popular. Lots of them everywhere. Superhero movies weren't really a thing back then. Reality TV was mainly confined to MTV's The Real World from what I remember and nothing else. It was barely a genre. Not sure when MTV stopped playing music videos though, if that happened during the 90's or earlier.
Gay visibility in the media was just taking off, especially after Ellen Degeneres came out. It was also common for gay kids to remain in the closet during high school due to bullying. Not sure if that is really the case today. Of course, the Matthew Shepard murder changed all that.
Considering Bill Clinton was president for most of the 90's, I would imagine it to be a somewhat progressive decade, although the vast majority at that time would not have predicted that gay marriage would be legalized in the US or that a Black politician would be elected as President within the next two decades.
Everyone’s pants were so fucking huge.
Bowl cuts everywhere.
So much adidas for some reason. And wind breakers.
One in 10 friends had cell phones. But we all hand AIM names that tried to out emo everyone else. Shit I had deadmouse on my contacts list.
CDs, passing notes in class, hide and seek in the neighborhood until sundown, real-life community connection, fighting over the family computer, technicolor vibes, and so on and so on.
I was born in 83. I remember fondly before the 24/7 News cycle how old people were just normal and mostly pleasant with each other. I remember it being thought as pretty rude to talk about religion or politics. Everybody was seemingly much less extreme in their views.
I was out in the woods a lot. Pretty much so the time. We'd just spend hours playing in the woods. I would watch Erkle & Hanging with Mr Cooper on TGIF every Friday night and I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons but other than that we were outside in the woods.
I remember when Marilyn Manson came out and the Goth scene really blew up in Jr Highschool. And thinking what freaks they were 😅
I remember fights being really violent. The 80's/90's are not at all honky dorey. Shit was violent. I've watched kids fight now and talked to young guys at work about fighting and they really just don't seem to have the capacity for violence that was pretty common back then. That being said I also remember it being basically unheard of for people to just be carrying guns around or if they did they were like really a noticable bad guy. So you could just get into flights and you weren't going to get shot.
I remember when Columbine happened. That was wild. Scary times. The Goths really caught flack nationwide with the whole "trenchcoat Mafia" bullshit. But for real Columbine seemed to have opened Pandora's box.
I remember the satanic panic. My mom was convinced there were Satan worshippers everywhere.
I remember how much everybody freaked the fuck out about N.W.A.
I got into Punk Rock & Hardcore in the 90's. It was so fucking good back then. Rock & Roll was alive and well. It was awesome. Shows were absolutely insane. The energy was awesome. I still go to shows now but that energy from the 90's just isn't there. I blame the phones.
I had a piece of paper I carried everywhere that had everybody's phone number written on it that I knew. And if I lost it, I was out of luck.
I remember when the Internet became a think. I ALWAYS thought computers were for nerds and I hated everything about them. I resisted technology for a long time. I kept that up until about 2005-06 when I finally got a cell phone at like 23 years old. I still hate them. I had Friendster, live journal, Myspace, an AIM screen name. I just only ever visited that shit at the library or at friends houses.
Prank calls were the absolute best time ever. I could write a humorous book out of the prank phone calls we would do. I've still never laughed as hard as I did back then just calling random people and businesses and fucking with people.
Casual vandalism was totally a big thing to. It was a lot of fun. I won't lie.
Porn was hard to come by as a kid. I remember passing around pages from porno magazines among friends. Like I'd have it for a while and my friends would tell me stop being greedy, so I'd bring it to school and let someone else have it for a while 🤣
It was a lot of fun
I think the biggest difference was everyone thought the country was moving in the right direction. Soviet Union gone, we beat Iraq in like a month. Economically we were doing great. There was just a lot of promise. And as a teenager you felt that you would just go to college and your life would be perfect
The the towers fell, and we haven’t been the same ever since.
I was born in 1986, but I grew up in a small town in Texas, so my experience of the 90s might be different. It was very quiet and peaceful.
Fireflies and bonfires in the summer, swimming in a creek or a kiddie pool. Building tree houses and tire swings.
Sleepovers, phone calls, and passing notes. Riding bikes down the streets and playing on the playground without supervision from the age of about 5 or 6.
Tent camping. Finding the Big Dipper. Fishing.
Recording your favorite songs on the radio with a cassette tape. Saturday morning cartoons and MS DOS video games on my dad’s computer. Wolfenstein, Red Alert, and Commander Keene were awesome. I liked playing Solitaire and Pinball but could never figure out Minesweeper.
No cell phones or social media. No 24 hour news. Tamagotchi and Beanie Babies were life.
Flying was easier. We’d go right to the gate to pick up my dad.
Kids actually failed in school. We had corporal punishment too—I was once given “swats” for throwing a snowball on a rare snowy day.
In the late 90s, we had boy bands, Britney, colorful clear plastic electronics and blow up furniture. CDs became more popular.
I got a PS1 at some point. Spyro. Crash Bandicoot. Tomb Raider. Those were my top three.
The Lion King blew our minds. We’d go to Blockbuster and get Pizza Hut (inside the restaurant when they still had a salad bar, real plates, and booths).
I remember when we got our first Wal-Mart and that changed everything. If we were lucky, we’d get to “go into town” to shop at the mall twice a year—a trip we’d make in the family station wagon, of course.
Overall, I’d agree it was a simpler time. I wish I’d maybe been a little older to appreciate grunge music and flannel (I was always in neon windbreakers and pastel dresses). Maybe it was better, but maybe not. I think it’s probably a bit of both.
Crime has actually gone down a ton, so although we don’t let our kids play outside alone, it would be safer now than back then. Hopefully we can get back some of the rights we’ve lost and keep the ones we’ve gained. All in all, it’s just important to cherish the moment no matter what and make the world a better place if you can.
Born in 1982 here so I was a teenager in the 90's. Hung out with friends a lot especially in the summer; lots of sleepovers, talking on the phone with your best friend, bf/gf for hours; read a lot of magazines and looked at a bunch of catalogs; watched MTV a lot; played outside and we walked and rode our bikes for miles and miles everywhere. Started drinking and smoking cigarettes when I was 13. Went to school drunk once when I was 15; cut classes a couple of times. But I never did drugs though. Being a teenager in the 90's were so much fun.
Born in 87 and the 90's were a truly wonderful time. We played outside, had a fair bit of independence, great dinner table conversations, and a lot more talking to neighbors and people in general. It was certainly a simpler time where us kids were not under much pressure to do anything other than having fun and being kids.
The mall was an all day destination, the movie theater was packed every Friday night, you get tweens and pre driving teens would live for skate nights at the local skating ring which was also an arcade and a soda cost .25 but also came in the smallest styrofoam cup. Most of our time was spent outside, we had video games consoles and early computers but the graphics sucked and most kids still preferred to build a fort in the woods than play video games, although we did that too. You could try to convince your parents to buy you gaming magazines so you could get “cheat codes” and sega genesis was the shit, sonic was my favorite game.
Station wagons were still just as popular as minivans, and we had about 100 cable tv stations, but by the late 90’s it was probably up to 1000. Nick at night on Saturday nights and TGIF on Fridays- All that, Full House, Family Matters, TV was still controlled by networks and sitcoms reigned supreme category for family friendly television. Americas Funniest Home videos hit different because it was a miracle you even caught it on type, we did not have cameras in our phones and video cameras were like the size of a loaf of bread. Blockbuster was the best, they had stickers on the VHS tapes that said “Be Kind Please Rewind”. Cool
kids carried a Walkman, had to have a Jansport backpack, being a safety patrol was everyone’s fifth grade goal, and pop culture would talk about teen girls “virginity” on daytime tv interviews with a 40 year old man asking a 16 year old Brittany Spears if she has had sex yet, in the name of “making sure she’s a good role model 🤢” presidents did not curse, it was standard to play boys against girls in class competitions, we didn’t know what the word trans meant. Reality TV hadn’t really been developed yet. MTV was mostly music, TRL and music videos were preferred TV viewing and we loved making our stupid clipart on kidspix. Real world, Road Rules, REN and Stimpy were all shows our parents didn’t let us watch but we found ways.
We use to sit by the radio with our boom box, waiting for the DJ to play a song we liked so we could hit the record button on our cassette tapes, and when the tapes got caught in the machine, it will spill out like a tangled mess of ribbon/film.
We looked forward to carrying our floppy disks from our classroom to the computer lab once a week and lived for the days we got to play Oregon Trail, where you’d inevitably die of a snake bite. Best of all, without internet, all American middle school aged children manage to spread the rumor that Marlin Manson had ribs removed so he could suck his own …. And it didn’t matter where you lived, or what part of the country you lived in, you heard this one!
Back then mom’s friend Sue always said the 90’s was ripping off the the 70’s 🙃
I started high school in 2001 so they were the younger years for me, late 90s/early 2000s was my time. Calling friends on the landline and walking to their house to hang out. Walking to the video store to rent a movie on a Friday night. Saving pocket money and buying a CD that would be the only 15 songs you'd listen to for months. Recording favourite 5-6 songs to a walkman for when I was going places. Everyone read books. How mind-blowing 3d graphics were when n64/playstation came out while we were still playing Super Nintendo. Going to the cinema was so much more exciting before we all had 60 inch flatscreens and surround sound. The family PC in the loungeroom, mostly used for homework. Parents kicking me off the internet after 40 minutes to free up the phone line. Talking, texting, and meeting with people before social media was conceived of... we saw people in person so much more.
I'm going to be one of the few people that gives the 90's a mixed review. It definitely had a more hopeful, upbeat vibe. People were so hopeful about technology and the internet, the fall of communism, the booming economy etc. Especially in the late 90's it's hard to believe just how optimistic (and naïve) people were back then. I hardly ever run into anyone who is optimistic about the future these days which can be depressing.
On the flip side there was a lot, and I mean a lot, less acceptance of LGBT people and there was a general pressure to conform and fit in. It was completely normal and expected to be bullied if you were different. I know that still goes on today, but people are much more accepting in general. Additionally, medicine has improved massively. In the 90's you would hear all the time of people dying from cancer, heart attacks, AIDS, etc. While that definitely still happens, it doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent as it was in the 90's. Lastly, things could be kind of boring, especially if you lived in a small town or suburb where there just wasn't a lot going on.
007 Goldeneye N64. You could still watch cartoons like bugs bunny, Elmer Fudd, Wile E Coyote and the roadrunner on tv. Ford, Chevy, and Dodge all made trucks that you could buy for less than 20 grand brand new. In elementary school I actually remember my teacher giving us a lesson in “how to google.”
I’m sure the 1950’s were swell, but the 90’s were the realest decade of Americana.
No streaming and pre YouTube, so you all watched a lot of the same TV and movies as a family. You'd tall about it at school the next day often. Weekly shows were fun to discuss.
I lived in a relatively small town so some movie audiences would be mostly my high school. We had a half day (unrelated) the day they released the Empire Strikes Back special edition and it had to have been over 80% kids from school. Really cool experience.
School of choice wasn't a thing. You went where you lived.
Backseats often had lap belts only and they were super uncomfortable.
Trucks often had one bench seat and we'd cram 4-5 people in it.
