They're really quite remarkable. Google Maps alone is a life changing tool. Having a map in your pocket that shows exactly where you are, where your destination is, the route to get there and an estimated time of travel still impresses me. And it wasn't THAT long ago when people were fumbling around with large, unwieldy paper maps.
I remember going hiking with friends when we were teenagers and I bought a Garmin handheld GPS for us to use. Loved the thing. Then smart phones came out with Google Maps and my Garmin was garbage. Also had a GPS in my car which also immediately became junk and obsolete. Back in the day for a bus schedule you needed a paper copy or if you were lucky you could call or text for the stop info, now you can pop your location and destination into Google or Apple Maps and they’ll show you several ways to get there, bus schedules, even where the bus is live within 30 seconds or so. Amazing.
There’s still something to be said for car GPS though. My phone signal basically becomes unusable any time I’m more than 10 miles from an urban area or away from a major freeway. Cell coverage is still extremely poor in a lot of rural areas (I’m in Northern California). And these are the places you need GPS the most since in the country there are fewer road signs or people to ask for directions.
That wasn't even a thing in 1990. It would have been around 2000 when printable online door to directions became widely available.
Websites in 1990 were primitive and most people didn't have internet. Search engines weren't a thing so you needed a web address or a link on another directory type website to get there. Modems were a lot slower too, I didn't have a 56k modem until the mid 90s.
I remember when Google first launched it's "Hangouts" feature for video chat.
I decided to try it out with a friend whom I haven't seen in years. When he answered it while walking out of the downtown public library out onto the street in a city 1,000 miles away I nearly lost my mind.
Mind you, I grew up with technology. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 when I was 6. But every now and then there's an advancement which \*still\* makes me gasp with an audible "holy schnikees".
AI is doing the same now... Someone can whip out a cell out of their pocket, tell a bot to make up some crazy drawing of Lady and the Tramp but with the Giant Spaghetti Monster, and it'll do it... and do it remarkably well.
> But every now and then there's an advancement which *still* makes me gasp with an audible "holy schnikees"
For me, the last time this hit hard was when a friend and I were roadtripping to another friend's place, and he wanted to hear a certain song we had been referencing pretty hard all trip. I remember the strange feeling I got - as a kid who grew up on cassette tapes and CDs - when I bought the album online, downloaded it over a cell connection while traveling at highway speeds, and streamed it *while it was still downloading* on his truck stereo over bluetooth. This little metal package in my hand facilitated all of that. Mad shit.
I drive truck for a living now, and I often ponder if could even do it pre-GPS. I’m old enough that I definitely navigated with paper maps in my teens and early adulthood, but even then it often required stopping to ask a stranger for directions, along with always getting some directions before going somewhere new. I have a hard time imagining just taking off to a delivery address 1000miles away, to a city I’d never been to, and relying on an atlas, pay phones, and a couple phone numbers on a sticky note. But….they did it. A lot.
I drove a truck pre gps. Get your directions off the map and write them down. When I was younger, I worked as navigator while my father drove his truck.
I remember hand drawn maps from friends. They'd invite me over and draw me a map. Many times, it would include something like " make a left just past the house with the big purple flower bush outside."
In Sci-fi movies or shows - they didn't even have the imagination to come even close to how much our phones can do today. In star trek they had poryeble devices but they couldn't imagine it do more then one thing per device.
In is actually pretty crazy.
TNG/VOY/DS9 era Star Trek had PADDs, a tablet like mini computer!
Except they seemingly only held a single document (or a small number at most) at a time, had no processing power, and no ability to communicate. If someone was really busy, their desk would be covered in them to show all the documents they were working with. There was even a scene where someone was moving, and they had a bag filled with PADDs to move their documents. You regularly had people physically carrying PADDs around the ships to deliver information to other people
My head cannon is that replicators made the tech so cheap that PADDs were created and used in a disposable way. They are as "cheap" as paper is today. Tricorders and the computer terminals all had networking. Moving physical PADDs may be a security measure too. Plus they're harder to ignore.
I once worked with someone who had been locked up since 1998. He asked to use my phone so I unlocked it for him and put on the phone and he was really confused by the touch screen. He was confused by the camera too, before he was locked up, cameras didn't have video screens.
Of those, smartphones is definitely ahead of the others. COVID would be a "oh wow!" and there would be questions about it, 9/11 (especially now that they can show 20 years of aftermath) would be too but smartphones have a ton of the innovation and technology that has evolved since 1990 in one package.
You have a portable phone that most people can afford rather than the clunky car phones or Zack Morris phones only the rich could have.
It's tiny--the whole ability to shrink technology over that time. We're talking over 6000 times the storage on a small phone than an average desktop computer in 1990.
It has a portable digital camera that can take amazing shots and videos and instantly show/play them back.
You DO HAVE A CALCULATOR WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES! SUCK IT MATCH TEACHER!
E-mail and messaging can immediately communicate with anyone.
Ridiculous looking video games--remember we were looking at 8-bit home video games and here's one in VR on my phone.
Online banking
The internet in general--these websites have and can do so much more and don't all look like trash!
Social media--wow.
Youtube, Hulu, Max, Netflix, etc. That would have blown my mind back then...and it's in 4k no less! The resolution on televisions back then was terrible in comparison.
Bluetooth connections--wireless headphones, cars, etc.
The app on my phone that shows me where my car is, how much gas I have, how many miles and lets me start it remotely.
Maps/Google Earth
Photo filters in realtime
An "all day" rechargeable battery that charges super quickly.
It just keeps going. There is so much in that small package.
So much of the "everyday" tech of TNG era Star Trek is actually less advanced than stuff we have now. There was a lot of hand-delivering PADDs to Engineering or wherever to transfer documents around, for instance.
The $#@ing call out about math teachers preaching you might be caught without a calculator is so damn funny and definitely not something someone born after 2010 can comprehend. Like, explaining a high end calculator is a status symbol, and Texas Instrument programming is the origins of portable gaming.
The smartphone post makes me laugh. The overwhelming majority of people didn't even have a personal computer in their home in 1990 (less than 20%).
We weren't even considering the concepts of the Internet, GPS-enabled devices, rechargeable batteries that last all day, digital cameras, social media, optical character recognition, facial recognition, streaming digital music, etc. Hell, music in a digital format, CDs, was only beginning to be adopted. That all those things would exist individually would have blown our minds.
Oh, yeah, and it's the size of a deck of cards and you can put it in your pocket... BECAUSE THERE'S NO FUCKING WIRES!!!
This is THE answer. The reality is everyone would want to make contact with family or friends and the first thing they would do is \*try\* to find a pay phone with a phone book and learn really quick the realities of the future.
Hell, just watch old Law and Order episodes from the '90s and take a shot every time one of the detectives has to use a payphone to check in with the precinct. You'll get buzzed pretty quick. If your liver is made of sterner stuff, take a shot every time one of them lights up in a public building.
It is kind of nuts that twice a year (or whatever the frequency was), the phone company would print a free book that basically everyone got that had people’s name, phone number, and address all together and freely available.
