In December 1995 as a sophomore in college, I got into a dispute with a friend as to whether Katharine Hepburn was alive or not (I said she was). Since I had a phase of writing to celebrities for autographs in high school, when I went home for Christmas I found my book with various celebrities' addresses (no need for that today) to find contact information for Ms. Hepburn. Essentially, I wrote to her to ask if she was living (without such tacky phrasing of course). I received something back from an agent/publicist a few weeks later that she indeed was living. I still have the letter.
In 1986 I was working down in Granville Island at the market. Ms. Hepburn actually had a place in Vancouver in those days and she liked to shop at the market ... she was quite old at the time and not working movies anymore. Ended up on a first name basis with her over the year or two during Expo. I was working at the fudge shop and she had grandchildren that visited and liked the sweet, so she always shopped there for a bit of fudge or caramel for them. I always gave her a good price. Lovely lady, very kind, remembered people.
Wow. That’s cool. Not quite as morbid but I remember that for an assignment, we had to write to a celebrity or sports person. I remember we even had to use this book that was sold at the book fair that had addresses of famous athletes or famous celebs. I’m kind of disappointed in myself though because I chose to write to Barry Sanders (a notable football player for the Detroit Lions) and I didn’t even know why. I just knew he played football. I wish I would have written to someone a bit more cool like James Earl Jones ( I remember thinking he was so cool due to the Sandlot and also being Darth Vader, though when I told kids Darth Vader was a black guy or rather voiced by one, most said it wasn’t true) or maybe Michael Jordan. Don’t know why I didn’t pick Jordan.
Why didn't you simply google it or check wikipedia? On a more serious note did your school have something like encyclopedia like a CD version in which was like an early version of Wikipedia?
I actually caused a “policy change” in the town where I lived. When I moved to a rural community to start a new job in 1995, I was the first person in the town to have a “cellular” phone, and the exchange for my phone number was in the town my parents lived. Whenever I would get groceries or food and needed to write a check, they always wanted you to write your phone number on the check. One time, at the local grocery store, I presented them a check, and they wouldn’t accept because my phone number was not on the check. I showed them that it was, and they asked me if I lived in the community, and I told them yes. And they asked, how can you live in the local community and not have a number in the local exchange? That is when I showed them my cellular phone, and they just stared at it. They would ask, how do you hang it up, and how far can you be away from the phone base, etc. People were actually freaked out seeing a cellular phone. SO much so, they passed a local ordinance at the next city council meeting that in order to write a check, the phone number must be the same exchange as the town listed on the check. So, I actually had to get a landline (it was a party line) just so I could write checks within the community.
You can add writing checks for things that have changed from the 1990s to now. The store owner will not want one and the cashier might not know what to do with it.
In 1995 I was a college freshman, and we had no idea what a cellular phone was. We'd heard of "satellite phones", but those things were big and bulky. You really didn't see many people with cell phones in the 90s. Most of us, even into the late 90s, if we were out and needed to call someone would stop at a pay phone which were all over the place. I had a calling card for long distance to call home from college.
@@palmercolson7037 There's actually still a moderately large set of elderly people who use checks. Having worked in retail, I can tell you that pretty much any cashier who's worked more than a week will know what to do with a check, but will also roll their eyes and silently, if politely, judge the person handing them this ancient thing.
I like this, it's like an old man sitting around the fire telling the kids about the "good old days" through rose tinted glasses, except the old man is a millenial who isn't even 40, the fire is the internet, and the "good old days" is the time in which The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was still being taped
cultural “generations” in the way that we understood it, are on a 3 to 5 year cycle (sometimes less) now, as apposed to the decade defined generations we grew up with. we are getting old, but it’s not our fault
In about 1990 my uncle worked in an office. When it was someone’s lunch break in the office they’d get a folder out of the filing cabinet which had all the funny pictures inside. If there was a picture they liked then they’d use the fax machine to send the picture to all the other offices. My uncle and his coworkers were pioneers of memes.
My dad used to photocopy the jokes and bring them home from work. When my uncle would visit every Thursday night, my Dad would bring out the more ‘G rated’ ones and pass them around. We’d all have a giggle. After I went to bed, the more ribald ones would be brought out. I’d hear huge uproars of laughter coming from the living room. As an 8 year old, I always wondered what they were laughing about.
As someone born in 97, I and many people my age have such a weird relationship with 90s culture. We were the awkward transition phase where the VCR and iPhone co-existed. When the internet was still seen as only a supplement to the then current forms of entertainment. Iconic remnants of 90s culture, like brick and mortar rental stores, were still very much relevant to us but quickly grew obsolete and didn't proceed with us into adulthood or even our teenage years. By highschool, many of us had ultimately developed this awkward nostalgia for these 90s remnants in spite of not being fully incorporated with the time period.
I was brown in the late 2000s, and I feel the same way, but for that period. It’s like I was only 3 when that decade ended, and yet I have a weird intense nostalgia for it
I was in high school/college age in the 90's and have always been curious about the interest in the 90's I see so much of with younger generations. What you said makes sense. thanks for providing that insight.
While I am a decade younger than you, I was growing up in a post-Soviet country and I can totally relate to everything you mentioned. We had computer literacy classes at school as late as the early 2010s. I remember using a payphone at school to call my grandma. I remember how kinds would share pirated DVDs (the only means to access any digital product in Eastern Europe up until the mid-2000s) and spread rumours about video games that only a couple of us could actually play. I never used computer to do any of my school assignments though, besides the ones for the computer literacy class. I remember pagers and fax machines, I remember taking off our landline phone while chatting online so nobody would be able to call my apartment and cut off the Internet. It is so strange how we got to live through similar experiences in different centuries
Actually, unplugging your phone wouldn't stop anybody from calling while you're online. If they tried to call they would get a busy signal because your phone line was in use. Unless you had call waiting which would allow people to call while you were on the phone but it still wouldn't ring the phone's ringer, it would just make a sound on your phone line, which would sometimes cause your connection to disconnect but you could disable it by dialing s certain number before making a call.
My experiences were similar as well, growing up in Ireland in the 2000s and 2010s. I think this is because both Ireland and post soviet countries didn't get much advancement, especially with technology, until starting in the mid 90s
@@TheIrishYoshi It's interesting you bring up technological development in Ireland. As an Englishman whenever I listen to Americans (and Canadians, in this case :p) it often strikes me that they somewhat ahead of the curve than the UK was, they really seemed to have had a head start in computer literacy and even internet "culture" than we Western Europeans did. I suppose regionalism would have played a part in that, I did grow up in a not enormous town in the West Midlands as opposed to any major population centre of England. But still, it's interesting how I can distinctly recall my primary school only acquiring it's first computer (read SINGULAR computer) about a year before I started high school.
@@freakishuproar1168 Aye that's an interesting point about regionalism, I'm from the west of Ireland which was, and still is in many ways, behind the rest of the country, particularly the east and the region around Dublin. I'm sure a lot of people my age who grew up in Dublin don't remember a time without the internet and all the modern technology they had in the US and Canada. That's pretty wild though, I never remember a time when my school didn't have computers, but they were almost all archaic, something Americans would have had about 10-15 years earlier in their homes. By the time I was leaving primary school for secondary school, the old computers were being replaced with a few newer PCs and a bunch of modern enough laptops.
Hey JJ, I'm the guy who ran into you on Thursday evening. I'm very grateful that you were willing to talk as long as you did. Talking about your channel and videos was a super fascinating privilege. You must be a pro at these encounters at this point -- even I, someone who had semi-thought of what I would want to say if I ever encountered you, was braindead and didn't know what to say, but you are versed and empathetic enough with your fans to lead the conversation and ask questions yourself. Even though I'm sure it was a routine encounter for you, it absolutely made my week and will be a moment I won't forget! Hit me up if you ever need half off at a JOEY or LOCAL next time. 😂
I've met JJ in person, too. He is so exactly who he seems to be, and so friendly and charitable in discussion. He deserves this audience and its respect.
JJ has such an interesting channel and content about culture that you don't really see anywhere else. At least if you do it isn't as well implemented. I'm definitely jealous you got to meet him because he seems so cool.
Thank you so much my friend! It was great meeting you as well. I make videos for you guys, so I value any chance to meet one of my viewers and I love chatting if I get the chance.
I've met him too, I think he lives very near me, and It was really sick to meet the guy who i watch religiously. Just the most friendly and awesome guy.
Your comment about how older generations couldn’t fact check things really struck a cord with me. I definitely see this with my dad. When I’m unsure about something I immediately google it but for my dad that never seems to even cross his mind as an option. He’s always shocked at how quickly I can find something out and I’m always confused at how he can not know something and not immediately try and look up the answer
Also, the Boomers and older generations are used to the idea that TV news, magazines, newspapers, and printed books are "authoritative" and trustworthy. Later generations are much more skeptical.
Lol, my dad is the same way. We have a running joke in our family whenever we try to remember which actor played that character, or what year that song was released, we argue about it for a couple minutes before someone pipes up and says “If only we had a magic black box in our pockets with all the knowledge of the world” to which we all reach for our phones and search it up.
I've noticed a related phenomenon like this in my own life, where if I have a question that relates to something from my childhood, I'm basically like "Dang, guess I'll never know...", but any modern problem, I'm like "Hey, Google..." For example, if I'm trying to remember the name of that one weird cartoon I watched as a kid, it doesn't even occur to me to simply search "90s cartoon blue guy". BONUS ACTIVITY: Can you guess which cartoon I was looking for? There's a surprising number of blue characters!
@@zephadusjoltspark6951I'm thinking wither Winslow Oldfellow from CatDog or Freakazoid. It's hard to come up with a blue character who's perfectly easy to forget.
I think the 90s generation is in a profoundly privileged position of actually being adept at technology in both ends of the spectrum - not fumbling with “those dang gadgets” like our parents, and neither being completely bamboozled with the sensory overload today. No other generation can claim to have lived and not only survived, but thrived, in both worlds.
I was born in 91 and the late 90s/early 00s was this early unique era. Like I remember when it would've been weird for a teenager to have a cell phone. We were literally figuring out what the internet was gonna be and at the same time there was an explosion of analog technology and digital gadgets. Before the iPhone came out there were all kinds of devices just for listening to music. I remember these little "mini walkman" type things that would play like 1/2 of a song lol. I think they were giving them out with happy meals for a while. I forget what they're called. Also I had a digital camera with a printer built in. Even the idea of photos as mainly physical objects feels dated. Now you phone is 100x better than the best digital camera or mp3 player from 2005.
@@t_ylr I think you're thinking of HitClips. I have a very vivid memory of a girl I hated in high school walking around with one that played thirty seconds of a Britney Spears song. She would play it and look you in the eyes with the intensely blank expression of some kind of aggressive fish while doing so, like she was daring you to be impressed with her coolness.
@@t_ylr I'm about 8 years older than you. I remember having film cameras growing up and remember the first time I ever saw a digital camera (sometime in the late 90's). It blew my mind being able to instantly see how the picture looked right after taking it. I got my first cell phone (Nokia candybar type phone) in 1999 so that I could communicate with my parents since I was driving myself to school and stuff. Calls and a very cumbersome ability to text was all that it could do. As for listening to music, don't forget that the iPod came out before the iPhone. The iPod was a game changer for sure.
JJ, I love your content. I'm in my 70's so I can strangely relate to your cultural translations, while finding others incomprehensible. I didn't have a computer/word processor until I was a professor in a community college. I never saw a gaming magazine, but I got hooked on the omnipresent card game before moving on to RR Tycoon ,etc. Adjusting to rapid social and tech change has always been an issue, but has become exceptionally rapid in the recent past! Keep up the excellent content.
I'm about the same age and one big change that the Internet has brought about is that it's made other countries less "distant." I had relatives in Australia and a phone call from them was a big thing. I remember my grandpa being very impressed by the fact that with the Internet, you could just talk to a person on the other side of the world. By a similar token, I remember movies would be released at significantly different times around the world. A film would be released in the US, then in the UK we'd have to wait months for it to come out. Then it would be several months more before it came out on video. I think it was The Phantom Menace that ended those practices, with the threat of online piracy.
My Filipino brother-in-law moved from the Philippines to Papua New Guinea like 15 years ago and my at the time girlfriend's family skyped for the first time with him from the US. They complained about the quality of the video and I was shocked that the internet in PNG was good enough to handle Skype but also aghast that my future in-laws were complaining about the video quality. They had become accustomed to phone calls and texts that they were just presumptuous about how video calls should be when it was like their first time.
Movies coming out months apart in different countries is definitely still a thing, or at least it was as recently as a few years ago. Release schedules are often driven by cultural associations with certain times of year-the "summer Blockbuster" or family movies coming out during Christmas or Thanksgiving break, for example-and those still can vary from country to country.
I remember it being "Revenge of the Sith". In 1999 there was little piracy going on. In 2002 they wanted to tackle piracy head-on. By 2005 they started to adapt to the new reality.
I used to remember getting excited when a 2 year old movie would finally premier on TV. Recording it would be a big money saver, big release films would cost at least 9.99 on VHS which as a kid, I couldn't afford.
Anyone that was born in the 1980s and lived there childhood the 1990s was blessed in my eyes.. I was born in 1981 and enjoyed so so many awesome things as a child- I Feel Blessed.. Very interesting video ✊🏼
@@mrwalle4u I know it isnt BUT I've lived through all 3 decades so know which one was best (80s).And I played video games in all of those decades and experienced almost everything a kid would have done, seen a lot of technological changes in every decade.
In 2001, I was still carrying a pager so that I could respond to issues with my company's database. This was a "cool" pager because it had four little lines of text that could show you little "news drops". There'd be the four most recent news stories to choose from usually with just a "---News Update---" shown on the line. Every once in a while, there'd be a big news story, and one of the news drops would show "**Breaking News**" instead. You always knew that was a big one. One Tuesday morning, I woke up and saw all four lines showed "**Breaking News**". That's odd, I thought. Turned out, it was September 11th, 2001. That's literally how I found out before turning on my television.
Ha! Love it… I remember when I had a two-way pager and thought I was the god of technology. This was probably ‘99 or so. I was sitting in a parole office waiting to take a piss test when the towers got hit. My parole officer burst into the waiting room with one of those wheeled TV stands from school and we all watched as the second tower exploded in that fireball. This was in Connecticut and multiple people jumped up and ran out of the office because they had family and friends in the towers… Normally they’d send you back to prison if you walked out of one of those appointments but obviously nobody gave a fuck. What a wild fucking day… I remember it with such clarity that I don’t think I’ll ever forget a moment of it. Sitting there drinking beers in my back yard watching the highway of black smoke pass over my house. Cheers bud, thanks for the memories!
I think one of my most missed gaming memories from 90’s/early 00’s was getting the PlayStation Mags and getting the new demo discs. It’s such an odd thing to think of now that was how we actually tried games before being able to look up trailers and gameplay now. Also the music on those discs were so good!
Same for me except it was Nintendo Power. In the early 2000s my uncle got a computer, and I loved going to his house just to look up stuff about video games. It was such a novelty. But now I'm nostalgic for being able to flip through the pages of a video game magazine.
Gaming magazines were part and parcel of my English language out of school training. Back in those years (in Europe) most gaming magazines were from the UK and localization of games was non existent. The fact that now games have full on dubbed voices still amazes me.
I still have Playstation magazine with screen shot's from the original RE 2, including the original female protagonist with the blonde hair and Alsatian dogs, rather than the Doberman Cerberus dogs.
RUclips videos, online reviews, demos, patching and marketplaces were light years away in the 90s. We had magazines and a couple of weak sauce tv programs that showcased some games. E3 started in the early 90s and I remember waiting for the september issue when the massive insert of previews filled the magazine.
I'm about a decade younger than JJ, but two other changes I vividly remember: 1) It used to be stressful (at least as a kid/teen) to meet a friend somewhere public at a predetermined time. If you hadn't been to that place before, you had to get somebody to give you detailed directions which you would need write down, often pretty vague compared to what we get now from google maps (e.g. turn left after the hill), or you needed to bring along one of those huge fold-out city maps to navigate with. Then you show up at the park or whatever and just wait and hope that you are in the right spot, because there was no way of contacting the other person until you found each other. 2) This is kinda small, but always having a flashlight in your pocket makes a big difference. Outside at night, away from street lamps, you just couldn't see at all. Even inside, if you didn't want to turn on a light which might bother someone else, you were relying on memory and caution to get from place to place without bumping into furniture or stepping on the cat or whatever
Sounds dramatic but this is the biggest safety blankets many of us younger people will not be familiar without. I find it absolutely insane nowadays of traveling the world or even meeting a friend across town without relying on Google maps every step of the way. I use Google maps more than any other app on my phone, including social media
Totally agree about #1. If you made plans to meet in an unfamiliar place, and there was a mistake in the directions, it could be disastrous. To resolve it, you would usually have to establish a third party that you both could call via a pay phone.
If you're 10 years younger than this guy bybthe time you were 5 everyone had a cell phone in their pocket and you likely dont have memories of the same stuff.
#1 is exactly why I have blank sections of memory from getting lost/having plans changed without notification. Just completely shut down. But those events happened between 2000-2009.
I was born in '87 and this is literally my whole childhood right here. From, "Word Munchers" to "Mario Run", the only thing he forgot was "Oregon Trail".
Jarred has died of Dysentery. Lol. I loved that game, I remember sitting beside the huge loud dot matrix printer and playing it. Logging on to the computer lab computer is the only reason I know my SS number 😂.
Fellow 90s teen. I'm incredibly grateful that I remember functioning in an analogue world. There are lots of obvious and profound advantages wrought by the internet and digital technology... but they have also resulted in a fundamental culture shift that has some acute disadvantages. One of the biggies is the increasing lack of time investment: we are now conditioned to brevity and fast turnaround, sound bytes, headlines and crystalised information - particularly in media. Our 90s selves may have had to spend $15 on a CD containing only 10 songs... but we sat down and listened to the whole thing from start to finish, time after time. We read the liner notes and song lyrics. We contemplated the album artwork. We physically interacted with the music - opening the case, removing the disc and inserting it into the player, pressing the clicky play button. We experienced the album - not just listen to it. Entertainment was deliberate and engaging instead of merely a perpetual distraction. We distracted our bored selves with thought and imagination, rather than with news feeds, endless images, banal social media content and binge streaming. Arrghhh, so much change to discuss...!!!
This is sort of a frustrating but wonderful aspect of the internet; there's so much media that's being released all the time it's nearly impossible to keep up with anything, let alone go back to old things. My media digestion might be considered on the slower side because I spend a lot of time with games or albums and so on like I did when I was young, but it's hard to just keep blasting yourself with new things constantly. And you know what? I miss having booklets and boxes for media I purchased. It really did make everything feel like a full package.
It was still easy to skip to a song you liked with CD. Not so much with vinyl or cassette. And albums were often arranged in such a way that would assume the listener would be hearing the album in its entirety. For example, sometimes the end of one song would lead into the beginning of the next song.
I do think it's kind of silly to glorify inconvenience like this. I'm sure there was once a time when people said "Kids these days with their gramophones. Back in my day we listened to orchestras live - that's the only true way to appreciate it"
@@morbidsearch Absolutely. Every generation has their perspective on the new 'way of things', which usually picks out its inferior qualities. But it doesn't mean the older generation's opinions are necessarily invalid or don't contain at least a kernel of truth. My perspective as someone whose conscious life has straddled each side of the internet's implementation necessarily colours my interpretation of current popular culture and technological engagement. And I think that the advantages of those particular modern conveniences also come with disadvantages. The older I get and the more change I witness and experience, the more I understand the perspectives of those generations that preceded mine - even if I couldn't assimilate them myself. To speak to your example, I can absolutely see the social, cultural and artistic benefits of only experiencing music in a live setting. But I also know that living in those confines in 2022 (or even in 1992) would be undesirable for me, having never not been able to listen to high fidelity recordings in my own time, at my own convenience. Likewise, I won't stop utilising and enjoying the benefits of streaming, but I also won't stop celebrating the best of those cultural phenomena that were intrinsic to my own social and personal development - indeed, to that of my entire generation.
I’m firmly Gen Z and I’ve started to force myself to listen to older albums in track order, as full experiences. I try to do it at least once for all my favorite pre-digital artists, to hear how their albums were meant to be experienced. I may be an outlier though because I am super into the history of music and music production. P.S. If you’re interested in how technology has shaped music culture over time, I can’t recommend highly enough the book How Music Works by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame). Dude’s an absolute genius and has voiced these amazing insights about music through time and space and technology that I never could have come up with.
I also grew up in the 90s. I've heard our generation described as the last generation of modern people who had an analog childhood. It's true. Those of us who had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood have a unique appreciation of the powers and privileges of technology, but mixed with a healthy dose of apprehension/distrust at its potentials. Those who grew up purely in a digital age don't have any apprehensions about technology, which can be very dangerous.
I 100% agree with you being around the same age myself. "Knowing things" was a far more participatory activity and much more hands on. The digital age makes the pursuit much more 2nd hand. I think its akin to knowing the answers to math questions because you've memorized them as opposed to knowing them by understanding the process of solving them. I think in modern times we give ourselves too much credit for what we know. Typically what we "know" is how to parrot appropriate answers based on entering some keywords into a search engine and reading a few paragraphs, if not just a headline or two.
Those of us who are a few years older also experienced a few years of an analogue adulthood, one where we had jobs with pagers and had to be the guy to go look for games on the store shelves. We also got to see the entire history of video game consoles starting with the 2600 in childhood then experiencing the crash and the move away from games only to have them come back in our teens. Not to mention many years without any sort of cable or even reasonably priced VCRs. We basically had 1 or 2 channels and watched whatever was on.
I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember being 10 years old riding my bike 2 miles to play with other kids from school. I had no cell phone or pager and was completely fine with that. Back then you could still get hit by a car or get kidnapped it was a risk worth taking though.
As a 2000's kid, a lot of this stuff does ring to my memories. I can recall video stores, having to wait until you got home to use the Internet or the phone, all that stuff. What does interest me is how different it was back then in terms of information. The fact that you guys just had no easy way of looking things up like we do nowadays is kind of strange to think about. Even at my youngest age I never had to wait more than a few hours before I could Google something. I remember bothering my dad while he was working and being told by him to just Google it. So to think that you guys had to rely on libraries and magazines and things like that just feels very odd and it makes me wonder how you guys coped with that sort of uncertainty. Just because these days we take that sort of knowledge for granted.
No one thought anything of it, as the Internet didn't explode onto the scene until 1994, and even then it was gradual for the next five to ten years before most people had access to it. Prior to that, we had no idea that you had access to any information with a simple search. With no relation to it, how could we have even imagined that such was possible? Most of us went to the library for information. We had a card catalog to look up information. We had microfiche as well for accessing old papers. We didn't have cell phones, and most people interacted more with one another. Relationships were much stronger, as were friendships. We actually lived our lives instead of being constantly in a screen. A lot of us did watch television, but being that your shows only came on at certain times, most didn't watch it all day. Some did in the 90s with cable, but even then most didn't want to sit and watch tv all day like people sit at their computers these days online. Television wasn't addictive to the extent like the Internet.
I mean we had my mom's old college textbooks and a basic encyclopedia set, a dictionary and a thesaurus at the house so that was the easiest way to look stuff up. Or you just went to the library when you had the chance because they had a full encyclopedia set
I'm 10 years younger than JJ and grew up in India and well, things were 10 years late there back in 2000s, I guess. Because I was able to relate to almost EVERYTHING he talked about. Especially the relationship with the computers.
I was born in 92 and I agree with everything about memories of the 90s being a dividing line between generations. Of course I obviously was not an adult during these years but I still feel like I can understand and recall the differences in daily life, although to a lesser extent.
I was born in 1969 and feel the same way about the 70s. Kind of cool I was just old enough to catch the original Star Wars in the theater! 90s was like a less fun version of the 80s, but with better video games, tv and cars.
I feel like the transition between "90s" and today can really be linked to the smart phone. A lot of what this video talks about is pretty relatable to a person who only hit their teenage years in the 2000s. There was a little bit more proliferation of the internet and cell phones, I suppose, but the difference in how my family operated between 2006 and 2012 is mind blowing in retrospect.
Internet is a big jump and smartphones are an even bigger jump - not just in regards to computing tech, but also for photography. Previously you couldn't expect that people would always have a camera on them, but now, you can. My fiancee is Finnish and in Finland they got onto mobile phone tech, especially texting, a lot earlier than much of the rest of the world (Nokia is a Finnish company.) She finds it hilarious and incomprehensible that I never learned to text until I got a smartphone, because using that weird keyboard function where you pressed the number 9 until you got the right letter was just too hard. I think I tried to send a text once when I was about 14 and then instantly gave up. Pre-smartphone, just calling people was a lot more common, because it was so much faster than texting for the majority of phone users. "HI I'M ON THE TRAIN" was a very common phone call, whereas now, almost nobody would do that, they'd just text instead.
I feel like the mid 2000s were the last time to have a sort of 90s lifestyle, with the iPhone coming out in 2007, although I wouldn't now for sure since I was only a toddler/prescooler in the 2000s.
The iPhone brought the internet to the mainstream. Before 2006 you would still have people say "I don't really do computers/go on the internet" and it was a socially acceptable thing to say. The iPhone made the internet posh. After it became the thing to have, not "doing computers" meant you were unhip (or worse, poor). Apple sold the internet to gen x and boomers at a time where millennials had fully embarrassed the tech. Say what I will about Apple today (or even then), they drove the cultural revolution behind modern tech.
I was in law school the first time I saw an iPhone. One of my fellow interns at the Brooklyn DAs office got one. We all hung out in one of the offices for like 15 minutes watching the screen automatically switch between portrait and landscape as he spun it around. It was AWESOME.
Nostalgia x 1000. Although the 90s were a boom time in the US, my understanding is that Canada suffered some brutal economic times during that decade. Ultimately, Canada did emerge from the 90s a stronger nation than it entered them though. Would be an interesting video.
It's weird that in the United States we usual consider the 1990s a very prosperous decade even though it started with a recession and many countries did not experience it and not just those "poor nations". Japan's economic bubble burst in that decade. The 90s were also surprisingly violent and politically chaotic with the high crime rates of the decade. The rise of right-wing antigovernmental militia groups. A relatively successful 3rd party candidate running on protectionism and stabilizing the budget deficit. The Republican's controlling the house for the first time in decades and the first impeachment since the 1860s.