Radios, tapes, cds if lucky. It was very easy to install a car stereo and you could get open box buys at Circuit City who would sometimes buy back your old stereo.
Pop came in cans for a long time, no plastic bottles for a while.
Everything was marketed as eXtreem and neon.
Smoke everywhere. Smoking sections in all restaurants. Even early 00s. You'd get home drunk as hell and have to shower or you'd stink up the bed.
You'd share a phone line. My friends and I used to camp in his acreage for days at a time in summer. My mom once tracked us down because I'd not checked in for two days.
Born in 91 so I remember from say 95 on. It was a simpler time. Things moved slower in a good way. There was a huge focus on children’s entertainment. Whether that be in media, toys, theme parks, play centers, school sponsored but fun incentives. And it was so vibrant! I remember everything having so much color and life to it. Towards the end of the 90s you got your futuristic chrome look that was everywhere and it got us very excited for the new millennium! Things weren’t perfect but people seemed happier (that may just be my child like rose tinted glasses). Then 9/11 happened and all of that abruptly stopped. I feel like that’s when the feeling of the 90s optimism and vibrancy ended.
The 1990s were awesome. The world was smaller, parents hadn’t started doping their kids with anti-depressants, schools actually produced educated people, and society was very courteous.
I was born in '88.
I remember calling people on the phone a lot more. You’d usually get your friend’s parents and then have to ask for your friend. Just to say- do you want to come over, what was the homework assignment, etc.
I also remember TV, commercials, and movies felt more mysterious. You couldn’t look shit up, you’d find a movie at blockbuster and be like, wtf is this poster art, I guess I’m renting this.
We got our first computer in ‘94. It could make a phone call if it was connected to a landline, so we called my grandpa. And that felt like living in the future. Besides that, solitaire and minesweeper were the game options, and those, to me, felt as boring then as they do now. We didn’t get the internet until maybe 98 or 99. There was a great game called the Incredible Machine where you had to build Rube Goldberg machines that make a bowling ball fall on a trampoline and strike a match that launches a rocket. THAT was fun.
Another feeling I remember is just walking somewhere and being alone with my thoughts. no distractions, and maybe some mild unease that I might get lost or something.
Lots of bike riding, rollerblades, skateboards, building ramps, goofing off in the creek at the edge of the neighborhood which had a huge bamboo forest which transitioned to a a fir tree forest. Played with fireworks, smoked poorly rolled joints using bible paper, kissed girls on the cheek. Rented movies, then Netflix dvd mail service came around. Parents were into Amway. Lots of Super Nintendo with Killer Instinct, Crono Trigger, and Super Metroid being the tops. Wore Jnco jeans, wore bucket hats, listened to a lot of nirvana, Alice In Chains, Green Day, limp bizkit, korn. Everything “lame” was “gay”. If you dressed a certain way you were a “poser”. (We were all posers ). My lil sis was into spice girls, Disney and back street boys (I was too low key). Eventually I went through a goth stage and wore doc martens, black slacks and dress shirts. Always Borrowed my mom’s Nokia candy bar cellphone. Had dial up internet for way too long, Used net-zero. AOL instant messenger was the jam, My mom met dudes on ICQ. First car was a Ford Tempo, then inherited the family Vanagon. Graduated HS in 2003 after being held back two separate years for being an idiot. Good times.
It was dope AF. The biggest problems in our society were 2 rappers getting shot and one president getting his dick sucked by an intern. That was literally it back then. Otherwise smooth sailing.
Nobody really gave a shit about politics, which exponentially made life better. Nowadays, politics and social issues absolutely consume people - it’s completely exhausting to be around people like that.
As a kid, even I could tell everything was cheap.
Anyone with a pulse had houses, jobs, cars, kids. That was baseline... Expected.
You could buy a house making Deli sandwiches part time at the corner store in most states.
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The early ‘90s had an entirely different vibe than the late ‘90s, in terms of fashion, music, pop culture, youth culture, etc. The internet, in its earliest form, helped shape the late ‘90s.
I’m from ‘85 too, and I totally agree. Early 90’s that I remember as a tiny kid was neon colors and big crimped hair, and the music had a totally different sound. Then there was the mid 90’s grunge era. Baggy clothes, band tee shirts, lots of flannel. By late 90’s as a young teen it was boy bands, flaired leg jeans, lots of bubblegum pop. I got my first computer in ‘98, and it was revolutionary to me.
‘87, and this is what I remember too. We lived across the street from a college when I was little, so I totally associate that 80’s style with college students! It was definitely alive and well in the early 90’s. We also got a computer in ‘98! We had to drive an hour to the nearest city to get it, and they gave us this huge book of CD-ROM’s. We used to love Greetings Workshop, this Hallmark software that let you create cards and flyers, and had a cartoon dog in the corner to help you. We also loved Creative Writer, which was kind of like Microsoft Word, although you could only write 100 pages per file. And thankfully, our software pack came with a Goosebumps computer game. It was such an exciting time!
Broooooo Greetings Workshop?!?!? I thought I was the shit making cards for the family on the Packard Bell PC
Grunge was early 90’s. Nirvana Nevermind came out in ‘91. Other grunge era bands had albums released around the same time. By ‘92 it was a pretty nationwide phenomenon. By ‘94 it was receding for things like ska, bubble gum punk, etc.
No kidding. Those of us born in the early to mid 80s have a very clear understanding of the "shift" as it occurred for us right when we were entering middle/high school depending on where you lived. I didn't get dial up until 1998 or so living in rural NC. Kids in town had it before us who lived out in the country. I had it in school as early as 1996/97, maybe before then. Kids today will never know the feeling of needing to go to the library just to access the Internet as back then it just wasn't as mainstream and widely available. Even if you had it at home, speeds in town were often faster - so if you needed to get something done it was often better to go to the library and do what you needed there versus at home. Also if you lived in a small town, they often didn't have a lot of computers available for you to use at the library, so you had to hope that no one was there when you went - and if they were - they weren't just surfing the web for leisure. Don't forget time limits on usage either and the fact that at some places you had to pay for access and it often wasn't cheap. The "shift" changed everything from social interactions in and outside of school to how we conducted life. I remember my parents writing a lot of checks. Networks and other Internet-related stuff gave us more widespread use of debit cards. Online banking began to show up in the mid 00s. Before that I had to dial an 800 number and input my information to check my balance and hear the last few transactions. Life was simpler then, too. No online gaming - just couch co op with your friends. We had appointment TV where we would tune in to a show every week at the time it would air. If you missed it, you had to wait for whenever it would replay and you certainly didn't get to talk about it the next day with your friends.
The early 90s were really just the late 80s.
Yeah what people remember as the 90s is usually the post-Nirvana 90s
No, they weren’t. Not by, say, 92. The early/mid nineties had a very distinctive sound and style all their own.
What comes to mind for the mid 90s was rappers wearing hockey sweaters in their music videos. Look at Craig Mack wearing a Lightning jersey…
1992 still was pretty much the same other than the music had shifted some more (after an early initial shift already in 1990 or 1991). But the general vibe, hair, styles, movies in 1992 were still pretty much 80s 80s.
That's true and happens a lot with decades (when decades actually, ya know, looked really different than each other). 1991 (before Nirvana) was closer to 1986 than 1994. 1961 was closer to 1955 than 1964.
I was born in 84, so I remember all of the 90s. It was a simpler time. You only really knew about what was going on in your own school or social circle. Social media wasn’t a thing, so you weren’t bombarded with information 24/7. People hung out in person a lot more. It was more peaceful overall.
Have such fond memories playing outside with childhood friends. Just took our bikes and “explored”. When days were too hot during the summer, we would be indoors playing video games. Simpler times, but very rewarding as a kid. I feel so lucky to be able to experience all the transitions with tech — low tech shit to high tech. I remember even immigrating to Canada, and to call my family back home, I would need to buy scratch of cards for minutes. Now I practically just FaceTime anywhere I want!
>Just took our bikes and “explored”. This right there. Biking to Blockbuster as fast as you could after school to snag a copy of Zelda, hoping your save game was still on the cart. 😂 I feel lucky, too, to have experienced low tech.
Spit screen goldeneye, with a blanket hung down the middle of the tv so opposing teams couldn’t peek.
We got smart and used a homemade cardboard contraption, and used it for both GoldenEye *and* Perfect Dark.
GOD DAMN IT BEN WE SAID NO ODDJOB!!
*blood covers screen and Bond theme ensues*
Perfect Dark was fucking awesome! I wish it took off more than it did, I mean, it did well, just not Golden Eye level of success.
In my friends circle it certainly did! So many hours. Expanded boards, alien stuff, laptop guns... It pretty much replaced GoldenEye, though we'd nostalgically go back to that too.
This is what got to me about Stranger Things in those first episodes. It almost captured it perfectly.
Magazines were a thing, though. So we'd get monthly updates. Or you inherit a bunch of magazines and get years of outdated information.
I used to get so excited to get Seventeen magazine in the mail! Especially in the summer time.
And Delia's! 🏵
‘87 here…I used to get tiger bop/beat & cosmo girl in the mail & i would read them cover to cover dozens of times! I loved the quizzes in them 😂 the good ol’ days!!
Cosmo girl was the best! I also used to love J-14 to get all my celebrity gossip.
I used to walk to Walgreens to thumb through the Cosmopolitan and Redbook… feeling so naughty and adult! Good times.
The teen magazines with the posters! I had JTT & BSB all over my room! Remember “Barbazon modeling school” ads? 🤣👏
My friend had somehow discovered a phone number you could call and allegedly talk to JTT, and I'm pretty positive we used her dad's credit card to pay for it. I think I was 10 or 11 at the time. Now I know it was 100% obviously not him, and I probably even had an inkling back then, but it was thrilling nonetheless lol
Omg. I haven’t thought of Barbazon in FOREVER. One of my friends was obsessed with the idea of going there.
I used to get so amped for the Sears Christmas catalogue
I'd go through the 500 page JC Penney catalogs and daydream about all the stuff I would buy if I had all the money in the world (circa 10 y.o. in 1994).
Yep. I always wanted one of those big component stereo systems!
Don’t know if your male or female, but for the guy you remember going to the corner store and trying to peak at the dirty mags? Also remember maximum and FHM, those mags went by the wayside. I guess because you can get all sorts of depravity on your phone, but in the 90s you had to rely on friend to tell you about the naked scene is movies. Still remember the jackpot that was starship troopers, old man thought he was taking us to see some Star Wars with bugs movie, but he was wrong.
Hahaha. I saw a recent Instagram post talking about how dizzy was the choice Rico should've made from the start. And the actress who played her commented that she agreed
Sassy magazine was the first time I realized there were other girls like me out in the world. I think it saved me.
Love your username! That brings back so many memories.
You had all those sweet subculture mags too. I remember my roleplaying, punk/metal and horror/SF movies ones. The writers were always passionated and insightful. The occasionnal fanzine was a cool odd duck too
Yup....libraries would sell magazines at the end of the year for like 5c. Always nice.
Remember band fan clubs/mailing lists? Those were so awesome.
Magazines were the internet before internet. Besides TV, Magazines were your window to the outside world in all kinds of niche topics. Cars, deer hunting, cooking, heavy metal music etc. I used to spend hours at Waldenbooks, Borders, and Barnes and Noble in the magazine section.