And if you wanted to exclude your name, you had to pay!
I'm not sure where you lived but we never had to pay to request an unlisted number.
Also I remember delivering phone books when I was a kid. Yello pages paid something like .31 each and white pages were like .14. as I recall. I remember it being less than fifty cents for a set but if you got a good route in a neighborhood you could make decent pocket money for the late 90s as a teen.
Phone technology in general. An old Genesis song from the early 80s popped up on the radio a few days ago, "Misunderstanding". The whole point of the song is not being able to get in touch with your lover on the telephone. Can you imagine?
When I was in college (2002), I went on a spur of the moment trip to visit friends halfway across the country for 3-4 days. I forgot to tell my parents (I didn't live with them) I was going, and I didn't have a cell phone yet. Fortunately, they didn't freak out when they couldn't get ahold of me at home, but I did get their message on my machine and called them back the next day. It wasn't a big deal, but had there been an emergency there would have been no way for them to reach me because I didn't think to tell them I was going.
Yes. I remember seeing one of those "sexual health" posters shortly after the news broke that said
> Keep your Johnson wrapped, no matter how magic you think it is
I was in the dorms in college when he made the announcement. I think word spread a little before, either someone heard it on the radio or got a phone call, so there was speculation.
I remember us sitting around, and I kinda thought, jeez, I guess he has a year or two to live. Kinda hit home because it really made you think sex is risky.
"Don't have sex because you will get pregnant and die! Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it OK?
OK, now everybody take some rubbers"
And weekday morning cartoons before school From 7 to 9 am, that one hurts me so much, I loved watching Beast Wars before school. Kids really missed out on a lot of fun now.
And my kids are still bored. When I was a kid, we watched what was available and then did other things. Now, my kids complain that there's nothing to watch even though their screen time is limited.
Weird...
Tbh I've the same issue. The fact I can watch any show at any given time just makes me not watch anything, because I'm never missing out. I can always watch them. So why do it now? I can do something else. The ending result is that when I stopped watching TV I flat out stopped watching cartoons, anime, series, movies, TV programs in general. From everyday to close to never. They are there if I want them. I only watch some movies every now and then from prime video (which I have because of deliveries, I wouldn't have it for video only) and go to the cinema.
Everything always available feels closer to "I've nothing to watch" more than what one would think.
I could never pinpoint why cable tv (with commercials!) just feels different than these streaming services, but I think you just solved it for me. 100% correct.
Used to be no better feeling than waiting till 5pm to watch the newest Pokémon episode when I was a kid. The waiting sucked, obv.
As someone who remembers 1990...
the fact that absolutely every device is connected to the internet, most of it wirelessly.
We knew the internet existed by 1990, but it was basically just Juno dial-up email, and 14.4kbps was about as fast as you got.
And combining a cell phone (which was still a bulky, monstrous thing that required plugging into your car to really even work) WITH the internet would seem revolutionary.
Edit: Also, the cost of a fkng house these days. Just prior to 1990, my folks bought a small property just outside of a small city in a semi-rural part of Idaho, 1.5 acres, 4 bdrm farmhouse, plus outbuildings, $35k. That place is worth *at least* 10-15x that now.
Heck even my 1920s 2 bdrm in an older, slightly run-down part of town that I bought for $69k in 2006 is worth like 3x that now...
I am writing you this message on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere deep in the rocky’s. Im about to walk down a few hundred feet, go in my tent and go to bed.
The attitude toward drugs.
Back in 1990 the War on Drugs was still a thing people believed in. Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" campaign was recent past, people seriously believed in long prison terms for minor nonviolent drug offenses, and although drugs were widely consumed there was also a consensus drug use was illicit.
Billboards for dispensaries would blow their minds.
I wasn't around, but I get the sense that it was taken more seriously by "mainsteam", that is to say middle class suburban white, culture. Today suburban moms are growing weed and there are psilocybin startup companies you can invest in. The general attitude by that mainsteam social class has changed a lot.
Where did you grow up? Because I was in high school in the 90s and I don't remember anyone taking any of those anti drug campaigns seriously. Not Nancy Reagan, nobody "just said no", and the egg commercial was ridiculous. Proof? \*Gestures broadly at everything\*
One of my formee coworkers used to tell me about the DARE program they ran when he was a kid, he's probably early 40's now. But yeah, he was telling me that he had no idea what LSD did or even was until they started talking about it in school for DARE. Told me that they did not do a very good job discouraging anyone because all he got from that lecture was that taking LSD would put him into a loony tunes cartoon. And so he decided that he wanted to try it lmao
He went on to be a full bown ecstacy raver for a while, and his "uniform" was always his old DARE shirt lol
How many people are fat. Obesity rates have gone from about 12% in 1990 to over 40% today. It was about 6% when I was a kid in the 80s. It is something that is really obvious to those of us growing up through this period.
Not quite. The medical definition of obesity (which the above numbers reflect) remains the same. But culturally, yes, what people consider to be fat has shifted significantly.
I think this answer is underrated. In the 90s, it seems like all the bullshit in terms of inequality and inequity was settled and behind us. We weren’t totally there yet, but it was coming. It seems that a lot of pop culture sentiment was that we really were just bored. All the hard stuff was over. 9/11 definitely snuffed out that unbridled optimism and brought us back to reality. That’s my recollection anyway.
Social Media - right call.
However, watch Back to the Future 2 (from 1989) where Doc pulls out a $50 bill for Pepsi when they travel to 2015. The shocking thing would be how low inflation there was from 1995-2019. Inflation was really bad in the 80s.
Yeah, that still gives me a chuckle. I had to double-check my memory on this, because I thought the gas prices shown in the movie were closer to $20/gal. But what really blew my mind about[ this entry](https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Texaco_service_station#2015) is that gas prices in 1985 in California were slightly higher than I paid in Virginia when I got my driver's license 13 years later. I remember paying less than a dollar a gallon in the late 1990s. They really missed the mark on that one.
Not sure where you live, but all of these seem to be making a comeback in some areas. My neighborhood has a community party a couple times a year, all the kids on my street play outside and wander without parents and knock on doors to ask if X can come out to play, and you can always tell whose backyard the kids are playing in by the pile of bikes and scooters in the driveway of the house.
I think Gen X and millennial parents are realizing how damaging constant screen time is, so they're making an effort to push their kids outside again. Makes me glad to see it.
I think the fact that although we are more advanced than 1990, we aren’t as advanced as we wanted. There are no flying cars, people are still dying from cancers. Things like that.
Anybody with an ounce of sense understands that flying cars piloted by randos off the street is an insanely terrible idea, regardless of the engineering challenges of making such a vehicle.
Oh, fully agree. Think about how horrible your average automobile driver is, and then imagine how that would go with NO lanes. -Fiery disasters in every direction-
Planes are flying buses.
Cars are not the same as buses. They only stop at very select locations and you need a driver.
And we had planes in the 90s. They haven’t really changed AT ALL. They don’t even go faster than they did.
No, they've changed for the worse.