My 90s memory: My nuclear family was watching Seinfeld when the phone rang. My father picked the handset up off the ringer and immediately dropped it back, ending the call to the confusion of the person on the other line. When my mom got frustrated with him, he responded: "everyone should know that you don't call during the hour Seinfeld and Frasier are on."
Growing up in the 90s, just watching tech evolve has been really interesting. We grew alongside it. So when I look at something like a Switch I remember everything that came before it to the NES and Gameboy.
@@KaiserMattTygore927 The N64 itself was far and away a technological miracle when it came out. I still see it as an advanced system and not an old school gaming system.
SNES was my most favorite system growing up, and when I saw the first pictures of GBA, being able to have something like a SNES in your pocket blew my mind.
I remember in the late 90s, my boyfriend’s mom being really into, “the internet”. It used to tie up their phone so I often couldn’t get through. I remember her recommending it so highly by saying, “you can look up a recipe and it only takes a few minutes for the page to load (or whatever the lingo was then) and then you can print it”. And I remember saying something about how cookbooks were FULL of recipes. She also said something about chatting on, “America Online”, and I thought, “I don’t wanna talk to strangers”. Hahaha. The best thing about being a Luddite and a late-adopter, though, is that by the time I caved and got my own computer it was a sweet, fast little Mac and I got to skip all the growing pains that the internet had had. Ditto for CDs, I eschewed them as new-flanged, kept playing my tapes and then boom! Got an iPod and was living. I mean my Walkman never skipped and neither did my iPod but I cannot say that about anyone’s Discman.
Who needs one of them new fangled battery operated flashlights? Me Kerosene lamp is just as good, and it keeps me warm. never seen a flashlight do that me hasnt! now to me horse and carriage for a quick 4 day ride to the grocer.
I remember having the same experience with DVDs - I thought VHS was just fine and held out long enough that I eventually got to skip right to streaming. (Living in a rural area where my peers were slow to adopt new technology really helped a lot lol.)
Another part of growing up in the 90s is the whole "flipping through the channels" thing on TV. Nowadays you're more likely to just choose a show or movie on some streaming service but back then you'd often times end up watching something that you had no intention of ever watching because happened to come across it when flipping through the many cable TV channels. It also meant you'd often end up only catching part of a movie half-way through and then not seeing the ending because you got bored during the commercials and turned it to another channel. Additionally it more more likely that if you were watching something on TV the whole family was as well. Now we seem to each be watching our own things on our own devices/TVs.
Yeah god, I went on holiday recently and trying to conserve my phone's battery I passed a lot of time in the evening by watching TV and it was such a return to monke kind of thing surfing channels to find something good and having to sit through ad breaks. I'm way too used to streaming and alternative media, I can't understand how I used to regularly sit through 5 minute blocks of advertising when a 30 second unskippable ad feels like torture nowadays. Also I wouldn't say this is a distinctively 90s thing although it's definitely the starting point as it's where access to more channels became more commonplace. Whenever my parents talk about TV in the 70s and 80s it's always along the lines of "we had 5 channels and they would stop broadcasting in the late evening". The 90s was probably the heyday of cable, I'd say it didn't truly end until the mid 2010s when smart devices became affordable for most people.
I used to turn the dial as fast as I could to get to the show I wanted on the UHF channel. My parents would tell me not to do that so fast, that I'd break it, which we did mess up at times.
I'm basically exactly JJ's age, and I recall all these things as well. My family got a computer far earlier than his, as my mother used it for work, but I didn't get a video game system until I was nearly 14 (it was an N64), as my father thought they were very déclassé and children would be better off engaging with physical things with their hands. As such, I ended up playing with things like building sets, and Warhammer, rather than video games for far longer. My family also thought that mobile phones were needlessly showy and wasteful far into the late 1990s. I recall when a friend's mother arrived to pick him up, and called the house from a block away from her car, my parents were incredibly put-off by what seemed a hugely snobbish gesture. "What, she can't just ring the doorbell?!"
Oh, my God, I remember ringing the doorbell to see if your friend was home! (Especially if they lived nearby.) I don't think anyone does that nowadays -- it would be totally weird!
Ohhhh man, my late aunt was the first person I can remember having a cell phone. There was this time she was in my mother's room in the back and called the house in order for someone to bring her something from the kitchen and I thought it was the most hysterical and insane thing in the world. I still remember that vividly.
I am over similar age but I was lucky my uncle with donate systems to me like NES, Atari, Sega Master System then on like my 7th birthday I got A Sega Megadrive for my birthday. It was like my most prized possession until I got to high school.
@@juliegolick Yeah if they lives close you could use the doorbell, if they lived further you could use landline and arrange to meet people at certain places at certain times. If they were not there or late you could not simply message them ask them where they were i which was a pain in the ass.
@@EatMyShortsAU Oh, man, and getting stood up was the worst, because you didn't know if they were just running late or if they were never going to show up, or if maybe YOU had gotten it wrong and showed up at the wrong place / time. No way to get in touch at all. Super-frustrating!
I needed this video. I am 42 and i have been thinking about my childhood alot lately. Enjoy your life my friends because time really does go by fast the older you get
As someone born in 2001, I certainly had remnants of the 90's present in my childhood, but I'm grateful to a certain degree that I didn't have access to "smart" technology until early highschool. It makes me more appreciative of what I have now. It was awesome to hear about your experiences growing up, and as usual, I'm always impressed at the depth of discussion you manage to create with your videos.
Same here though I was born in 99. I think that 97-03 group got a very unique experience with all of it since we were somewhat caught in between two waves of technology and avoided smart tech at a young age.
@@Billycca3 as someone born in 91 that’s so interesting to me because when I look at younger people I always think about social media, not smartphones. I felt insecure enough comparing myself to other kids at my high school, I can’t imagine being bombarded with IG models and TikTok stars.
@@alexandraeilise as someone born in 02 it blows my mind that kids in kindergarten are getting smartphones now. My first phone had an actual keyboard and I bought it myself when I was like 13.
Same exact experience as someone born in '95. A big part of the media I consumed as a kid was reruns of '90s shows (especially sitcoms, I loved '90s sitcoms as a kid) so I have very strong memories of '90s culture. I sometimes say the '90s lasted until 2004, I feel like that's when tech became mainstream and everything changed.
im a year older and tbh i relate more to 90s kids than 2000s in a lot of ways. we were poor so all my stuff was old- i had a cd walkman, i almost exclusively played sega and super nintendo, we didnt have wifi at home, we didnt have cable so i mostly watched 90s reruns, and almost all our electronics were from the 90s- TVs, VHS/DVD players, the actual tapes&DVDs we had at home, cassette player, the computer, etc. our furniture was from the 90s, a lot of my clothes were from the 90s... i only tangentially relate to 2000s kid stuff because i would experience it at other kids houses
I always question my lens towards the 90s as being too rose-coloured, but it's sobering to hear others sharing my exact same sentiments. Also reading "The Nineties" by Chuck Klosterman solidified the warm fuzzies towards that decade as being more than just "everything was better as a kid". Really enjoyed this video, and reading through the comments! There's deep value in keeping those nostalgic feelings alive - I truly believe they help ground us as we trend towards more chaos and detachment in our lives.
The Cold War was over and the whole world was celebrating the “End of History.” It was a very optimistic decade. Then…. 9/11, and history resumed with a bang.
It’s so weird to me seeing a bunch of 90’s residue still present in the early 2000s. I can relate to some of these things, but then other parts of it seem very unfamiliar or outdated. Old MP3 players really embody this. You didn’t need to buy physical disks or anything, but you still needed a specialty device to listen to your songs.
The Early 2000s have their own charm, but it feels like a continuation. I remember a lot of the talks and discussion over people being sued for thousands for downloading music on P2P Networks. That's the big missing gap between CDs and Spotify.
Exactly my thoughts! Oftentimes the 2000s are treated like the current decade or the last one,but a lot of the now commonplace technology was only emerging in the 2000's and not everyone had access to these things either. While it was definitely more advanced than the 90's, my early childhood was more similar to a 90's kid than a kid now.
That's usually how it is for the first couple to few years of a new decade. Examples being like: the early '80s feeling like an extension of the late '70s, 1990-91 feeling like a continuation of the late '80s, the first couple years of the 2010s feeling like a propagation of the late 2000s, so on and so forth. Having residues of the previous decade permeate into the new decade for at least the first few years is nothing new, and it'll never stop.
@@thetexanhusky 2020s will prob be the exception to this trend. The pandemic happening only 2 months into the 2020s put a full stop to any late-2010s residue. January and February 2020 was basically 2019 part 2, the real decade began in March.
MP3s didn't exist in the 90s. It is completely a first decade of the 2000s, and perhaps a few years into the 2010s technology. They were primarily overlapped and replaced with the I-Pod until the I-Phone came out in 2008. The I-Pod held on somewhat till around 2011, but after which few had them.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention answering machines. Despite only being an infant in the 90s, I still learned how to “take a message” (even tho everyone basically had an answering machine at that point). I do vividly remember how basically every pay phone disappeared as I was growing up.
I have fond memories of various relatives and friends who left us messages on our answering machine. On those days you could personalise the greeting message to which I recorded one that went a bit like "Hello?!.... Pardon?... Ah, okay.... You know what, please leave your message after the beep.". Our machine had a setting to start recording from the beginning of the greeting message or after the beep so obviously I set it to full recording. My grandfather was the one who fell for it the most and I always gave him an apologetic hug the next time I visited. Good times...
Payphones were a lifesaver when you were out with friends and needed to contact parents. I can't remember the last time I used a payphone but they were so useful at the time
Answering machines were used to screen incoming calls, too, because Caller ID was not available in many areas until the later 1990s. You heard the person leaving the message. People KNEW you could hear them talking (if you were home), so people would start their message saying, "Hi Aaron... you there? Can you pick up please? This is so and so... please pick up... I really need to talk..."
My family never had an answering machine and I was born in 1987. My only exposure to them were in movies. I never even knew anyone that had one. I figured it was just something rich people had.
Watching these videos as a close to young adult, it’s interesting how many things from the “before times” are starting to seep there way back into this generation’s culture. In the new music scene, it’s not uncommon for kids to brag about their physical music collections and buy music related magazines and merchandise. Even in non-music scenes there seems to be a growing awareness of youth cultures lack of physicality, with more kids opting for cd movies and written assignments etc. I personally really like these changes- there’s something indescribably different about listening to an album you own and payed for as opposed to streaming. I hope we continue to go on this path towards mediating between the vast information of the internet and the simple comfort of owning a cd/magazine/whatever.
I only wish some of the youth of today would be listening to more of the older music genres too, like jazz and such. I played in junior high and High School and I really want a big band revival.
This is very interesting! I was essentially born into the internet age yet some of my favorite possessions are an Apple II and a record from an artist I like, both of which I got somewhat recently. It's so much easier to feel an emotional connection to a medium of content when you own some physical object that correlates to it. I think the comeback of old media is about as much of a "revival trend" as it's the decades-long novelty of the internet age beginning to fade and exposing crowds of people who ultimately just don't prefer some of the internet's inherent qualities.
I'm in my early 20's. I was always one of those people; born out of coming from a low-income family that often held onto or handed down old gadgets, and my autism making me uncomfortable learning new things. So while I adapted to the digital world in many ways, I always had something of an affinity for the likes of physical media. I'd hand in my assignments hand-written, or go out of my way to purchase a video-game on a physical disk (or cartridge or whatever in the case of handhelds). It's a bit of a strange experience to see this appreciation seep back into our generation, and perhaps the only thing I can smugly think to myself 'I liked this before it was cool'.
As a 27 year old middle class American o can assure you that there are absolutely high school students today who buy vinyl and listen to jazz, they're just the minority
@@WasatchWind This is definitely happening! Rap and Jazz go hand in hand- the majority of early hip hop was sampled from jazz. Even now, you see a lot of young producers going back to guys like Wes, Coltrane, Jacko, and more obscure artists for beats and ideas. Even just the new Weeknd album heavily samples Jazz- so i wouldn’t say the genre is foreign to Gen Z! I wouldn’t go as far as implying a full on big band revival though 😅
I fondly recall being one of the first families to get WiFi in my area, my family was one of those "computer people". It was so new, when I went to school the next day and asked my librarian (also the computer room teacher, an older fellow) if the school would ever get such a system, he called me a liar and said such a thing was impossible. lol. It was just so different during those transitional periods. (EDIT: I should note this was in the early 00s, but the sentiment of the time and the length of the transition into the modern digital world stretched all the way to the '10s, arguably)
I'm German and schools don't have WiFi here, basically only private homes, workplaces (but only for the business itself) and some restaurants have WiFi, but you have to ask for a password at all occasions
WIFI didn't even reach saturation until 2012 or 2013. You started seeing it around 2004 or 2005, but most people and places did not have it. Prior to 2004, most people had no idea it existed, as most of us were connected to either landline or ethernet until well beyond 2010, though landline was being purged out of a lot of homes from 2005-2009. Wireless Internet just wasn't much of a thing prior to 2006, and beyond the decade it took a backseat to wired Internet.
Despite being born in 2001, my experiences growing up with computers were extremely similar to yours JJ. For example, we had dial up Internet that only my father used until at least 2010 or so. This is because of where Ireland started off in the early nineties and the rapid progression of our society to where it is today, another advanced Western country. Honestly I might try and make a channel and video about this myself, I feel the perspective of an Irish person in this time period is quite unique, and Ireland's story of progression is vastly different to almost every other western country.
I would be very interested to see that. The only thing I know is Ireland was unstable and now it's got one of the highest quality of life in the world. I understand how the economic policy of Ireland lead to it being richer, but I'd love to hear what it was like experiencing the transition
@@xifamilynetflixaccount7450 It'll take a good while since I have no experience with editing or anything like that, the writing is the only part I can do at the moment. A project for the summer perhaps. I personally love hearing the perspectives of people who grew up in different countries, hopefully others find it interesting too.
I was born in urban Kerry in 2000 and I've had broadband as long as I can remember. I know many people in the UK were still using dial up in the late 2000s, and I think it's more of an urban/rural thing than Ireland necessarily being behind other countries around that time.
IF you never grew up in the 90s , you CANT relate to being a 90s kid & that’s just the way it is , 2000 kids always try to be like 90s kids lol by the time you were 7 years old it was 2008 , so by then all your doing is using things that are almost a decade out of date , doesn’t mean you can “relate” to being a 90s kid. Call me a gatekeeper etc but I'm pretty sure you did not grow up at the time when nobody has heard about the internet, no social medias to ruin kids/teenager self esteem, bulky encyclopedias were the wikipedias of that time, computers are for tech geeks, cellphones or brick phones as we called it were for the rich people mainly, most cars had manual transmission and the window had to be rolled up manually, sega or microgenius was the GOAT of video game consoles, buying a new TV feels like buying a new car, TVs had no more than 5 channels to watch and by 12pm midnight all the programs has ended, cable TVs were more of mid to late 90s fad and even then only the well to do's have subscription, if you have a walkman you are the coolest kid in school and most importantly kids were more innocent back then and most evenings we spent time playing outside with our friends, fooling around, went biking to the nearest 7Es to have slurpies, have minor cut and bruises due to falling down from bikes and fights with older kids who were bullies.
This may sound weird now but... I LOVED encyclopedias! I loved randomly grabbing one off the shelf at school and finding something, anything, new to learn. I even enjoyed looking at them. Just seeing the words seamlessly line up on the spines was satisfying. I dreamed of growing up and having my own collection of encyclopedias one day. World encyclopedias filled me with feelings of joy, awe, and wonder. ESPECIALLY when they started having colors and pictures on the spines. They were beautiful. The only time I disliked them is when I got into trouble and had to "write lines." The teacher would grab a random encyclopedia from the shelf, flip to a random page, point at something, and tell me to write until she said to stop. It somehow was always something borrrring! But, I have ADHD so maybe it was just boring because it wasn't what I wanted to read about at that moment. haha Sometimes I still want to have a collection and I do think I would be happy with one. But, they are just beautiful pages and can't be updated as science progresses as such a rapid pace without buying an entirely new book. I'm sure that a lot of it would be extremely out of date after about ten to fifteen years. Then, I think to myself, "But that is history. It's interesting to look back on what we thought we knew and how far we've come." After all, I do have some newspapers from 1938-1940. There's an article where they talk about how Mars will be the closest it's been in 'x' amount of time and that there will be three astronomers on three different points on the globe to view it. They were said to be specialists and claimed that Mars changed from brown to green throughout the year which suggested the planet had seasons. They claimed that this proved, without a shadow of a doubt, there was vegetation on Mars. We know now that that is inaccurate, but at the time, they were so sure it was true. We have come so far as a species but we still have so far to go. I always wonder what we are so sure of today that future generations will find is completely false. It keeps me hopeful and forever interested in the world. Oh, and I miss when Animal Planet and Discovery Channel didn't have just reality shows but educational shows. No drama, no following humans around as they make saddles or whatever tf. And I know it's 2000s but, Xanga. I miss Xanga. That's a story for another day. It's late and I've typed more here than I have in my journal in months. haha Feels like a Xanga post. Late night, on the computer when I should be sleeping. Ah, the nostalgia...
Same here. There was something about flipping through the pages and learning random stuff. I can imagine people flipping through the whole encyclopedia and think that they had the knowledge of everything that happened on earth. Or people going through wormholes like on Wikipedia. The only parallelism I can make is the random page on Wikipedia or Austin McConnell's video on "useless information".
@@666mrdoctor Aaaaaah! Yay! Another person that loves encyclopedias! In school, I thought I was weird for that because no one else did it. Being a neurodivergent kid, I (and other people) thought I was weird for a lot of things. But, as an adult, I see that I wasn't weird for that because knowledge is power and learning is fun!
@@drts6955 Luckyyyyyyy!! Haha I didn't have one of my own. I did have a few kids science books. Not like textbooks but books about fossils, the ocean, arachnids, things like that. Oooo, and a subscription to Muse magazine. A kid's science magazine. When we couldn't afford it anymore I cried. 😅 I was very sad about that.
As someone who grew up in the 2010s, the thing about typing still rings true. Typing was always quite difficult, and we took typing classes in the computer lab every Wednesday.
@@williamwingo8952 as another person who grew up in the 2010s with a typewriter... ribbons are actually incredibly cheap at least for my model I have a few backup ones all the time
Being born in 2000 was pretty alright too. Computers were always a thing but no one had cellphones till I was like 14 or so I got to see the internet grow up along side me for the most part. I feel so bad for gen alpha. They're going to be toddlers in a world with billion dollar algorithms designed specifically to get them addicted to the Internet for as long as possible.
@@bradthunderpants3283 thats already the case sadly. I see a backlash against being online already from younger kids and thats a reassuring sign. The internet is so manufactured now its not nearly as fun to explore anymore (not that you really can anymore in the first place)
It was magic, there were so many good shows and movies so many new things coming out that you never seen before. Today it seems like everything is just an improved version of something that already existed. It was a great time, I know the sun didn't shine brighter in the 90s but it sure seems like it did. Being a kid in the 90s was great with TGIF and snick and all the things to look forward to on TV, kids just don't have that now.
To me, as somebody who grew up in the 2010s,the idea of not understanding what the internet is is impossible to comprehend. It's like trying to have an english word stop making sense to you as a cohesive structure, it just can't be done. All of the little tropes of the internet (even things as minor as the way scrolling works, or where the standard buttons are located) are as intuitive as language and can't be unrationalized.
I'll go further and say the internet is not needed, and I could VERY easily go back to a world with no internet or smartphones. Go buy records at a record store and watch movies in a cinema or on tape. It was a great world that we all thought was sufficiently technologically advanced. After all, we had sent a man to the moon and had nuclear weapons.
My grandparents don't have a computer and don't get computers. When we celebrated their birthdays, we started singing old songs and they suggested some titles they didn't know the lyrics of. My grandma was genuinely amazed that the internet "has songs as old as this, who has archived them". I tried to explain that the internet is like a giant drawer of index cards that anyone can put cards into... I don't know if she understood what I meant. Also, I have a computer job (HR) and my dad has a computer job (road design) so she thinks we are basically doing the same thing.
Funny you should mention that. Some of the very early computer games (like minesweeper or solitaire) were actually designed to teach the concept of moving the mouse, clicking, right-clicking, etc., because NONE of those were intuitive to first-generation computer users. Sure, in theory you were playing a game, but in practice you were learning how to physically manipulate the computer.
"grew up in the 2010s?" Wow, you're a "baby". 0-1% of people had access to the Internet in the early 90s, and it wasn't the Internet of today. Mostly used for academic papers and medical facilities, for the most part. In early 1994, they started airing "INFORMATION SUPER HIGHWAY" commercials on television, as the Internet, at least the early version of how we now know it, was being released and made available to the general public for the first time. Prior to this, most of us had no idea what the Internet was. I remember watching those commercials and not being able to understand what she was talking about. I was 17 years old at the time. By late 1994, Internet use took off, spurred by AOL and their discs. Throughout the rest of the 90s, AOL dominated the Internet, taking up well over 95% of the market share, and use of the Internet grew. This was landline (through the phone line) Internet, and it was very slow compared to today. It wasn't until around 2005 that most people had a personal computer with access to the Internet. AOL still had a lot of market share up till around 2009. Starting around 2004, as cable Internet became more available, AOL lost a lot of customers, as did the other dial up companies like Net Zero and Earthlink which gained a significant market share in the first three years of the 2000s. When smart phones were introduced late 2007/2008, over the next four or so years, it changed a lot. Coupled with WIFI penetration, and you see how things came along to what we have today.
Born in '83. I remember when CDs became a thing and we were totally blown away by this new technology. My family got a computer (it was HUGE) in '94. I used it to play Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Going to the video rental store was just... amazing. Impossible to get kids nowadays to understand the excitement it was. And when dad would cave and buy a box of Junior Mints, too? Man, that was the best.
All these things you're describing just sound like my experience of growing up in South Africa in the mid to late 00s. Growing up in a developing country plus a poor family made sure I was at least a decade behind everyone else, lol.
it's wild to me how my experience with computers in education ended up so vastly different to yours, only 5 years later. still, i remember the novelty of computers as well as the computer rooms, and eventually using the school library to access the internet and print out assignments. but i also remember using an "Alphabeta" typing gadget in the 4th grade, and only a select few of us were allowed to take them home because of our advanced skill in typing. i remember how magical Microsoft Paint was at that time, and I remember how insane it was to finally get my own computer in maybe sophomore year of high school. wild. thanks for this JJ, a pleasure as always :)
'89 here and I was thinking that too. My school didn't get the Mac's until the mid-to-late 90's (both the colored ones and the models before it). I faintly remember pre-internet, but it's wild to imagine any computers not having a mouse.
I'm especially intrigued by how phone culture has changed, I think you could make an entire video about this. Just the fact that you didn't know who was calling had all sorts of ramifications. You kind of had to answer, as there was no way of telling who was calling and how important it was. When I was a kid (born 1978) most people did not have phones that could store numbers, you had to hand-dial the entire number every time, so misdialing and getting 'wrong number' calls was much more common. Calls were metered and cost a certain amount per every 8 minutes or so. My family had an 8-minute hourglass next to the phone, so that you would't run over to 8:05 or so and accidentally pay for the next unit. When an aunt of mine called us, she always let the phone ring once to give us a heads up before she dialed again, so that we could decide if we wanted to pick up or not. She only wanted to speak if she could use the full 8 minutes for the call, everything less than that was a waste of money to her. :)
We had a rotary phone through most of my childhood (born in 1976). When we called my aunt and uncle, who are only on the other side of the county, they'd tell us they'd call back. For us to call them was a toll call (billed per minute, I suppose), but it wasn't a toll call for them to call us.
You could also build these little boxes back then to mask the fact that you were on a call from the phone company and essentially make calls for free. Super illegal though
@@alexanderfo3886 Or you could dial *67 before the call to hide your info.. but sometimes they'd dial *69 to automatically call back the last number that called them and you could only sit there in terror.
@@howtomeetwomen- Ah but remember before those were options? Those were crazy technological advances to my childhood. Most especially 3-way calling because this was in middle school for me lol.
Born in the early 2000’s, I feel like I came at just the right time to just barely see 90’s culture phased out and see modern technology rise up. I distinctly remember renting out movies and video games at our local blockbuster as a very young kid, only to get home and prod my parents to let me mess with their new smartphone that just came out. Beginning middle school, of the kids who had phones half of them had a sleek new iPhones while the other half were still using flip phones. They way different generations describe the paradigm shift of the 21st century is funny to me because I grew up during that transition
This was really interesting to watch as someone born in 2005. I hope one day I'll be able to tell kids about responding to texts on my digital wristwatch or asking a little Amazon-made disc for the weather or wearing surgical masks for a year straight. Another great video, J. J.
“Dad, what were the 2010s like?” “First part was pretty chill. Things were sort of goofy in a weird type of way. Second part sucked ass. Everyone was pissed off and angry at each other all the time.” “What were the ‘20s like?” “HELL. They were hell.” “Why were they so bad.” “They were just HELL. Next question!”
I'm about a decade older than JJ, but pretty much everything in the video was highly relatable. It brought back many nostalgic memories that I had to hit pause to remenisce about.
As a person who didn't grow up in the 1990s, I remember hearing extremely vague mentions of egg yolks in computer mice, and while I just now checked and turns out that isn't a real thing, the fact that that sounded completely plausible says a lot about the era.
The old rubber balls in mice that had to be cleaned totally looked like old/overcooked egg yolks 😂 they also did NOT bounce like I thought they would at first.
Well the egg yolk mouse stick around a lot longer then the 90's. I remember having a computer that had one in early 2000's. I know by then computers had LED mouse like today, but those were very expensive and my family only got a computer with a LED mouse when it was mandatory to do so (same with box computer to flat screen computer) around 2006
I come from a fairly small town in Argentina, so even in 2004/05 cellphones weren't so common, so I got to live some of the 90s phone culture despite being born in 2001. I clearly remember my mom going to a payphone near my house whenever she needed to call someone, because we didn't have a phone at home.