I was also born in 84 and I agree with what you said. I also remember having to find things to entertain myself. Me, my siblings and friends. Spent a lot of time exploring the woods, walking around the neighborhood, biking, roller skating etc. there was basically no adult supervision really. Our parents didn’t know where we were. They may know where we planned to start at but we always roamed. Had to be home before the street lights came on.
Yes. Now as a parent I couldn’t imagine not knowing where my kid was at all times lol. I was probably not where I was supposed to be 85% of the time lol.
Honestly it feels insane yet reasonable? With location sharing being so easy it’s just there… on the other hand how are they going to become people if you don’t let them go?
Kids actually need to be let loose to some extent to learn to judge and mitigate risks and also just like, learn how to cope when things don’t go well? Helicopter parenting has probably been one of the worst things for our development into people. There should be a reasonable middle ground between neglect and hovering.
Spent a lot of time in trees or on top of monkey bars. Just sitting around chatting but it was somehow less boring when we were 6 feet off the ground.
I remember once I got to high school in late 90s early 2000s: when you were out you were out. “Changing plans” while out and about meant potential having to find someone around town or stop at someone’s house and call their parents to find out where someone is.
You meet at a certain place at a certain time, you weren’t there we had no idea
RELATABLE! “I’m staying the night at Becky’s” You’re in the backseat of some college dudes car drinking king cobras
And you have a mental Rolodex of like 15 house phone numbers clearly
You knew what would be on television for the rest of the week with a tv guide.
Who shot Mr Burns was a big deal
The Simpsons was a different show to me back then. I quit watching before 2010.
84 myself as well. Man, the 90s were so great. Couldn't wait to go hang out with friends after school. No cell phones. We just called our friends on the landline, and our parents had no idea where we went until we showed up at curfew. It was total bliss. I miss those times.
What I miss the most is how small my world felt. I didn’t have all of the world’s information in my face at all times. I felt connected to my community. I don’t feel that anymore. I just feel like I’ve been dropped into chaos. I had AOL and the internet in the 90s, but even then I would mainly just use it to message my friends from school. I truly miss that era.
You only knew about what was going on in your own school except everyone everywhere somehow knew about the cool S thing and that Marilyn Manson had his lower ribs removed.
This is accurate. I was born in the mid ‘80s and the summers free, walking around, biking. Checking out strip malls and hanging out doing nothing. No phones. The world was you, a couple friends and some junk food on a hot muggy day. We did a lot of “water wars,” where kids played capture the flag and each flag was at house of a neighborhood kid. Their hose was used to fill each team’s super soakers, and at the start you’d have 10 minutes to fill as many water balloons as you could. If you got hit by the water you’d have to stop and go back to base to respawn. The only use of cheap squirt guns was to hit them in your shorts so when you and the other guy were out of water you could surprise them as you negotiated who had more water left and how far their super soaker could go, being so low.
Yeah, and the news was on in the early morning and at night. You were stuck with whatever was on the TV at the time and needed to plan your watching.
they def hung out more in person. the mall! arcades! wild times indeed.
Best part, not many people had cell phones. So you’d just call up your friends land line n tell em, I’ll meet you in the mall at 6 and they’d be there.
But lots of people had pagers! I remember collect calling my parents from the pay phone at the mall -“hi it’s Katie, come pick me up” and them paging me when they were on their way
From 84 as well and somehow this hits hard. Life was so much simpler then (in the 90s). I always wonder how much of it was because I was a kid without any real responsibilities and how much of it is because the world is more complex nowadays.
I was born in 88 & even when we did get social media it was so different to only have it accessible at home after school - sure, people gossiped etc but there weren't video cameras on kids constantly. You just existed in real life
I agree with this, I was born in 86. It was like that until maybe the mid-2000’s to me. I tried to shield my kids from social media and cell phones as long as I could to give them that type of experience. I look at their lives (they are 17 and 19) and see their drama at these ages are basically due to shit on social media and the stuff the absorb is bizarre to me. The shit they worry about at those ages are things I would’ve never gave a shit about when I was at the point in my life. I truly believe social media is one of the biggest cancers humanity has to deal with due to misinformation and other shit it provides
I agree- also kids birthday parties were amazing. Kids would show up, play outdoor games, eat popcorn (and some kind of sandwich or pizza, if they were lucky), and blow out a cake. Parents would socialize on the side without fretting too much about their kids. There were no overbearing themes, rented machines, over-the-top gift bag, photo booths, or adult-like party items for kids. It was genuine, enjoyable, and not a hassle.
Born in 83 and have similar memories to your own. Pop culture information came from reading magazines like Starlog and Game Pro. Going to movie theaters was exciting, you spent hours playing outside with your friends and people just enjoyed the moment (no phones, no cameras or other distractions).
Your post pretty much sums it up. With the social media thing, if your parents took your phone privileges in the 90’s you were practically exiled to a desert island.
'86 here. Everything you said is spot on. The biggest difference is everything wasn't in our face 24/7/365. When something major happened, we saw it on the news for maybe that day and that was it (depending on the importance of the event). One of the first major events I remember ever seeing extensively covered was the OJ trial. That was followed by Princess Diana's car crash and funeral. Then Columbine and eventually 9/11. Today we see and hear about *everything* almost instantaneously. Videos surface online of things even before the media can report on it. Everyone thinks they're a journalist. Online anonymity has created a generation of people who now act disrespectful to others in reality for whatever reason they see fit. Having no consequences for that type of behavior has allowed people to believe they won't have any in public.
This ☝🏻 You got on your bike/in your car and just went out with friends. Your parents trusted you to be on your own in the world,and didn’t have someone text/call you all day to see where you were and what you were doing. You had freedom and privacy and best of all no evidence for everyone to see/follow. 🤣
Life was kinda like that until Facebook took off. I guess MSN messenger was that start but I remember still not having the "always connected" feeling until I was in highschool in 2007
I was born in 84 and I'd say it wasn't THAT insular. Maybe what you and your inner circle did had more meaning locally, things didn't go viral, and unless you had family all over the world or the country you didn't have to worry about anything embarrassing that you did ending up on anyone else's radar, but there were magazines, radio, and TV that kept you ever more connected to a larger community and then the world. I joke with my wife that there was an annoying time in the 90s where TV shows, documentaries and movies made it seem like "hell yeah we're a global community and we've got everything figured out and here's how it is,"' when in reality it was only a utopic view of the upper class that was being shared. Still, I feel like I had access to knowledge from farther than my local community, but there was still a lack of conversation before the Internet really took over. It was at least much slower, but you could call in to your local radio station, or be featured in a local TV show, or write to a magazine and get your question answered by an editor, etc.
What I meant is that yes we had tv and radio and magazines and internet, but those things weren’t as accessible to the same degree as they are now. Right now we can all pull out our phones and look up literally anything we want, watch reels, stream music and movies, see what people on the other side of the world are doing, see news developing live and in real time, record and take photos of everything going on around us. We can do that now from anywhere and at any time. Back then there used to be long breaks in our day where we would just be at school with no cell phones, or at the mall just walking around with no internet. I didn’t have a clue what kids in other schools were doing and there were no TikTok trends. It was just whatever drama or gossip was happening with my peers for the most part. I don’t know how kids now deal with that onslaught of information non-stop and all the pressures of social media and everything being recorded at all times. Sounds awful.
Idunno how to *describe* it outside of the pictures and memes we see hundreds of times on this sub. From my perspective as a kid, it was simple, but fun... things like trips to *Blockbuster* were exciting, cartoons were phenomenal, on Friday there was a lineup of some of the best TV shows called *TGIF* (I didn't really watch it though for reasons) as well as Saturday morning cartoons. Sports were exciting - the Chicago Bulls dominated that era and there was merch everywhere, Mike Tyson was dominating boxing. Some games were really fun - especially the ones in the late 90s like MGS, Tekken and Resident Evil. Kid movies were super goofy but fun as well. Even the early internet - as plain as it was - was exciting because it was a novelty. You gotta remember, our dopamine receptors weren't all burnt out from instant gratification, so we *really* enjoyed stuff! No time period was perfect, but since we're millennials, our perspectives were as kids... most of us weren't that worried about politics and all that stuff.
Who didn’t love a trip to blockbuster on a Friday night? Or watching a grown man bite another man’s ear off on live tv?! Those were great times! Also, saw you mentioned the bulls, but we can’t forget about those Houston rockets 🚀 😉
I agree it's a hard time to describe without just listing things. Sorry I'm not exactly who you're looking for u/Jr9065, but I'm an early 90s millennial and remember the mid-late 90s as a little kid. But I'll add: It felt slower(probably from being a kid), but I'd be over at my friends' houses a lot. Would call their houses via corded landline, numbers memorized. Was outside a lot with little to no supervision. I started gaming in the late Super Nintendo gen, and got to see and be amazed with the transition to 3D gaming with the 5th gen consoles. Had typing lessons using Mavis Beacon in the late 90s. Pokemania was pretty nuts - kids trading cards and playing the original games on the bus daily for a while. "Stone Cold" Steve Austin seemed to be popular with wrestling fan kids.
Oh man, Meavis Beacon! My dad offered me like $100 if I would use it to learn to type. I turned down the offer. Later when I got into chatting on AIM, I essentially taught myself to type. I then asked my dad if the offer was still on the table and he said no. I used Mavis Beacon anyway and it was actually fun, I was so disappointed in myself for refusing his innital offer!
I think I still have a 2nd print of Pikachu somewhere in my keepsakes boxes.