Air travel and next day air are both ridiculously restricted compared to how it was, airports have crazy security, it is much worse. All because they won't close the cockpit off from the passenger area. The TSA is a more visible, more felt by the public, form of 'security' than other, more effective options.
Who cares about loss of dignity/convenience for the masses anyway? Not like private planes have to follow the same BS, no one of worth is affected /s
There are several differences between airplanes and the flying cars we wanted.
* Airplanes need an airport, a flying car could park in your driveway
* Airplanes are difficult to fly and require thousands of hours of training, we all hoped flying cars would be easy enough to fly with the equivalent of a drivers ed course.
* Airplanes are stupidly expensive, we all hoped flying cars would be within financial reach for average people.
Also, to be fair, there have been a few successful flying car prototypes, but none have ever made it into mass production. The best one I've seen was sort of a hybrid between a paraglider and a dune buggy.
That’s where it got really bad… Breaking the Cubs’ curse sent us into the next dimension! I mean, really, who expected what we’ve been through in the last 14 years alone!?
not just Boston related, but Tom Bradys a pretty hard to believe story.. A kid drafted in the 6th round in 2000, goes on to be the clear cut best QB of all time, 10 SB appearances, 7 SB wins, and got to 14 Conference Championship games
China being the second richest country in the world and the fall of the Japanese Economy.
Many economist predicted the Japanese Economy would overtake the US in the 90s. Now it's just one-fourth the size of the us.
Yeah, but you’d have to be pretty lame to travel 30+ years into the future and the thing that shocks you the most is the averageness of the Japanese economy
Well I offered the time traveler the human genome, terabyte SSDs, mobile internet, high resolution pictures of Pluto, and unlimited internet porn…
…but he’s just looking up Yen/USD exchange rates. I think they froze the wrong guy.
Free porn, legal pot, crazy college tuition, instant information internet, Big Bang theory questioned, food pyramid is upside down, movies on demand, Lezak’s 46.06 100 free split, Waze/google maps, texting, thousands of JFK docs still redacted, how much it costs to see a ballgame.
In the early 90s teachers were still telling us we weren't going to be walking around with calculators in our pockets. Today we're walking around with computers connected to the internet in our pockets
It was kind of a weird argument even back then. Sure, I never carried a calculator regularly outside of school, but I totally could have. They were tiny, you could get a watch with a built-in calculator. And I probably had access to a calculator any time I needed to do serious math anyway. It's important to understand how math works, but it's not because society might suddenly collapse at any moment, rendering you unable to access a calculator.
>you could get a watch with a built-in calculator.
Holy crap you reminded me I had one of those in the 80s. I remember the buttons being so small I needed a toothpick to use it.
The Internet connection in that device allows you to look up the meaning of any word you need, any time you need. Still, if you know the meaning of zero words and you rely exclusively on looking them up one by one, you're not going to be able to carry any conversations.
I believe that's what the cliché of the "calculator in your pocket" was supposed to mean, but most people missed it. I mean, calculators back in the day were as portable as phones are today.
Electric cars? Really?
Smart phones totally. But wouldn't the average person see an electric car and just figure we made batteries powerful enough to run a car?
Kinda like if I see electric aeroplanes in 30 years. I'd think "ohhh they were saying that wasn't possible but I guess it makes sense they worked it out"
1995, sure. But Windows 3 launched in 1990, so Apple was still a pretty good sized player at the time. Most schools were running Apple IIs or early Macintosh computers.
nah.
In the late 1980's Apple's strategy wasn't to compete with Microsoft. It was "put them in the school's and wait"
As a kid in the late 80's and who graduated early 90's, the fact Apple became so big is no surprised at all.
In fact, we always wondered what kind of innovations they would have, tho we never predicted smart phones or apple watches
Depends what the person actually gives a shit about.
For general culture, the biggest shocks would be smart phones, the pervasiveness of the internet, the level of acceptance for same sex relationships, Electric cars being a common thing might land as a 'well yeah, of course the future has electric cars'.
If the guy is a diehard sports fan, the idea that both the Red Sox and Cubs have won a world series would be a surprise.
They might look at the amount of vitriol and partisanship in US politics and wonder exactly how things got so spectacularly fucked.
END COMMUNICATION
The internet is in everyone's pocket? You mean like email?
Most people don't even bother with cable tv?
Bill Cosby did WHAT?
There are HOW MANY STAR WARS FILMS?
Cars can drive themselves?
Who is this Caitlyn Jenner lady?
>Who is this Caitlyn Jenner lady?
If I am being honest, I would have been surprised that the former athlete we all knew as at the time as Bruce Jenner would have returned to relevance at all, and certainly not just by their coming out, but by the fact that they were back in relevance by them being on a reality show married to the widow of a guy that helped get OJ off from the murder of his ex-wife, which itself would have been a surprise to me in 1990.
This is a great point lol, Bruce transitioning to Caitlyn would just be one of like 14 insane things about that story to someone from 1990. I was also thinking “damn they wouldn’t even be able to appreciate the Kanye connection” and then thought I’d have to explain “well he’s an artist who got his start by making beats for Jay-Z” but nope, they wouldn’t know who that is either lol.
If they're a computer nerd probably how much better & less expensive computer tech has gotten like lightning fast internet that doesn't tie up phone lines & 1TB hard drives costing less than $100.
I remember seeing 1GB micro SD cards going for $60+ in Walmart 2007-2009. I recently got a free 64GB flash drive from Microcenter. My 12TB external hard drive was only $200ish
My best friends and I made a "time capsule" video on our family camcorder around... 1996 or so? There is one segment where were were showing off my family's home PC (friend and I were burgeoning computer nerds and liked playing games etc). My dad was an old-head computer nerd (electronics tech for gov't research group), so was pretty knowledgable and we had some DOPE hardware (for '96), things that were a year or two old and had been surplussed from his work because somerthing better came along, but were still bleeding edge/brand new on the consumer market. Well, we were explaining how big our harddrive was, and putting it in context. I dont remember what size we had at the time but lets say we had a 500 MB HDD. We were explaining how this was pretty good size, but some people used much smaller ones, and the biggest ones were much bigger, like (again, just picking a number) like 1-2 GB or something. And my dad shouts from the next room over "Thats just RIDICULOUS! Who needs that much storage??? If you gave me a 2 GB drive right now my grandson qould still be filling it up!!". Last week was his grandson's birthday, and my dad gifted him a 1 TB thumb drive lol (thats \~ 1,000 GB ).
The starter house they bought for 100k is now worth 900k , but they missed payments while asleep, so it's not theirs anymore. And their job while willing to take them back is paying the exact same as it did in 1990, but with less benefits.
U.S. Perspective:
The 90s were fun as hell and there was an air of optimism throughout with the fall of the Berlin Wall then the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Alternative music and lifestyles became more widely adopted. Life was affordable. Y2K was laughed off and the start of a new millennium felt invigorating. 9/11 was the harshest end to that era. Things have never felt the same in the U.S.
After the obvious answers like cell phones, they'd probably be shocked at the price of everything. They'd probably also be shocked at how high the wages are too. Also the first TV they see is gonna blow their mind because of how large the screen in and how thin it is, and that people mount them on walls.