@@bigscarysteve having a landline was common here, we just didn't have one. My mom was fairly young and had just came out of college so she was just starting to work and my dad had a bit of a hard time finding a job, so they were trying to save every cent.
As someone born in 2007, I might be able to contribute something from the Gen Z side of this discussion. I only recently began thinking about the way our generation's media usage must feel odd for anyone older and how that will shape us in the future. I personally learned to use a phone or computer long before I learned to question my actions and focus my attention, and that applies to almost our entire age group, with some interesting consequences. For example, looking back at my time in elementary school (where most of us already had our first phones), I feel like our relationship with the internet and especially video games was always very superficial and based on quantity rather than quality. Since we could remember, we had a play store with more games than you could ever imagine, not to mention the countless (and often quite sketchy) websites with flash games. Most were not good or even functioning games, but at some point, we stopped caring what exactly we're playing as long as the lights on the screen would keep moving. I was guilty of this too and spent a lot of time playing really pointless games just to delete them afterwards. And even in school, it's common for disinterested stundents to pick up their phones and start playing literally anything, motivated more by spite for the teacher than a desire to, well, play the game. And given the way almost all of our teachers react, this relationship to their phones and media consumption might be one of the biggest differences between GenZ and the one born before, say, 1995. What I'm getting at is the way we really don't value physical goods and property anymore. You briefly touch on this about 2:00 into the video and I can absolutely confirm this "generational confusion" we have when comparing the new and old ways of using technology for entertainment. What used to be common just 20 years ago now seems completely and almost insultingly archaic, but I find it is also fascinating in its own way. And that feeling only increases the more you go back in time. When my father, a computer scientist, tells me about his experience with 80s computers like the Commodore 64 and the games he played on it, I feel a weird mixture of pride about "the new technology" / relief that "these times of inferior tech" are over ("What? Only 64KB of RAM? And no Internet at all? What was that even good for?!") but also a great admiration for the dedication that went into operating and learning these machines that weren't even sure to succeed like they ultimately did.. It honestly must've been great being that "computer kid Ryan" during the 90s because you could consciously observe and interact with the massive changes in computers and the way they influence society, gaining some important insights. The way we went from just a few home computers to massive online games and smartphones in our pockets in no more than a decade just sounds so exciting and the early internet looks like an absolutely wild ride as well, but than might just be the imagination and wishful thinking of someone who was thrown right into the internet age without learning moderation. Okay, these some of my thoughts about this topic, I'd love to write more about it if someone's actually reading this :) Thank you for the video JJ, I love how you cover such a vast range topics in your unique casual but still productive and thoughtful style, it makes me come back to your channel every Saturday. I've been watching for a long time but never commenting, so I just had to get that off my chest.
Well said. I was born in 99 so a bit of both for me but I can certainly relate on quite a few of your points. As well as J.J.'s actually. Weird time to be born I guess haha
Thanks for writing, I have a younger brother whose over 10 years younger then me and I definitely see some of these behaviors in him as well, and it was insightful to see the perspective from someone growing up in the 2010’s, I was born in 2002 myself and didn’t get a phone till 8th grade but my youngest brother got one in second grade, so even just 10 years apart our perspectives on technology definitely feel worlds apart
I hope this doesn't come across as condescending/patronizing, but you think and write exceptionally well for a 14/15yo. As someone waaaay older, your insights are pretty interesting, especially the idea that becoming familiar with tech at an early age has had an impact on the way people learn to question actions
You were born the year smart phones first release, so I can see why you grew up with a smart phone. It's no different then me holding my dads old brick phone when I was a baby / toddler. It's just different phones.
Road trips with family. No screens, only the music we brought on tape, and car games that dad or mom wouldn't take part in. Lots of sibling fights, the one arm reach back to smack a kid (wrong kid), and so help me I'll turn this car around when we didn't even want to go in the first place.
JJ you are almost exactly 3 months younger than me. This was such a similar take in things as I had. I have often reflected with my dad that our childhoods mine from the 90s and his from the 50s are more alike than the one my children are having now.
Your story about the computer room, writing assignments by hand, and getting a home computer in high-school made me remember going to the computer lab in elementary school. I also remember my senior year of high school all the students got an iPad from the school. It's also interesting to me in college seeing the increase of students regularly bringing laptops to class and professors asking students to download software for class. It's reached the point where professors can ask people to bring their laptops to class and expect everyone to be able to. Although I have also noticed an increase in this after covid.
What's interesting is how many students schools discovered didn't have regular access to computers during Covid. It's something we as a society just took for granted like having a TV (which these days are often one and the same with computer monitors).
My family bought an encyclopedia when I was young -- maybe 10 years old. I was able to look up a lot of things there, to see if it was true. I remember using the encyclopedia to prove that the hole in the ozone was real, for example.
Oh gosh that reminds me about how my mother bought a big set of Britannica encyclopedias back in the day for us to use for reports. They were very expensive, I don't know how she afforded them. I remember turning in a history report that had some information from the books into my social studies teacher, and he was rather impressed because it "wasn't something he taught".
@@ishitaananya8649 yeah I feel this tbh, our family computer from around 2005 was a toshiba laptop that I used exclusively for flash games. The idea of learning to submit things in school electronically/using the internet for school at all just didn't exist until I was way older
I turned 20 in 1990 and I’m the same age as the members of the band Nirvana! I remember a lot about pop culture in the 90’s . The first half of the 90’s was a great time for music and fashion and rave culture. I had that exact phone on the cover of klostermans book!
J.J., you and I are the same age, only you're older than me by a few months. I was born in October 1984, started high school in 1999, et cetera. The first computer I ever used was in the 1st grade; it was an old fashioned monochrome IBM that was meant for teaching spelling and typing. By 2nd grade, we had color computer monitors for playing Number Munchers, Odell Lake, and the ever popular Oregon Trail. As for the internet, that was basically an expensive and breakthrough novelty that took off around the time I was in my pre-teens. My aunt and uncle were well-off and really big into new tech, so they let me use early dial-up internet at their house in circa 1995, back when AOL charged by the hour, and it took like 10-15 minutes to load a website. As for PC games, I first played Wolfenstein 3D at a friend's house in 1994 and immediately got hooked, then got obsessed with DOOM and DOOM II when the latter eventually came out.
As an, I assume, somewhat younger viewer of your channel, it really hit me hard when you said you became a legal adult in 2002 as that was the year I was born. To think that someone whose content I now watch and enjoy so greatly was just coming into their own when I first started existing is quite mind blowing.
You are my brother´s age then, or nearly so. It always seems to be weird to me that people your age are adults halfway or more through university, even though I was only born two years before you. What a biennium can do to your thinking, such is the rate of change in the world.
Although I don't have much conscious memory of the 90s, being born near the end of 97', I feel that having two older sisters and such still exposed me to a lot of pre-2000s life. Still listened to stuff on casette, still watched 90s Disney on VHS, watched them play Super Nintendo at a neighbor's house - I still think the starkest difference between my childhood and now is that we actually had a really nice house for our economic status. Besides getting lucky with a nice location and pretty good sized yard, my dad and other family members did the bulk of work building the house. Now I am looking at the housing market with absolute dread. Not only will it be an astronomically higher cost, I am uncertain if I'll even be able to live in my state because of how many people are moving in.
Just wanna say that housing regulations are more responsible for housing prices going up, or houses in States like Illinois ,which is losing population, would be going down in price as people leave but it is not.
It's like I wrote this comment, lol! Born in '98 with two older sisters (from '88 and '90). I was introduced to all things ninetees by them because they were handed down to me!
I think the biggest difference between being a kid in the 90s and being born in he 90s is just the availability of tech. We all used the same stuff for the most part, but the stuff later kids used was easier to get and more common. Other then that, we were all the same. Nowadays it’s like you’re born 4 years apart you grew up on totally different things lol
@@sans-nom8311 Totally. I know I repeat the Gen Z stuff ad nauseum, but aside from my two younger siblings who also grew up in a similar environment to me, people born just a few years younger than me felt waaay different. By the time I was in High School I felt almost grandpa-ish because of how immature some of my peers felt to me.
Might you do a video on the 2000's? It's barely ever talked about as an era of its own but it generated an almost unbelievable amount of popular culture and is tied to some pretty iconic people and events. And for a lot of people 10-20 years younger than you it was obv a hugely important time.
The 2000s are interesting to me because I grew up then and I have fond nostalgia as a result but objectively and even subjectively it was a kind of bland and "plastic" era. Actually "Plastic" is a great term to describe the vibe from 1998+.
I'm a bit older than you; born in 1980, graduated from high school in 1998, went to college from 1998-2002. But many of our experiences line up for sure. Another wrinkle in my story is that I grew up in a low-income home, but in a relatively affluent area, so even by the mid 90s, a fair number of my friends had computers at home, but we did not. But still, back then there was, as you say, very much an idea that computers were a novelty entertainment device, and not something literally everyone would have to have someday. I also remember a curious gap in my awareness of personal computers. I remember in elementary school (mid to late 80s) people were very excited about them, and my school had a computer room with a bunch of Apple IIe computers that we sometimes visited to play very simple text based educational games. Then by the end of the 80s/early 90s it felt like interest in them waned a bit for a few years; they had been a fun novelty but people couldn't see how they'd be useful for everyday life so most people just ignored them other than people who had to use them for work or whatever. It wasn't until 1993 or so that there seemed to be a resurgence in interest in them among everyday people, that I attribute mainly to the rise of the "internet", although back then, the internet wasn't what it is now. I still remember friends who had CompuServe and had to pay for the "internet", which was really just access to CompuServe's chat rooms and bulletin boards, and you had to pay by the hour. The world wide web, and ISPs like AOL that charged a flat rate per month to access it is what really changed things, but this wasn't in the consciousness of normal people until like 1996 or 1997. When I went to college in 1998, my school was very big on technology and loudly touted their "connected campus", which had T1 connections in all the dorm rooms and large computer labs equipped with both iMacs and HP computers in every dorm and academic building. I didn't even own a computer though. I actually brought my electric typewriter to school, thinking that'd be fine. It was not, lol. Pretty much all my professors expected papers to be done on a computer, some even wanted assignments to be turned in as a file on a floppy disk rather than a printed out paper. I quickly found that using the computer labs for this was hit or miss. They were locked after a certain hour, often they were full, or the printers were down. Then I found out that you could take out an extra loan for a PC as a necessary educational expense, so I did that and bought my first PC, an HP Pavilion model that had like 56 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive.
I was a kid in the 90s living in East Germany so a lot of stuff came to us a couple of years later than it was out in the U.S. My parents were priviliged so we had a computer, a printer, Atari game console, Game Boy and a VCR. I also had to take a computer literacy class in school. It was quite usefull to me actually . The most 90s thing I did was checking a CD out of the library and transfering it to a cassette. That was in the early 2000s. I still have it. I feel ike I grew up with the best of two worlds and that is something that defines me.
It'd be really cool to do a version of this video for the 2000s compared to the 2020s. One of the things that stick out the most to me was the emphasis on teaching us beginning Grade 3 (2003 or 2004) how to write in cursive because as my teacher always said, "you'll need it in high school". Turns out I did not need to use it in high school lol
@@साहिल-ख9छ Yeah the times I used it the most in high school were for writing in English classes. Though, I opted for printing often because as someone told me once, my cursive "is nice to look at but hard to read".
As someone born in 95 but in the poorest state of the US, Mississippi, I'm really surprised how similar our initial years were. I'd say Mississippi caught up all at once in 2011 and for us lower class kids it was a major culture shock. We didn't go from flip phones to smart phones, but home phones to smart phones.
I actually have to agree being a 00s kid from the Bronx. You would think being so close to a huge American staple like Manhattan (which is what everyone considers NYC despite it covering all 5 boroughs) which is perceived as very much so “with the times”, that we too would be with the times, but no, I vividly remember mostly everyone I knew having VCRs and bulky computers and using their home phones until 2011/2012. In fact, I hardly remember there being a smooth transition period from this to everyone in my 8th grade class suddenly having smartphones, where suddenly my slide phone that was cool the previous year was now deemed outdated (which pissed 13 y/o me off so bad lol). It was such a harsh culture shock that sometimes I wonder if I blinked and missed something.
Not from the 90s (born 1999) but I still had an experience with pagers as a kid. I was a light sleeper as a kid, and my dad was a fireman, so I still have distinct memories of being kept up at night from that loud whitenoise and beeping his pager would emit from across the hall. Nowadays I think he just has an app on his phone that keeps track of it all.
as another 1999 kid I have similar experiences. My dad would occasionally get pagered but i firmly remember the days of dial up internet, and I didn’t get my first smartphone till I was 13
It's different to see how geography and, honestly, probably social class influenced a lot of these experiences. I'm a bit older than J.J., and was born in 1980 in Manhattan. In 1983, we got a computer. We had Quantum Link (the AOL predecessor) over a 300 baud modem at home in 1987. In 1989, I was using BBSes and proto-Internet (Telnet and Tymnet, which became Sprintnet). By 1988, most of my elementary classmates' homes had their own computers as well.
In more blue collar regions, having multiple TVs in the house was considered a luxury well into the 80's mostly because electronics used to be really expensive. With the economic boom if the mid-late 90's it became possible for middle and even working class families to have multiple TVs, video game systems, and computers. That's also when electronics started to be cheaper.
Whaaaaat. We didn't get a computer until Christmas 97. And it didn't have the internet. I think we got the internet around Christmas 99. I didn't use a computer in a classroom until the fall of 98, and that was just a keyboarding class so no internet there either. Your whole paragraph there is like 🤯 My parents were blue collar. But still. 🤯
They were around, but until I was in highschool in the mid 90s I definitely felt like one of thefew with a personal computer or any real knowledgeof computers. We also only had one television, which my sister and I were constantly fighting over, one day even managing o break it in our struggle.t
@@ryanjacobson2508 Same here. My parents are very blue collar and didn't have a need for a computer in the 80s. Before I got my own PC in my high school years, in '97, the only exposure to computers was at school and the library, especially with the Apple II GS. Those Apple II's weren't really connected to anything online, though.
As a 90s kid in rural backwater America, my childhood was near indistinguishable from my great-grandfather's childhood in 1900. I manually pumped water, boiled water in order to draw a bath, and washed clothes by hand, I started working in town at 15, and I would walk 3 miles to work, occasionally getting picked up by friendly motorists who would drop me off either at work or at home. Not the typical American 90s kid, but having a lot of immigrant friends from Russia and Ukraine at my current job, we were surprised to find our childhoods were all roughly the same. My kids, even if we do live in the middle of nowhere are going to have a substantially different life than mine.
The 90s in the US had the same technological advancements as India and other developing nations in 2000-2005/6. But its amazing how smart phones and the internet made all nations catch up from 2008-now. a person living in rural African town with interent access can watch RUclips videos and tv shows about the American lifestyle. i remeimber in 2004 and 5 my family used to take me to an internet cafe with dial up internet while American households already had colorful macs in everyones rooms
Yeah that is interesting and I think a lot people from developing countries don't even use credit/debit cards. For example in China they transitions directly from cash to digital payments.
Oh wow, great video, this hit hard. I'm a few years older than you JJ, Born '77, Graduated '96. After the air force in the 60s, my dad was an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley in the 70s and early 80s and worked down the street from Apple when they opened, knew Steve Jobs from the sandwich shop where they all ate lunch (my dad still tells the best stories). My whole childhood was legos, transformers, he man, gi joe, construx, building military vehicle models and model trains. My entire elementary school years was all analog/non-electronics. My school didn't have a computer lab until middle school in sixth grade, and then it was mostly oregon trail. We got our first family computer in 1991 mostly for my dad's work and I'd get on it whenever he wasn't. That was back in DOS days and games came on floppies. I started getting into programming and learning BASIC and stuff, and I was one of the only kids that liked that stuff. I got made fun of computers CONSTANTLY, they just were nerd things that nobody needed. I worked a full summer bussing tables to save up to buy the SNES - I was 14 at the time. I also had nintendo power (and was in an issue but that's a story for another time) - I still remember the nintendo power hotline that you'd call and sit on hold when you were stuck on a level. We got the internet my junior year and it was mostly limited to AOL, there wasn't really much to do on it in '95. I continued learning programming on my own through books (remember books?) in high school and college, where my roommate taught me html, css, and javascript - that was a lot more fun than class. By '98 I was back in Silicon Valley living on my own making websites for small businesses trying to explain why they needed a website and what was coming in just a few years time, I saw what was coming, but few others did. It felt like trying to explain a car to a cowboy in the old west. I've worked as a programmer since I was 19, and through that made early websites, building my own webservers and running them out of my home on an ISDN line, then early mobile wallpaper and ringtone apps for old nokia and motorola phones, up to HR software for fortune 1000 companies which I do now. I train and mentor junior programmers now and there is such a stark difference in basic computer comprehension between my generation and the new generation - the younger programmers just don't understand how things work the same way, they never had to learn DOS or ever heard of an AUTOEXEC.BAT or a CONFIG.SYS file or had to figure out how to set jumpers for either COM1/COM3 or COM2/COM4.For them computers have always been graphical and hardware has always been plug and play. As such their ability to troubleshoot complicated problems is substantially less. It makes me worried for the future 30 years from now as we increase the reliance on tech but forget more and more how it works. By then we'll be telling stories in the home to grandkids about the 90s that sound as strange as MY grandparents' stories about growing up on a farm in North Dakota during the depression without electricity. What a ride it's been.
as a 2006 kid, this is so interesting to me omg. my parents were older when they had me so they were kids in the 70s and my older siblings were kids in the 90s/early 2000s. i grew up not only hearing about most of everything you discussed today but experiencing most of it in some strange, left over way. my dad always had a copy of the yellowpages in his office, my mom would take me with her to the library when she had to fax things, i watched almost every childhood movie on a vhs, and we all shared one computer for most of my early childhood. i remember seeing my first iphone when i was probably 3 or 4 and it was completely foreign to me seeing as my parents used either our home phone or a flip phone. it’s also worth noting that because my parents had substantial memories of the 70s and 80s, they would (and still do) tell me stories of how hard it was to do x, y, or z without a computer, so i’ve always had a fairly good grasp on what life before 21st century tech was like. this was such a cool video, jj!! i love this kind of generational society stuff!!
You're a mere week younger than I, so hearing how tech-less your youth was reminded me how privileged mine was. My parents were in fields that required computer knowledge and access, so thus, we had high-end machines that I appreciated almost as much as took for granted. My mother even had a series of laptops and early flip cell phones that I was truly fascinated by. My father had a bulky car phone with a hands-free system via the stereo. I became a tech junkie despite, in hindsight, a rudimentary understanding of how it all worked. I got in a lot of trouble fiddling with the various gadgets and computers my parents would bring into our lives, always looking to explore their potential.
It is interesting how for some countries certain technologies would come later. For example for the post-Soviet states video game consoles have come later than they did in the West. I remember how different kinds of NES knock-offs and Sega Mega Drives aka Genesis were popular among kids as far as the early 2000’s. Another thing that is fascinating is how sometimes missing out on certain technologies would be advantageous in adapting of newer ones. For example it is true that some countries like China and Russia did not have the e-mail culture similar what you can see in the west and people there have started using chatting and social media apps for tasks such as work earlier than some did in the west.
No answering machines and now no voicemail in China either, which the former would encourage the use of social media messaging and the latter was rendered obsolete by the same.
@@joelsmith3473 a Kenyan here. No one I know uses voicemail because we went from a few public phone booths in major cities and just one in smaller towns straight to mobile phones. Over 99% of the population never had a home fixed line phones and we jumped straight to mobile phones On finance, most of the population never had a bank account because banking was not liberalised. The liberalisation of finance and banking coincided with the advent of mobile phones. The population jumped credit cards technology straight to mobile phone banking. All this coinciding with democratisation of the country and improvements in education made possible by a newly democratically elected government resulted in Kenya becoming a world leader in fintech innovation and adoption
As someone 19 years younger than yourself, I obviously was not alive during the 90s, but as somewhat of a technology and history buff, I feel like I nevertheless have a good grasp on the time period. I think one of the most fascinating characteristics of the decade in contrast to today is the overall sense of optimism and hope for the future, especially in American culture. The decade falls fairly nicely in a post-Cold War, pre-9/11 world where international issues were fairly non-existent, and the few that happened (such as the Balkans conflicts) weren't seen as something personal or applicable to the daily lives of those in North America. Additionally, the lack of social media, and infrequence of 24/7 media coverage in general, prevented the kind of constant anxiety over world affairs we see today. Being widely general again, domestic issues were also treated with a much more utopian view, such as racism being seen as something that could be solved by simply treating each other equally, rather than the more popular understanding today that it is something that is so intertwined within our society and culture, that to remove it requires society's very own deconstruction. I think this overall demonstrates a greater kind of optimism and hope that society would only further move upwards, and that today this belief no longer exists. Instead, it's replaced by an overall very self-conscious culture that is overly obsessive with preventing any kind of moral failure by not actively supporting the "correct" causes (whatever they may be), and that this obsession over discouraging or hopeless topics has caused much of the overall discouragement and hopelessness we see in society and individuals today. This societal state is visible through things like greater political polarization, higher rates of depression and suicide, and an overall anxiety for the future that seems omnipresent within our culture. Not to sound too boomer-y either, but I think the over abundance of entertainment and media through things like streaming and social media discourages physical interaction with other people, and creates a greater sense of loneliness that compounds with the previously described issues. Sorry if that became too much of a rant, but seriously thanks for your great content and promotion of discussion
For someone who didn't live in that period, you got a good sense of it. But I will point out there was another aspect to the culture, kind of relevant to what you're saying: shock culture. The 90s was when Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, Tom Green, Nine Inch Nails, and a lot of other media personalities pushed the envelope, trying to jar you with shocking statements, lyrics, or acts. You see, in the 90s, political correctness began to rev up and seep into the culture, but it was heavily countered. People were not afraid to call bullshit on "political correctness going too far." Many media personalities would be purposely offensive just to laugh at political correctness. In fact, if you're a Tool fan, their song "Stinkfist" is exactly about this shock culture (while also being a pretty shocking song in itself). It talks about how so much sensationalism numbs the senses and just makes you want to find something even more shocking, just to see if you still feel anything. And it does this with the analogy of an anal fist fuck, getting ever deeper.
Growing up in the early 2000's was a really interesting time; I didn't live anyway particularly urban, so I was dealing with the remnants left over a dying culture. We still had one solitary family computer - nobody I knew really thoroughly understood the internet until a good few years into primary school, and we still had one of those computer rooms with the terrible, slow computers. Nobody I knew typed their work, and if you wanted something printed, you usually had to go to the local library. As a very young child, VHS's were still a thing I actually had to use, and it's weird going from VHS's to DVDs to Bluray to digital in just a decade and a half or so. Nobody had a mobile phone until highschool, either - not that they weren't readily available, it just wasn't seen as something kids even wanted or had any use for. I remember there being a particularly large amount of judgement around that kind of tech being given to children, too - with people scoffing that they wouldn't have any use for a phone, anyway. I remember my sister getting an iPod and being blown away by the whole concept of one - and thinking that I was living in a full Back To The Future era when I got an iPod shuffle on my 10th birthday (and promptly loading it up with youtube2mp3 copies of all the music I knew). That's the weird thing about the 00's as a decade overall really - one defined by the awkward growing pains between the 90's and the 10's - though perhaps to some extent that's true about all decades.
Most of the time a good RAM upgrade usually fixed the slow computers: Dad always made sure to have the fastest ram usually 16 on literally every old computer we had he tried to max out the memory part of it and often put in a mid range graphics card later in the late 90s onwards but for most of my games I cared about having 16GB of ram was plenty of speed: 8GB is ALWAYS slow even today things are a slug fest even if you have a powerful single core CPU going to 16 doesn't hurt. 32 is recommended but 16 is optimal. Some computers can go all the way up to 64GB of ram but that isn't very common.
I was born after the 90s and my childhood was very similar to yours. I was mostly dealing with 90s tech that my parents, friends, and schools could afford
I grew up rurally and am almost a decade younger than JJ, but I thought this sounded very much like my educational experience. Being rural is like being years behind.
I remember in the 90s I would go to the movie theater, and either had to tell my parents when the movie would be over or call them on a pay phone to pick me up to return home. If you didn't have quarters, you had to walk home. Lol I remember chat rooms in the 90s and I remember thinking that they could very well bring about world peace through the interactions of different people empathizing with the other's humanity. I remember in the 90s in the USA, there was a bright light of optimism for the future and that the times would get better and better and better. I remember in the 90s going to raves and dancing with others of my generation in a massive celebration of living during the historic moment of the next millennium, and imagining how to create a future that would be far better than the past. I remember in the 90s being much less scared of the future than I am now.
You captured my own thoughts here. I didn't have the best childhood, but one thing I did have back then that I don't at present was not only hope, but conviction that society was progressing and the future would approximate something like Star Trek. I'd gladly trade all of my (admittedly awesome) 21st century technology and creature comforts to feel that again. I don't want to say ignorance is bliss, but just a little can go a long way if you know how to use it.
Payphones, lol. Funny enough, even into, like... 2002 or 2003, there were still a few in my old area, for some reason (even though, if memory serves, they were being rapidly phased-out by then, esp. with more and more people getting at least standard cell phones)
@@Whoo711 The last pay phone I saw was about five years ago. There was a lone holdout at a gas station near the Interstate. But it now has been removed. Pay phones were still widely available in 2000 and 2001, but around that time in 2000, they started charging 50 cents instead of 35 (which originally replaced 25 cents) cents. Not long after 2001, in the years of 2002-2005, most of them were removed, with a few holdouts remaining until around 2010, and an extreme few exceptions, like I indicated earlier, remaining until around 2015-2017.
I was born in the year 2000 and I feel like I had a lot of similar childhood experiences as you did. But while the 2000s were certainly a transitional period between the 90s era uncertainty of technology like the internet and 2010s complete domination of the internet in everyday life, I think that the real deciding factor was that my parents, who were both Doctors and spent much of the 1980s and 1990s grinding out residency and spending 18 hour shifts at the hospital, made a concerted effort to limit screens as much as possible. We didn't have a permanent TV in our home until the pandemic rolled around, I went to my cousins' house to play video games on the weekends and during summer break, we still rented DVDs at the local rental store to watch on our shared iMac in the family room, and my brother and I didn't get cell phones until my parents decided we were trustworthy enough and old enough the ride public transit home from school. Also my parents had pagers deep into the 2010s and I think even now my Mom still prefers using a pager for work because she is old school like that and partially because the hospital she works for is a bit of a logistical mess. I still have my parents phone numbers and even my landline (which no longer exists) memorized so I could use the front-desk telephone at school to call them to pick me up from after-school programs which I imagine would be seen as weird to children today who have had contacts in their cellphones from an earlier age.