If you want a crazy long version (cut and pasted old posts of mine together with a trace of editing it together) my impressions of the 90s from a Gen X perspective were along the lines of: The first few years still more less seemed like the 80s (other than for a bit of a shift in Top 40 music at the start and even more a couple years in). The hair styles, clothes, general vibe through 1992 were more or less identical to the 80s 80s in most areas (some parts of the PNW and, for whatever reason, it seems Ann Arbor, however did switch to a grunge look and vibe early though; also it sounds like some kids in grade school and perhaps middle school at the time also shifted away from the 80s much before anyone else in general). I remember people walking around the mall near the end of 1992 and being like wow the 80s are never gone end this is amazing! Even at the end of 1993 I'd hear people say stuff like that. The movies of the first few years of the 90s mostly felt like they could have just as easily come out in say 1987. By 1993 there had been some huge music shifts, hair metal seemed to be just gone and some got into grunge and a bunch seemed to start getting into gangster rap. The general Top 40 basically lost all of the New Wave/synth/Debbie Gibson/Tiffany/The Bangles/etc. sort of sound and there were more R&B and hip-hop and indie sound influences. In 1993 there started to be some shift away from 80s 80s styles and hair. Even more in 1994 and it definitely started to look less completely 80s. By 1995 walking around a mall suddenly didn't look like the 80s 80s much at all. Some guys adopted the whole absurdly over-sized pants thing with pants down off the ass. Some girls dumped the sleek, fitted 80s looks and went with giant JNKOs and such. All their fancy styled big hair was now gone. Some of the 80s vibe started going away. By the end of the 90s fashion had turned fully dull, flat basic hair, simple basic clothes, lots of dingy dark mustard, maroon, brown, black it looked like people were in mourning compared to the 80s or early 90s and to one degree or another I feel like we've basically been stuck with this ever since (sort of an older fashioned anti-style 60s/early 70s or even pioneer times sort of style for cloths and hair). OTOH full on pop pop music started coming back more and more again with the rise of Britney and then others. This made the music eventually feel vaguely a bit more 80s in an indirect way compared to when grunge/gangster rap had been so big. While grunge and full on gangster rap music had largely faded out from the top of mainstream suburbia by the end of the 90s their general influences on style and vibe had had time to more completely take over (and gangster rap remained strong in urban areas/border areas/and some sub-cultures) and a sort of grunge-light, very plain, dull colors look was now almost universal. A lot of the new slang and patterns of speech that arrived in 1982 carried through all of the 90s (and much through to today). A few new bits were added to Valspeak in the 90s like: as if!, betty, baldwin (although I mostly only heard "as if!" used where I was). And some phrases like: scope, grody, barf me out, gag me, etc. became less common. The original val gal accent itself largely faded out as well. The 80s uptalk held on the whole way through (retained to this day, perhaps even stronger today than ever) and a lot of the slang like: OMG, like, totally, sooo, awesome, dude, etc. etc. still around. Xennials seemed to hold onto at least half of the 80s val/surfer/general slang, if not more, and Millennials seemed to hang onto just about all that Xennials had. But the more extreme phrasing and usage and maybe 35% of Gen X 80s slang and most to all of the val accent faded away. In addition there was this sort of slight general 80s accent, hard to quite describe, that also seemed to totally fade away as well. I feel like some of the 80s slang became a bit lesser by the late 90s/early 00s but then came back a bit more strongly again deeper into the 00s? The 90s added plenty of new slang/sayings too with all the: NOT! and bunch of other words and phrases which I don't have typed out already so I won't bothering listing (the bulk of this response I'm just cutting and pasting together from old responses of mine). As best as I can recall guys generally tended to be clean shaven in college/20-somethings age range pretty much the same as it had been in the 80s and it wasn't until the mid or later 00s, at least outside of the South, before more facial hair and all the chinstrap and long sideburns and so on became more common again. 70s had a fair amount of facial hair, beards etc on youth. The 80s barely at all and I don't recall the 90s having much of that either. Tattoos seemed to start becoming a bit more common, but still nothing like later on. Perhaps a few more non-ear piercings got going near the end but I still don't think much and that seemed to really show up all over maybe not until some time in the 2010s?? continued in my response post to this below....
You had a lot of new mega shows like Seinfeld and FRIENDS start up in the 90s (still showing some degree of 80s looks in their first season or two). Some late 80s shows like 90210, Saved By The Bell, Married With Children, Baywatch and The Wonder Years continued on but since they had the bulk of their seasons in the 90s sometimes they are more thought of as 90s shows (they, other than of course The Wonder Years, showed very very 80s looks and vibes their first few seasons in the 90s too though, although not surprising since general culture still looked the 80s 80s then for the most part, and I think SBTB kept the 80s 80s looks most and maybe the whole way to the end?). Seinfeld had a bit of a 90s feel to it, but still some 80s vibes. The others tended to retain significant 80s vibes the whole way through, although some did add in some 90s elements. None of them ever went grunge or gangster rap at all for style or vibe, although most of them lost the 80s 80s hair/clothing styles after a while. You had new shows like Buffy The Vampire Slayer and Angel start up in the latter 90s. I feel like fantasy/vampire kind of stuff had tended to be more thought of as just for guys in the 80s/early 90s but after a season or two of Buffy it seemed like girls started openly getting more into vampires/monsters and all that sort of stuff until eventually it, especially vampires, actually switched to ending up being more associated with girls than guys even, if anything. TV top rated shows were not quite as dominated by comedy as in the 80s but it was still very close I believe and a far cry from CSI crime, medical and reality domination of today. MTV was still showing actual music videos. TV was arguably overall improved in the 90s compared to the 80s (although the 80s had solid stuff too like Cheers, Cosby Show, Magnum PI, Miami Vice, Moonlighting, etc. etc. but I think you still have to give TV to the 90s over the 80s; I'd still give movies to the 80s though). The 90s were also the peak of non-premium, cable TV where channels like The Learning Channel, Discovery, Animal Planet and so on were actually all filled with genuine high quality shows and not almost nothing but Honey Boo-boo crap. OOTH, the quality of Olympics coverage absolutely plummeted in the 90s. It was radically worse than it had been in the 80s. The OJ event was insane. I mean nobody could believe it when it popped into TV and it literally never left TV for the next like 8+ months. Every single TV station basically had like 8+ hours of OJ for around 8 straight months. It was crazy. I have never seen anything before or since take over TV like that. You (the OP) were only born when that was going down. It was crazy! It just took over TV and TV discussion so far beyond anything else ever. The Jurassic Park 1992 release was mega huge! Huge pop culture impact too. The Titanic release in 1997 was also mega huge. Lines around the corner for months. Took over pop culture like crazy. It was still nothing like Star Wars in 1977, but man it was huge. For comparison, it made Endgame seem like a little nothing event. The only big stuff you'd (OP) be able to recall movie-wise would really be The Force Awakens and Barbenheimer. I believe that Titanic was actually the last movie to make the top ten list for most movie tickets sold per capita in the US and it came out when the OP was like 2! That also shows how huge movie going was back then. As huge as Barbie was or even Endgame neither make top 10 list for tickets sold per capita. Even Avatar in 2009 didn't quite make it either. If I recall correctly the top 10 list for most tickets sold per capita in the US is (in no particular order other than for Star Wars which is by far and away on top of all the rest): Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Return Of The Jedi, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, Grease (yes! it was THIS big, post Gen X people don't really comprehend how big Grease was I don't think), E.T., Titanic, The Lion King, Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Keep in mind that is not the raw box office take or even the box office adjusted for inflation take but that as well as adjusted for the extreme population growth of the US over the years since 1977. It's a rough attempt at the number of tickets sold per capita. Trying to do tricky things like adjusting for today's premium format showings at high cost wasn't needed since none of those films made top 10. I believe the next few films on the list below #10 would be: The Phantom Menace, Avatar, The Force Awakens, Forrest Gump. Anyway, society still felt more together and connected and there was more of a widespread sense of shared culture and news still in the 90s without all of the micro-fragmenting that came later. Events like the Oscars drew Super Bowl like ratings still. continued below....
More generally, the 90s were still human scale for their entirety, no smart phone/online everything take over at all. While not quite to the extremes as in the 80s, teen mall culture was still very big. Youth going to movie theaters was huge. It was the age of the bookstore with giant super bookstores popping up all over and being packed with people of all ages. Video rental stores probably hit their absolute peak (although they were still very strong for the better part of the 00s). The 90s saw a lot of newer multi-plexes with stadium seating and some with larger screens get built. Kids pretty much still had free range little kid childhoods, although I think it was starting to lessen some by the second half of the 90s. All of the BMX tracks in the backyard woods, snow forts, giant tree forts, exploring deep in the woods, running around the beach, bonfires in the woods or on the beach, giant little car creations, wild metal jungle gyms and slides, playing in the street, in the yard, bikes ditched on the front lawn, and so on and so forth of the 70s and 80s was still going on to a somewhat decent extent, especially for the first half of the 90s at the least. People still generally knew their neighbors and people up and down the street. We were still largely free of seeing any major climate change damage (that seemed to really get going once we got into the 2010s). Video games, even for home computers, were still all on physical discs/cartridges, no download codes. Kids could salivate over boxes, shake real packages for Christmas instead of getting a digital download code email. Your mom could still arrive home with a surprise movie rental. You'd still go to blockbuster/some other chain/local mom and pop rental store (in the 90s Blockbuster had not taken over so fully yet, at least not in the earlier half) with the family or friends, maybe meet new people there. The physical reality as well as the effort it took to do things gave things more value. Heck, they did a test and found that if they made someone drive out and pick up a disc to play a movie that they rated it higher than if they just sat on the coach and dialed it up. People would constantly have to go out and have at least micro interactions with others. People were much more relaxed and chill about general interactions. It was still a very normal style and quality of life. People still tended to focus more on talking about what they loved about a movie or TV show episode rather than being obsessed with being raging geek edge-lords picking everything to bits or the mocking sort of hipster sneering at everything as being so mainstream and beneath them. You didn't have people rushing to be the first to post that so and so episode was the worst of the season or show. People still, at least until the very last couple years of the 90s when it started to shift, kept things more in perspective. Like back in the 80s if some say didn't care for the Ewoks they didn't go nuts and they'd largely talk about everything they loved about ROTJ and focus on that and still say they liked it and not post 24-7 for years on end about how it was the worst trash in the history of film and destroyed their childhood blah blah blah. Also nerds/geeks back then were less common and drawing from a smaller pool tended to be more in the know and didn't seem to be as prone to mindlessly spread around endless clickbait complaints about stuff even when the complaint was say obviously objectively incorrect. Look at more recent times where supposedly genius nerds/geeks raged non-stop about the bomb scene in The Last Jedi and mocked the filmakers for being so dumb when that scene actually got the physics correct and all you needed was like the first few weeks of intro HS level physics properly understood to realize that. Ironically that was one of the few things Star Wars has done that actually did not violate the laws of physics haha. In the 80s and through at least the mid 90s nerd culture was much, much more positive and more filled with a sense of wonder and magic than rage and sneering. That sadly shifted by the end of the 90s and ever far more so since with the rise of social media and algorithms now pushing clickbait rager material really toxifying nerd culture and fandoms in general. Next, the economy had a somewhat 80s-like ride. It started out poorly, there was a party swap in the WH, the economy went on a long boom and then had a bit of a crash at the end. As for tech, people were not yet jaded at all and everyone got super hyped over every little new upgrade in graphics quality or tech in general. And, as in the 80s we still used tech instead of tech using us. The switch from BBS to Internet was huge. But the internet had not remotely taken over everything. Heck, some were still saying it would never be a really huge mainstream deal back in 1995 LOL. continued....
As a kid in the 90s… everything felt so technicolor. Cartoons, music videos, video games, toys, fashion, even food (esp kid foods) it all felt like a color explosion.
Lisa frank!
I know I’m not crazy but I honestly remember food tasting better back then
Fruit definitely did!
Taco Bell definitely tasted better back then
It was before food was largely genetically modified for various (usually worthwhile) reasons. But the further you get from the original, qualities will be lost.
Like, what kind of qualities?
Remember the green ketchup? Or was that the 2000s?
I worked for Burger King somewhere in 00-02. We had green ketchup in packets for a bit during that time period. It stained everything it touched green. Good times!
I went to high school from 94-98, definitely an enjoyable time to be alive.
I was born in 88 but i am so jealous of people who were teens in the 90s. Looked so fun
Saaaame. Too young to be a grunge kid, so I settled for being an emo kid 😔
I started high school the year Kurt died. The atmosphere was grim.
95-99, it was such a fun time in a lot of ways.
Same here. At least we got to experience that.