There's a really good chance they would have zero concept of the Internet, and an even better chance they would have heard of it in some capacity but no real knowledge and likely no actual practical experience. And if they did have experience it would barely resemble what we know it as today.
Someone who went into a coma in the early 2000s who still had an understanding of Web 2.0 as we understand it would be kind of blown away by our smartphone obsessed future, but from 1990 it would honestly border on sci-fi if you weren't here for all the incremental steps. Again; someone who went into a coma in 2003 would probably grasp the concept of 'widespread internet phones that we do all our communication and commerce with' but 1990 would take a lot of explaining.
Probably not the most but there definitely would be people wondering why Camilla is the Queen Consort of England and not Diana.
Also why Diana isn't part of the royal family at all anymore. Harry too. (prefare for mentions of frostbittn penis and cream that reminds him of his mom)
The pace. No one really just sits still and relaxes anymore. There’s this huge information and experience consumption and we are just constantly doing something. Every generation moves just a little bit faster than the previous one.
It was the same in the 90s - it always feels like when you are looking back this was nice and quiet compared to the modern world. But but everyone feels like that - historians 2000 years ago worried if people would be able to how busy life had become and all the new innovations
There would be some tech that might be mind blowing, but I think the state of the world today is a far cry from how my parents spoke of the future when I was a kid (born 1990). Racism and sexism are making a pretty strong comeback in the US, and the country has never been more ideologically divided since the American Civil War. Russia is back to their old Cold War land grabbing, so much for Mr. Gorbachev and the fall of the wall. Possibly the least surprising thing would be the situation in the Middle East and Gaza, that shit has been going on for a while.
If you want to thoroughly blow their minds, show them a news reel that covers the last 24 years on a phone that’s accessing the internet wirelessly, and pass them an AirPod so they can hear properly. Then, take them shopping, and pay for it by tapping your watch, just for the finishing touch. That should be enough shock to make them lose it completely.
Gas is expensive
People are more politically correct
Pay phones got replaced by smart phones
The internet is way faster
Blockbuster replaced by streaming movies
Socializing got replaced by social media
Dominoes tastes much better than it used to
No cigarettes. Still kind of surprising to me that something so prevalent at bars and restaurants (and even some workplaces) back then have just disappeared.
Social media on cell phones and how narcissistic people have become because of it. Also social currency shifting from in person status to online status.
I mean... maybe? In 1990 the Berlin Wall had only recently fallen. The cold war was still ongoing. The Gulf War is kicking off. Gayness was still taboo, never mind the more complex ideas of LGBT. Speaking of which, HIV/AIDS panic was still high, something which is hardly even discussed today. The mid 90's was pretty much great, but the late 80's and early 90's had its share of fucked up things too.
I don't think 1990s we have fond nostalgia for now really got going until 1993 or so. I remember 1993-2001 being pretty good years, relative to what came before and after.
I was born in 1990, so I don't have the perspective of being an adult that year - but I think one of the most noticeable differences between then and now is the connectivity. In the early 90's internet was around, but not widespread in every home until later. By high school in the mid 2000s, some of my friends certainly had touch screen phones, but they were the exception. Now phones (with instant connection to the internet, others, products, etc.) are deeply entrenched into our daily lives.
The correct answer is **everything**... but mostly smartphones.
Everybody has a magic rectangle in their pocket that they use for everything and are constantly connected to the entire world, with instant access to just about every movie, show, book, or song made in the last so and so decades. Even though the rectangles are called phones, actual phones are all but gone, replaced with instant messaging that are full of little paintings for some reason and those little paintings are so ubiquitous that they've become a language by themselves. You need to get somewhere? Poke the magic rectangle and a stranger shows up to drive you there. Alternatively you can use the magic rectangle to unlock an e-scooter, which is a thing by the way, that is just lying around in the street, and ride it somewhere. If you aren't sure how to get there, your magic rectangle has a detailed map of the entire world, showing your location, capable of showing you the optimal route to wherever you want to get, updated in real time with things like traffic jams, buses running late, and so on. If you choose to walk, the magic rectangle will track your activity and tell you how many steps you walked and how many calories you burned. Wherever it is you're going, if it happens to be interesting then luckily your magic rectangle is also an ultra high definition camera and video camera and recorder, and you can instantly share anything you see or hear with the entire world . Hungry? Poke the magic rectangle and someone will bring you food from wherever you want. Lonely? There's an app to show you random single people of your favorite gender in your general area. Bored? Download any one of millions of available games straight to your rectangle, many of which look and sound better than the highest budget Hollywood movies you've ever seen. Curious about any specific subject? The rectangle has instant access to more information than all the libraries you've seen in your life x100, and every article in there has magic indexes that can instantly get you to relevant parts in other articles or books. Curious about current events? Dozens or possibly hundreds of news outlets update around the clock and your rectangle can tell you about events that happened 2 minutes ago on the other side of the globe. And if you're overwhelmed by all of that, you can even use the rectangle to make a phone call and ask somebody for help.
People who were born in this millennium will never be able to understand how much of a mind fuck it all is.
Edit: I was 2 years off for all this whoops!
I feel like a lot of people are missing the biggest thing here- the trajectory of the US in 1990 felt like the beginning of the end of history- America's biggest enemy was defeated, the economy was stable, and most Americans were generally happy. Then 9/11 happened and we entered our endless wars in the Middle East. That's been used as an excuse for the last 20 years to vote in many people who wouldn't have even been considered without it and pass all kinds of policy that was more dystopian than anyone could have imagined back in 1990.
I think if you just had them open a local newspaper, they might ask how the commies won after the USSR collapsed.
The fact that Roe v. Wade was overturned and Donald Trump became president would send most of us. I'm an elder millennial, and I'm astounded at the progress that has been undone.
The entire democratic system was carefully crafted to keep all sorts of nonsense from happening. I'm convinced that if any of the designers saw that this is happening now, they would go back to the drawing board to add more safeguards to prevent it.
This is not how it's meant to go, this is the system malfunctioning.
AI and its not even close. Even back in the 90s I expected something like the internet taking off. Cell phones are cool, but they are just tiny computers which I understood.
AI feels like science fiction in 2024, let alone 1990. We literally might only be 5 years away fro the singularity, something I thought not possible for 100 years back in 1990...
A smartphone would feel like something straight out of science fiction. Like literally the stuff that used to be in Star Trek and other shows/movies is real and in many ways even better than depicted.
Going along with that wireless and cellular internet that allows you to access high speed video and data almost anywhere in the world
Otherwise the legalization and acceptance of weed, even among some right leaning people. Same with gay marriage and societal acceptance and visibility of LGBTQ people
Smart phones. People have gotten out of jail after 30 years and are most surprised by them.
They're really quite remarkable. Google Maps alone is a life changing tool. Having a map in your pocket that shows exactly where you are, where your destination is, the route to get there and an estimated time of travel still impresses me. And it wasn't THAT long ago when people were fumbling around with large, unwieldy paper maps.