Oh my gosh, I was also born in 2000 and had a similar experience with growing up. We had no cable, one special Windows PC in the computer room, video game time was restricted to weekends, and my siblings and I all got cell phones way later than my peers did. I still have my landline memorized too, lol. I feel like I identify a bit with 90s nostalgia just because it reminds me of the earliest parts of my relatively tech-free childhood.
As someone who grew up in the 2000s and only became an adult in the 2010s, I have this weird experience with the phantom of 90s culture and the 20th century in general seeping into much of the 2000s for me. I recognize most of the technology you were talking about (aside from the pager, which I always kinda knew about but didn't understand the purpose of until much later), but have never really gotten a chance to see any of it in action as commonplace. That said, my parents were kinda always a little behind in terms of technology, sometimes deliberately (we were still using CRT TVs well into 2013, and occasionally canceled our internet plan throughout the 2010s to save money), so I suppose I caught a glimpse of the 90s experience™ through that. I guess I'm also one of those older zoomers who remembers when stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video were open, even if only vaguely. I remember having a combination VCR/DVD player back when I was a kid, and even though VHS was discontinued some time in 2006 iirc, I still have memories of occasionally watching tapes, sometimes at school whenever there was, like, a substitute teacher or whatever. I also vaguely remember Blockbuster Video crumbling apart; the only memento I have of it is a used PS2 copy of Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity from GameStop that came in a Blockbuster DVD case. All in all, I guess being a young kid in the 2000s gave me a general idea of what life in 20th century was like, even though I didn't have memories from said century to call my own. I've heard similar experiences from other "zillennials" that simultaneously feel too young to relate to most millennials yet old enough to feel at least partially estranged from Gen Z.
I love this!! I was a teen in the 90s and thought it was the last good decade 🤣. I need to get this book, not only because it sounds great but because I had that exact phone. The same exact phone. It was cool as hell. It lit up when the phone rang. I always turned the ringer off and turned the lights off at night just to see if any of my friends would call, the lights still lit up. So cool.
I'm 20 years younger than jj, being born I'm 2004. Which means that his 90s was basically my 2010s so it's kinda fun to mirror between the two decades. There certainly wasnt much in common but I could relate to a couple generic experiences here or there. Great video, jj. Always a joy to hear about the 90s
I'm born in 2005. However, I didn't really think much about experiences in the 2010s that much, until when I occasionally watch videos on RUclips about this era, then I only realise how far we've gone. For example, I have never realised that no one uses house phones anymore (I mean I know we haven't used the house phone at home for a while, but I haven't "realised" that it's a trend worldwide). Besides, now I only realised that we were crazy about 3D TVs but now even cinemas just stick to good old 2D movies. And now I have also realised that no one watches TV since like 2015(?) Last time I always watch cartoon network and Nickelodeon through Astro (satellite TV provider in Malaysia), then later I watched shows through China TV boxes where you can access Chinese-language content, then finally I just watched RUclips on my laptop because there's just more things you can watch on RUclips. Now i'm addicted to RUclips!
@@yokelengleng huh yeah you're very right!! We had a house phone until like, 2017 but I have no idea why because no one actually used it lol. And yeah, I remember that whole 3d tv craze that happened and everyone thought it was going to revolutionize tv/cinema but everyone just sticks to 2d anyway. It's quite sad to say but yeah traditional tv is definitely dying because it simply cant compete with streaming and RUclips, I've not properly watched tv in ages!!
@@gusemiester True.... If by "properly" watching TV means going through the experience of commercials and the sort, I think none of us has done that in a while, even the older people are addicted to social media! (which unfortunately means they are more susceptible to foreign propaganda, especially China propaganda, in the context of Malaysian Chinese) But if by properly watching TV you mean you can watch a long TV drama, I think people still watch TV by this definition, it's just that you can choose which drama to watch and when to watch it, without being limited by the TV provider.
@@yokelengleng I meant more as in I haven't sat down, selected a channel and simply watched a show for years!! But yeah it's been ages since anyones sat through ads, though older people tend to sit through them, for whatever reason. Social media is super addictive but also super dangerous if you dont really know how to use it or who to trust. I hope when more millenials and such begin to be the adults in control (rather than boomers) they begin to educate children on how to use the internet properly because people our age just kinda learned it for ourselves
I remember Instant Messaging being kind of liberating as it was the first time I could talk with friends without worrying my parents were listening in (our phone was in the kitchen too). Since my parents only really used our computer for specific tasks, I had a little more independence with it. Asking people their screen name was the precursor to asking their number.
Never had a computer class going through school, and didn’t know a single person with a cell phone until I was damn near 21. As a drug dealer in the late ‘90s, I can’t stress the importance of the pay phone enough… I like to think that it would be glorious to go back to pagers and pay phones, but deep down, I know I’d lose my mind. Also, I had that very same Nintendo Power issue at one point in my life… Even though I was an EGM guy through and through.
In the late 90s, my first job out of college was making custom software for small businesses and local schools. The amazing thing was that almost all of this software was just some customized databases app with a few printable reports. Just having a new database increased productivity by huge margin. Every client was so amazed that something as simple as a database could change their world and to them, the database was magic. Today’s software is much more complex and tries to do so much. But back then, all anybody needed was just a database.
Hearing the 1990s referred to as "25 years ago" makes me feel like a Pixar character struggling with obsolescence. I was around 2- 11 years old in the 1990s and, looking back, realize that it was in many ways a dress rehearsal for a lot of the tonal shift in discourse and the breakdown of objective reasoning. But since I was a kid, I tend to equate the '90s as a benevolent, benign era of Nickelodeon, the "TGIF" lineup, the Disney Renaissance, desperately holding your discman to keep it from skipping and still feeling privileged to even have one, and regurgitating "Seinfeld" dialogue on the playground without understanding what any of it meant. The 1992 LA Riots, the obsession with OJ in 1995, Yugoslav stuff and Clinton's (in retrospect) weird obsession with it, and the continued long march of Academia ideologies into mainstream culture and discourse amounted to little more than background noise.
@@nuberiffic Outside of the hard sciences, there has been a move (in some quarters) to discredit anything that was produced by "western" culture. Unfortunately that has sometimes included the enlightenment and the ideas of the scientific method, argument from reason and evidence, protections of freedom of speech and the idea that one can consider an idea without agreeing with it or supporting it. It isn't as widespread in society as people like to think, but it is worrying to some degree that we are no longer are confident in facing down and arguing against injustices (like my grandfather did when he emigrated to segregationist Virginia in the 50s). Instead the approach is to use institutional power (the infamous "cancel culture") and social taboo as a way of enforcing a particular point of view rather than considering things on their own merits and arguing against them.
@@ENoob Segregation wasn't ended by just arguing against it, it was ended by passing laws to ban it, i.e. a pretty strong form of institutional power.
@@ENoob that’s literally completely untrue and sounds like something a loser like Jordan Peterson would say so, for the record, give me an example of some western “science” that is being rejected solely based on it being “western”. You can’t lol, I’m going to take a guess and say you literally aren’t in academia nor do you have a degree from an institution where you would even be exposed to the “science” you’re referring to. You watched a couple RUclips videos and think western civilization is under attack lol
It's weird how this is familiar to people from outside the western world, for me a 18 years old moroccan, i actually still remember "before internet" era, with cellphones being rare and exotic, and internet even rarer but today, it's quite everywhere, but i could say that before 2020, having a stable connection to internet, and/or a computer was still considered somewhat exotic
It’s been interesting to see how I’ve noticed this as an American. When I first used the internet in the late 90s, it was mainly other Americans. Speaking to a Canadian back then was considered really cool. Then in the 2000s you started to meet people from Europe and Australia. Now you can talk to almost anyone from any nation. It’s really expanded our cultural horizons in a way that seemed impossible back in the 90s.
Nice, I was a July 15, 88 baby. Loved the 90s, and love your content lol!! No wonder we seem to have things in common xD 😎 def going to check out the book. AND BRO WORD MUNCHERS WAS THE BEST! I, too, was the "computer kid", in fact my Dad used to do maintenance on my class computers as a side gig as he worked for IBM back then. And we had engineers in my family that built computers. I though I was cool. Oh and chat rooms was the BEST! Stayed in yahoo chats all the time especially the EDM chats where they played music religiously. THE BEST.
Growing up in the early 2000's wasn't super radically different for me as physical music, video stores, land lines, and learning to type in the computer lab at school were still in full affect. I would say the major difference is that the internet was more established and everyone understood at least the basics of email and using a search engine.
I never really thought of my parents as especially wealthy, we lived in a 2bd/1ba apartment, but I was definitely lucky to have access to a computer and internet fairly early on because my dad works in the computer component industry. I remember learning how to use a C prompt, needing multiple floppy disks to install a single game, getting annoyed at a glitchy game and deleting all the DLL files (it worked after that, but I couldn't save), weird computer-animated videos explaining the World Wide Web and email, Netscape, formatting those free AOL floppy disks they sent in the mail for reuse, the excitement of talking to strangers in real time in chatrooms, waiting an hour to download a single song on Napster, and of course fighting with my mom about who got to use the phone line since all internet was dial-up, to name a few. Oh, and unfortunately I remember life before auto-save. I have shed so many tears over term papers lost to power surges and, one time, bumping the power button on the computer tower with my knee. And I will continue typing two spaces after my periods until I die, I don't care that computers have made the practice unnecessary. EDIT: Ohh!! Remember Shockwave Flash and Newgrounds? That was an aesthetic.
I never had to use floppies myself (thank god) but I remember my grandfather had a big ass case full of them in all sorts of different colors, I remember numerous times where the computer shat the bed for whatever reason and he'd have to use some of those floppy disks to fix it.
@@KaiserMattTygore927 Only one case? That's rookie numbers, my grandpa had like 4 or 5 of them. But yea, those floppies probably had an operating system on them.
@@cameron7374 It was a holdover from typewriters, which have a bit wider spacing between the letters (kerning), and the extra space after a period helped distinguish it from a comma
I remember growing up in the late 2000s they would always tell us about how dangerous it was to talk to strangers on "chat rooms." Turns out their Internet safety info was nearly a decade out of date and me and my classmates had no idea what a "chat room" even was. I never even visited one until I was in college and that was a weird experience indeed.
@@yokelengleng Yes, but the choice of terminology has changed which rendered the safety rule confusing. How it was oddly specific. Not just talking with strangers can be dangerous it had to specify the platform.
I was born in 85. I remember these times pretty well. I remember a friend of mines brother who was a couple years older then us would constantly be on the internet and keep the phone lines hostage. So we would pic up the phone and repeatedly smashing the button on the receiver. Which would kick his brother off the internet. We would hear him screaming from the basement and we would die laughing.
As someone who grew up in the 2000s, it only hit me relatively recently that the 90s was not just a few years ago. I just grew up in that frame of mind, and it took FOREVER to move on and finally recognize the 90s as its own distinct era in my mind. (Also, lowkey surprised J.J. didn't get even a flip-phone or something while in Japan, since they were so damn popular there back then, lol)
While I went through primary education between 1998-2010, I still experienced a lot of the old way and new way things were done. My teachers stressed how important it was to write out an essay and we learned cursive but they wanted all our reports and essays typed out and printed. I got to experience renting movies and games but I didn't grow too attached to the idea other than the chance to try out a game before buying it.
I without question think that writing by hand is very important...what are you going to do when the lights go out...and done come on again for a decade? Which is what is going to happen when there is a solar storm and 90 % of the U.S. die off in the first few days? Welcome to me not being able to sleep at night. Good luck though! 😂
I remember in '96 my 2nd grade teacher punished me for lying because "no one has 2 computers in their home." it was a wild concept then but my parents saved up to get a computer right before I was born. Then 8 years later they got a full color computer with a mouse and a windows operating system. It's so sereal to look back at.
I like to call the decade "The Long Afternoon". Because it reminded me of a long sunny, slow and relaxed summer afternoon and evening. Slow-paced, no big worries, the world was just a wide open "global village" that finally had moved on from the Cold War. Tech was also better than the 70s and 80s, but it wasn't ALL OVER THE D@MN PLACE. I used my first Mac in 1991, my first PC in 1994 got the internet (AOL) in 1995. Digital cable came around 1998. Streamed my first video in 1999, and dreamed of the "future" promised on shows like Beyond 2000, Beyond Tomorrow, Next Step and Cnet TV. I even miss all of the New Age music that was popular back then! It was my life from 12-22, and I could not have asked for a better time to have lived that age range.
That's a rather nice way to describe the decade. Most of my memories during that time were riding my bike or rollerblading to my friend's houses to knock on their door asking if they could come out to play. Or laying beneath trees eating popsicles on hot summer days and travelling to the nearest park. Waking up early in the morning or racing home as fast as I could as to catch Pokémon as it started airing. Playing Mario, Donkey Kong, or Zelda when we finally got a hand me down Nintendo system. The 90s felt like the perfect intersection of early technology and pre technology living. As you put it, slow-paced living.
I do wonder if this viewpoint of the 90s is kind of similar to how people view the Edwardian era in a similar rose tinted way due to the juxtaposition of what came after. For context, the Edwardian era in Britain is remembered very much like a long summer with tea on the lawn being the distinct cultural memory that defines that period due to how brutal WW1 that came shortly after was. I do wonder if the 90s is viewed similarly due to the juxtaposition of 9/11 and the war on terror and what it went on to entail in the 2000s. I'm not saying that the view is necessarily wrong of course, but we do have a tendency to gloss over the bad that happened during that time period, like for instance the world was not entirely peaceful, the Yugoslav wars spanned the entire decade and beyond.
@@captainweekend5276 it's an interesting analogy, although I doubt we will reach again such low points as in WW1 or WW2, but still, anything can change. I find it interesting because the era known as Belle Epoque wasn't that "belle" for many countries at war between 1871 and 1914, and the 90s, that usually are regarded as the calm before the storm, had had two of the most horrendous genocides of modern times (Bosnia and Rwanda).
My mother, who graduated early 90’s always tells me stories of her calling a friend who lived 40 minutes down town and them peeling off to go to a random 24 hr breakfast cafe. It’s crazy to me because the level of control she wanted over our lives was so far from the liberty she had, even if she sometimes had to sneak out for it.
I tried to give my kids as much liberty as I could get away with... and found that the laws might not have changed, but Child Welfare didn't care, and interpreted them differently. The compromise? they got cellphones in middle school, with the caveat that if they had no charge, or had no phone, they were to return home and stay there! Now, they literally demand helicopter parenting... even when the courts tell them to back the bleep off.
@@WilliamHostman I feel this. I wanted to be a free-range parent, but after leaving my kids alone for less than 10 minutes, playing in an inch deep creek (inside a gated community) and returning to find police had been called by a neighbor... Well, let's just say I'm much more paranoid about nosy people than actual danger.
@@ryannewman3676 Not in Alaska - Office of Children's Services doesn't act upon law, but upon their own overreaches of the extant law. The courts have not been kind, and often are NOT upholding the OCS decisions process.
As a 2001 kid I guess I just barely missed this era. When it comes to the technology what I would say is that it feels like I grew up in this transition period where things were not so new as to be completely foreign, but not really fully grasping and getting my hands on them until later than kids born in the 2010's did/are. For example, I got my first computer pretty young, maybe four or five, and I was aware that the internet was a thing because my parents had it on their computer. What I didn't know was the full scope of what the internet was capable of, for two reasons. First, my mom was the only one to use the internet on that computer early on and she only really used it to read forums and check the e-mail, so this was my impression of what the internet was for. Second, my computer was in my room and didn't have a built in wi-fi card so I had no way of hooking up to it even if I wanted to, and thus wasn't able to explore and discover at all. The first time I think I really got my hands on the internet would've been in school in the computer labs you mentioned, and it was really eye openning. Meanwhile at home I would watch dvds, play disc-based computer games, and use microsoft office for school stuff on my computer. Eventually my parents got me a usb wi-fi antenna for my birthday, I don't remember exactly which but if must have been around 8-10, and it was at this point that it became open season. I think the interesting thing to take out of this is when I first got on the internet, and subsequently when I was first able to freely explore it at my leisure, my general tech literacy was much high than your generation's would have been at the same age(on average). I think a similar thing can be said about 2010's kids when it come to "smart device" tech literacy in comparison to my peers and I. To remark on a few other things, my grandparents tried to get me to learn how to type and I was never having it, I still don't know how to type "properly" to this day. Also, I still remember going to blockbusters for rentals and taking out VHS tapes from the library, with the latter maybe being more shocking, I don't know. Another thing is that I when I was younger I feel there was still more of an emphasis on going outisde and playing/meeting up with friends which slowly transitioned to interacting online as I grew up, which I feel is more of the default for the kids now. Interesting things to think about and reflect upon, thanks for another great video JJ!
I agree with everything you said, my famoly computer when I was 4 had Windows 95 or Xp, so I had access to the internet and everything it was capable of. At 4 you don't really explore beyond your interests and back then internet was too slow for videos. Flat-screen TV's still kinda confuse me though, when I was 8 my dad dropped what was definitely a really small 50lbs TV on his foot and almost broke his foot. The shrinking of TV's and how quick that happened is amazing. My dad was also a delivery driver in the 90s and I am today so comparing how we navigated and interacted with people is always interesting. My mom is from Japan so we did spend alot of time growing up, so hearing about air travel in August 31 2001 vs 2 days after is always just confusing. No scanner? Don't need a passport to go to the US? No Metal detectors or body scans? I think even though we were born in this transition phase, because of the capabilities of computers back then, how quickly it changed; it seems natural but incredible.
Children today have no clue what it is to be a kid and I fear I may be of the last generation of kids to have what I consider a normal childhood and of course I am biased but I would hope that any sane person could see it from my point of view. I was born in 1991 and when we were growing up we went outside everyday it was nice enough to be out and really we went outside most days it wasn't nice enough to be out lol. We went and played in the snow we ran around in the sprinklers in the summer we caught bugs in jars and we ran around barefoot we knocked on the neighbors doors and asked if so and so could come out to play we literally went outside as soon as morning started probably about 8 am and we didn't come back in until the street lights came on which was like 9-10 pm we played and interacted with real living humans in person and we grew and learned together we formed relationships and friendships we learned trust and deceit we learned to get along we learned to fight we learned how to stand up for ourselves and when to run away from a situation if you were too scared to face it or felt threatened. Point being is we interacted socially in person face to face and it made me a better person today and man am I fucking grateful that I had the childhood I did because today I watch my nieces and nephews and they are just selfish slobs that stare at these dumb bright rectangles in their hands all day and they keep their headphones in and never talk and even if they are in a room full of people they are completely alone and that is fucked up. I have literally never once seen my niece go out and play in the snow or go out and play with any other kids all they do is sit on their phones it is sad and I think one day when they grow up they will realize that they let their childhoods pass them by and it is going to be a soul crushing horrible moment in their lives. Imagine this, the technology of today is focused towards making kids feel like they are important and part of something it helps them feel like they are adults but the truth is you have your whole life to be an adult but you really only got like a solid ten years to be a kid and then it's all over and that is sad because the day you realized you traded your childhood for ten extra years of this pain and misery we call adult society is going to be a hard day to wash down. Anyway buddy good on you for getting out and living your life your post really resonated with me and I'm pretty sure you just caught the tail end of the good normal childhood and you and I brother are a dying breed.
I'm also a 2001 kid, but I didn't have a computer at such a young age. I would occasionally use my parent's computers, until I got a kindle with internet access for my 11th birthday. I became very tech-literate very quickly. By the time I was 13, I built my first PC, and started using Linux full-time. I taught my little brother how to do sysadmin stuff, and now he manages servers for a living. A big difference I've noticed between me, and other people my age who started using technology from a younger age, is that I generally have a more pessimistic and negative view towards technology. I don't own a smartphone, and I always prefer to do things physically/in-person as much as possible. I think a lot of this has to do with how I started using the internet at the same time Edward Snowden released his leaks about the NSA's surveillance.
@@HughJassole420 damn yo. 1992 born hear and i relate so much. Always tell people we are literally the last of the old world. Hey we are still out here. Love and respect!!!!
... You're hitting some good notes Here... I remember word munchers, there was only half as many computers as students in the class so we had to share... But yes there was one with a color screen and everybody wanted... calling the video store in advance... Especially if you're looking for something specific that was not a new release, approaching the year 2000 new releases they would have twenty or Thirty copies... But if you wanted something unique yeah there was only one copy up in that house.. Something you left out that I vividly remember.. every town had a radio station with disc jockeys who were in the studio it was live broadcast, that's how we got a lot of the community information as youth from the radio broadcast it all day everyday.. sure there was the early morning news or the evening news on tv which was geared for adults when they got home from work but if you wanted to keep up-to-date you listen to a radio.... and sometimes the information be provided by callers calling into the radio oh, just an alert there's a horrible accident on the Highway everybody slow down find an alternate route... or calling in to request a song and send a special message to your crush live on the radio... And yes a few times I nearly became injured running to the telephone... Because I knew the answer to the question asked on the radio and I was sure as hell going to be the first caller with the right answer!
In December 1995 as a sophomore in college, I got into a dispute with a friend as to whether Katharine Hepburn was alive or not (I said she was). Since I had a phase of writing to celebrities for autographs in high school, when I went home for Christmas I found my book with various celebrities' addresses (no need for that today) to find contact information for Ms. Hepburn. Essentially, I wrote to her to ask if she was living (without such tacky phrasing of course). I received something back from an agent/publicist a few weeks later that she indeed was living. I still have the letter.
3 minutes ago and pinned. Well done.
I had a similar experience with the lead singer of Aqua in 98. Everyone claimed she was dead, including the teachers. She is not.
In 1986 I was working down in Granville Island at the market.
Ms. Hepburn actually had a place in Vancouver in those days and she liked to shop at the market ... she was quite old at the time and not working movies anymore. Ended up on a first name basis with her over the year or two during Expo. I was working at the fudge shop and she had grandchildren that visited and liked the sweet, so she always shopped there for a bit of fudge or caramel for them. I always gave her a good price. Lovely lady, very kind, remembered people.
Wow. That’s cool. Not quite as morbid but I remember that for an assignment, we had to write to a celebrity or sports person. I remember we even had to use this book that was sold at the book fair that had addresses of famous athletes or famous celebs. I’m kind of disappointed in myself though because I chose to write to Barry Sanders (a notable football player for the Detroit Lions) and I didn’t even know why. I just knew he played football. I wish I would have written to someone a bit more cool like James Earl Jones ( I remember thinking he was so cool due to the Sandlot and also being Darth Vader, though when I told kids Darth Vader was a black guy or rather voiced by one, most said it wasn’t true) or maybe Michael Jordan. Don’t know why I didn’t pick Jordan.
Why didn't you simply google it or check wikipedia? On a more serious note did your school have something like encyclopedia like a CD version in which was like an early version of Wikipedia?
I actually caused a “policy change” in the town where I lived. When I moved to a rural community to start a new job in 1995, I was the first person in the town to have a “cellular” phone, and the exchange for my phone number was in the town my parents lived. Whenever I would get groceries or food and needed to write a check, they always wanted you to write your phone number on the check. One time, at the local grocery store, I presented them a check, and they wouldn’t accept because my phone number was not on the check. I showed them that it was, and they asked me if I lived in the community, and I told them yes. And they asked, how can you live in the local community and not have a number in the local exchange? That is when I showed them my cellular phone, and they just stared at it. They would ask, how do you hang it up, and how far can you be away from the phone base, etc. People were actually freaked out seeing a cellular phone. SO much so, they passed a local ordinance at the next city council meeting that in order to write a check, the phone number must be the same exchange as the town listed on the check. So, I actually had to get a landline (it was a party line) just so I could write checks within the community.
You can add writing checks for things that have changed from the 1990s to now. The store owner will not want one and the cashier might not know what to do with it.
In 1995 I was a college freshman, and we had no idea what a cellular phone was. We'd heard of "satellite phones", but those things were big and bulky. You really didn't see many people with cell phones in the 90s. Most of us, even into the late 90s, if we were out and needed to call someone would stop at a pay phone which were all over the place.
I had a calling card for long distance to call home from college.
@@palmercolson7037 There's actually still a moderately large set of elderly people who use checks. Having worked in retail, I can tell you that pretty much any cashier who's worked more than a week will know what to do with a check, but will also roll their eyes and silently, if politely, judge the person handing them this ancient thing.
So if you were from out of town you were just banned from paying via check?
@@stoutyyyy In reality they only cared about in-town checks.
I like this, it's like an old man sitting around the fire telling the kids about the "good old days" through rose tinted glasses, except the old man is a millenial who isn't even 40, the fire is the internet, and the "good old days" is the time in which The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was still being taped
I'm 45 and listening to these twenty somethings makes you think, "maybe I am getting old".
cultural “generations” in the way that we understood it, are on a 3 to 5 year cycle (sometimes less) now, as apposed to the decade defined generations we grew up with. we are getting old, but it’s not our fault
And they actually used "tape" to film the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.
Yes, It all started with that damn pager, til the only useful pager carrier was your “source”. 🤟
This is extremely incorrect lol
In about 1990 my uncle worked in an office. When it was someone’s lunch break in the office they’d get a folder out of the filing cabinet which had all the funny pictures inside. If there was a picture they liked then they’d use the fax machine to send the picture to all the other offices. My uncle and his coworkers were pioneers of memes.
My dad used to photocopy the jokes and bring them home from work. When my uncle would visit every Thursday night, my Dad would bring out the more ‘G rated’ ones and pass them around. We’d all have a giggle. After I went to bed, the more ribald ones would be brought out. I’d hear huge uproars of laughter coming from the living room. As an 8 year old, I always wondered what they were laughing about.