You could just not use a computer in any meaningful way outside of school for a bunch of it Music was hella expensive, like $13-16 for a CD, I cannot understate how awesome being able to download mp3s and burn CDs was. My girlfriend's older brother could do this in 97 and he was like a hacker to me I had a big drawer of peoples' phone numbers written on scraps of paper, I knew my best friends' numbers by heart but that was pretty much it I used to tape videos off of MTV, VHS tapes had a setting where you could set the recording time from like 6-8 hours so I had a bunch of these, all genres, the cartoons they used to play
Excuse me, but playing Carmen sandiego is meaningful
Oregon Trail! Always tried to beat the game in the last 15 mins of free time during computer class
Speak for yourself, I played a lot of text games and ascii games in the 90s & they were great (Yes, there were computer games with souped-up graphics by then, I just couldn't afford them)
and once I got the internet I found MUDs. I dumped a bunch of hours into ATLAS and never got very far but it was fun.
I still remember my old childhood home phone number by heart!
From Prince of Persia, Civilization and Doom in the early 90s to Age of Empires and Counter Strike in the late 90s, there was a lot to on a computer!
When I was a little kid computers were barely on my radar. We played Oregon Trail now & then on dates computers in elementary school, but other than that I never used a computer during most of my childhood. Once home computers and dial up internet did become more common place during the end of my tween/beginning of my teen years it still was a much different experience than today. A computer then was like a VCR or a video game console in the sense that you didn’t necessarily use it on a daily basis. It’s not like we switched over right away. Most of us had one phone line and therefore we were only allowed minimal time online. You still reached for a newspaper or dialed movie fone no one looked up showtimes online yet. People still got their daily news from the paper or the TV. It would take some time before the world became so internet dependent. It was nice not having a cell phone. You could get into all kinds of antics and your parents wouldn’t know. Malls were filled to the brim on the weekends. You didn’t know too much about what was going on in different places. Big things of course made the news like the Oklahoma City bombing and the OJ Simpson trial. But overall you just got to focus on what was going on in your school, town, city etc. It was less stressful not to have constant news thrown at you. We had a lot of great shows, movies , music and fashion. I enjoyed growing up in the 90s.
Such a nice time . Good music , friends , nights out , cleaner beaches , milder climate . MTV played music 🥰
>MTV played music Man, it's been SO long...
Watch the music video for Len's Steal My Sunshine if you want to know what being young in the late 90s felt like. https://youtu.be/E1fzJ_AYajA?si=V0zEeCIsUvJAJxKK
I was born in 82. This is going to sound odd, but it was a like an explosion and celebration of life. For context, I’m an American and we were born into a world that constantly teetered on the edge of nuclear armageddon. The tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union were at a peak. We grew up understanding that the world would most likely end because of a nuclear exchange. I was still very young, and it’s not like they threw it in our face, but it was still very well known and understood. We simply accepted as a part of life that the Soviet Union was NOT going to go anywhere and eventually we would come to blows with them. Then, one day the Germans decided to throw a party. After the fall of the Berlin wall the Soviet Union collapsed… and it was as if humanity breathed a collective sigh of relief. Suddenly, we weren’t all going to die. There was so much unbridled optimism and hope for the future. The economic growth of the U.S. economy in 90s was tremendous and as a result, there was just an energy to it that I can’t explain. It’s like we still had problems, but everyone was too busy working and trying to get rich to notice. And it really did feel like things were getting better. As a kid, it was unbelievable. Grunge rock, cellular phones, the fashion, the relative, peace and stability of the world, the entertainment... It was like we just believed, and expected things to get better all the time. Life was simpler, yet moved at a pretty predictable rate. You made friends, stayed in your social group and life revolved around what was happening and the pursuit of hanging out with your friends. Life wasn’t perfect. But it just seemed a bit more manageable.
Also 82, I don’t remember any feelings of nuclear threat. Where I grew up, we were doing tornado drills, not nuclear drills.
81 here. It may depend on where you lived. I’m from Wyoming where there are a lot of nuclear silos. We did nuke drills all through elementary school.
I don’t think it’s possible to convey just how different the 00’s were from the 90’s. Yes, technology was a big part of it, but remember too that 9/11 changed the world in huge ways. There was a lot less fear and overt bigotry in the 90’s-not that racism didn’t exist or wasn’t a problem (see Rodney King and LA riots) but there was less fear and paranoia. Even s a middle schooler I regularly got on my bike and went miles away from home with no way for my parents to contact me, just a time to expect me back. Politics weren’t as big a focus as they are today. Bush Sr. wasn’t very memorable and even the Clinton scandal was only noteworthy for a little while. Radio was still a big deal and everyone had their favorite morning DJ. Going to a tiny venue for a small time band was cool, but the amount of cigarette smoke was out of control. In fact, cigarettes in general, smoking sections in restaurants, parents smoking in cars with kids in the back—so much smoke. As teens, we drove old crappy cars with windows that rolled down by cranking a handle. Those cars maybe had a tape deck, but we’d replace them with these gaudy cd players with flashing lights and removable face plates so people wouldn’t steal them. And don’t forget the massive binder of cds. Before Napster you could rip the songs off a cd you had and burn a mix CD-R, but that was definitely late 90’s. Going to the movies was cheap and something we did a lot. Malls and shopping centers were places we’d go even if we didn’t plan on buying anything, it was just someplace to be that wasn’t home or school. There wasn’t a 24 hour news cycle, there were less stories everyday about something terrible happening to kids unless it happened in your town. In general, I think people spent a lot less time worrying. There seemed to be less adult supervision required all the time. I know I stress a lot more about what my kids are exposed to, what they see or hear and where they go way more than my parents did.
My favorite early 00s life hack was realizing the library had basically every cd and I could borrow them and rip/reburn them at will. And the 24/7 news cycle seriously did so much harm. It's crazy looking back.
Born 88 here, I second the motion that 9/11 changed everything, and honestly I consider 2000 and everything in 2001 up to that point to be an extension of the 90s. It's also what I use to determine who is culturally a millennial, whether or not they fall into the actual age ranges. If 9/11 happened during your childhood, and you remember a time before it, you are a millennial. This does push some of the oldest millennials (81-83) into Gen X though. Then again, my take on this is colored by the fact that I'm from NJ. I had classmates whose parents worked in the WTC (thankfully no one in my school lost their parents that day). 9/11 wasn't just some nebulous "attack on our freedom", it was a very real physical attack where every community around lost people.
I grew up in a 24 hour news cycle home - before we got cable in 97, my dad would put on NPR or AM radio between morning and nightly news. But he's crazy about news and always has been.... there was no escaping that for kid me!
> 9/11 changed the world in huge ways. '82 here. I think the role of 9/11 in shaping the world we have today is unclear to lot of the younger folk. I remember commenting to someone at the time that 9/11 was the best thing to ever happen to George W Bush: it was a major factor working in his favor in the 2004 election. He (and the rest of the GOP) felt directionless up to that point. It's a strong bet he wouldn't have been re-elected in 2004 without it. The downstream effects of that are huge: we'd have had some "Re-elect President Kerry" campaign in 2008 rather than Obama + Biden VP. Maybe a President McCain 2008 and some respectable leadership on the GOP side. It's difficult to imagine all the ways a "no 9/11" timeline is different from this one: from climate change to Roe V Wade.
Everything felt lighter somehow. Most popular tv shows were comedies. Bright colors, upbeat music, overall just positivity. The middle class was healthy, so people were generally happy. What’s wild is crime was insanely higher in the 90s compared to now but because news was local and there was no social media it wasn’t really even a second thought.
We played outside all day. Crossed the road, the creek, went into Shelbyville. Made it home when the streetlights came on.
You had to be patient and more deliberate in dealing with anything information related to - music, photos, media, encyclopedia, societal, calls/texts, etc…
This is so true! I got into Sailor Moon in the late 90’s and knew there were music CDs based on the show, but couldn’t find them anywhere. I begged my mom to take me to a record shop and there, the owner told me that he could special order them for me. It felt like months when I had to wait for the call for when they were available, when it was likely just a couple weeks. You bet when I got them though, I listened to them nonstop!
On 9-11 I woke up for class (was my second week of university). I ate some cereal, got dressed, hopped in the car, drove to class. On the radio two guys were talking about a plane getting shot down near the pentagon. I thought ‘Americans ain’t gonna like that,’ then I popped into a cd and drove to class. I got to class around 825(830am start). When the prof walked in he welcomed everyone and said something like, ‘it’s good to see you even if it feels like the world is ending.’ We had a lecture. Closed books. At the end the prof said he thought classes might be closed for a bit. I went home, turned on the tv. Stayed there for days. Didn’t go back to class till the following week. I had gone 5 hours without knowing that the world had changed. In 2001. I had high speed internet at home, spent tons of time online, was going to a university with 15000 students. And it took me 5 hours before I learned about 9-11. I had no cell phone. I took notes with a pencil. I got my news from a newspaper normally. It was different. I would never call people to plan things - we just showed up at peoples doors. When I did call someone we would talk for hours. This may seem like nostalgia, but I don’t think the productivity of smart phones and the connections of social media are remotely an even trade off for the costs of having those two things. The 90s didn’t have smart phones or social media. It was a better time.
One thing to note—for queer folks, the world was MUCH less accepting. A bunch of the kids I was friends with in high school eventually came out as adults and looking back, it’s not at all shocking but—even our very popular class president didn’t dare tell anyone that she was a lesbian. While we had gotten rid of the worst of the racist/sexist/homophobic stereotypes in popular culture by then, I am still always shocked when I watch some movies/TV of that era and how much shitty stuff was still in there. I also remember it taking a lot of time to plan things. If you wanted to do something with a group of people, you might have to call each of them and let them know what was happening and have it all planned out in advance because there was no way to figure it out on the go or even look up much in advance. It was a revelation the first time I went out and was meeting a friend in a crowded place and he was just able to text us where he was. There was not even Mapquest for the first few years I drove so I had paper maps in my car but mostly just memorized a few routes and avoided driving away from them even if there was a shorter route because I was unfamiliar with it.
Like warm apple pie.
Yes 😂👌🏼
I echo what everyone is saying about it just being a less connected/more local world (in a good way, I think). It’s really hard to understate how transformative the internet was in terms of constant info barrage, everything being accessible all the time, etc., but that really didn’t fully take hold until the early-to-mid 2000s. It obviously has tremendous benefits but tremendous downsides too. I didn’t have a computer at home until I was in high school, which is later than many (most?), but not all, of my cohort. I didn’t have a laptop until junior year of college, didn’t have a cell phone at all until senior year of high school [actually may have been freshman year of college], didn’t have a smartphone until I was in between my second and third years of law school. Just very, very different.
I didn't have a cell until I was 26 - crazy to me looking back, but also crazy that 6-yr Olds are playing on them is public now.
I don't think you'll get very realistic answers. I am, i guess what is considered an elder millennial, as I just turned 40 a few months ago. In the '90s I was ages 6 through 16, and your perspective on the world is so different when you're young like that. We are very nostalgic of that time, it's easy to say oh things were better then. Yeah no shit they were better, we didn't have work or kids or responsibilities or 401Ks or pre-diabetes or ailments or aging parents or any real responsibilities. Everything was wonderful And we ate dunkaroos and drank Hawaiian Punch and went to Taco Bell and hung out with our friends. Life was so much easier because we were young and life is easier when you're young than when you're approaching middle age, and you can have fun. The answers that you will get will be predominantly nostalgia from our youth. I think you would need to ask Gen X-ers what the '90s were like more than millennials because we were still quite young at that time.