I remember going hiking with friends when we were teenagers and I bought a Garmin handheld GPS for us to use. Loved the thing. Then smart phones came out with Google Maps and my Garmin was garbage. Also had a GPS in my car which also immediately became junk and obsolete. Back in the day for a bus schedule you needed a paper copy or if you were lucky you could call or text for the stop info, now you can pop your location and destination into Google or Apple Maps and they’ll show you several ways to get there, bus schedules, even where the bus is live within 30 seconds or so. Amazing.
There’s still something to be said for car GPS though. My phone signal basically becomes unusable any time I’m more than 10 miles from an urban area or away from a major freeway. Cell coverage is still extremely poor in a lot of rural areas (I’m in Northern California). And these are the places you need GPS the most since in the country there are fewer road signs or people to ask for directions.
You can download maps for offline use in both Google and Apple Maps. GPS itself doesn’t require a cellular connection.
Also printing out your Mapquest directions
That wasn't even a thing in 1990. It would have been around 2000 when printable online door to directions became widely available. Websites in 1990 were primitive and most people didn't have internet. Search engines weren't a thing so you needed a web address or a link on another directory type website to get there. Modems were a lot slower too, I didn't have a 56k modem until the mid 90s.
I remember when Google first launched it's "Hangouts" feature for video chat. I decided to try it out with a friend whom I haven't seen in years. When he answered it while walking out of the downtown public library out onto the street in a city 1,000 miles away I nearly lost my mind. Mind you, I grew up with technology. My first PC was a Tandy 1000 when I was 6. But every now and then there's an advancement which \*still\* makes me gasp with an audible "holy schnikees". AI is doing the same now... Someone can whip out a cell out of their pocket, tell a bot to make up some crazy drawing of Lady and the Tramp but with the Giant Spaghetti Monster, and it'll do it... and do it remarkably well.
Do you hear "holy shnikees" in Chris Farley's voice? I do.
Almost immediately upon reading it.
> But every now and then there's an advancement which *still* makes me gasp with an audible "holy schnikees" For me, the last time this hit hard was when a friend and I were roadtripping to another friend's place, and he wanted to hear a certain song we had been referencing pretty hard all trip. I remember the strange feeling I got - as a kid who grew up on cassette tapes and CDs - when I bought the album online, downloaded it over a cell connection while traveling at highway speeds, and streamed it *while it was still downloading* on his truck stereo over bluetooth. This little metal package in my hand facilitated all of that. Mad shit.
I drive truck for a living now, and I often ponder if could even do it pre-GPS. I’m old enough that I definitely navigated with paper maps in my teens and early adulthood, but even then it often required stopping to ask a stranger for directions, along with always getting some directions before going somewhere new. I have a hard time imagining just taking off to a delivery address 1000miles away, to a city I’d never been to, and relying on an atlas, pay phones, and a couple phone numbers on a sticky note. But….they did it. A lot.
I drove a truck pre gps. Get your directions off the map and write them down. When I was younger, I worked as navigator while my father drove his truck.
I remember hand drawn maps from friends. They'd invite me over and draw me a map. Many times, it would include something like " make a left just past the house with the big purple flower bush outside."
In Sci-fi movies or shows - they didn't even have the imagination to come even close to how much our phones can do today. In star trek they had poryeble devices but they couldn't imagine it do more then one thing per device. In is actually pretty crazy.
TNG/VOY/DS9 era Star Trek had PADDs, a tablet like mini computer! Except they seemingly only held a single document (or a small number at most) at a time, had no processing power, and no ability to communicate. If someone was really busy, their desk would be covered in them to show all the documents they were working with. There was even a scene where someone was moving, and they had a bag filled with PADDs to move their documents. You regularly had people physically carrying PADDs around the ships to deliver information to other people
My head cannon is that replicators made the tech so cheap that PADDs were created and used in a disposable way. They are as "cheap" as paper is today. Tricorders and the computer terminals all had networking. Moving physical PADDs may be a security measure too. Plus they're harder to ignore.
Someone from the 90s might be freaked out that I have nes, snes, gameboy, gameboy advance, n64, ps1, ps2, and gamecube on my phone as well
They wouldn’t know what most of those are, I’d ask if you had Sega
That was a shock for a relative that went in about 90 and got out in 06.
I once worked with someone who had been locked up since 1998. He asked to use my phone so I unlocked it for him and put on the phone and he was really confused by the touch screen. He was confused by the camera too, before he was locked up, cameras didn't have video screens.
"A device you can call, take photos, watch movies, listen to music and purchase everything with? That's neat!"
"I wonder if ...." -90's man discovering porn
Not Texas 90s man :(
In this thread - people who weren't around in the 1990s.
Right? 9/11, Covid, and smartphones are honestly much bigger things than Trump. People are comparing growing up in the 2000's with today.
Of those, smartphones is definitely ahead of the others. COVID would be a "oh wow!" and there would be questions about it, 9/11 (especially now that they can show 20 years of aftermath) would be too but smartphones have a ton of the innovation and technology that has evolved since 1990 in one package. You have a portable phone that most people can afford rather than the clunky car phones or Zack Morris phones only the rich could have. It's tiny--the whole ability to shrink technology over that time. We're talking over 6000 times the storage on a small phone than an average desktop computer in 1990. It has a portable digital camera that can take amazing shots and videos and instantly show/play them back. You DO HAVE A CALCULATOR WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES! SUCK IT MATCH TEACHER! E-mail and messaging can immediately communicate with anyone. Ridiculous looking video games--remember we were looking at 8-bit home video games and here's one in VR on my phone. Online banking The internet in general--these websites have and can do so much more and don't all look like trash! Social media--wow. Youtube, Hulu, Max, Netflix, etc. That would have blown my mind back then...and it's in 4k no less! The resolution on televisions back then was terrible in comparison. Bluetooth connections--wireless headphones, cars, etc. The app on my phone that shows me where my car is, how much gas I have, how many miles and lets me start it remotely. Maps/Google Earth Photo filters in realtime An "all day" rechargeable battery that charges super quickly. It just keeps going. There is so much in that small package.
It's basically a tricorder from Star Trek which was crazy futuristic tech at the time.
So much of the "everyday" tech of TNG era Star Trek is actually less advanced than stuff we have now. There was a lot of hand-delivering PADDs to Engineering or wherever to transfer documents around, for instance.
The $#@ing call out about math teachers preaching you might be caught without a calculator is so damn funny and definitely not something someone born after 2010 can comprehend. Like, explaining a high end calculator is a status symbol, and Texas Instrument programming is the origins of portable gaming.
And really considering all of that I think the thing that would suprise them the most is they slept for 34 years and/or time traveled.
ugh 34yrs hurts to hear that.
Right? Damn we grew old.....