You want it when?
my dad did this at his company too
As someone born in 97, I and many people my age have such a weird relationship with 90s culture. We were the awkward transition phase where the VCR and iPhone co-existed. When the internet was still seen as only a supplement to the then current forms of entertainment. Iconic remnants of 90s culture, like brick and mortar rental stores, were still very much relevant to us but quickly grew obsolete and didn't proceed with us into adulthood or even our teenage years. By highschool, many of us had ultimately developed this awkward nostalgia for these 90s remnants in spite of not being fully incorporated with the time period.
is it weird that I'm 9 years younger than you but I can relate to this? Was I just late to technology or did this stuff last for a while?
I was brown in the late 2000s, and I feel the same way, but for that period. It’s like I was only 3 when that decade ended, and yet I have a weird intense nostalgia for it
I was in high school/college age in the 90's and have always been curious about the interest in the 90's I see so much of with younger generations. What you said makes sense. thanks for providing that insight.
@@angrypersoninthecomments3050 what years would you consider the late 2000s? I personally consider 07-09 the late 2000s.
@@Anubisdream1 but yeah I have weird nostalgia for the 00s even though I was only in preschool by the end of the decade.
While I am a decade younger than you, I was growing up in a post-Soviet country and I can totally relate to everything you mentioned. We had computer literacy classes at school as late as the early 2010s. I remember using a payphone at school to call my grandma. I remember how kinds would share pirated DVDs (the only means to access any digital product in Eastern Europe up until the mid-2000s) and spread rumours about video games that only a couple of us could actually play. I never used computer to do any of my school assignments though, besides the ones for the computer literacy class. I remember pagers and fax machines, I remember taking off our landline phone while chatting online so nobody would be able to call my apartment and cut off the Internet. It is so strange how we got to live through similar experiences in different centuries
Actually, unplugging your phone wouldn't stop anybody from calling while you're online. If they tried to call they would get a busy signal because your phone line was in use. Unless you had call waiting which would allow people to call while you were on the phone but it still wouldn't ring the phone's ringer, it would just make a sound on your phone line, which would sometimes cause your connection to disconnect but you could disable it by dialing s certain number before making a call.
My experiences were similar as well, growing up in Ireland in the 2000s and 2010s. I think this is because both Ireland and post soviet countries didn't get much advancement, especially with technology, until starting in the mid 90s
@@TheIrishYoshi It's interesting you bring up technological development in Ireland. As an Englishman whenever I listen to Americans (and Canadians, in this case :p) it often strikes me that they somewhat ahead of the curve than the UK was, they really seemed to have had a head start in computer literacy and even internet "culture" than we Western Europeans did. I suppose regionalism would have played a part in that, I did grow up in a not enormous town in the West Midlands as opposed to any major population centre of England. But still, it's interesting how I can distinctly recall my primary school only acquiring it's first computer (read SINGULAR computer) about a year before I started high school.
Similar experience to India here. Most developing countries fit the bill for this very same culture in the late 2000s, early 2010s.
@@freakishuproar1168 Aye that's an interesting point about regionalism, I'm from the west of Ireland which was, and still is in many ways, behind the rest of the country, particularly the east and the region around Dublin. I'm sure a lot of people my age who grew up in Dublin don't remember a time without the internet and all the modern technology they had in the US and Canada.
That's pretty wild though, I never remember a time when my school didn't have computers, but they were almost all archaic, something Americans would have had about 10-15 years earlier in their homes. By the time I was leaving primary school for secondary school, the old computers were being replaced with a few newer PCs and a bunch of modern enough laptops.
Hey JJ, I'm the guy who ran into you on Thursday evening.
I'm very grateful that you were willing to talk as long as you did. Talking about your channel and videos was a super fascinating privilege. You must be a pro at these encounters at this point -- even I, someone who had semi-thought of what I would want to say if I ever encountered you, was braindead and didn't know what to say, but you are versed and empathetic enough with your fans to lead the conversation and ask questions yourself. Even though I'm sure it was a routine encounter for you, it absolutely made my week and will be a moment I won't forget! Hit me up if you ever need half off at a JOEY or LOCAL next time. 😂
I've met JJ in person, too. He is so exactly who he seems to be, and so friendly and charitable in discussion. He deserves this audience and its respect.
JJ has such an interesting channel and content about culture that you don't really see anywhere else. At least if you do it isn't as well implemented. I'm definitely jealous you got to meet him because he seems so cool.
Thank you so much my friend! It was great meeting you as well. I make videos for you guys, so I value any chance to meet one of my viewers and I love chatting if I get the chance.
I've met him too, I think he lives very near me, and It was really sick to meet the guy who i watch religiously. Just the most friendly and awesome guy.
@@JJMcCullough I live in Gastown and will keep my eyes peeled for you then only nod knowingly when I see you.
Uber-Canadian and all that. Sorry.
Your comment about how older generations couldn’t fact check things really struck a cord with me. I definitely see this with my dad. When I’m unsure about something I immediately google it but for my dad that never seems to even cross his mind as an option. He’s always shocked at how quickly I can find something out and I’m always confused at how he can not know something and not immediately try and look up the answer
Also, the Boomers and older generations are used to the idea that TV news, magazines, newspapers, and printed books are "authoritative" and trustworthy. Later generations are much more skeptical.
Lol, my dad is the same way. We have a running joke in our family whenever we try to remember which actor played that character, or what year that song was released, we argue about it for a couple minutes before someone pipes up and says “If only we had a magic black box in our pockets with all the knowledge of the world” to which we all reach for our phones and search it up.
I've noticed a related phenomenon like this in my own life, where if I have a question that relates to something from my childhood, I'm basically like "Dang, guess I'll never know...", but any modern problem, I'm like "Hey, Google..."
For example, if I'm trying to remember the name of that one weird cartoon I watched as a kid, it doesn't even occur to me to simply search "90s cartoon blue guy".
BONUS ACTIVITY: Can you guess which cartoon I was looking for? There's a surprising number of blue characters!
We could fact check things back then. You just had to go to a library.
@@zephadusjoltspark6951I'm thinking wither Winslow Oldfellow from CatDog or Freakazoid. It's hard to come up with a blue character who's perfectly easy to forget.
I think the 90s generation is in a profoundly privileged position of actually being adept at technology in both ends of the spectrum - not fumbling with “those dang gadgets” like our parents, and neither being completely bamboozled with the sensory overload today.
No other generation can claim to have lived and not only survived, but thrived, in both worlds.
my dad, born in the 60s, is more proficient with tech than most teens. i think jj is right that profeciency comes with need for the tech
I was born in 91 and the late 90s/early 00s was this early unique era. Like I remember when it would've been weird for a teenager to have a cell phone. We were literally figuring out what the internet was gonna be and at the same time there was an explosion of analog technology and digital gadgets. Before the iPhone came out there were all kinds of devices just for listening to music. I remember these little "mini walkman" type things that would play like 1/2 of a song lol. I think they were giving them out with happy meals for a while. I forget what they're called. Also I had a digital camera with a printer built in. Even the idea of photos as mainly physical objects feels dated. Now you phone is 100x better than the best digital camera or mp3 player from 2005.
@@t_ylr I think you're thinking of HitClips. I have a very vivid memory of a girl I hated in high school walking around with one that played thirty seconds of a Britney Spears song. She would play it and look you in the eyes with the intensely blank expression of some kind of aggressive fish while doing so, like she was daring you to be impressed with her coolness.
@@ondigottesman979 yup that's it. Kids loved those things 😆.
@@t_ylr I'm about 8 years older than you. I remember having film cameras growing up and remember the first time I ever saw a digital camera (sometime in the late 90's). It blew my mind being able to instantly see how the picture looked right after taking it. I got my first cell phone (Nokia candybar type phone) in 1999 so that I could communicate with my parents since I was driving myself to school and stuff. Calls and a very cumbersome ability to text was all that it could do. As for listening to music, don't forget that the iPod came out before the iPhone. The iPod was a game changer for sure.
JJ, I love your content. I'm in my 70's so I can strangely relate to your cultural translations, while finding others incomprehensible. I didn't have a computer/word processor until I was a professor in a community college. I never saw a gaming magazine, but I got hooked on the omnipresent card game before moving on to RR Tycoon ,etc. Adjusting to rapid social and tech change has always been an issue, but has become exceptionally rapid in the recent past!
Keep up the excellent content.
I'm about the same age and one big change that the Internet has brought about is that it's made other countries less "distant." I had relatives in Australia and a phone call from them was a big thing. I remember my grandpa being very impressed by the fact that with the Internet, you could just talk to a person on the other side of the world.
By a similar token, I remember movies would be released at significantly different times around the world. A film would be released in the US, then in the UK we'd have to wait months for it to come out. Then it would be several months more before it came out on video. I think it was The Phantom Menace that ended those practices, with the threat of online piracy.
My Filipino brother-in-law moved from the Philippines to Papua New Guinea like 15 years ago and my at the time girlfriend's family skyped for the first time with him from the US. They complained about the quality of the video and I was shocked that the internet in PNG was good enough to handle Skype but also aghast that my future in-laws were complaining about the video quality. They had become accustomed to phone calls and texts that they were just presumptuous about how video calls should be when it was like their first time.
I think maybe camcorder piracy had something to do with film companies synchronising release of films worldwide.
Movies coming out months apart in different countries is definitely still a thing, or at least it was as recently as a few years ago. Release schedules are often driven by cultural associations with certain times of year-the "summer Blockbuster" or family movies coming out during Christmas or Thanksgiving break, for example-and those still can vary from country to country.
I remember it being "Revenge of the Sith".
In 1999 there was little piracy going on.
In 2002 they wanted to tackle piracy head-on.
By 2005 they started to adapt to the new reality.
I used to remember getting excited when a 2 year old movie would finally premier on TV. Recording it would be a big money saver, big release films would cost at least 9.99 on VHS which as a kid, I couldn't afford.
Anyone that was born in the 1980s and lived there childhood the 1990s was blessed in my eyes.. I was born in 1981 and enjoyed so so many awesome things as a child-
I Feel Blessed..
Very interesting video ✊🏼
You could argue that anyone living their childhood now is blessed. Personally I preferred being an adult in the 90s and child in the 70s and 80s.
@@maccagrabme This video is not about the 70s or 80s maybe you should find one of those to write your opinion on 👍🏼..
Have a blessed day
@@mrwalle4u I know it isnt BUT I've lived through all 3 decades so know which one was best (80s).And I played video games in all of those decades and experienced almost everything a kid would have done, seen a lot of technological changes in every decade.
Yes!! I miss the 90s. 😢
In 2001, I was still carrying a pager so that I could respond to issues with my company's database. This was a "cool" pager because it had four little lines of text that could show you little "news drops". There'd be the four most recent news stories to choose from usually with just a "---News Update---" shown on the line. Every once in a while, there'd be a big news story, and one of the news drops would show "**Breaking News**" instead. You always knew that was a big one. One Tuesday morning, I woke up and saw all four lines showed "**Breaking News**". That's odd, I thought. Turned out, it was September 11th, 2001. That's literally how I found out before turning on my television.
Wow.
I remember paying $12 a month for my pager thinking it was so much money
There was simply a time before 911 and after 911 the time before was better. I was 8 though at the time so what do I know.
Ha! Love it… I remember when I had a two-way pager and thought I was the god of technology. This was probably ‘99 or so.
I was sitting in a parole office waiting to take a piss test when the towers got hit. My parole officer burst into the waiting room with one of those wheeled TV stands from school and we all watched as the second tower exploded in that fireball.
This was in Connecticut and multiple people jumped up and ran out of the office because they had family and friends in the towers… Normally they’d send you back to prison if you walked out of one of those appointments but obviously nobody gave a fuck.
What a wild fucking day… I remember it with such clarity that I don’t think I’ll ever forget a moment of it.
Sitting there drinking beers in my back yard watching the highway of black smoke pass over my house.
Cheers bud, thanks for the memories!
@@johncahill1985 I was around the same age and I also refer to life as pre 9/11 and post 9/11. Also pre ‘08 and post ‘08 life.
I think one of my most missed gaming memories from 90’s/early 00’s was getting the PlayStation Mags and getting the new demo discs. It’s such an odd thing to think of now that was how we actually tried games before being able to look up trailers and gameplay now. Also the music on those discs were so good!
Same for me except it was Nintendo Power. In the early 2000s my uncle got a computer, and I loved going to his house just to look up stuff about video games. It was such a novelty. But now I'm nostalgic for being able to flip through the pages of a video game magazine.
I believe to this day there are versions of games that only came out as demo discs.
Gaming magazines were part and parcel of my English language out of school training. Back in those years (in Europe) most gaming magazines were from the UK and localization of games was non existent. The fact that now games have full on dubbed voices still amazes me.
I still have Playstation magazine with screen shot's from the original RE 2, including the original female protagonist with the blonde hair and Alsatian dogs, rather than the Doberman Cerberus dogs.
RUclips videos, online reviews, demos, patching and marketplaces were light years away in the 90s. We had magazines and a couple of weak sauce tv programs that showcased some games. E3 started in the early 90s and I remember waiting for the september issue when the massive insert of previews filled the magazine.
I'm about a decade younger than JJ, but two other changes I vividly remember:
1) It used to be stressful (at least as a kid/teen) to meet a friend somewhere public at a predetermined time. If you hadn't been to that place before, you had to get somebody to give you detailed directions which you would need write down, often pretty vague compared to what we get now from google maps (e.g. turn left after the hill), or you needed to bring along one of those huge fold-out city maps to navigate with. Then you show up at the park or whatever and just wait and hope that you are in the right spot, because there was no way of contacting the other person until you found each other.
2) This is kinda small, but always having a flashlight in your pocket makes a big difference. Outside at night, away from street lamps, you just couldn't see at all. Even inside, if you didn't want to turn on a light which might bother someone else, you were relying on memory and caution to get from place to place without bumping into furniture or stepping on the cat or whatever
Sounds dramatic but this is the biggest safety blankets many of us younger people will not be familiar without. I find it absolutely insane nowadays of traveling the world or even meeting a friend across town without relying on Google maps every step of the way. I use Google maps more than any other app on my phone, including social media
The band Creed comes over to my house every other weekend and cleans my toilet with their tongues
Totally agree about #1. If you made plans to meet in an unfamiliar place, and there was a mistake in the directions, it could be disastrous. To resolve it, you would usually have to establish a third party that you both could call via a pay phone.
If you're 10 years younger than this guy bybthe time you were 5 everyone had a cell phone in their pocket and you likely dont have memories of the same stuff.
#1 is exactly why I have blank sections of memory from getting lost/having plans changed without notification. Just completely shut down. But those events happened between 2000-2009.
I was born in '87 and this is literally my whole childhood right here. From, "Word Munchers" to "Mario Run", the only thing he forgot was "Oregon Trail".
I never got to play Oregon Trail either. So to me Xennials aren't defined by that.
I don't remember getting to play Oregon Trail much, but there was always Kid Pix to turn to during free time.
I didn't like Oregon Trail, so I would play Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Jarred has died of Dysentery. Lol. I loved that game, I remember sitting beside the huge loud dot matrix printer and playing it. Logging on to the computer lab computer is the only reason I know my SS number 😂.
Fellow 90s teen. I'm incredibly grateful that I remember functioning in an analogue world. There are lots of obvious and profound advantages wrought by the internet and digital technology... but they have also resulted in a fundamental culture shift that has some acute disadvantages. One of the biggies is the increasing lack of time investment: we are now conditioned to brevity and fast turnaround, sound bytes, headlines and crystalised information - particularly in media.
Our 90s selves may have had to spend $15 on a CD containing only 10 songs... but we sat down and listened to the whole thing from start to finish, time after time. We read the liner notes and song lyrics. We contemplated the album artwork. We physically interacted with the music - opening the case, removing the disc and inserting it into the player, pressing the clicky play button. We experienced the album - not just listen to it.
Entertainment was deliberate and engaging instead of merely a perpetual distraction. We distracted our bored selves with thought and imagination, rather than with news feeds, endless images, banal social media content and binge streaming.
Arrghhh, so much change to discuss...!!!
This is sort of a frustrating but wonderful aspect of the internet; there's so much media that's being released all the time it's nearly impossible to keep up with anything, let alone go back to old things. My media digestion might be considered on the slower side because I spend a lot of time with games or albums and so on like I did when I was young, but it's hard to just keep blasting yourself with new things constantly.
And you know what? I miss having booklets and boxes for media I purchased. It really did make everything feel like a full package.
It was still easy to skip to a song you liked with CD. Not so much with vinyl or cassette. And albums were often arranged in such a way that would assume the listener would be hearing the album in its entirety. For example, sometimes the end of one song would lead into the beginning of the next song.
I do think it's kind of silly to glorify inconvenience like this. I'm sure there was once a time when people said "Kids these days with their gramophones. Back in my day we listened to orchestras live - that's the only true way to appreciate it"
@@morbidsearch Absolutely. Every generation has their perspective on the new 'way of things', which usually picks out its inferior qualities. But it doesn't mean the older generation's opinions are necessarily invalid or don't contain at least a kernel of truth. My perspective as someone whose conscious life has straddled each side of the internet's implementation necessarily colours my interpretation of current popular culture and technological engagement. And I think that the advantages of those particular modern conveniences also come with disadvantages.
The older I get and the more change I witness and experience, the more I understand the perspectives of those generations that preceded mine - even if I couldn't assimilate them myself.
To speak to your example, I can absolutely see the social, cultural and artistic benefits of only experiencing music in a live setting. But I also know that living in those confines in 2022 (or even in 1992) would be undesirable for me, having never not been able to listen to high fidelity recordings in my own time, at my own convenience.
Likewise, I won't stop utilising and enjoying the benefits of streaming, but I also won't stop celebrating the best of those cultural phenomena that were intrinsic to my own social and personal development - indeed, to that of my entire generation.
I’m firmly Gen Z and I’ve started to force myself to listen to older albums in track order, as full experiences. I try to do it at least once for all my favorite pre-digital artists, to hear how their albums were meant to be experienced. I may be an outlier though because I am super into the history of music and music production.
P.S. If you’re interested in how technology has shaped music culture over time, I can’t recommend highly enough the book How Music Works by David Byrne (of Talking Heads fame). Dude’s an absolute genius and has voiced these amazing insights about music through time and space and technology that I never could have come up with.
I also grew up in the 90s. I've heard our generation described as the last generation of modern people who had an analog childhood. It's true. Those of us who had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood have a unique appreciation of the powers and privileges of technology, but mixed with a healthy dose of apprehension/distrust at its potentials. Those who grew up purely in a digital age don't have any apprehensions about technology, which can be very dangerous.
I 100% agree with you being around the same age myself. "Knowing things" was a far more participatory activity and much more hands on. The digital age makes the pursuit much more 2nd hand. I think its akin to knowing the answers to math questions because you've memorized them as opposed to knowing them by understanding the process of solving them.
I think in modern times we give ourselves too much credit for what we know. Typically what we "know" is how to parrot appropriate answers based on entering some keywords into a search engine and reading a few paragraphs, if not just a headline or two.
We have basically lived through two ages of human existence
Those of us who are a few years older also experienced a few years of an analogue adulthood, one where we had jobs with pagers and had to be the guy to go look for games on the store shelves.
We also got to see the entire history of video game consoles starting with the 2600 in childhood then experiencing the crash and the move away from games only to have them come back in our teens.
Not to mention many years without any sort of cable or even reasonably priced VCRs. We basically had 1 or 2 channels and watched whatever was on.
I remember having dial up and using bbs before Inet wondering if the Inet really would take off or not 😂, now the world could not exists without
I grew up in the late 80s and early 90s. I remember being 10 years old riding my bike 2 miles to play with other kids from school. I had no cell phone or pager and was completely fine with that. Back then you could still get hit by a car or get kidnapped it was a risk worth taking though.
As a 2000's kid, a lot of this stuff does ring to my memories. I can recall video stores, having to wait until you got home to use the Internet or the phone, all that stuff. What does interest me is how different it was back then in terms of information. The fact that you guys just had no easy way of looking things up like we do nowadays is kind of strange to think about. Even at my youngest age I never had to wait more than a few hours before I could Google something. I remember bothering my dad while he was working and being told by him to just Google it. So to think that you guys had to rely on libraries and magazines and things like that just feels very odd and it makes me wonder how you guys coped with that sort of uncertainty. Just because these days we take that sort of knowledge for granted.
No one thought anything of it, as the Internet didn't explode onto the scene until 1994, and even then it was gradual for the next five to ten years before most people had access to it.
Prior to that, we had no idea that you had access to any information with a simple search. With no relation to it, how could we have even imagined that such was possible?
Most of us went to the library for information. We had a card catalog to look up information. We had microfiche as well for accessing old papers.
We didn't have cell phones, and most people interacted more with one another. Relationships were much stronger, as were friendships. We actually lived our lives instead of being constantly in a screen. A lot of us did watch television, but being that your shows only came on at certain times, most didn't watch it all day. Some did in the 90s with cable, but even then most didn't want to sit and watch tv all day like people sit at their computers these days online. Television wasn't addictive to the extent like the Internet.
I graduated high school in 2002, i was doing research for class papers in the library, looking through books and the like up till i graduated.
I mean we had my mom's old college textbooks and a basic encyclopedia set, a dictionary and a thesaurus at the house so that was the easiest way to look stuff up. Or you just went to the library when you had the chance because they had a full encyclopedia set
I'm 10 years younger than JJ and grew up in India and well, things were 10 years late there back in 2000s, I guess. Because I was able to relate to almost EVERYTHING he talked about. Especially the relationship with the computers.
Encarta encyclopedia was the big thing back then.
I was born in 92 and I agree with everything about memories of the 90s being a dividing line between generations. Of course I obviously was not an adult during these years but I still feel like I can understand and recall the differences in daily life, although to a lesser extent.
I was born a year after you and feel the same.
The differences were just that obvious that us kids back then could notice.
I was born in 1969 and feel the same way about the 70s. Kind of cool I was just old enough to catch the original Star Wars in the theater! 90s was like a less fun version of the 80s, but with better video games, tv and cars.
I feel like the transition between "90s" and today can really be linked to the smart phone. A lot of what this video talks about is pretty relatable to a person who only hit their teenage years in the 2000s. There was a little bit more proliferation of the internet and cell phones, I suppose, but the difference in how my family operated between 2006 and 2012 is mind blowing in retrospect.
Internet is a big jump and smartphones are an even bigger jump - not just in regards to computing tech, but also for photography. Previously you couldn't expect that people would always have a camera on them, but now, you can. My fiancee is Finnish and in Finland they got onto mobile phone tech, especially texting, a lot earlier than much of the rest of the world (Nokia is a Finnish company.) She finds it hilarious and incomprehensible that I never learned to text until I got a smartphone, because using that weird keyboard function where you pressed the number 9 until you got the right letter was just too hard. I think I tried to send a text once when I was about 14 and then instantly gave up. Pre-smartphone, just calling people was a lot more common, because it was so much faster than texting for the majority of phone users. "HI I'M ON THE TRAIN" was a very common phone call, whereas now, almost nobody would do that, they'd just text instead.
I feel like the mid 2000s were the last time to have a sort of 90s lifestyle, with the iPhone coming out in 2007, although I wouldn't now for sure since I was only a toddler/prescooler in the 2000s.
The iPhone brought the internet to the mainstream. Before 2006 you would still have people say "I don't really do computers/go on the internet" and it was a socially acceptable thing to say.
The iPhone made the internet posh. After it became the thing to have, not "doing computers" meant you were unhip (or worse, poor). Apple sold the internet to gen x and boomers at a time where millennials had fully embarrassed the tech. Say what I will about Apple today (or even then), they drove the cultural revolution behind modern tech.
@@bort6459 true. I was born in mid-2006 so I only had like 10 months of experience before the iPhone came out lol
I was in law school the first time I saw an iPhone. One of my fellow interns at the Brooklyn DAs office got one. We all hung out in one of the offices for like 15 minutes watching the screen automatically switch between portrait and landscape as he spun it around. It was AWESOME.
Nostalgia x 1000. Although the 90s were a boom time in the US, my understanding is that Canada suffered some brutal economic times during that decade. Ultimately, Canada did emerge from the 90s a stronger nation than it entered them though. Would be an interesting video.
It's weird that in the United States we usual consider the 1990s a very prosperous decade even though it started with a recession and many countries did not experience it and not just those "poor nations". Japan's economic bubble burst in that decade.
The 90s were also surprisingly violent and politically chaotic with the high crime rates of the decade. The rise of right-wing antigovernmental militia groups. A relatively successful 3rd party candidate running on protectionism and stabilizing the budget deficit. The Republican's controlling the house for the first time in decades and the first impeachment since the 1860s.
@@Marylandbrony Everything is relative.
@@Marylandbrony You reminded me of that meme
Americans during the 90s: 😊
The Balkans, Iraq, Rwanda, etc during the 90s: ☠️
@@Marylandbrony The last few Clinton years and the first Bush year were the last time we ended the years with a surplus.
I'm a candian from the 90's and there was no weird depression I dont know what the fuck youre going on about.
My 90s memory: My nuclear family was watching Seinfeld when the phone rang. My father picked the handset up off the ringer and immediately dropped it back, ending the call to the confusion of the person on the other line. When my mom got frustrated with him, he responded: "everyone should know that you don't call during the hour Seinfeld and Frasier are on."
Growing up in the 90s, just watching tech evolve has been really interesting. We grew alongside it. So when I look at something like a Switch I remember everything that came before it to the NES and Gameboy.
Having an N64 and a Switch in the same room for me is still insane.
@@KaiserMattTygore927 The N64 itself was far and away a technological miracle when it came out. I still see it as an advanced system and not an old school gaming system.
SNES was my most favorite system growing up, and when I saw the first pictures of GBA, being able to have something like a SNES in your pocket blew my mind.
I still call my kids Switch a "Nintendo." As in, "are you guys playing Nintendo???" 😁
I remember in the late 90s, my boyfriend’s mom being really into, “the internet”. It used to tie up their phone so I often couldn’t get through. I remember her recommending it so highly by saying, “you can look up a recipe and it only takes a few minutes for the page to load (or whatever the lingo was then) and then you can print it”. And I remember saying something about how cookbooks were FULL of recipes. She also said something about chatting on, “America Online”, and I thought, “I don’t wanna talk to strangers”. Hahaha. The best thing about being a Luddite and a late-adopter, though, is that by the time I caved and got my own computer it was a sweet, fast little Mac and I got to skip all the growing pains that the internet had had. Ditto for CDs, I eschewed them as new-flanged, kept playing my tapes and then boom! Got an iPod and was living. I mean my Walkman never skipped and neither did my iPod but I cannot say that about anyone’s Discman.