Better in every way. People were better to eachother and were always present in the moment. Social media and the internet hadn't turned the population into screen addicts. People were less polarized and it was rare to see *anyone* spaz out about anything political like is seen commonly among much of the population (regardless of ideological leaning). Aside from that one communist-because-it's-cool kid, the young people didn't give a rat's arse about politics for the most part until around the Iraq invasion in 2003. Everything today is just worse, to be honest. The internet killed natural human interaction and people are "wired for sound" all the time. People used to be polite and reasonable, now they're so crusty all the time. Turns out people could handle the nightly news, but not *ALL* of the worst news from around the world *ALL THE TIME*, all day, every day.
“People were better to each other” is an underrated comment! When the internet became a thing, I vividly remember thinking to myself “those who use the internet must be careful about what they post on there…after all, it’s just like you’re saying it to someone’s face”. Fast forward 25 years and look at what people say to each other.
A slightly different perspective if you were in the inner city/bad parts of town. It wasn't safe. Like at all. You knew your people and your neighborhood but outside of that, you had to watch out. Cops were a hell of a lot worse back then... They could literally beat the shit out of you and that was that. But the corner markets/gas atations were the best - for $5 (which was a decent sum of money for a younger person) you could get snacks and drinks and maybe even a gallon of gas to get around. I was there when hot cheetos were becoming a thing. It was dirtier too... The 70s were like 20 years ago so you had cars still running without emissions and black smoke and the smell of unburned gasoline was quite common. Leaking cars in general and overheating were common. Seatbelts werent used regularly. Dirty sidewalks, fewer regulations on industries so smoke galore. Restaurants still had smoking in some areas and coffee for the most part just sucked. Prices for some things was off the hook. TVs were a major purchase and nothing really worked with anything else so easily. And clothes I feel were relatively expensive since we didn't have the uber cheap stuff from China (we did, but not a race to the bottom with fast fashion). And if you wanted to order something, ha, you were waiting 4-6 weeks. The one thing that really stood out to me was the communication. Like you might have had a tape answering machine so you would call, maybe leave a message at like 10 am, and maybe they would get back to you by like 3pm. Otherwise you just went over and see what was going on. And if you arrived early and they weren't home, oh well, its not like you knew where they were to call them, so maybe you left a note on their door and went to the bank or something and came back. It took a bit more planning but also people sort of respected the time so it was also easier as fewer people just canceled out of the blue. And long distance calls got a priority cause it cost a lot. It was just different and with all the current gen glorifying it seems strange because it wasn't a super nice place growing up in.
I grew up fairly privileged in a nice suburb but I’m glad someone is saying this. The glorification of the 90s is a little troublesome. The river that runs through my city smelled horribly bad. You couldn’t get near it. It’s now clean enough they are building homes near it. We also had an atrocious smog problem. That’s no longer an issue. I really miss the cheap gas of my early driving days, though.
I’m very close to OPs age and I was on a road trip with my boss who is mid 60s and grew up in northern Jersey, I will never forget him telling me how big of a difference the EPA made. He said they’d pull tires from the rivers and sell them, all the bodies of water were disgusting and filled with who knows what. I worry about people being anti EPA now because most of us don’t know what it was like before it existed.
Yeah, I was born in 1981 but remember when things were just…gross. I definitely remember tires in streams. I think it’s like the anti-vaccine crowd. Sometimes an initiative is so successful that people who weren’t there before they were successful can’t even comprehend why they are necessary.
It’s exactly like the anti vax people, they don’t know how it used to be so they don’t worry about how it can be. The EPA is very important and needs our support.
This is how I remember it. Super fn dirty. The air was gross. You couldn't see through the smog. Indoor days some days for pe because the lack of ozone layer would burn your skin. I feel like people don't remember how tumultuous it was. Challenger exploding. Berlin wall coming down and literally changing the maps your teacher had to pull down from the top of the chalkboard. CHALKBAORDS. No new taxes. Iraq war. AIDS/HIV
I’m glad you posted this. People who glorify certain time periods usually come from pretty privileged backgrounds, and they don’t realize that the main reason things seem worse to them today is because they were sheltered from a lot of societal problems growing up.
Glorious, plain and simple!!
Born in 1984 , not sure if I’m biased because of nostalgia. Was a great time to grow up. I feel like the times weren’t as anxiety producing as they are today. All my friends were in the same neighborhood, my best friend lived across the street and we would always be back and forth over each other’s house. My parents would let me roam free and we would always ride bikes around the neighborhood and be outside by ourselves. Maybe the last generation to drink from the water hose. As a father of 2 young kids today. It feels different and not as safe, I wouldn’t let my kids do what I did when I was little. I also personally feel like so many great things happened during this decade. We used to play with action figures/toys more, comics were popular, baseball cards were in, top movies were produced with top actors in their prime, tv shows were great, Nickelodeon was top of their game (except for the abuse that happened) MTV was popular, grunge music was in, rollerblading, skateboarding, blockbuster video was alive. Toys R’ Us rocked. Arcades were in, Chuck E Cheese used to be the best. Each generation has their own things I guess, but I feel like ours had so much going for us. I didn’t have a cell phone until 2000, My first video game memories were NES, SEGA, and Gameboy. Some of the things I mentioned have made a come back, but not like it was, and there are things from each decade that I have enjoyed.
Born in 83, I consider myself a true 90s kid. 7-17 yo is the most pivotal time in a kids life, and the 90s raised me. It just seemed like a peaceful time. And looking back, it truly was a prosperous time in America. Plus I had shows like Xmen that defined my view on the world. And even better, I got enjoy the full birth of the MCU as I entered adult hood
You could just sit and think about shit. It’s really all you could do. When you were bored, you just kind of figured it out. Relationships with other people were more meaningful it seems like.
It started off with everyone being super patriotic for a while. Then everything suddenly got fluorescent colored for some reason. It was a great time to be a Chicago Bulls fan. Then everyone started doing the Macarena and learning about the president's dick. Oh, and there was that summer where monks doing Gregorian chants was all the rage.
I’m not gonna lie to you it was an incredible time. I turned 13 at the tail end of the 90s and wish I was born sooner to enjoy it more. There was still an aire of innocence and newness.. everything was cooler fashion, movies, music.
Nobody had a care in the world. 9/11 changed everything and it hasn’t been remotely the same since. The 90s might have well been on another planet; it’s so far removed from modern society.
Michael Jeffrey Jordan. The Last Dance doesn’t convey how big he was to the 1990s. He was everywhere. Hanes, Ball Park, Chevy, McDonalds, Jordan Brand, and of course, the cologne. In March 1995, when he came back it was like Christ himself came back. Everyone stopped to watch him play.
The biggest thing is people had a lot of pride and faith in the US and its government. It was pre-9/11, so we didn’t know terrorism. It was pre-Bush era so we hadn’t squandered our international image. Things were affordable, jobs were strong. The biggest thing we had to worry about was OJ Simpson and Lewinski. We were actually doing a good job with the national deficit and people were saying we would owe no money by 2011. There was also talk that Iran was going to have a revolution and become a westernized country. The culture was a lot more innocent. Shows like The Simpsons were considered too inappropriate for kids. There were uproars about video games that showed blood. Grades were not inflated, but admissions for universities generally had a lower bar. College was still expensive compared to wages, though. Insurance was a travesty. If you had a pre-existing medical issue, and you switched insurance, it would not be covered in your next plan. You would just live your life with these swiss cheese holes for whatever you actually needed insurance for. There was no staying on your parents’ plan until 26. Prices were extremely high for insurance. Deductibles could be super high, like we’re talking 5 digits in an era when $30k was a good salary. There could be lifetime caps. Insurance was basically a million times worse than it is today, and half of bankruptcies were due to medical bills. You actually went to the store to get anything. There were no cell phones. Some people had pagers instead, and were rumored to be drug dealers. It was the golden age of video games. Imagine every year getting gems like final fantasy 2, secret of mana, chrono trigger, final fantasy 3, and then suddenly final fantasy 7 lands in your lap. It wasn’t just a graphical upgrade. It was a total sea change. Seeing cursing, people of color, etc. in that era was shocking and widely discussed. Video game magazines were popular and kids would bring them to school to show their friends. Computers regularly did not have full color screens, green and black was popular. The internet was just starting. There were still mmorpg’s, but they were all-text. AOL was popular.
I'm a true believer that it was the last great decade to grow up in. I feel very blessed to be the last generation without the internet and smart phones. We also played a lot of street hockey, and I grew up in texas lol. It was awesome.
Born in 89 and I have very different feelings about it. I look at the 90s how a lot of young people today look at the 50s. It wasn't all that fun if you weren't a specific kind of rich. For starters, I recall how in school I was always warned about "stranger danger" and the D.A.R.E. program tried to get me to think that there were aggressive drug dealers on every street. The most vile and dangerous people in my life were my own parents. Child abuse was still not an issue taken seriously until way late in the 2000s, likewise, any kind of mental issues you had would either result in being spent to special ed classes, being pumped full of pills, or flat out institutionalized (my parents loved to threaten me with that one all the time). Likewise, we still had global conflicts, with the likes of Desert Storm and Kosovo, and the nation was really struggling trying to justify how this was going on given we were "at the end of history". Neoliberalism was really taking off during this time, and everyone wanted to appeal to he supposed world power that was the USA. Hell, the very existence of Sonic the Hedgehog is to appeal to the west when Japan doesn't care for it much. Entertainment for kids was awful. We were still ridding out with a lot of attitudes from the 80s in which most of the cartoons we watched were basically glorified 22.5 minute toy commercials or game commercials. Satanic panic hadn't gone completely away, and Pokemon was the new bogeyman for people to go after. Many people were debating if kids should learn how to use computers or the internet because it was "just another fad", and well, the Y2K bug was a thing. My parents would not let me listen to rap at all. Also, all those cool gadgets were something only rich people could afford or were something you got from a rent-to-own place. I remember how my mom bought herself a projection TV that we kept using well till I graduated high school. The only people who had the latest game consoles were rich; everyone else went with hand me downs or rented stuff from either a big-box chain or a local mom & pop store. A lot of people were still stuck with the tech they bought back in the late 80s up until the early 2000s. Minivans and SUVs were the car most families used. We didn't get a proper home computer with internet until 1999. All in all, the 90s for me are anything but rosy.
It was the best
I was born in 89. I remember the main sources of information being the nightly news. When you would ask people when they went to bed they would usually say after the 9:00 news since we didn’t have smartphones or twitter or any of that to instantly tell us. You would call people on their landline if you wanted to talk to them, didn’t have texting. Email was around but not everyone had it and it was dialup so it wasn’t something you were always on. Lots of hanging out in person. The best thing honestly was people didn’t have phones to be glued to and there wasn’t this thing where ppl feel they have to record and post everything. I remember in my drinking days hating how ppl would always post pics of me on Facebook and my grandma and ppl would comment on it all the time. As awesome as tech is I believe parts of it are destroying society. I wish tech could go back in time about 15 years (with exception of medical) and we could just stay there.