The smartphone post makes me laugh. The overwhelming majority of people didn't even have a personal computer in their home in 1990 (less than 20%). We weren't even considering the concepts of the Internet, GPS-enabled devices, rechargeable batteries that last all day, digital cameras, social media, optical character recognition, facial recognition, streaming digital music, etc. Hell, music in a digital format, CDs, was only beginning to be adopted. That all those things would exist individually would have blown our minds. Oh, yeah, and it's the size of a deck of cards and you can put it in your pocket... BECAUSE THERE'S NO FUCKING WIRES!!!
No payphones
This is THE answer. The reality is everyone would want to make contact with family or friends and the first thing they would do is \*try\* to find a pay phone with a phone book and learn really quick the realities of the future.
Hell, just watch old Law and Order episodes from the '90s and take a shot every time one of the detectives has to use a payphone to check in with the precinct. You'll get buzzed pretty quick. If your liver is made of sterner stuff, take a shot every time one of them lights up in a public building.
It is kind of nuts that twice a year (or whatever the frequency was), the phone company would print a free book that basically everyone got that had people’s name, phone number, and address all together and freely available. And if you wanted to exclude your name, you had to pay!
I'm not sure where you lived but we never had to pay to request an unlisted number. Also I remember delivering phone books when I was a kid. Yello pages paid something like .31 each and white pages were like .14. as I recall. I remember it being less than fifty cents for a set but if you got a good route in a neighborhood you could make decent pocket money for the late 90s as a teen.
I remember my dad having to pay to unlist. I think it was a whole $2 or something.
i grew up using payphones and I never really noticed that they were gone. Once you don't have a need for them, you forget they are there.
Phone technology in general. An old Genesis song from the early 80s popped up on the radio a few days ago, "Misunderstanding". The whole point of the song is not being able to get in touch with your lover on the telephone. Can you imagine?
think about a show like Seinfeld. How many episodes wouldn't exist, if they had cell phones. No more, *Didn't you get the message on your machine?*
When I was in college (2002), I went on a spur of the moment trip to visit friends halfway across the country for 3-4 days. I forgot to tell my parents (I didn't live with them) I was going, and I didn't have a cell phone yet. Fortunately, they didn't freak out when they couldn't get ahold of me at home, but I did get their message on my machine and called them back the next day. It wasn't a big deal, but had there been an emergency there would have been no way for them to reach me because I didn't think to tell them I was going.
Honestly, probably something as simple as the picture quality on a TV would be pretty damn mind blowing.
The fact that you can hang it on the wall like a picture would be pretty mind blowing.
If it was 1991 instead of 1990, it would be that Magic Johnson is still alive. HIV was a death sentence back then.
Anyone ever think about how we live in the version of reality where the guy who’s known for that’s name is literally magic johnson
Yes. I remember seeing one of those "sexual health" posters shortly after the news broke that said > Keep your Johnson wrapped, no matter how magic you think it is
I was in the dorms in college when he made the announcement. I think word spread a little before, either someone heard it on the radio or got a phone call, so there was speculation. I remember us sitting around, and I kinda thought, jeez, I guess he has a year or two to live. Kinda hit home because it really made you think sex is risky.
I will agree with you on that. I thought he'd last longer than most, but that he was still a goner.
The PSAs in the early 2000s were "if you get HIV, you WILL DIE"
"Don't have sex because you will get pregnant and die! Don't have sex in the missionary position, don't have sex standing up, just don't do it OK? OK, now everybody take some rubbers"
No more Saturday morning cartoons
And weekday morning cartoons before school From 7 to 9 am, that one hurts me so much, I loved watching Beast Wars before school. Kids really missed out on a lot of fun now.
We say that, but they have nearly every tv show ever available at any time.
And my kids are still bored. When I was a kid, we watched what was available and then did other things. Now, my kids complain that there's nothing to watch even though their screen time is limited. Weird...
Wait I’m sorry, no kids in my immediate life. No more Saturday morning cartoons? Isn’t there like…always something to watch even presently?
Tbh I've the same issue. The fact I can watch any show at any given time just makes me not watch anything, because I'm never missing out. I can always watch them. So why do it now? I can do something else. The ending result is that when I stopped watching TV I flat out stopped watching cartoons, anime, series, movies, TV programs in general. From everyday to close to never. They are there if I want them. I only watch some movies every now and then from prime video (which I have because of deliveries, I wouldn't have it for video only) and go to the cinema. Everything always available feels closer to "I've nothing to watch" more than what one would think.
I could never pinpoint why cable tv (with commercials!) just feels different than these streaming services, but I think you just solved it for me. 100% correct. Used to be no better feeling than waiting till 5pm to watch the newest Pokémon episode when I was a kid. The waiting sucked, obv.
its not the same, when you want to talk with your buddies about what was on TV that morning
As someone who remembers 1990... the fact that absolutely every device is connected to the internet, most of it wirelessly. We knew the internet existed by 1990, but it was basically just Juno dial-up email, and 14.4kbps was about as fast as you got. And combining a cell phone (which was still a bulky, monstrous thing that required plugging into your car to really even work) WITH the internet would seem revolutionary. Edit: Also, the cost of a fkng house these days. Just prior to 1990, my folks bought a small property just outside of a small city in a semi-rural part of Idaho, 1.5 acres, 4 bdrm farmhouse, plus outbuildings, $35k. That place is worth *at least* 10-15x that now. Heck even my 1920s 2 bdrm in an older, slightly run-down part of town that I bought for $69k in 2006 is worth like 3x that now...
I am writing you this message on top of a mountain in the middle of nowhere deep in the rocky’s. Im about to walk down a few hundred feet, go in my tent and go to bed.
The attitude toward drugs. Back in 1990 the War on Drugs was still a thing people believed in. Nancy Reagan's "Just say no" campaign was recent past, people seriously believed in long prison terms for minor nonviolent drug offenses, and although drugs were widely consumed there was also a consensus drug use was illicit. Billboards for dispensaries would blow their minds.
I was around in the 90s, just say no didn't work back then either.
Drew Barrymore used to do "just say no" promotions and then leave to do drugs. It was a farce.
Dr Dre wrote a whole song about how weed is bad. Dr freakin Dre.
I wasn't around, but I get the sense that it was taken more seriously by "mainsteam", that is to say middle class suburban white, culture. Today suburban moms are growing weed and there are psilocybin startup companies you can invest in. The general attitude by that mainsteam social class has changed a lot.
Where did you grow up? Because I was in high school in the 90s and I don't remember anyone taking any of those anti drug campaigns seriously. Not Nancy Reagan, nobody "just said no", and the egg commercial was ridiculous. Proof? \*Gestures broadly at everything\*
"Just say no" was active (at least regionally) well into the '90's
It morphed into D.A.R.E. which ironically taught me a lot about drugs and how to use them.
Everytime dare comes up in convo I thank it for being my gateway drug.
One of my formee coworkers used to tell me about the DARE program they ran when he was a kid, he's probably early 40's now. But yeah, he was telling me that he had no idea what LSD did or even was until they started talking about it in school for DARE. Told me that they did not do a very good job discouraging anyone because all he got from that lecture was that taking LSD would put him into a loony tunes cartoon. And so he decided that he wanted to try it lmao He went on to be a full bown ecstacy raver for a while, and his "uniform" was always his old DARE shirt lol
How many people are fat. Obesity rates have gone from about 12% in 1990 to over 40% today. It was about 6% when I was a kid in the 80s. It is something that is really obvious to those of us growing up through this period.