Who needs one of them new fangled battery operated flashlights? Me Kerosene lamp is just as good, and it keeps me warm. never seen a flashlight do that me hasnt! now to me horse and carriage for a quick 4 day ride to the grocer.
I remember having the same experience with DVDs - I thought VHS was just fine and held out long enough that I eventually got to skip right to streaming. (Living in a rural area where my peers were slow to adopt new technology really helped a lot lol.)
OHMYGOD skipping discmen
Seriously, how much was skipping a problem mere less dismissing the entire format? I think it was because your player sucked.
Another part of growing up in the 90s is the whole "flipping through the channels" thing on TV. Nowadays you're more likely to just choose a show or movie on some streaming service but back then you'd often times end up watching something that you had no intention of ever watching because happened to come across it when flipping through the many cable TV channels. It also meant you'd often end up only catching part of a movie half-way through and then not seeing the ending because you got bored during the commercials and turned it to another channel. Additionally it more more likely that if you were watching something on TV the whole family was as well. Now we seem to each be watching our own things on our own devices/TVs.
Also being forced to watch a program at the specific time a television station broadcasted it.
Yeah god, I went on holiday recently and trying to conserve my phone's battery I passed a lot of time in the evening by watching TV and it was such a return to monke kind of thing surfing channels to find something good and having to sit through ad breaks. I'm way too used to streaming and alternative media, I can't understand how I used to regularly sit through 5 minute blocks of advertising when a 30 second unskippable ad feels like torture nowadays. Also I wouldn't say this is a distinctively 90s thing although it's definitely the starting point as it's where access to more channels became more commonplace. Whenever my parents talk about TV in the 70s and 80s it's always along the lines of "we had 5 channels and they would stop broadcasting in the late evening". The 90s was probably the heyday of cable, I'd say it didn't truly end until the mid 2010s when smart devices became affordable for most people.
I used to turn the dial as fast as I could to get to the show I wanted on the UHF channel. My parents would tell me not to do that so fast, that I'd break it, which we did mess up at times.
The TV Guide used to have it's own dedicated spot on the coffee table in my living room
I remember speed shitting in the bathroom during commercial breaks and not washing my hands to conserve time as to not miss out on the show.
I'm basically exactly JJ's age, and I recall all these things as well. My family got a computer far earlier than his, as my mother used it for work, but I didn't get a video game system until I was nearly 14 (it was an N64), as my father thought they were very déclassé and children would be better off engaging with physical things with their hands. As such, I ended up playing with things like building sets, and Warhammer, rather than video games for far longer. My family also thought that mobile phones were needlessly showy and wasteful far into the late 1990s. I recall when a friend's mother arrived to pick him up, and called the house from a block away from her car, my parents were incredibly put-off by what seemed a hugely snobbish gesture. "What, she can't just ring the doorbell?!"
Oh, my God, I remember ringing the doorbell to see if your friend was home! (Especially if they lived nearby.) I don't think anyone does that nowadays -- it would be totally weird!
Ohhhh man, my late aunt was the first person I can remember having a cell phone. There was this time she was in my mother's room in the back and called the house in order for someone to bring her something from the kitchen and I thought it was the most hysterical and insane thing in the world. I still remember that vividly.
I am over similar age but I was lucky my uncle with donate systems to me like NES, Atari, Sega Master System then on like my 7th birthday I got A Sega Megadrive for my birthday. It was like my most prized possession until I got to high school.
@@juliegolick Yeah if they lives close you could use the doorbell, if they lived further you could use landline and arrange to meet people at certain places at certain times. If they were not there or late you could not simply message them ask them where they were i which was a pain in the ass.
@@EatMyShortsAU Oh, man, and getting stood up was the worst, because you didn't know if they were just running late or if they were never going to show up, or if maybe YOU had gotten it wrong and showed up at the wrong place / time. No way to get in touch at all. Super-frustrating!
I needed this video. I am 42 and i have been thinking about my childhood alot lately. Enjoy your life my friends because time really does go by fast the older you get
As someone born in 2001, I certainly had remnants of the 90's present in my childhood, but I'm grateful to a certain degree that I didn't have access to "smart" technology until early highschool. It makes me more appreciative of what I have now.
It was awesome to hear about your experiences growing up, and as usual, I'm always impressed at the depth of discussion you manage to create with your videos.
Same here though I was born in 99. I think that 97-03 group got a very unique experience with all of it since we were somewhat caught in between two waves of technology and avoided smart tech at a young age.
@@Billycca3 as someone born in 91 that’s so interesting to me because when I look at younger people I always think about social media, not smartphones. I felt insecure enough comparing myself to other kids at my high school, I can’t imagine being bombarded with IG models and TikTok stars.
@@alexandraeilise as someone born in 02 it blows my mind that kids in kindergarten are getting smartphones now. My first phone had an actual keyboard and I bought it myself when I was like 13.
Same exact experience as someone born in '95. A big part of the media I consumed as a kid was reruns of '90s shows (especially sitcoms, I loved '90s sitcoms as a kid) so I have very strong memories of '90s culture. I sometimes say the '90s lasted until 2004, I feel like that's when tech became mainstream and everything changed.
im a year older and tbh i relate more to 90s kids than 2000s in a lot of ways. we were poor so all my stuff was old- i had a cd walkman, i almost exclusively played sega and super nintendo, we didnt have wifi at home, we didnt have cable so i mostly watched 90s reruns, and almost all our electronics were from the 90s- TVs, VHS/DVD players, the actual tapes&DVDs we had at home, cassette player, the computer, etc. our furniture was from the 90s, a lot of my clothes were from the 90s... i only tangentially relate to 2000s kid stuff because i would experience it at other kids houses
I always question my lens towards the 90s as being too rose-coloured, but it's sobering to hear others sharing my exact same sentiments. Also reading "The Nineties" by Chuck Klosterman solidified the warm fuzzies towards that decade as being more than just "everything was better as a kid". Really enjoyed this video, and reading through the comments! There's deep value in keeping those nostalgic feelings alive - I truly believe they help ground us as we trend towards more chaos and detachment in our lives.
Not rose-coloured at all, bro. We were a bunch of lucky bastards!
The Cold War was over and the whole world was celebrating the “End of History.” It was a very optimistic decade. Then…. 9/11, and history resumed with a bang.
It’s so weird to me seeing a bunch of 90’s residue still present in the early 2000s. I can relate to some of these things, but then other parts of it seem very unfamiliar or outdated. Old MP3 players really embody this. You didn’t need to buy physical disks or anything, but you still needed a specialty device to listen to your songs.
The Early 2000s have their own charm, but it feels like a continuation. I remember a lot of the talks and discussion over people being sued for thousands for downloading music on P2P Networks.
That's the big missing gap between CDs and Spotify.
Exactly my thoughts! Oftentimes the 2000s are treated like the current decade or the last one,but a lot of the now commonplace technology was only emerging in the 2000's and not everyone had access to these things either. While it was definitely more advanced than the 90's, my early childhood was more similar to a 90's kid than a kid now.
That's usually how it is for the first couple to few years of a new decade. Examples being like: the early '80s feeling like an extension of the late '70s, 1990-91 feeling like a continuation of the late '80s, the first couple years of the 2010s feeling like a propagation of the late 2000s, so on and so forth.
Having residues of the previous decade permeate into the new decade for at least the first few years is nothing new, and it'll never stop.
@@thetexanhusky 2020s will prob be the exception to this trend. The pandemic happening only 2 months into the 2020s put a full stop to any late-2010s residue. January and February 2020 was basically 2019 part 2, the real decade began in March.
MP3s didn't exist in the 90s. It is completely a first decade of the 2000s, and perhaps a few years into the 2010s technology. They were primarily overlapped and replaced with the I-Pod until the I-Phone came out in 2008. The I-Pod held on somewhat till around 2011, but after which few had them.
NOOOO!!! The dreaded yellow pages 🤣🤣🤣 That took me off guard, haha
This was an awesome video!!!
I’m surprised you didn’t mention answering machines. Despite only being an infant in the 90s, I still learned how to “take a message” (even tho everyone basically had an answering machine at that point). I do vividly remember how basically every pay phone disappeared as I was growing up.
I have fond memories of various relatives and friends who left us messages on our answering machine. On those days you could personalise the greeting message to which I recorded one that went a bit like "Hello?!.... Pardon?... Ah, okay.... You know what, please leave your message after the beep.". Our machine had a setting to start recording from the beginning of the greeting message or after the beep so obviously I set it to full recording. My grandfather was the one who fell for it the most and I always gave him an apologetic hug the next time I visited. Good times...
Ah, yes. Answering machines. I still have one of those one my landline house phone!
Payphones were a lifesaver when you were out with friends and needed to contact parents. I can't remember the last time I used a payphone but they were so useful at the time
Answering machines were used to screen incoming calls, too, because Caller ID was not available in many areas until the later 1990s. You heard the person leaving the message. People KNEW you could hear them talking (if you were home), so people would start their message saying, "Hi Aaron... you there? Can you pick up please? This is so and so... please pick up... I really need to talk..."
My family never had an answering machine and I was born in 1987. My only exposure to them were in movies. I never even knew anyone that had one. I figured it was just something rich people had.
Watching these videos as a close to young adult, it’s interesting how many things from the “before times” are starting to seep there way back into this generation’s culture. In the new music scene, it’s not uncommon for kids to brag about their physical music collections and buy music related magazines and merchandise. Even in non-music scenes there seems to be a growing awareness of youth cultures lack of physicality, with more kids opting for cd movies and written assignments etc.
I personally really like these changes- there’s something indescribably different about listening to an album you own and payed for as opposed to streaming. I hope we continue to go on this path towards mediating between the vast information of the internet and the simple comfort of owning a cd/magazine/whatever.
I only wish some of the youth of today would be listening to more of the older music genres too, like jazz and such. I played in junior high and High School and I really want a big band revival.
This is very interesting! I was essentially born into the internet age yet some of my favorite possessions are an Apple II and a record from an artist I like, both of which I got somewhat recently. It's so much easier to feel an emotional connection to a medium of content when you own some physical object that correlates to it. I think the comeback of old media is about as much of a "revival trend" as it's the decades-long novelty of the internet age beginning to fade and exposing crowds of people who ultimately just don't prefer some of the internet's inherent qualities.
I'm in my early 20's. I was always one of those people; born out of coming from a low-income family that often held onto or handed down old gadgets, and my autism making me uncomfortable learning new things. So while I adapted to the digital world in many ways, I always had something of an affinity for the likes of physical media. I'd hand in my assignments hand-written, or go out of my way to purchase a video-game on a physical disk (or cartridge or whatever in the case of handhelds). It's a bit of a strange experience to see this appreciation seep back into our generation, and perhaps the only thing I can smugly think to myself 'I liked this before it was cool'.
As a 27 year old middle class American o can assure you that there are absolutely high school students today who buy vinyl and listen to jazz, they're just the minority
@@WasatchWind This is definitely happening! Rap and Jazz go hand in hand- the majority of early hip hop was sampled from jazz. Even now, you see a lot of young producers going back to guys like Wes, Coltrane, Jacko, and more obscure artists for beats and ideas. Even just the new Weeknd album heavily samples Jazz- so i wouldn’t say the genre is foreign to Gen Z! I wouldn’t go as far as implying a full on big band revival though 😅
I fondly recall being one of the first families to get WiFi in my area, my family was one of those "computer people". It was so new, when I went to school the next day and asked my librarian (also the computer room teacher, an older fellow) if the school would ever get such a system, he called me a liar and said such a thing was impossible. lol. It was just so different during those transitional periods. (EDIT: I should note this was in the early 00s, but the sentiment of the time and the length of the transition into the modern digital world stretched all the way to the '10s, arguably)
amazing
I'm German and schools don't have WiFi here, basically only private homes, workplaces (but only for the business itself) and some restaurants have WiFi, but you have to ask for a password at all occasions
WIFI didn't even reach saturation until 2012 or 2013. You started seeing it around 2004 or 2005, but most people and places did not have it. Prior to 2004, most people had no idea it existed, as most of us were connected to either landline or ethernet until well beyond 2010, though landline was being purged out of a lot of homes from 2005-2009. Wireless Internet just wasn't much of a thing prior to 2006, and beyond the decade it took a backseat to wired Internet.
Being a Canadian myself, this is the strongest Canadian accent I’ve ever heard. Good lord.
I think some of it is put on. Ie: Aroooooned
A 👢
You have clearly not heard about Bob McKeown. He is a Canadian news reporter on CBC News who is on the program The FIfth Estate.
I was thinking the same thing
Despite being born in 2001, my experiences growing up with computers were extremely similar to yours JJ. For example, we had dial up Internet that only my father used until at least 2010 or so. This is because of where Ireland started off in the early nineties and the rapid progression of our society to where it is today, another advanced Western country.
Honestly I might try and make a channel and video about this myself, I feel the perspective of an Irish person in this time period is quite unique, and Ireland's story of progression is vastly different to almost every other western country.
I would be very interested to see that. The only thing I know is Ireland was unstable and now it's got one of the highest quality of life in the world. I understand how the economic policy of Ireland lead to it being richer, but I'd love to hear what it was like experiencing the transition
@@xifamilynetflixaccount7450 It'll take a good while since I have no experience with editing or anything like that, the writing is the only part I can do at the moment.
A project for the summer perhaps. I personally love hearing the perspectives of people who grew up in different countries, hopefully others find it interesting too.
would love to learn more!
I was born in urban Kerry in 2000 and I've had broadband as long as I can remember.
I know many people in the UK were still using dial up in the late 2000s, and I think it's more of an urban/rural thing than Ireland necessarily being behind other countries around that time.
IF you never grew up in the 90s , you CANT relate to being a 90s kid & that’s just the way it is , 2000 kids always try to be like 90s kids lol by the time you were 7 years old it was 2008 , so by then all your doing is using things that are almost a decade out of date , doesn’t mean you can “relate” to being a 90s kid. Call me a gatekeeper etc but I'm pretty sure you did not grow up at the time when nobody has heard about the internet, no social medias to ruin kids/teenager self esteem, bulky encyclopedias were the wikipedias of that time, computers are for tech geeks, cellphones or brick phones as we called it were for the rich people mainly, most cars had manual transmission and the window had to be rolled up manually, sega or microgenius was the GOAT of video game consoles, buying a new TV feels like buying a new car, TVs had no more than 5 channels to watch and by 12pm midnight all the programs has ended, cable TVs were more of mid to late 90s fad and even then only the well to do's have subscription, if you have a walkman you are the coolest kid in school and most importantly kids were more innocent back then and most evenings we spent time playing outside with our friends, fooling around, went biking to the nearest 7Es to have slurpies, have minor cut and bruises due to falling down from bikes and fights with older kids who were bullies.
This may sound weird now but... I LOVED encyclopedias! I loved randomly grabbing one off the shelf at school and finding something, anything, new to learn.
I even enjoyed looking at them. Just seeing the words seamlessly line up on the spines was satisfying.
I dreamed of growing up and having my own collection of encyclopedias one day.
World encyclopedias filled me with feelings of joy, awe, and wonder. ESPECIALLY when they started having colors and pictures on the spines. They were beautiful.
The only time I disliked them is when I got into trouble and had to "write lines." The teacher would grab a random encyclopedia from the shelf, flip to a random page, point at something, and tell me to write until she said to stop. It somehow was always something borrrring! But, I have ADHD so maybe it was just boring because it wasn't what I wanted to read about at that moment. haha
Sometimes I still want to have a collection and I do think I would be happy with one. But, they are just beautiful pages and can't be updated as science progresses as such a rapid pace without buying an entirely new book. I'm sure that a lot of it would be extremely out of date after about ten to fifteen years. Then, I think to myself, "But that is history. It's interesting to look back on what we thought we knew and how far we've come." After all, I do have some newspapers from 1938-1940. There's an article where they talk about how Mars will be the closest it's been in 'x' amount of time and that there will be three astronomers on three different points on the globe to view it. They were said to be specialists and claimed that Mars changed from brown to green throughout the year which suggested the planet had seasons. They claimed that this proved, without a shadow of a doubt, there was vegetation on Mars. We know now that that is inaccurate, but at the time, they were so sure it was true.
We have come so far as a species but we still have so far to go. I always wonder what we are so sure of today that future generations will find is completely false. It keeps me hopeful and forever interested in the world.
Oh, and I miss when Animal Planet and Discovery Channel didn't have just reality shows but educational shows. No drama, no following humans around as they make saddles or whatever tf. And I know it's 2000s but, Xanga. I miss Xanga. That's a story for another day. It's late and I've typed more here than I have in my journal in months. haha Feels like a Xanga post. Late night, on the computer when I should be sleeping. Ah, the nostalgia...
Same here. There was something about flipping through the pages and learning random stuff. I can imagine people flipping through the whole encyclopedia and think that they had the knowledge of everything that happened on earth. Or people going through wormholes like on Wikipedia. The only parallelism I can make is the random page on Wikipedia or Austin McConnell's video on "useless information".
@@666mrdoctor Aaaaaah! Yay! Another person that loves encyclopedias! In school, I thought I was weird for that because no one else did it. Being a neurodivergent kid, I (and other people) thought I was weird for a lot of things. But, as an adult, I see that I wasn't weird for that because knowledge is power and learning is fun!
My DK encyclopedia was my life. I used to bookmark all the pages I loved haha
@@drts6955 Luckyyyyyyy!! Haha
I didn't have one of my own. I did have a few kids science books. Not like textbooks but books about fossils, the ocean, arachnids, things like that. Oooo, and a subscription to Muse magazine. A kid's science magazine. When we couldn't afford it anymore I cried. 😅 I was very sad about that.
*Man, my original comment didn't look this long when I typed it on the computer.* 😆
As someone who grew up in the 2010s, the thing about typing still rings true. Typing was always quite difficult, and we took typing classes in the computer lab every Wednesday.
I've still got a typewriter out in the garage somewhere. Good luck getting ribbons for it....
We never learned typing but we did learn cursive writing 😂🤡
@@williamwingo8952 Bet you still could get one if you searched online.
@@williamwingo8952 as another person who grew up in the 2010s with a typewriter... ribbons are actually incredibly cheap at least for my model I have a few backup ones all the time
the 90s were magic and none can convince me otherwise. I was a teen but being a teen in the 90s was pretty perfect. Technology grew up with me.
I was a teenager from 2010-2017. Smartphones and social media are what truly changed everything, and I grew up with that
Being born in 2000 was pretty alright too. Computers were always a thing but no one had cellphones till I was like 14 or so I got to see the internet grow up along side me for the most part.
I feel so bad for gen alpha. They're going to be toddlers in a world with billion dollar algorithms designed specifically to get them addicted to the Internet for as long as possible.
@@bradthunderpants3283 thats already the case sadly. I see a backlash against being online already from younger kids and thats a reassuring sign. The internet is so manufactured now its not nearly as fun to explore anymore (not that you really can anymore in the first place)
It was magic, there were so many good shows and movies so many new things coming out that you never seen before. Today it seems like everything is just an improved version of something that already existed. It was a great time, I know the sun didn't shine brighter in the 90s but it sure seems like it did. Being a kid in the 90s was great with TGIF and snick and all the things to look forward to on TV, kids just don't have that now.
@@austinhernandez2716 i was a 90s teen too. not having a phone tether.
To me, as somebody who grew up in the 2010s,the idea of not understanding what the internet is is impossible to comprehend. It's like trying to have an english word stop making sense to you as a cohesive structure, it just can't be done. All of the little tropes of the internet (even things as minor as the way scrolling works, or where the standard buttons are located) are as intuitive as language and can't be unrationalized.
I'll go further and say the internet is not needed, and I could VERY easily go back to a world with no internet or smartphones. Go buy records at a record store and watch movies in a cinema or on tape. It was a great world that we all thought was sufficiently technologically advanced. After all, we had sent a man to the moon and had nuclear weapons.
My grandparents don't have a computer and don't get computers. When we celebrated their birthdays, we started singing old songs and they suggested some titles they didn't know the lyrics of. My grandma was genuinely amazed that the internet "has songs as old as this, who has archived them". I tried to explain that the internet is like a giant drawer of index cards that anyone can put cards into... I don't know if she understood what I meant.
Also, I have a computer job (HR) and my dad has a computer job (road design) so she thinks we are basically doing the same thing.
Funny you should mention that. Some of the very early computer games (like minesweeper or solitaire) were actually designed to teach the concept of moving the mouse, clicking, right-clicking, etc., because NONE of those were intuitive to first-generation computer users. Sure, in theory you were playing a game, but in practice you were learning how to physically manipulate the computer.
@@themoviedealers It was a better world.
"grew up in the 2010s?" Wow, you're a "baby".
0-1% of people had access to the Internet in the early 90s, and it wasn't the Internet of today. Mostly used for academic papers and medical facilities, for the most part.
In early 1994, they started airing "INFORMATION SUPER HIGHWAY" commercials on television, as the Internet, at least the early version of how we now know it, was being released and made available to the general public for the first time. Prior to this, most of us had no idea what the Internet was. I remember watching those commercials and not being able to understand what she was talking about. I was 17 years old at the time.
By late 1994, Internet use took off, spurred by AOL and their discs. Throughout the rest of the 90s, AOL dominated the Internet, taking up well over 95% of the market share, and use of the Internet grew. This was landline (through the phone line) Internet, and it was very slow compared to today. It wasn't until around 2005 that most people had a personal computer with access to the Internet. AOL still had a lot of market share up till around 2009. Starting around 2004, as cable Internet became more available, AOL lost a lot of customers, as did the other dial up companies like Net Zero and Earthlink which gained a significant market share in the first three years of the 2000s.
When smart phones were introduced late 2007/2008, over the next four or so years, it changed a lot. Coupled with WIFI penetration, and you see how things came along to what we have today.
Born in '83. I remember when CDs became a thing and we were totally blown away by this new technology. My family got a computer (it was HUGE) in '94. I used it to play Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Going to the video rental store was just... amazing. Impossible to get kids nowadays to understand the excitement it was. And when dad would cave and buy a box of Junior Mints, too? Man, that was the best.
All these things you're describing just sound like my experience of growing up in South Africa in the mid to late 00s. Growing up in a developing country plus a poor family made sure I was at least a decade behind everyone else, lol.
it's wild to me how my experience with computers in education ended up so vastly different to yours, only 5 years later. still, i remember the novelty of computers as well as the computer rooms, and eventually using the school library to access the internet and print out assignments. but i also remember using an "Alphabeta" typing gadget in the 4th grade, and only a select few of us were allowed to take them home because of our advanced skill in typing. i remember how magical Microsoft Paint was at that time, and I remember how insane it was to finally get my own computer in maybe sophomore year of high school. wild.
thanks for this JJ, a pleasure as always :)
'89 here and I was thinking that too. My school didn't get the Mac's until the mid-to-late 90's (both the colored ones and the models before it). I faintly remember pre-internet, but it's wild to imagine any computers not having a mouse.
I'm especially intrigued by how phone culture has changed, I think you could make an entire video about this. Just the fact that you didn't know who was calling had all sorts of ramifications. You kind of had to answer, as there was no way of telling who was calling and how important it was. When I was a kid (born 1978) most people did not have phones that could store numbers, you had to hand-dial the entire number every time, so misdialing and getting 'wrong number' calls was much more common.
Calls were metered and cost a certain amount per every 8 minutes or so. My family had an 8-minute hourglass next to the phone, so that you would't run over to 8:05 or so and accidentally pay for the next unit. When an aunt of mine called us, she always let the phone ring once to give us a heads up before she dialed again, so that we could decide if we wanted to pick up or not. She only wanted to speak if she could use the full 8 minutes for the call, everything less than that was a waste of money to her. :)
We had a rotary phone through most of my childhood (born in 1976). When we called my aunt and uncle, who are only on the other side of the county, they'd tell us they'd call back. For us to call them was a toll call (billed per minute, I suppose), but it wasn't a toll call for them to call us.
Right...and how easy it was to make phone pranks because no one would see your number. Thanks for reminding me of that.
You could also build these little boxes back then to mask the fact that you were on a call from the phone company and essentially make calls for free. Super illegal though
@@alexanderfo3886 Or you could dial *67 before the call to hide your info.. but sometimes they'd dial *69 to automatically call back the last number that called them and you could only sit there in terror.
@@howtomeetwomen- Ah but remember before those were options? Those were crazy technological advances to my childhood. Most especially 3-way calling because this was in middle school for me lol.
Born in the early 2000’s, I feel like I came at just the right time to just barely see 90’s culture phased out and see modern technology rise up. I distinctly remember renting out movies and video games at our local blockbuster as a very young kid, only to get home and prod my parents to let me mess with their new smartphone that just came out. Beginning middle school, of the kids who had phones half of them had a sleek new iPhones while the other half were still using flip phones. They way different generations describe the paradigm shift of the 21st century is funny to me because I grew up during that transition
This was really interesting to watch as someone born in 2005. I hope one day I'll be able to tell kids about responding to texts on my digital wristwatch or asking a little Amazon-made disc for the weather or wearing surgical masks for a year straight. Another great video, J. J.
“Dad, what were the 2010s like?”
“First part was pretty chill. Things were sort of goofy in a weird type of way. Second part sucked ass. Everyone was pissed off and angry at each other all the time.”
“What were the ‘20s like?”
“HELL. They were hell.”
“Why were they so bad.”
“They were just HELL. Next question!”
I'm about a decade older than JJ, but pretty much everything in the video was highly relatable. It brought back many nostalgic memories that I had to hit pause to remenisce about.
As a person who didn't grow up in the 1990s, I remember hearing extremely vague mentions of egg yolks in computer mice, and while I just now checked and turns out that isn't a real thing, the fact that that sounded completely plausible says a lot about the era.
I think it was because the balls that made analogue mice work sometimes got gross and yellow and looked like the yolk of a rotten boiled egg.