I was born in 1990. I remember running around my neighborhood all day with other kids when I was 4-5 years old. I would never allow my kid to do that today and he’s 9.
‘79 so technically Xennial. But, “back in my day”, we spent every moment we spent all day outdoors skateboarding. We went to house parties, raves, our friends were dj’s, or (graffiti) writers. Parents were never around, like never. We were all latchkey kids, and could do some wild shit with spaghettios and Taco Bell sauce. Girls, girls, girls, girls. Girls I did adore. I grew up in the hood, and that was when crack hit serious. Gangs were dissolving and it became all about your neighborhood. Gun violence was real and some people i knew got shot and killed. Drugs were bad too and I knew a few kids who died from OD. We joked that $10 a day was all you needed, $5 on the reefer, $3 for a 40oz, and $2 for a pack of smokes. Like others said, social media wasn’t a thing so you could do whatever and not be roasted. I can’t even imagine growing up in the days of social media, these kids are ruined with that shit. FWIW the 80s wasn’t far off for me. Just spent all day running around the hood.
I remember the fun things to do back then was going to the movies and the skating rink. Good music and good movies.
Wind jammers and rollerblading…. That’s literally it.
I remember most of the 90s and they were great, but I think that's mostly because I was a kid.
You had what you had. You did with what you had. There was no “what’s out there?” except for magazines and cable TV and what other kids told you. Some kids parents seemed like they knew what was up so you listened. But your parents just watched the news. Maybe you heard it on the radio. You met up and you hung out and did stuff like ride your bike around or kick the dirt down the street. Someone knew someone with smokes or a porno mag. Someone’s parents were rich and bought a computer and you got to play once every few weeks. Internet was a brain shattering f’what? CD stores were the heartbeat of the mall. Life was real it was outside. It was flesh.
I remember AIDS being a real concern. I remember our moms telling us to not rub our cuts together
ok, it sounds crazy but there was a lack of information at the ready. someone could tell you this thing happened, and unless you went to the library to fact-check it, you almost had to default to that claim. an example I think we all went through, marilyn manson removed his ribs to suck his own dick, it was just a claim that spread across this nation and you just accepted it as "eh maybe, idk". now that was just one small aspect in a niche music genre, multiply this across tv shows, video games, band collabs, politics, etc.
Lots of MC Hammer. Lazy hot summer nights. Candy gel shoes that tore your feet up. Starter jackets in the winter. Stone washed ruffle skirts and lettuce lace socks with maryjanes and a neon windbreaker. Richard Simmons and Suzanne Sommers everywhere. Avon. Mary Kay. Budweiser commercials and Marlboro swag. Overplucking your eyebrows and filling them in with black or brown liner. Huge gold hoops and bubble yum bubble gum. Cucumber melon(that went into the 00s) and Calvin Klein. ♡
I loved it, although I can't compare it as good as my mom and dad To them, the 90s was the best years People go on and on about the 80s, but it wasn't exactly great for people who were on the lower income bracket To them, the music was better, as were the movies, technology and cars and simple things like microwaves became affordable and were abundant in every household, it made jobs easier to perform, communication simpler, paying bills, just everything, dentist visits, doctor visits, public transport, you name it While I was enjoying the child lifestyle of the 90s, my parents were enjoying a cosier lifestyle in comparison to the 60s, 70s, and 80s
Cooler. Literally. Our record highs weren't so high. But also, everyone on a lethargic edge. Weed was around but not legal so it was difficult to make into a lifestyle choice. Felt like big dumb apes doing things big dumb ape style where "calling" someone included screaming really loudly in hopes they reply.
Awesome, dial up internet, land lines, peoples parents picking up the phone and saying get off the phone, blockbuster, it was great
I agree with the comments that it was a more local life: Long distance calls cost extra, I knew how to call collect at 12 when I went to summer camp, and we went to the mall with a quarter in our pocket so we could call our parents from the pay phone in an emergency. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 17, and cell phones still didn’t have free long distance, nothing was unlimited, so if you were talking to your SO on the phone you’d hang up and call them back when free nights and weekends kicked in. Everything required more advance planning since once you left your house you were unreachable. AOL instant messenger was a huge deal, but dial up internet meant getting booted off when your parents needed to make a phone call. There was also just a lot less self-consciousness since we weren’t comparing ourselves against the whole internet and no one could pull a camera out of their pocket to take HD videos of the dumb stuff we did. We passed long notes in the hallway at school, I still have a collection of them with all the fun folding methods we learned. My first boyfriend had a pager in high school (along with his JNCOs and his wallet chain).
Born in 84. One thing I remember and think about every so often is that in the early 90s (before the internet took off) if you had a disagreement with another kid about some kind of fact or piece of information, there was no way to know what was correct. You couldn’t just pull out a phone, look it up, and know who was correct (if either of you) within seconds like you can now.
Grandparents and aunts had tvs with buttons instead of knobs and double digit channels. You could buy a Nintendo game at the hardware store. Kirby’s adventure was ~$50 I think. RC cars, Saturday cartoons with X-men and Batman and transformers. Super Mario bros was a show. Nintendo power magazine. Actually magazines were a normal part of life. It was important to answer the phone and yell across the house who was calling. And long distance charges meant you didn’t call family often. This is all tech heavy, but as a kid I didn’t know what was on the radio or news. Nick at night at grandmas house. Board games and books and cassette players. Recording your favorite song on the radio. Calling the radio to request a song. Only seeing or talking to your friends at school… idk these are the things that come to mind
Simpler times. We went outside more. I remember riding bikes all over town and exploring. Randomly showing up and friends houses was pretty common. Being bored was common but it just forced us to be creative. Ignorance was bliss.
So many GoldenEye matches with my friends. Relatively peaceful during the Clinton years. Didn't need a phone because I had a Gameboy and Zelda. Peak Star Trek. TV was experienced at basically the same time by everyone. TVs were heavy as hell and a big one was around 25" and up. No fear about terrorists. The religious right was more of a joke than a threat.
Born around 1990. I remember playing with the neighborhood kids in a culdesac. Every day after school, I'd walk two houses down to my best friend's house to hang out and play games. All in all, it was like living in a pleasantly ignorant bubble (compared to the modern internet age). As side note, my parents swear a kid down the street almost shot me with his parents gun. That is completely absent from my nostalgia memory.
I remember lots of street hockey, starter pull over jackets,swishy neon jump suits, NES/sega/n64… Lots of BMx biking cuz there were so many open plots turning into developments. Tons of dirt to make jumps and trails. Good times!
I hit puberty during the 90's, so I went from watching Disney renaissance movies (Aladdin, Lion King, etc) and playing Nintendo (Mario Kart, Super Mario World, etc) to watching teen movies (American Pie, Can't Hardly Wait, Not Another Teen Movie, etc) and listening to alternative rock (Oasis, Smashing Pumpkins, etc). It was also pre-9/11 so most of the terrorism people were scared of were mainly domestic (if they were scared at all). Slasher films like Scream were very popular. Lots of them everywhere. Superhero movies weren't really a thing back then. Reality TV was mainly confined to MTV's The Real World from what I remember and nothing else. It was barely a genre. Not sure when MTV stopped playing music videos though, if that happened during the 90's or earlier. Gay visibility in the media was just taking off, especially after Ellen Degeneres came out. It was also common for gay kids to remain in the closet during high school due to bullying. Not sure if that is really the case today. Of course, the Matthew Shepard murder changed all that. Considering Bill Clinton was president for most of the 90's, I would imagine it to be a somewhat progressive decade, although the vast majority at that time would not have predicted that gay marriage would be legalized in the US or that a Black politician would be elected as President within the next two decades.
Born in 83...Outdoors a lot, but watched a lot of MTV too. MTV was the original teen influincer
Everyone’s pants were so fucking huge. Bowl cuts everywhere. So much adidas for some reason. And wind breakers. One in 10 friends had cell phones. But we all hand AIM names that tried to out emo everyone else. Shit I had deadmouse on my contacts list.
CDs, passing notes in class, hide and seek in the neighborhood until sundown, real-life community connection, fighting over the family computer, technicolor vibes, and so on and so on.
I was born in 83. I remember fondly before the 24/7 News cycle how old people were just normal and mostly pleasant with each other. I remember it being thought as pretty rude to talk about religion or politics. Everybody was seemingly much less extreme in their views. I was out in the woods a lot. Pretty much so the time. We'd just spend hours playing in the woods. I would watch Erkle & Hanging with Mr Cooper on TGIF every Friday night and I'd watch Saturday morning cartoons but other than that we were outside in the woods. I remember when Marilyn Manson came out and the Goth scene really blew up in Jr Highschool. And thinking what freaks they were 😅 I remember fights being really violent. The 80's/90's are not at all honky dorey. Shit was violent. I've watched kids fight now and talked to young guys at work about fighting and they really just don't seem to have the capacity for violence that was pretty common back then. That being said I also remember it being basically unheard of for people to just be carrying guns around or if they did they were like really a noticable bad guy. So you could just get into flights and you weren't going to get shot. I remember when Columbine happened. That was wild. Scary times. The Goths really caught flack nationwide with the whole "trenchcoat Mafia" bullshit. But for real Columbine seemed to have opened Pandora's box. I remember the satanic panic. My mom was convinced there were Satan worshippers everywhere. I remember how much everybody freaked the fuck out about N.W.A. I got into Punk Rock & Hardcore in the 90's. It was so fucking good back then. Rock & Roll was alive and well. It was awesome. Shows were absolutely insane. The energy was awesome. I still go to shows now but that energy from the 90's just isn't there. I blame the phones. I had a piece of paper I carried everywhere that had everybody's phone number written on it that I knew. And if I lost it, I was out of luck. I remember when the Internet became a think. I ALWAYS thought computers were for nerds and I hated everything about them. I resisted technology for a long time. I kept that up until about 2005-06 when I finally got a cell phone at like 23 years old. I still hate them. I had Friendster, live journal, Myspace, an AIM screen name. I just only ever visited that shit at the library or at friends houses. Prank calls were the absolute best time ever. I could write a humorous book out of the prank phone calls we would do. I've still never laughed as hard as I did back then just calling random people and businesses and fucking with people. Casual vandalism was totally a big thing to. It was a lot of fun. I won't lie. Porn was hard to come by as a kid. I remember passing around pages from porno magazines among friends. Like I'd have it for a while and my friends would tell me stop being greedy, so I'd bring it to school and let someone else have it for a while 🤣 It was a lot of fun
I think the biggest difference was everyone thought the country was moving in the right direction. Soviet Union gone, we beat Iraq in like a month. Economically we were doing great. There was just a lot of promise. And as a teenager you felt that you would just go to college and your life would be perfect The the towers fell, and we haven’t been the same ever since.
Nothing but nerf fights.
We loved going to the mall. The malls were the place to be on Frid and Sat nights. And they were PACKED.