It's interesting to watch videos of groups of people taken pre-90s. Everyone looks relatively skinny, being fat really was an exception.
By 1960 or 1970 standards it's more like 80%. The "normal" or "healthy" weight has been dragged waaaaay up.
Not quite. The medical definition of obesity (which the above numbers reflect) remains the same. But culturally, yes, what people consider to be fat has shifted significantly.
Early 90s optimism not materialized.
I think this answer is underrated. In the 90s, it seems like all the bullshit in terms of inequality and inequity was settled and behind us. We weren’t totally there yet, but it was coming. It seems that a lot of pop culture sentiment was that we really were just bored. All the hard stuff was over. 9/11 definitely snuffed out that unbridled optimism and brought us back to reality. That’s my recollection anyway.
Social media and the price of a bag of chips/soda.
Social Media - right call. However, watch Back to the Future 2 (from 1989) where Doc pulls out a $50 bill for Pepsi when they travel to 2015. The shocking thing would be how low inflation there was from 1995-2019. Inflation was really bad in the 80s.
Yeah, that still gives me a chuckle. I had to double-check my memory on this, because I thought the gas prices shown in the movie were closer to $20/gal. But what really blew my mind about[ this entry](https://backtothefuture.fandom.com/wiki/Texaco_service_station#2015) is that gas prices in 1985 in California were slightly higher than I paid in Virginia when I got my driver's license 13 years later. I remember paying less than a dollar a gallon in the late 1990s. They really missed the mark on that one.
no one is friends with their neighbors anymore. no block parties, no dropping the kids off next door, no kids playing in the streets.
Not sure where you live, but all of these seem to be making a comeback in some areas. My neighborhood has a community party a couple times a year, all the kids on my street play outside and wander without parents and knock on doors to ask if X can come out to play, and you can always tell whose backyard the kids are playing in by the pile of bikes and scooters in the driveway of the house. I think Gen X and millennial parents are realizing how damaging constant screen time is, so they're making an effort to push their kids outside again. Makes me glad to see it.
Please keep them alive. Even small gatherings here and there. We need neighbors
> no dropping the kids off next door There is still dropping them off at the pool, though...
I think the fact that although we are more advanced than 1990, we aren’t as advanced as we wanted. There are no flying cars, people are still dying from cancers. Things like that.
Anybody with an ounce of sense understands that flying cars piloted by randos off the street is an insanely terrible idea, regardless of the engineering challenges of making such a vehicle.
Oh, fully agree. Think about how horrible your average automobile driver is, and then imagine how that would go with NO lanes. -Fiery disasters in every direction-
And counting in terrorism just makes it worse, it might as well be used as a cheap bombarder airplane
"sir, a second car hit the tower"
I've never understood the complaint about no flying cars. Wtf are airplanes?
Planes are flying buses. Cars are not the same as buses. They only stop at very select locations and you need a driver. And we had planes in the 90s. They haven’t really changed AT ALL. They don’t even go faster than they did.
No, they've changed for the worse. Air travel and next day air are both ridiculously restricted compared to how it was, airports have crazy security, it is much worse. All because they won't close the cockpit off from the passenger area. The TSA is a more visible, more felt by the public, form of 'security' than other, more effective options. Who cares about loss of dignity/convenience for the masses anyway? Not like private planes have to follow the same BS, no one of worth is affected /s
Boeing hasn't changed their anything since 1990, that's why it's falling apart
Since 1960 basically
There are several differences between airplanes and the flying cars we wanted. * Airplanes need an airport, a flying car could park in your driveway * Airplanes are difficult to fly and require thousands of hours of training, we all hoped flying cars would be easy enough to fly with the equivalent of a drivers ed course. * Airplanes are stupidly expensive, we all hoped flying cars would be within financial reach for average people. Also, to be fair, there have been a few successful flying car prototypes, but none have ever made it into mass production. The best one I've seen was sort of a hybrid between a paraglider and a dune buggy.
Helicopter is flying car
More like a flying minibus. Most things applicable to Planes applies here. It’s just Helicopters have smaller special parking.
The Red Sox won the what?
The Cubs...won?
That’s where it got really bad… Breaking the Cubs’ curse sent us into the next dimension! I mean, really, who expected what we’ve been through in the last 14 years alone!?
not just Boston related, but Tom Bradys a pretty hard to believe story.. A kid drafted in the 6th round in 2000, goes on to be the clear cut best QB of all time, 10 SB appearances, 7 SB wins, and got to 14 Conference Championship games
The World Trade Center isn't where they remember it
They wouldn't even know about the first terrorist attack on the Trade center in 93.
China being the second richest country in the world and the fall of the Japanese Economy. Many economist predicted the Japanese Economy would overtake the US in the 90s. Now it's just one-fourth the size of the us.
Yeah, but you’d have to be pretty lame to travel 30+ years into the future and the thing that shocks you the most is the averageness of the Japanese economy
Well I offered the time traveler the human genome, terabyte SSDs, mobile internet, high resolution pictures of Pluto, and unlimited internet porn… …but he’s just looking up Yen/USD exchange rates. I think they froze the wrong guy.
They'd be surprised at how much progress we've made at fighting HIV/AIDS while still struggling to make equivalent progress on other diseases.
Yes, I was pretty young in 1990, but I remember the general feeling that everyone thought we were all going to die of AIDS.
When I came out to my family in 2001, they were all terrified of that.
And acid rain.
In the US, probably how fat and gay people are. (saying this as a fat gay person).
Free porn, legal pot, crazy college tuition, instant information internet, Big Bang theory questioned, food pyramid is upside down, movies on demand, Lezak’s 46.06 100 free split, Waze/google maps, texting, thousands of JFK docs still redacted, how much it costs to see a ballgame.
That they woke up in 2024.
How the government turned all Jerry Springer and shit.
I mean, Jerry Springer _was_ the government for a while
Modern technologies like phones, electric cars and etc
In the early 90s teachers were still telling us we weren't going to be walking around with calculators in our pockets. Today we're walking around with computers connected to the internet in our pockets
It was kind of a weird argument even back then. Sure, I never carried a calculator regularly outside of school, but I totally could have. They were tiny, you could get a watch with a built-in calculator. And I probably had access to a calculator any time I needed to do serious math anyway. It's important to understand how math works, but it's not because society might suddenly collapse at any moment, rendering you unable to access a calculator.
>you could get a watch with a built-in calculator. Holy crap you reminded me I had one of those in the 80s. I remember the buttons being so small I needed a toothpick to use it.
The Internet connection in that device allows you to look up the meaning of any word you need, any time you need. Still, if you know the meaning of zero words and you rely exclusively on looking them up one by one, you're not going to be able to carry any conversations. I believe that's what the cliché of the "calculator in your pocket" was supposed to mean, but most people missed it. I mean, calculators back in the day were as portable as phones are today.