The old rubber balls in mice that had to be cleaned totally looked like old/overcooked egg yolks 😂 they also did NOT bounce like I thought they would at first.
Well the egg yolk mouse stick around a lot longer then the 90's. I remember having a computer that had one in early 2000's. I know by then computers had LED mouse like today, but those were very expensive and my family only got a computer with a LED mouse when it was mandatory to do so (same with box computer to flat screen computer) around 2006
I come from a fairly small town in Argentina, so even in 2004/05 cellphones weren't so common, so I got to live some of the 90s phone culture despite being born in 2001. I clearly remember my mom going to a payphone near my house whenever she needed to call someone, because we didn't have a phone at home.
@@bigscarysteve having a landline was common here, we just didn't have one. My mom was fairly young and had just came out of college so she was just starting to work and my dad had a bit of a hard time finding a job, so they were trying to save every cent.
As someone born in 2007, I might be able to contribute something from the Gen Z side of this discussion. I only recently began thinking about the way our generation's media usage must feel odd for anyone older and how that will shape us in the future. I personally learned to use a phone or computer long before I learned to question my actions and focus my attention, and that applies to almost our entire age group, with some interesting consequences. For example, looking back at my time in elementary school (where most of us already had our first phones), I feel like our relationship with the internet and especially video games was always very superficial and based on quantity rather than quality. Since we could remember, we had a play store with more games than you could ever imagine, not to mention the countless (and often quite sketchy) websites with flash games. Most were not good or even functioning games, but at some point, we stopped caring what exactly we're playing as long as the lights on the screen would keep moving. I was guilty of this too and spent a lot of time playing really pointless games just to delete them afterwards. And even in school, it's common for disinterested stundents to pick up their phones and start playing literally anything, motivated more by spite for the teacher than a desire to, well, play the game. And given the way almost all of our teachers react, this relationship to their phones and media consumption might be one of the biggest differences between GenZ and the one born before, say, 1995.
What I'm getting at is the way we really don't value physical goods and property anymore. You briefly touch on this about 2:00 into the video and I can absolutely confirm this "generational confusion" we have when comparing the new and old ways of using technology for entertainment. What used to be common just 20 years ago now seems completely and almost insultingly archaic, but I find it is also fascinating in its own way. And that feeling only increases the more you go back in time. When my father, a computer scientist, tells me about his experience with 80s computers like the Commodore 64 and the games he played on it, I feel a weird mixture of pride about "the new technology" / relief that "these times of inferior tech" are over ("What? Only 64KB of RAM? And no Internet at all? What was that even good for?!") but also a great admiration for the dedication that went into operating and learning these machines that weren't even sure to succeed like they ultimately did.. It honestly must've been great being that "computer kid Ryan" during the 90s because you could consciously observe and interact with the massive changes in computers and the way they influence society, gaining some important insights. The way we went from just a few home computers to massive online games and smartphones in our pockets in no more than a decade just sounds so exciting and the early internet looks like an absolutely wild ride as well, but than might just be the imagination and wishful thinking of someone who was thrown right into the internet age without learning moderation.
Okay, these some of my thoughts about this topic, I'd love to write more about it if someone's actually reading this :) Thank you for the video JJ, I love how you cover such a vast range topics in your unique casual but still productive and thoughtful style, it makes me come back to your channel every Saturday. I've been watching for a long time but never commenting, so I just had to get that off my chest.
Well said. I was born in 99 so a bit of both for me but I can certainly relate on quite a few of your points. As well as J.J.'s actually. Weird time to be born I guess haha
Thanks for writing, I have a younger brother whose over 10 years younger then me and I definitely see some of these behaviors in him as well, and it was insightful to see the perspective from someone growing up in the 2010’s, I was born in 2002 myself and didn’t get a phone till 8th grade but my youngest brother got one in second grade, so even just 10 years apart our perspectives on technology definitely feel worlds apart
@@Billycca3 Feel ya (also born in 99)
I hope this doesn't come across as condescending/patronizing, but you think and write exceptionally well for a 14/15yo.
As someone waaaay older, your insights are pretty interesting, especially the idea that becoming familiar with tech at an early age has had an impact on the way people learn to question actions
You were born the year smart phones first release, so I can see why you grew up with a smart phone. It's no different then me holding my dads old brick phone when I was a baby / toddler. It's just different phones.
Road trips with family.
No screens, only the music we brought on tape, and car games that dad or mom wouldn't take part in.
Lots of sibling fights, the one arm reach back to smack a kid (wrong kid), and so help me I'll turn this car around when we didn't even want to go in the first place.
JJ you are almost exactly 3 months younger than me. This was such a similar take in things as I had. I have often reflected with my dad that our childhoods mine from the 90s and his from the 50s are more alike than the one my children are having now.
Your story about the computer room, writing assignments by hand, and getting a home computer in high-school made me remember going to the computer lab in elementary school. I also remember my senior year of high school all the students got an iPad from the school. It's also interesting to me in college seeing the increase of students regularly bringing laptops to class and professors asking students to download software for class. It's reached the point where professors can ask people to bring their laptops to class and expect everyone to be able to. Although I have also noticed an increase in this after covid.
What's interesting is how many students schools discovered didn't have regular access to computers during Covid. It's something we as a society just took for granted like having a TV (which these days are often one and the same with computer monitors).
My family bought an encyclopedia when I was young -- maybe 10 years old. I was able to look up a lot of things there, to see if it was true. I remember using the encyclopedia to prove that the hole in the ozone was real, for example.
Oh gosh that reminds me about how my mother bought a big set of Britannica encyclopedias back in the day for us to use for reports. They were very expensive, I don't know how she afforded them. I remember turning in a history report that had some information from the books into my social studies teacher, and he was rather impressed because it "wasn't something he taught".
Honestly as an early 2000's kid I relied on encyclopedias for knowledge and computers for me were just for fun and gaming until I was 10-11
@@Desolate-Utopia Ours was Encyclopedia Americana.
We had the World Book Encyclopedia set. Man, I loved them.
@@ishitaananya8649 yeah I feel this tbh, our family computer from around 2005 was a toshiba laptop that I used exclusively for flash games. The idea of learning to submit things in school electronically/using the internet for school at all just didn't exist until I was way older
I turned 20 in 1990 and I’m the same age as the members of the band Nirvana! I remember a lot about pop culture in the 90’s . The first half of the 90’s was a great time for music and fashion and rave culture. I had that exact phone on the cover of klostermans book!
The members of the band nirvana aren’t the same age as the other members of the band nirvana
J.J., you and I are the same age, only you're older than me by a few months. I was born in October 1984, started high school in 1999, et cetera. The first computer I ever used was in the 1st grade; it was an old fashioned monochrome IBM that was meant for teaching spelling and typing. By 2nd grade, we had color computer monitors for playing Number Munchers, Odell Lake, and the ever popular Oregon Trail. As for the internet, that was basically an expensive and breakthrough novelty that took off around the time I was in my pre-teens. My aunt and uncle were well-off and really big into new tech, so they let me use early dial-up internet at their house in circa 1995, back when AOL charged by the hour, and it took like 10-15 minutes to load a website. As for PC games, I first played Wolfenstein 3D at a friend's house in 1994 and immediately got hooked, then got obsessed with DOOM and DOOM II when the latter eventually came out.
As an, I assume, somewhat younger viewer of your channel, it really hit me hard when you said you became a legal adult in 2002 as that was the year I was born. To think that someone whose content I now watch and enjoy so greatly was just coming into their own when I first started existing is quite mind blowing.
It’s so wild. I’ve changed a lot since 2002 but not as much as you have!
Oh god. My youngest cousin was born the same year JJ became an adult
You are my brother´s age then, or nearly so. It always seems to be weird to me that people your age are adults halfway or more through university, even though I was only born two years before you. What a biennium can do to your thinking, such is the rate of change in the world.
Although I don't have much conscious memory of the 90s, being born near the end of 97', I feel that having two older sisters and such still exposed me to a lot of pre-2000s life. Still listened to stuff on casette, still watched 90s Disney on VHS, watched them play Super Nintendo at a neighbor's house -
I still think the starkest difference between my childhood and now is that we actually had a really nice house for our economic status.
Besides getting lucky with a nice location and pretty good sized yard, my dad and other family members did the bulk of work building the house.
Now I am looking at the housing market with absolute dread. Not only will it be an astronomically higher cost, I am uncertain if I'll even be able to live in my state because of how many people are moving in.
Just wanna say that housing regulations are more responsible for housing prices going up, or houses in States like Illinois ,which is losing population, would be going down in price as people leave but it is not.
It's like I wrote this comment, lol! Born in '98 with two older sisters (from '88 and '90). I was introduced to all things ninetees by them because they were handed down to me!
Same experience, had my brothers' Super Nintendo.
The early 2000s are much more nostalgic for me.
I think the biggest difference between being a kid in the 90s and being born in he 90s is just the availability of tech. We all used the same stuff for the most part, but the stuff later kids used was easier to get and more common. Other then that, we were all the same. Nowadays it’s like you’re born 4 years apart you grew up on totally different things lol
@@sans-nom8311 Totally. I know I repeat the Gen Z stuff ad nauseum, but aside from my two younger siblings who also grew up in a similar environment to me, people born just a few years younger than me felt waaay different.
By the time I was in High School I felt almost grandpa-ish because of how immature some of my peers felt to me.
So awesome that you chose Dookie as the quintessential example of a 90s CD. Because that, in fact, was the 1st CD I ever purchased and owned
Mine was "Americana" by The Offspring.
use your illusion 2 by guns and roses
Might you do a video on the 2000's? It's barely ever talked about as an era of its own but it generated an almost unbelievable amount of popular culture and is tied to some pretty iconic people and events. And for a lot of people 10-20 years younger than you it was obv a hugely important time.
agreed. underrated era
The 2000s are interesting to me because I grew up then and I have fond nostalgia as a result but objectively and even subjectively it was a kind of bland and "plastic" era. Actually "Plastic" is a great term to describe the vibe from 1998+.
Important, because they were kids back then. But there wasn't a huge shift like from the 1990s to, say, post 2005.
I feel like the 2000s were fantastic but fell off around 2007.
@@StephenLewisUniverse from what I've seen and heard, 2005-2007 seem to be the main transitional years from the 20th-century vibe to the 21st.
I'm a bit older than you; born in 1980, graduated from high school in 1998, went to college from 1998-2002. But many of our experiences line up for sure. Another wrinkle in my story is that I grew up in a low-income home, but in a relatively affluent area, so even by the mid 90s, a fair number of my friends had computers at home, but we did not. But still, back then there was, as you say, very much an idea that computers were a novelty entertainment device, and not something literally everyone would have to have someday.
I also remember a curious gap in my awareness of personal computers. I remember in elementary school (mid to late 80s) people were very excited about them, and my school had a computer room with a bunch of Apple IIe computers that we sometimes visited to play very simple text based educational games. Then by the end of the 80s/early 90s it felt like interest in them waned a bit for a few years; they had been a fun novelty but people couldn't see how they'd be useful for everyday life so most people just ignored them other than people who had to use them for work or whatever. It wasn't until 1993 or so that there seemed to be a resurgence in interest in them among everyday people, that I attribute mainly to the rise of the "internet", although back then, the internet wasn't what it is now. I still remember friends who had CompuServe and had to pay for the "internet", which was really just access to CompuServe's chat rooms and bulletin boards, and you had to pay by the hour. The world wide web, and ISPs like AOL that charged a flat rate per month to access it is what really changed things, but this wasn't in the consciousness of normal people until like 1996 or 1997.
When I went to college in 1998, my school was very big on technology and loudly touted their "connected campus", which had T1 connections in all the dorm rooms and large computer labs equipped with both iMacs and HP computers in every dorm and academic building. I didn't even own a computer though. I actually brought my electric typewriter to school, thinking that'd be fine. It was not, lol. Pretty much all my professors expected papers to be done on a computer, some even wanted assignments to be turned in as a file on a floppy disk rather than a printed out paper. I quickly found that using the computer labs for this was hit or miss. They were locked after a certain hour, often they were full, or the printers were down. Then I found out that you could take out an extra loan for a PC as a necessary educational expense, so I did that and bought my first PC, an HP Pavilion model that had like 56 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive.
I was a kid in the 90s living in East Germany so a lot of stuff came to us a couple of years later than it was out in the U.S. My parents were priviliged so we had a computer, a printer, Atari game console, Game Boy and a VCR. I also had to take a computer literacy class in school. It was quite usefull to me actually . The most 90s thing I did was checking a CD out of the library and transfering it to a cassette. That was in the early 2000s. I still have it. I feel ike I grew up with the best of two worlds and that is something that defines me.
I remember the '90s. It was fun to be a musician in Chicago in the '90s.
It'd be really cool to do a version of this video for the 2000s compared to the 2020s. One of the things that stick out the most to me was the emphasis on teaching us beginning Grade 3 (2003 or 2004) how to write in cursive because as my teacher always said, "you'll need it in high school".
Turns out I did not need to use it in high school lol
Yes! Same experience. I hated learning cursive, and it was all wasted. Learning to type in 5th grade was wonderfully helpful though.
Didn't you have to use it while writing exams?
Funnily enough I decided to learn cursive again in highschool just on my own volition. Now I can barely print without connecting letters haha
@@साहिल-ख9छ Yeah the times I used it the most in high school were for writing in English classes. Though, I opted for printing often because as someone told me once, my cursive "is nice to look at but hard to read".
4-5th grade for me. Found it faster to write with cursive. Never let it go
As someone born in 95 but in the poorest state of the US, Mississippi, I'm really surprised how similar our initial years were. I'd say Mississippi caught up all at once in 2011 and for us lower class kids it was a major culture shock. We didn't go from flip phones to smart phones, but home phones to smart phones.
I actually have to agree being a 00s kid from the Bronx. You would think being so close to a huge American staple like Manhattan (which is what everyone considers NYC despite it covering all 5 boroughs) which is perceived as very much so “with the times”, that we too would be with the times, but no, I vividly remember mostly everyone I knew having VCRs and bulky computers and using their home phones until 2011/2012. In fact, I hardly remember there being a smooth transition period from this to everyone in my 8th grade class suddenly having smartphones, where suddenly my slide phone that was cool the previous year was now deemed outdated (which pissed 13 y/o me off so bad lol). It was such a harsh culture shock that sometimes I wonder if I blinked and missed something.
Not from the 90s (born 1999) but I still had an experience with pagers as a kid. I was a light sleeper as a kid, and my dad was a fireman, so I still have distinct memories of being kept up at night from that loud whitenoise and beeping his pager would emit from across the hall.
Nowadays I think he just has an app on his phone that keeps track of it all.
as another 1999 kid I have similar experiences. My dad would occasionally get pagered but i firmly remember the days of dial up internet, and I didn’t get my first smartphone till I was 13
It's different to see how geography and, honestly, probably social class influenced a lot of these experiences. I'm a bit older than J.J., and was born in 1980 in Manhattan. In 1983, we got a computer. We had Quantum Link (the AOL predecessor) over a 300 baud modem at home in 1987. In 1989, I was using BBSes and proto-Internet (Telnet and Tymnet, which became Sprintnet). By 1988, most of my elementary classmates' homes had their own computers as well.
In more blue collar regions, having multiple TVs in the house was considered a luxury well into the 80's mostly because electronics used to be really expensive. With the economic boom if the mid-late 90's it became possible for middle and even working class families to have multiple TVs, video game systems, and computers. That's also when electronics started to be cheaper.
Whaaaaat. We didn't get a computer until Christmas 97. And it didn't have the internet. I think we got the internet around Christmas 99. I didn't use a computer in a classroom until the fall of 98, and that was just a keyboarding class so no internet there either. Your whole paragraph there is like 🤯 My parents were blue collar. But still. 🤯
They were around, but until I was in highschool in the mid 90s I definitely felt like one of thefew with a personal computer or any real knowledgeof computers. We also only had one television, which my sister and I were constantly fighting over, one day even managing o break it in our struggle.t
@@ryanjacobson2508 Same here. My parents are very blue collar and didn't have a need for a computer in the 80s. Before I got my own PC in my high school years, in '97, the only exposure to computers was at school and the library, especially with the Apple II GS. Those Apple II's weren't really connected to anything online, though.
As a 90s kid in rural backwater America, my childhood was near indistinguishable from my great-grandfather's childhood in 1900. I manually pumped water, boiled water in order to draw a bath, and washed clothes by hand, I started working in town at 15, and I would walk 3 miles to work, occasionally getting picked up by friendly motorists who would drop me off either at work or at home. Not the typical American 90s kid, but having a lot of immigrant friends from Russia and Ukraine at my current job, we were surprised to find our childhoods were all roughly the same. My kids, even if we do live in the middle of nowhere are going to have a substantially different life than mine.
What kind of work did your father do?
@@JJMcCullough Ship scrapper, he commuted 3 hours per day.
The 90s in the US had the same technological advancements as India and other developing nations in 2000-2005/6. But its amazing how smart phones and the internet made all nations catch up from 2008-now. a person living in rural African town with interent access can watch RUclips videos and tv shows about the American lifestyle. i remeimber in 2004 and 5 my family used to take me to an internet cafe with dial up internet while American households already had colorful macs in everyones rooms
Yeah that is interesting and I think a lot people from developing countries don't even use credit/debit cards. For example in China they transitions directly from cash to digital payments.
Oh wow, great video, this hit hard. I'm a few years older than you JJ, Born '77, Graduated '96. After the air force in the 60s, my dad was an electrical engineer in Silicon Valley in the 70s and early 80s and worked down the street from Apple when they opened, knew Steve Jobs from the sandwich shop where they all ate lunch (my dad still tells the best stories). My whole childhood was legos, transformers, he man, gi joe, construx, building military vehicle models and model trains. My entire elementary school years was all analog/non-electronics. My school didn't have a computer lab until middle school in sixth grade, and then it was mostly oregon trail. We got our first family computer in 1991 mostly for my dad's work and I'd get on it whenever he wasn't. That was back in DOS days and games came on floppies. I started getting into programming and learning BASIC and stuff, and I was one of the only kids that liked that stuff. I got made fun of computers CONSTANTLY, they just were nerd things that nobody needed. I worked a full summer bussing tables to save up to buy the SNES - I was 14 at the time. I also had nintendo power (and was in an issue but that's a story for another time) - I still remember the nintendo power hotline that you'd call and sit on hold when you were stuck on a level. We got the internet my junior year and it was mostly limited to AOL, there wasn't really much to do on it in '95. I continued learning programming on my own through books (remember books?) in high school and college, where my roommate taught me html, css, and javascript - that was a lot more fun than class. By '98 I was back in Silicon Valley living on my own making websites for small businesses trying to explain why they needed a website and what was coming in just a few years time, I saw what was coming, but few others did. It felt like trying to explain a car to a cowboy in the old west. I've worked as a programmer since I was 19, and through that made early websites, building my own webservers and running them out of my home on an ISDN line, then early mobile wallpaper and ringtone apps for old nokia and motorola phones, up to HR software for fortune 1000 companies which I do now. I train and mentor junior programmers now and there is such a stark difference in basic computer comprehension between my generation and the new generation - the younger programmers just don't understand how things work the same way, they never had to learn DOS or ever heard of an AUTOEXEC.BAT or a CONFIG.SYS file or had to figure out how to set jumpers for either COM1/COM3 or COM2/COM4.For them computers have always been graphical and hardware has always been plug and play. As such their ability to troubleshoot complicated problems is substantially less. It makes me worried for the future 30 years from now as we increase the reliance on tech but forget more and more how it works. By then we'll be telling stories in the home to grandkids about the 90s that sound as strange as MY grandparents' stories about growing up on a farm in North Dakota during the depression without electricity. What a ride it's been.
Same life. Born in 78. I remember autoexec and config.sys. Loading drivers into high memory to conserve your 640k. Good times.
@@clydewilson9105 woohoo HIMEM.SYS ftw!
as a 2006 kid, this is so interesting to me omg. my parents were older when they had me so they were kids in the 70s and my older siblings were kids in the 90s/early 2000s. i grew up not only hearing about most of everything you discussed today but experiencing most of it in some strange, left over way. my dad always had a copy of the yellowpages in his office, my mom would take me with her to the library when she had to fax things, i watched almost every childhood movie on a vhs, and we all shared one computer for most of my early childhood. i remember seeing my first iphone when i was probably 3 or 4 and it was completely foreign to me seeing as my parents used either our home phone or a flip phone. it’s also worth noting that because my parents had substantial memories of the 70s and 80s, they would (and still do) tell me stories of how hard it was to do x, y, or z without a computer, so i’ve always had a fairly good grasp on what life before 21st century tech was like. this was such a cool video, jj!! i love this kind of generational society stuff!!
You're a mere week younger than I, so hearing how tech-less your youth was reminded me how privileged mine was. My parents were in fields that required computer knowledge and access, so thus, we had high-end machines that I appreciated almost as much as took for granted. My mother even had a series of laptops and early flip cell phones that I was truly fascinated by. My father had a bulky car phone with a hands-free system via the stereo. I became a tech junkie despite, in hindsight, a rudimentary understanding of how it all worked. I got in a lot of trouble fiddling with the various gadgets and computers my parents would bring into our lives, always looking to explore their potential.
Same. I couldn't really relate to what he said since I've had the internet since 1994. I was playing a lot of DOS/MS-DOS games in the early 90s.
It is interesting how for some countries certain technologies would come later. For example for the post-Soviet states video game consoles have come later than they did in the West. I remember how different kinds of NES knock-offs and Sega Mega Drives aka Genesis were popular among kids as far as the early 2000’s.
Another thing that is fascinating is how sometimes missing out on certain technologies would be advantageous in adapting of newer ones. For example it is true that some countries like China and Russia did not have the e-mail culture similar what you can see in the west and people there have started using chatting and social media apps for tasks such as work earlier than some did in the west.
All I know is, whenever I see someone mention 90s Sega, I instantly think "BLAST PROCESSING"!!
No answering machines and now no voicemail in China either, which the former would encourage the use of social media messaging and the latter was rendered obsolete by the same.
@@joelsmith3473 a Kenyan here. No one I know uses voicemail because we went from a few public phone booths in major cities and just one in smaller towns straight to mobile phones. Over 99% of the population never had a home fixed line phones and we jumped straight to mobile phones
On finance, most of the population never had a bank account because banking was not liberalised. The liberalisation of finance and banking coincided with the advent of mobile phones. The population jumped credit cards technology straight to mobile phone banking. All this coinciding with democratisation of the country and improvements in education made possible by a newly democratically elected government resulted in Kenya becoming a world leader in fintech innovation and adoption
As someone 19 years younger than yourself, I obviously was not alive during the 90s, but as somewhat of a technology and history buff, I feel like I nevertheless have a good grasp on the time period. I think one of the most fascinating characteristics of the decade in contrast to today is the overall sense of optimism and hope for the future, especially in American culture. The decade falls fairly nicely in a post-Cold War, pre-9/11 world where international issues were fairly non-existent, and the few that happened (such as the Balkans conflicts) weren't seen as something personal or applicable to the daily lives of those in North America. Additionally, the lack of social media, and infrequence of 24/7 media coverage in general, prevented the kind of constant anxiety over world affairs we see today.
Being widely general again, domestic issues were also treated with a much more utopian view, such as racism being seen as something that could be solved by simply treating each other equally, rather than the more popular understanding today that it is something that is so intertwined within our society and culture, that to remove it requires society's very own deconstruction.
I think this overall demonstrates a greater kind of optimism and hope that society would only further move upwards, and that today this belief no longer exists. Instead, it's replaced by an overall very self-conscious culture that is overly obsessive with preventing any kind of moral failure by not actively supporting the "correct" causes (whatever they may be), and that this obsession over discouraging or hopeless topics has caused much of the overall discouragement and hopelessness we see in society and individuals today. This societal state is visible through things like greater political polarization, higher rates of depression and suicide, and an overall anxiety for the future that seems omnipresent within our culture.
Not to sound too boomer-y either, but I think the over abundance of entertainment and media through things like streaming and social media discourages physical interaction with other people, and creates a greater sense of loneliness that compounds with the previously described issues.
Sorry if that became too much of a rant, but seriously thanks for your great content and promotion of discussion
Very interesting points!
For someone who didn't live in that period, you got a good sense of it. But I will point out there was another aspect to the culture, kind of relevant to what you're saying: shock culture. The 90s was when Howard Stern, Marilyn Manson, Tom Green, Nine Inch Nails, and a lot of other media personalities pushed the envelope, trying to jar you with shocking statements, lyrics, or acts. You see, in the 90s, political correctness began to rev up and seep into the culture, but it was heavily countered. People were not afraid to call bullshit on "political correctness going too far." Many media personalities would be purposely offensive just to laugh at political correctness.
In fact, if you're a Tool fan, their song "Stinkfist" is exactly about this shock culture (while also being a pretty shocking song in itself). It talks about how so much sensationalism numbs the senses and just makes you want to find something even more shocking, just to see if you still feel anything. And it does this with the analogy of an anal fist fuck, getting ever deeper.
Sorry what Baltic conflicts?!?
He meant Balkans.
@@marrobertx Sorry! I fixed it
Growing up in the early 2000's was a really interesting time; I didn't live anyway particularly urban, so I was dealing with the remnants left over a dying culture. We still had one solitary family computer - nobody I knew really thoroughly understood the internet until a good few years into primary school, and we still had one of those computer rooms with the terrible, slow computers. Nobody I knew typed their work, and if you wanted something printed, you usually had to go to the local library. As a very young child, VHS's were still a thing I actually had to use, and it's weird going from VHS's to DVDs to Bluray to digital in just a decade and a half or so.
Nobody had a mobile phone until highschool, either - not that they weren't readily available, it just wasn't seen as something kids even wanted or had any use for. I remember there being a particularly large amount of judgement around that kind of tech being given to children, too - with people scoffing that they wouldn't have any use for a phone, anyway. I remember my sister getting an iPod and being blown away by the whole concept of one - and thinking that I was living in a full Back To The Future era when I got an iPod shuffle on my 10th birthday (and promptly loading it up with youtube2mp3 copies of all the music I knew).
That's the weird thing about the 00's as a decade overall really - one defined by the awkward growing pains between the 90's and the 10's - though perhaps to some extent that's true about all decades.