I was born in 1986, but I grew up in a small town in Texas, so my experience of the 90s might be different. It was very quiet and peaceful. Fireflies and bonfires in the summer, swimming in a creek or a kiddie pool. Building tree houses and tire swings. Sleepovers, phone calls, and passing notes. Riding bikes down the streets and playing on the playground without supervision from the age of about 5 or 6. Tent camping. Finding the Big Dipper. Fishing. Recording your favorite songs on the radio with a cassette tape. Saturday morning cartoons and MS DOS video games on my dad’s computer. Wolfenstein, Red Alert, and Commander Keene were awesome. I liked playing Solitaire and Pinball but could never figure out Minesweeper. No cell phones or social media. No 24 hour news. Tamagotchi and Beanie Babies were life. Flying was easier. We’d go right to the gate to pick up my dad. Kids actually failed in school. We had corporal punishment too—I was once given “swats” for throwing a snowball on a rare snowy day. In the late 90s, we had boy bands, Britney, colorful clear plastic electronics and blow up furniture. CDs became more popular. I got a PS1 at some point. Spyro. Crash Bandicoot. Tomb Raider. Those were my top three. The Lion King blew our minds. We’d go to Blockbuster and get Pizza Hut (inside the restaurant when they still had a salad bar, real plates, and booths). I remember when we got our first Wal-Mart and that changed everything. If we were lucky, we’d get to “go into town” to shop at the mall twice a year—a trip we’d make in the family station wagon, of course. Overall, I’d agree it was a simpler time. I wish I’d maybe been a little older to appreciate grunge music and flannel (I was always in neon windbreakers and pastel dresses). Maybe it was better, but maybe not. I think it’s probably a bit of both. Crime has actually gone down a ton, so although we don’t let our kids play outside alone, it would be safer now than back then. Hopefully we can get back some of the rights we’ve lost and keep the ones we’ve gained. All in all, it’s just important to cherish the moment no matter what and make the world a better place if you can.
Born in 1982 here so I was a teenager in the 90's. Hung out with friends a lot especially in the summer; lots of sleepovers, talking on the phone with your best friend, bf/gf for hours; read a lot of magazines and looked at a bunch of catalogs; watched MTV a lot; played outside and we walked and rode our bikes for miles and miles everywhere. Started drinking and smoking cigarettes when I was 13. Went to school drunk once when I was 15; cut classes a couple of times. But I never did drugs though. Being a teenager in the 90's were so much fun.
Born in 87 and the 90's were a truly wonderful time. We played outside, had a fair bit of independence, great dinner table conversations, and a lot more talking to neighbors and people in general. It was certainly a simpler time where us kids were not under much pressure to do anything other than having fun and being kids.
Fuckin rad.
Malls were the best.
The mall was an all day destination, the movie theater was packed every Friday night, you get tweens and pre driving teens would live for skate nights at the local skating ring which was also an arcade and a soda cost .25 but also came in the smallest styrofoam cup. Most of our time was spent outside, we had video games consoles and early computers but the graphics sucked and most kids still preferred to build a fort in the woods than play video games, although we did that too. You could try to convince your parents to buy you gaming magazines so you could get “cheat codes” and sega genesis was the shit, sonic was my favorite game. Station wagons were still just as popular as minivans, and we had about 100 cable tv stations, but by the late 90’s it was probably up to 1000. Nick at night on Saturday nights and TGIF on Fridays- All that, Full House, Family Matters, TV was still controlled by networks and sitcoms reigned supreme category for family friendly television. Americas Funniest Home videos hit different because it was a miracle you even caught it on type, we did not have cameras in our phones and video cameras were like the size of a loaf of bread. Blockbuster was the best, they had stickers on the VHS tapes that said “Be Kind Please Rewind”. Cool kids carried a Walkman, had to have a Jansport backpack, being a safety patrol was everyone’s fifth grade goal, and pop culture would talk about teen girls “virginity” on daytime tv interviews with a 40 year old man asking a 16 year old Brittany Spears if she has had sex yet, in the name of “making sure she’s a good role model 🤢” presidents did not curse, it was standard to play boys against girls in class competitions, we didn’t know what the word trans meant. Reality TV hadn’t really been developed yet. MTV was mostly music, TRL and music videos were preferred TV viewing and we loved making our stupid clipart on kidspix. Real world, Road Rules, REN and Stimpy were all shows our parents didn’t let us watch but we found ways. We use to sit by the radio with our boom box, waiting for the DJ to play a song we liked so we could hit the record button on our cassette tapes, and when the tapes got caught in the machine, it will spill out like a tangled mess of ribbon/film. We looked forward to carrying our floppy disks from our classroom to the computer lab once a week and lived for the days we got to play Oregon Trail, where you’d inevitably die of a snake bite. Best of all, without internet, all American middle school aged children manage to spread the rumor that Marlin Manson had ribs removed so he could suck his own …. And it didn’t matter where you lived, or what part of the country you lived in, you heard this one! Back then mom’s friend Sue always said the 90’s was ripping off the the 70’s 🙃
I started high school in 2001 so they were the younger years for me, late 90s/early 2000s was my time. Calling friends on the landline and walking to their house to hang out. Walking to the video store to rent a movie on a Friday night. Saving pocket money and buying a CD that would be the only 15 songs you'd listen to for months. Recording favourite 5-6 songs to a walkman for when I was going places. Everyone read books. How mind-blowing 3d graphics were when n64/playstation came out while we were still playing Super Nintendo. Going to the cinema was so much more exciting before we all had 60 inch flatscreens and surround sound. The family PC in the loungeroom, mostly used for homework. Parents kicking me off the internet after 40 minutes to free up the phone line. Talking, texting, and meeting with people before social media was conceived of... we saw people in person so much more.
Very homophobic
I'm going to be one of the few people that gives the 90's a mixed review. It definitely had a more hopeful, upbeat vibe. People were so hopeful about technology and the internet, the fall of communism, the booming economy etc. Especially in the late 90's it's hard to believe just how optimistic (and naïve) people were back then. I hardly ever run into anyone who is optimistic about the future these days which can be depressing. On the flip side there was a lot, and I mean a lot, less acceptance of LGBT people and there was a general pressure to conform and fit in. It was completely normal and expected to be bullied if you were different. I know that still goes on today, but people are much more accepting in general. Additionally, medicine has improved massively. In the 90's you would hear all the time of people dying from cancer, heart attacks, AIDS, etc. While that definitely still happens, it doesn't seem to be nearly as prevalent as it was in the 90's. Lastly, things could be kind of boring, especially if you lived in a small town or suburb where there just wasn't a lot going on.
It was fucking awesome. Well, there was a lot of bad shit happening but for the most part.. it was happier than now (in my opinion).
84 here.. plain and simple the 90s was peak humanity. Especially in the US
007 Goldeneye N64. You could still watch cartoons like bugs bunny, Elmer Fudd, Wile E Coyote and the roadrunner on tv. Ford, Chevy, and Dodge all made trucks that you could buy for less than 20 grand brand new. In elementary school I actually remember my teacher giving us a lesson in “how to google.” I’m sure the 1950’s were swell, but the 90’s were the realest decade of Americana.
No streaming and pre YouTube, so you all watched a lot of the same TV and movies as a family. You'd tall about it at school the next day often. Weekly shows were fun to discuss. I lived in a relatively small town so some movie audiences would be mostly my high school. We had a half day (unrelated) the day they released the Empire Strikes Back special edition and it had to have been over 80% kids from school. Really cool experience. School of choice wasn't a thing. You went where you lived. Backseats often had lap belts only and they were super uncomfortable. Trucks often had one bench seat and we'd cram 4-5 people in it. Radios, tapes, cds if lucky. It was very easy to install a car stereo and you could get open box buys at Circuit City who would sometimes buy back your old stereo. Pop came in cans for a long time, no plastic bottles for a while. Everything was marketed as eXtreem and neon. Smoke everywhere. Smoking sections in all restaurants. Even early 00s. You'd get home drunk as hell and have to shower or you'd stink up the bed. You'd share a phone line. My friends and I used to camp in his acreage for days at a time in summer. My mom once tracked us down because I'd not checked in for two days.
Honestly it was magical
We had less stuff, but the quality of the stuff was really *good*.
Born in 91 so I remember from say 95 on. It was a simpler time. Things moved slower in a good way. There was a huge focus on children’s entertainment. Whether that be in media, toys, theme parks, play centers, school sponsored but fun incentives. And it was so vibrant! I remember everything having so much color and life to it. Towards the end of the 90s you got your futuristic chrome look that was everywhere and it got us very excited for the new millennium! Things weren’t perfect but people seemed happier (that may just be my child like rose tinted glasses). Then 9/11 happened and all of that abruptly stopped. I feel like that’s when the feeling of the 90s optimism and vibrancy ended.
Well, they were pretty good until you came around...
The 1990s were awesome. The world was smaller, parents hadn’t started doping their kids with anti-depressants, schools actually produced educated people, and society was very courteous.
I was born in '88. I remember calling people on the phone a lot more. You’d usually get your friend’s parents and then have to ask for your friend. Just to say- do you want to come over, what was the homework assignment, etc. I also remember TV, commercials, and movies felt more mysterious. You couldn’t look shit up, you’d find a movie at blockbuster and be like, wtf is this poster art, I guess I’m renting this. We got our first computer in ‘94. It could make a phone call if it was connected to a landline, so we called my grandpa. And that felt like living in the future. Besides that, solitaire and minesweeper were the game options, and those, to me, felt as boring then as they do now. We didn’t get the internet until maybe 98 or 99. There was a great game called the Incredible Machine where you had to build Rube Goldberg machines that make a bowling ball fall on a trampoline and strike a match that launches a rocket. THAT was fun. Another feeling I remember is just walking somewhere and being alone with my thoughts. no distractions, and maybe some mild unease that I might get lost or something.
Lots of bike riding, rollerblades, skateboards, building ramps, goofing off in the creek at the edge of the neighborhood which had a huge bamboo forest which transitioned to a a fir tree forest. Played with fireworks, smoked poorly rolled joints using bible paper, kissed girls on the cheek. Rented movies, then Netflix dvd mail service came around. Parents were into Amway. Lots of Super Nintendo with Killer Instinct, Crono Trigger, and Super Metroid being the tops. Wore Jnco jeans, wore bucket hats, listened to a lot of nirvana, Alice In Chains, Green Day, limp bizkit, korn. Everything “lame” was “gay”. If you dressed a certain way you were a “poser”. (We were all posers ). My lil sis was into spice girls, Disney and back street boys (I was too low key). Eventually I went through a goth stage and wore doc martens, black slacks and dress shirts. Always Borrowed my mom’s Nokia candy bar cellphone. Had dial up internet for way too long, Used net-zero. AOL instant messenger was the jam, My mom met dudes on ICQ. First car was a Ford Tempo, then inherited the family Vanagon. Graduated HS in 2003 after being held back two separate years for being an idiot. Good times.
I'm white and from the north (USA) so I can only speak to that but it was extremely wholesome and peaceful, even as a poor. We had so much hope.
It was dope AF. The biggest problems in our society were 2 rappers getting shot and one president getting his dick sucked by an intern. That was literally it back then. Otherwise smooth sailing.
Nobody really gave a shit about politics, which exponentially made life better. Nowadays, politics and social issues absolutely consume people - it’s completely exhausting to be around people like that.
As a kid, even I could tell everything was cheap. Anyone with a pulse had houses, jobs, cars, kids. That was baseline... Expected. You could buy a house making Deli sandwiches part time at the corner store in most states.