Most of the time a good RAM upgrade usually fixed the slow computers: Dad always made sure to have the fastest ram usually 16 on literally every old computer we had he tried to max out the memory part of it and often put in a mid range graphics card later in the late 90s onwards but for most of my games I cared about having 16GB of ram was plenty of speed:
8GB is ALWAYS slow even today things are a slug fest even if you have a powerful single core CPU going to 16 doesn't hurt. 32 is recommended but 16 is optimal. Some computers can go all the way up to 64GB of ram but that isn't very common.
I was born after the 90s and my childhood was very similar to yours. I was mostly dealing with 90s tech that my parents, friends, and schools could afford
The memory of loading up an iPod with excessive amounts of youtube2mp3 is such a great shared experience.
I grew up rurally and am almost a decade younger than JJ, but I thought this sounded very much like my educational experience. Being rural is like being years behind.
2000-2006 was the transition from 90s to 2000s
I remember in the 90s I would go to the movie theater, and either had to tell my parents when the movie would be over or call them on a pay phone to pick me up to return home. If you didn't have quarters, you had to walk home. Lol
I remember chat rooms in the 90s and I remember thinking that they could very well bring about world peace through the interactions of different people empathizing with the other's humanity.
I remember in the 90s in the USA, there was a bright light of optimism for the future and that the times would get better and better and better.
I remember in the 90s going to raves and dancing with others of my generation in a massive celebration of living during the historic moment of the next millennium, and imagining how to create a future that would be far better than the past.
I remember in the 90s being much less scared of the future than I am now.
You captured my own thoughts here. I didn't have the best childhood, but one thing I did have back then that I don't at present was not only hope, but conviction that society was progressing and the future would approximate something like Star Trek. I'd gladly trade all of my (admittedly awesome) 21st century technology and creature comforts to feel that again. I don't want to say ignorance is bliss, but just a little can go a long way if you know how to use it.
Payphones, lol. Funny enough, even into, like... 2002 or 2003, there were still a few in my old area, for some reason (even though, if memory serves, they were being rapidly phased-out by then, esp. with more and more people getting at least standard cell phones)
@@Whoo711 The last pay phone I saw was about five years ago. There was a lone holdout at a gas station near the Interstate. But it now has been removed. Pay phones were still widely available in 2000 and 2001, but around that time in 2000, they started charging 50 cents instead of 35 (which originally replaced 25 cents) cents. Not long after 2001, in the years of 2002-2005, most of them were removed, with a few holdouts remaining until around 2010, and an extreme few exceptions, like I indicated earlier, remaining until around 2015-2017.
I was born in the year 2000 and I feel like I had a lot of similar childhood experiences as you did. But while the 2000s were certainly a transitional period between the 90s era uncertainty of technology like the internet and 2010s complete domination of the internet in everyday life, I think that the real deciding factor was that my parents, who were both Doctors and spent much of the 1980s and 1990s grinding out residency and spending 18 hour shifts at the hospital, made a concerted effort to limit screens as much as possible. We didn't have a permanent TV in our home until the pandemic rolled around, I went to my cousins' house to play video games on the weekends and during summer break, we still rented DVDs at the local rental store to watch on our shared iMac in the family room, and my brother and I didn't get cell phones until my parents decided we were trustworthy enough and old enough the ride public transit home from school. Also my parents had pagers deep into the 2010s and I think even now my Mom still prefers using a pager for work because she is old school like that and partially because the hospital she works for is a bit of a logistical mess.
I still have my parents phone numbers and even my landline (which no longer exists) memorized so I could use the front-desk telephone at school to call them to pick me up from after-school programs which I imagine would be seen as weird to children today who have had contacts in their cellphones from an earlier age.
Oh my gosh, I was also born in 2000 and had a similar experience with growing up. We had no cable, one special Windows PC in the computer room, video game time was restricted to weekends, and my siblings and I all got cell phones way later than my peers did. I still have my landline memorized too, lol. I feel like I identify a bit with 90s nostalgia just because it reminds me of the earliest parts of my relatively tech-free childhood.
Don't hurt your arm doing that reach
same here. we still only have 1 TV for the family and still have our landline
@@maelucchino6339 What's really weird is seeing people born in the 2000s who are not children. That is what is weird.
@@Scrimjer ????
As someone who grew up in the 2000s and only became an adult in the 2010s, I have this weird experience with the phantom of 90s culture and the 20th century in general seeping into much of the 2000s for me. I recognize most of the technology you were talking about (aside from the pager, which I always kinda knew about but didn't understand the purpose of until much later), but have never really gotten a chance to see any of it in action as commonplace. That said, my parents were kinda always a little behind in terms of technology, sometimes deliberately (we were still using CRT TVs well into 2013, and occasionally canceled our internet plan throughout the 2010s to save money), so I suppose I caught a glimpse of the 90s experience™ through that.
I guess I'm also one of those older zoomers who remembers when stores like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video were open, even if only vaguely. I remember having a combination VCR/DVD player back when I was a kid, and even though VHS was discontinued some time in 2006 iirc, I still have memories of occasionally watching tapes, sometimes at school whenever there was, like, a substitute teacher or whatever. I also vaguely remember Blockbuster Video crumbling apart; the only memento I have of it is a used PS2 copy of Sonic Riders: Zero Gravity from GameStop that came in a Blockbuster DVD case.
All in all, I guess being a young kid in the 2000s gave me a general idea of what life in 20th century was like, even though I didn't have memories from said century to call my own. I've heard similar experiences from other "zillennials" that simultaneously feel too young to relate to most millennials yet old enough to feel at least partially estranged from Gen Z.
I still have 2 DVD/VCR combo players. 1 is still plugged in & usable. I haven't used it in about 3 years.
I love this!! I was a teen in the 90s and thought it was the last good decade 🤣. I need to get this book, not only because it sounds great but because I had that exact phone. The same exact phone. It was cool as hell. It lit up when the phone rang. I always turned the ringer off and turned the lights off at night just to see if any of my friends would call, the lights still lit up. So cool.
I'm 20 years younger than jj, being born I'm 2004. Which means that his 90s was basically my 2010s so it's kinda fun to mirror between the two decades. There certainly wasnt much in common but I could relate to a couple generic experiences here or there. Great video, jj. Always a joy to hear about the 90s
I'm born in 2005. However, I didn't really think much about experiences in the 2010s that much, until when I occasionally watch videos on RUclips about this era, then I only realise how far we've gone. For example, I have never realised that no one uses house phones anymore (I mean I know we haven't used the house phone at home for a while, but I haven't "realised" that it's a trend worldwide). Besides, now I only realised that we were crazy about 3D TVs but now even cinemas just stick to good old 2D movies. And now I have also realised that no one watches TV since like 2015(?) Last time I always watch cartoon network and Nickelodeon through Astro (satellite TV provider in Malaysia), then later I watched shows through China TV boxes where you can access Chinese-language content, then finally I just watched RUclips on my laptop because there's just more things you can watch on RUclips. Now i'm addicted to RUclips!
@@yokelengleng huh yeah you're very right!! We had a house phone until like, 2017 but I have no idea why because no one actually used it lol. And yeah, I remember that whole 3d tv craze that happened and everyone thought it was going to revolutionize tv/cinema but everyone just sticks to 2d anyway. It's quite sad to say but yeah traditional tv is definitely dying because it simply cant compete with streaming and RUclips, I've not properly watched tv in ages!!
@@gusemiester True.... If by "properly" watching TV means going through the experience of commercials and the sort, I think none of us has done that in a while, even the older people are addicted to social media! (which unfortunately means they are more susceptible to foreign propaganda, especially China propaganda, in the context of Malaysian Chinese) But if by properly watching TV you mean you can watch a long TV drama, I think people still watch TV by this definition, it's just that you can choose which drama to watch and when to watch it, without being limited by the TV provider.
@@yokelengleng I meant more as in I haven't sat down, selected a channel and simply watched a show for years!! But yeah it's been ages since anyones sat through ads, though older people tend to sit through them, for whatever reason. Social media is super addictive but also super dangerous if you dont really know how to use it or who to trust. I hope when more millenials and such begin to be the adults in control (rather than boomers) they begin to educate children on how to use the internet properly because people our age just kinda learned it for ourselves
I remember Instant Messaging being kind of liberating as it was the first time I could talk with friends without worrying my parents were listening in (our phone was in the kitchen too). Since my parents only really used our computer for specific tasks, I had a little more independence with it. Asking people their screen name was the precursor to asking their number.
Dude, you are a gem. Keep up the good work. I was born in 1980, and on the other hemisphere, but my memories and experiences are very similar.
Never had a computer class going through school, and didn’t know a single person with a cell phone until I was damn near 21.
As a drug dealer in the late ‘90s, I can’t stress the importance of the pay phone enough…
I like to think that it would be glorious to go back to pagers and pay phones, but deep down, I know I’d lose my mind.
Also, I had that very same Nintendo Power issue at one point in my life… Even though I was an EGM guy through and through.
You sell drugs?? You should be in jail
@@corymiller536 Is it still the late '90s?
Weird.
And I did my time...lots of it.
In the late 90s, my first job out of college was making custom software for small businesses and local schools. The amazing thing was that almost all of this software was just some customized databases app with a few printable reports. Just having a new database increased productivity by huge margin. Every client was so amazed that something as simple as a database could change their world and to them, the database was magic.
Today’s software is much more complex and tries to do so much. But back then, all anybody needed was just a database.
Hearing the 1990s referred to as "25 years ago" makes me feel like a Pixar character struggling with obsolescence. I was around 2- 11 years old in the 1990s and, looking back, realize that it was in many ways a dress rehearsal for a lot of the tonal shift in discourse and the breakdown of objective reasoning. But since I was a kid, I tend to equate the '90s as a benevolent, benign era of Nickelodeon, the "TGIF" lineup, the Disney Renaissance, desperately holding your discman to keep it from skipping and still feeling privileged to even have one, and regurgitating "Seinfeld" dialogue on the playground without understanding what any of it meant. The 1992 LA Riots, the obsession with OJ in 1995, Yugoslav stuff and Clinton's (in retrospect) weird obsession with it, and the continued long march of Academia ideologies into mainstream culture and discourse amounted to little more than background noise.
What's this tonal shift in discourse, and breakdown of objective reasoning you're referring to?
@@nuberiffic Outside of the hard sciences, there has been a move (in some quarters) to discredit anything that was produced by "western" culture. Unfortunately that has sometimes included the enlightenment and the ideas of the scientific method, argument from reason and evidence, protections of freedom of speech and the idea that one can consider an idea without agreeing with it or supporting it. It isn't as widespread in society as people like to think, but it is worrying to some degree that we are no longer are confident in facing down and arguing against injustices (like my grandfather did when he emigrated to segregationist Virginia in the 50s). Instead the approach is to use institutional power (the infamous "cancel culture") and social taboo as a way of enforcing a particular point of view rather than considering things on their own merits and arguing against them.
@@ENoob ...your granddad was a segregationist?
@@ENoob Segregation wasn't ended by just arguing against it, it was ended by passing laws to ban it, i.e. a pretty strong form of institutional power.
@@ENoob that’s literally completely untrue and sounds like something a loser like Jordan Peterson would say so, for the record, give me an example of some western “science” that is being rejected solely based on it being “western”. You can’t lol, I’m going to take a guess and say you literally aren’t in academia nor do you have a degree from an institution where you would even be exposed to the “science” you’re referring to. You watched a couple RUclips videos and think western civilization is under attack lol
It's weird how this is familiar to people from outside the western world, for me a 18 years old moroccan, i actually still remember "before internet" era, with cellphones being rare and exotic, and internet even rarer but today, it's quite everywhere, but i could say that before 2020, having a stable connection to internet, and/or a computer was still considered somewhat exotic
I was about to comment that, if you were born in a poorer place a lot of these practices really didn’t change much until the 2010s at the earliest
It’s been interesting to see how I’ve noticed this as an American. When I first used the internet in the late 90s, it was mainly other Americans.
Speaking to a Canadian back then was considered really cool. Then in the 2000s you started to meet people from Europe and Australia. Now you can talk to almost anyone from any nation. It’s really expanded our cultural horizons in a way that seemed impossible back in the 90s.
Nice, I was a July 15, 88 baby. Loved the 90s, and love your content lol!! No wonder we seem to have things in common xD 😎 def going to check out the book. AND BRO WORD MUNCHERS WAS THE BEST! I, too, was the "computer kid", in fact my Dad used to do maintenance on my class computers as a side gig as he worked for IBM back then. And we had engineers in my family that built computers. I though I was cool. Oh and chat rooms was the BEST! Stayed in yahoo chats all the time especially the EDM chats where they played music religiously. THE BEST.
Growing up in the early 2000's wasn't super radically different for me as physical music, video stores, land lines, and learning to type in the computer lab at school were still in full affect. I would say the major difference is that the internet was more established and everyone understood at least the basics of email and using a search engine.
I never really thought of my parents as especially wealthy, we lived in a 2bd/1ba apartment, but I was definitely lucky to have access to a computer and internet fairly early on because my dad works in the computer component industry.
I remember learning how to use a C prompt, needing multiple floppy disks to install a single game, getting annoyed at a glitchy game and deleting all the DLL files (it worked after that, but I couldn't save), weird computer-animated videos explaining the World Wide Web and email, Netscape, formatting those free AOL floppy disks they sent in the mail for reuse, the excitement of talking to strangers in real time in chatrooms, waiting an hour to download a single song on Napster, and of course fighting with my mom about who got to use the phone line since all internet was dial-up, to name a few.
Oh, and unfortunately I remember life before auto-save. I have shed so many tears over term papers lost to power surges and, one time, bumping the power button on the computer tower with my knee.
And I will continue typing two spaces after my periods until I die, I don't care that computers have made the practice unnecessary.
EDIT: Ohh!! Remember Shockwave Flash and Newgrounds? That was an aesthetic.
People don’t still type two spaces after a period? 😳
Wait, why was the two spaces ever necessary?
I never had to use floppies myself (thank god) but I remember my grandfather had a big ass case full of them in all sorts of different colors, I remember numerous times where the computer shat the bed for whatever reason and he'd have to use some of those floppy disks to fix it.
@@KaiserMattTygore927 Only one case? That's rookie numbers, my grandpa had like 4 or 5 of them.
But yea, those floppies probably had an operating system on them.
@@cameron7374 It was a holdover from typewriters, which have a bit wider spacing between the letters (kerning), and the extra space after a period helped distinguish it from a comma
I remember growing up in the late 2000s they would always tell us about how dangerous it was to talk to strangers on "chat rooms." Turns out their Internet safety info was nearly a decade out of date and me and my classmates had no idea what a "chat room" even was. I never even visited one until I was in college and that was a weird experience indeed.
Isn't it still dangerous to talk to strangers on social media nowadays?
@@yokelengleng Yes, but the choice of terminology has changed which rendered the safety rule confusing. How it was oddly specific. Not just talking with strangers can be dangerous it had to specify the platform.
You never used Omegle or Chat Roulette back then? I used to love talking to random people on those when I was a teen in the late 00s
I was born in 85. I remember these times pretty well. I remember a friend of mines brother who was a couple years older then us would constantly be on the internet and keep the phone lines hostage. So we would pic up the phone and repeatedly smashing the button on the receiver. Which would kick his brother off the internet. We would hear him screaming from the basement and we would die laughing.
As someone who grew up in the 2000s, it only hit me relatively recently that the 90s was not just a few years ago. I just grew up in that frame of mind, and it took FOREVER to move on and finally recognize the 90s as its own distinct era in my mind.
(Also, lowkey surprised J.J. didn't get even a flip-phone or something while in Japan, since they were so damn popular there back then, lol)
While I went through primary education between 1998-2010, I still experienced a lot of the old way and new way things were done. My teachers stressed how important it was to write out an essay and we learned cursive but they wanted all our reports and essays typed out and printed. I got to experience renting movies and games but I didn't grow too attached to the idea other than the chance to try out a game before buying it.
I without question think that writing by hand is very important...what are you going to do when the lights go out...and done come on again for a decade? Which is what is going to happen when there is a solar storm and 90 % of the U.S. die off in the first few days? Welcome to me not being able to sleep at night. Good luck though! 😂
We must be the same age because I graduated in 2010. I’ve had these same experiences too!
As someone who grew up in the 80s and 90s, I found this to be one of your most enjoyable videos.
It's impressive how many details you remember!
I remember in '96 my 2nd grade teacher punished me for lying because "no one has 2 computers in their home." it was a wild concept then but my parents saved up to get a computer right before I was born. Then 8 years later they got a full color computer with a mouse and a windows operating system. It's so sereal to look back at.
"He's Joking. Nobody has 2 television sets."
Too funny. That’s because computers were expensive! We bought our first, a Hewlett-Packard Packard, in ‘97 for $2500!
I like to call the decade "The Long Afternoon". Because it reminded me of a long sunny, slow and relaxed summer afternoon and evening.
Slow-paced, no big worries, the world was just a wide open "global village" that finally had moved on from the Cold War.
Tech was also better than the 70s and 80s, but it wasn't ALL OVER THE D@MN PLACE. I used my first Mac in 1991, my first PC in 1994 got the internet (AOL) in 1995. Digital cable came around 1998. Streamed my first video in 1999, and dreamed of the "future" promised on shows like Beyond 2000, Beyond Tomorrow, Next Step and Cnet TV.
I even miss all of the New Age music that was popular back then!
It was my life from 12-22, and I could not have asked for a better time to have lived that age range.
😐 that means we're now in the long twilight 😐
That's a rather nice way to describe the decade. Most of my memories during that time were riding my bike or rollerblading to my friend's houses to knock on their door asking if they could come out to play. Or laying beneath trees eating popsicles on hot summer days and travelling to the nearest park. Waking up early in the morning or racing home as fast as I could as to catch Pokémon as it started airing. Playing Mario, Donkey Kong, or Zelda when we finally got a hand me down Nintendo system. The 90s felt like the perfect intersection of early technology and pre technology living. As you put it, slow-paced living.
I do wonder if this viewpoint of the 90s is kind of similar to how people view the Edwardian era in a similar rose tinted way due to the juxtaposition of what came after. For context, the Edwardian era in Britain is remembered very much like a long summer with tea on the lawn being the distinct cultural memory that defines that period due to how brutal WW1 that came shortly after was. I do wonder if the 90s is viewed similarly due to the juxtaposition of 9/11 and the war on terror and what it went on to entail in the 2000s. I'm not saying that the view is necessarily wrong of course, but we do have a tendency to gloss over the bad that happened during that time period, like for instance the world was not entirely peaceful, the Yugoslav wars spanned the entire decade and beyond.
@@captainweekend5276 it's an interesting analogy, although I doubt we will reach again such low points as in WW1 or WW2, but still, anything can change. I find it interesting because the era known as Belle Epoque wasn't that "belle" for many countries at war between 1871 and 1914, and the 90s, that usually are regarded as the calm before the storm, had had two of the most horrendous genocides of modern times (Bosnia and Rwanda).
@@celebalert5616 Nah. The description is just an analogy. No time is as bad as it seems when you are in the middle of it.
My mother, who graduated early 90’s always tells me stories of her calling a friend who lived 40 minutes down town and them peeling off to go to a random 24 hr breakfast cafe.
It’s crazy to me because the level of control she wanted over our lives was so far from the liberty she had, even if she sometimes had to sneak out for it.
I tried to give my kids as much liberty as I could get away with... and found that the laws might not have changed, but Child Welfare didn't care, and interpreted them differently. The compromise? they got cellphones in middle school, with the caveat that if they had no charge, or had no phone, they were to return home and stay there!
Now, they literally demand helicopter parenting... even when the courts tell them to back the bleep off.
@@WilliamHostman helicopter moms legislated helicoptering.
@@WilliamHostman I feel this. I wanted to be a free-range parent, but after leaving my kids alone for less than 10 minutes, playing in an inch deep creek (inside a gated community) and returning to find police had been called by a neighbor... Well, let's just say I'm much more paranoid about nosy people than actual danger.
@@ryannewman3676 Not in Alaska - Office of Children's Services doesn't act upon law, but upon their own overreaches of the extant law. The courts have not been kind, and often are NOT upholding the OCS decisions process.
As a 2001 kid I guess I just barely missed this era. When it comes to the technology what I would say is that it feels like I grew up in this transition period where things were not so new as to be completely foreign, but not really fully grasping and getting my hands on them until later than kids born in the 2010's did/are. For example, I got my first computer pretty young, maybe four or five, and I was aware that the internet was a thing because my parents had it on their computer. What I didn't know was the full scope of what the internet was capable of, for two reasons. First, my mom was the only one to use the internet on that computer early on and she only really used it to read forums and check the e-mail, so this was my impression of what the internet was for. Second, my computer was in my room and didn't have a built in wi-fi card so I had no way of hooking up to it even if I wanted to, and thus wasn't able to explore and discover at all.
The first time I think I really got my hands on the internet would've been in school in the computer labs you mentioned, and it was really eye openning. Meanwhile at home I would watch dvds, play disc-based computer games, and use microsoft office for school stuff on my computer. Eventually my parents got me a usb wi-fi antenna for my birthday, I don't remember exactly which but if must have been around 8-10, and it was at this point that it became open season. I think the interesting thing to take out of this is when I first got on the internet, and subsequently when I was first able to freely explore it at my leisure, my general tech literacy was much high than your generation's would have been at the same age(on average). I think a similar thing can be said about 2010's kids when it come to "smart device" tech literacy in comparison to my peers and I.
To remark on a few other things, my grandparents tried to get me to learn how to type and I was never having it, I still don't know how to type "properly" to this day. Also, I still remember going to blockbusters for rentals and taking out VHS tapes from the library, with the latter maybe being more shocking, I don't know. Another thing is that I when I was younger I feel there was still more of an emphasis on going outisde and playing/meeting up with friends which slowly transitioned to interacting online as I grew up, which I feel is more of the default for the kids now.
Interesting things to think about and reflect upon, thanks for another great video JJ!
I agree with everything you said, my famoly computer when I was 4 had Windows 95 or Xp, so I had access to the internet and everything it was capable of. At 4 you don't really explore beyond your interests and back then internet was too slow for videos.
Flat-screen TV's still kinda confuse me though, when I was 8 my dad dropped what was definitely a really small 50lbs TV on his foot and almost broke his foot. The shrinking of TV's and how quick that happened is amazing.
My dad was also a delivery driver in the 90s and I am today so comparing how we navigated and interacted with people is always interesting.
My mom is from Japan so we did spend alot of time growing up, so hearing about air travel in August 31 2001 vs 2 days after is always just confusing. No scanner? Don't need a passport to go to the US? No Metal detectors or body scans?
I think even though we were born in this transition phase, because of the capabilities of computers back then, how quickly it changed; it seems natural but incredible.
Children today have no clue what it is to be a kid and I fear I may be of the last generation of kids to have what I consider a normal childhood and of course I am biased but I would hope that any sane person could see it from my point of view. I was born in 1991 and when we were growing up we went outside everyday it was nice enough to be out and really we went outside most days it wasn't nice enough to be out lol. We went and played in the snow we ran around in the sprinklers in the summer we caught bugs in jars and we ran around barefoot we knocked on the neighbors doors and asked if so and so could come out to play we literally went outside as soon as morning started probably about 8 am and we didn't come back in until the street lights came on which was like 9-10 pm we played and interacted with real living humans in person and we grew and learned together we formed relationships and friendships we learned trust and deceit we learned to get along we learned to fight we learned how to stand up for ourselves and when to run away from a situation if you were too scared to face it or felt threatened. Point being is we interacted socially in person face to face and it made me a better person today and man am I fucking grateful that I had the childhood I did because today I watch my nieces and nephews and they are just selfish slobs that stare at these dumb bright rectangles in their hands all day and they keep their headphones in and never talk and even if they are in a room full of people they are completely alone and that is fucked up. I have literally never once seen my niece go out and play in the snow or go out and play with any other kids all they do is sit on their phones it is sad and I think one day when they grow up they will realize that they let their childhoods pass them by and it is going to be a soul crushing horrible moment in their lives. Imagine this, the technology of today is focused towards making kids feel like they are important and part of something it helps them feel like they are adults but the truth is you have your whole life to be an adult but you really only got like a solid ten years to be a kid and then it's all over and that is sad because the day you realized you traded your childhood for ten extra years of this pain and misery we call adult society is going to be a hard day to wash down. Anyway buddy good on you for getting out and living your life your post really resonated with me and I'm pretty sure you just caught the tail end of the good normal childhood and you and I brother are a dying breed.
I'm also a 2001 kid, but I didn't have a computer at such a young age. I would occasionally use my parent's computers, until I got a kindle with internet access for my 11th birthday. I became very tech-literate very quickly. By the time I was 13, I built my first PC, and started using Linux full-time. I taught my little brother how to do sysadmin stuff, and now he manages servers for a living.
A big difference I've noticed between me, and other people my age who started using technology from a younger age, is that I generally have a more pessimistic and negative view towards technology. I don't own a smartphone, and I always prefer to do things physically/in-person as much as possible. I think a lot of this has to do with how I started using the internet at the same time Edward Snowden released his leaks about the NSA's surveillance.
@@HughJassole420 damn yo. 1992 born hear and i relate so much. Always tell people we are literally the last of the old world. Hey we are still out here. Love and respect!!!!
... You're hitting some good notes Here... I remember word munchers, there was only half as many computers as students in the class so we had to share... But yes there was one with a color screen and everybody wanted...
calling the video store in advance... Especially if you're looking for something specific that was not a new release, approaching the year 2000 new releases they would have twenty or Thirty copies... But if you wanted something unique yeah there was only one copy up in that house..
Something you left out that I vividly remember.. every town had a radio station with disc jockeys who were in the studio it was live broadcast, that's how we got a lot of the community information as youth from the radio broadcast it all day everyday.. sure there was the early morning news or the evening news on tv which was geared for adults when they got home from work but if you wanted to keep up-to-date you listen to a radio.... and sometimes the information be provided by callers calling into the radio oh, just an alert there's a horrible accident on the Highway everybody slow down find an alternate route... or calling in to request a song and send a special message to your crush live on the radio... And yes a few times I nearly became injured running to the telephone... Because I knew the answer to the question asked on the radio and I was sure as hell going to be the first caller with the right answer!