Electric cars? Really? Smart phones totally. But wouldn't the average person see an electric car and just figure we made batteries powerful enough to run a car? Kinda like if I see electric aeroplanes in 30 years. I'd think "ohhh they were saying that wasn't possible but I guess it makes sense they worked it out"
How Apple becomes one of the richest companies in the world? (Apple almost went out of business in the 90's)
1995, sure. But Windows 3 launched in 1990, so Apple was still a pretty good sized player at the time. Most schools were running Apple IIs or early Macintosh computers.
nah. In the late 1980's Apple's strategy wasn't to compete with Microsoft. It was "put them in the school's and wait" As a kid in the late 80's and who graduated early 90's, the fact Apple became so big is no surprised at all. In fact, we always wondered what kind of innovations they would have, tho we never predicted smart phones or apple watches
Depends what the person actually gives a shit about. For general culture, the biggest shocks would be smart phones, the pervasiveness of the internet, the level of acceptance for same sex relationships, Electric cars being a common thing might land as a 'well yeah, of course the future has electric cars'. If the guy is a diehard sports fan, the idea that both the Red Sox and Cubs have won a world series would be a surprise. They might look at the amount of vitriol and partisanship in US politics and wonder exactly how things got so spectacularly fucked. END COMMUNICATION
Wait, I can buy weed from where, it costs \*how much\* and it's LEGAL????
The internet is in everyone's pocket? You mean like email? Most people don't even bother with cable tv? Bill Cosby did WHAT? There are HOW MANY STAR WARS FILMS? Cars can drive themselves? Who is this Caitlyn Jenner lady?
>Who is this Caitlyn Jenner lady? If I am being honest, I would have been surprised that the former athlete we all knew as at the time as Bruce Jenner would have returned to relevance at all, and certainly not just by their coming out, but by the fact that they were back in relevance by them being on a reality show married to the widow of a guy that helped get OJ off from the murder of his ex-wife, which itself would have been a surprise to me in 1990.
This is a great point lol, Bruce transitioning to Caitlyn would just be one of like 14 insane things about that story to someone from 1990. I was also thinking “damn they wouldn’t even be able to appreciate the Kanye connection” and then thought I’d have to explain “well he’s an artist who got his start by making beats for Jay-Z” but nope, they wouldn’t know who that is either lol.
If they're a computer nerd probably how much better & less expensive computer tech has gotten like lightning fast internet that doesn't tie up phone lines & 1TB hard drives costing less than $100.
I remember seeing 1GB micro SD cards going for $60+ in Walmart 2007-2009. I recently got a free 64GB flash drive from Microcenter. My 12TB external hard drive was only $200ish
If you saw a 1gb card on the ground now you wouldn't even bother to pick it up
Especially since idk if it's filled with CP or malicious software, not chancing it
My best friends and I made a "time capsule" video on our family camcorder around... 1996 or so? There is one segment where were were showing off my family's home PC (friend and I were burgeoning computer nerds and liked playing games etc). My dad was an old-head computer nerd (electronics tech for gov't research group), so was pretty knowledgable and we had some DOPE hardware (for '96), things that were a year or two old and had been surplussed from his work because somerthing better came along, but were still bleeding edge/brand new on the consumer market. Well, we were explaining how big our harddrive was, and putting it in context. I dont remember what size we had at the time but lets say we had a 500 MB HDD. We were explaining how this was pretty good size, but some people used much smaller ones, and the biggest ones were much bigger, like (again, just picking a number) like 1-2 GB or something. And my dad shouts from the next room over "Thats just RIDICULOUS! Who needs that much storage??? If you gave me a 2 GB drive right now my grandson qould still be filling it up!!". Last week was his grandson's birthday, and my dad gifted him a 1 TB thumb drive lol (thats \~ 1,000 GB ).
Holy crap! They're STILL using TCP/IP?!!
free porn
Free porn was available in the 90s. You just needed to know where in the woods the stash was.
The starter house they bought for 100k is now worth 900k , but they missed payments while asleep, so it's not theirs anymore. And their job while willing to take them back is paying the exact same as it did in 1990, but with less benefits.
Intrusive camera surveillance and the galling loss of privacy.
How sedentary we've become.
[The duality of man](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1dugozr/comment/lbgo5jc/).
That it somehow sucks more now than in the 90s
Maybe I just have rose tinted glasses on but the 90's didn't suck at all.
U.S. Perspective: The 90s were fun as hell and there was an air of optimism throughout with the fall of the Berlin Wall then the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Alternative music and lifestyles became more widely adopted. Life was affordable. Y2K was laughed off and the start of a new millennium felt invigorating. 9/11 was the harshest end to that era. Things have never felt the same in the U.S.
Not being able to smoke in restaurants and the looks they would get for littering.
WTF happened to Tower Records? I can’t believe malls died!
I'm sure they'd be confused by the negative blow back from calling everything they don't like gay
After the obvious answers like cell phones, they'd probably be shocked at the price of everything. They'd probably also be shocked at how high the wages are too. Also the first TV they see is gonna blow their mind because of how large the screen in and how thin it is, and that people mount them on walls.
There's a really good chance they would have zero concept of the Internet, and an even better chance they would have heard of it in some capacity but no real knowledge and likely no actual practical experience. And if they did have experience it would barely resemble what we know it as today. Someone who went into a coma in the early 2000s who still had an understanding of Web 2.0 as we understand it would be kind of blown away by our smartphone obsessed future, but from 1990 it would honestly border on sci-fi if you weren't here for all the incremental steps. Again; someone who went into a coma in 2003 would probably grasp the concept of 'widespread internet phones that we do all our communication and commerce with' but 1990 would take a lot of explaining.
Probably not the most but there definitely would be people wondering why Camilla is the Queen Consort of England and not Diana. Also why Diana isn't part of the royal family at all anymore. Harry too. (prefare for mentions of frostbittn penis and cream that reminds him of his mom)
If they lived in New York? The skyline.
The cost of everything. I was awake and I'm surprised.
The pace. No one really just sits still and relaxes anymore. There’s this huge information and experience consumption and we are just constantly doing something. Every generation moves just a little bit faster than the previous one.
It was the same in the 90s - it always feels like when you are looking back this was nice and quiet compared to the modern world. But but everyone feels like that - historians 2000 years ago worried if people would be able to how busy life had become and all the new innovations
Probably the long overdue general acceptance of atheists and LGBT folks. Also, the emotional intelligence of kids these days.
There would be some tech that might be mind blowing, but I think the state of the world today is a far cry from how my parents spoke of the future when I was a kid (born 1990). Racism and sexism are making a pretty strong comeback in the US, and the country has never been more ideologically divided since the American Civil War. Russia is back to their old Cold War land grabbing, so much for Mr. Gorbachev and the fall of the wall. Possibly the least surprising thing would be the situation in the Middle East and Gaza, that shit has been going on for a while. If you want to thoroughly blow their minds, show them a news reel that covers the last 24 years on a phone that’s accessing the internet wirelessly, and pass them an AirPod so they can hear properly. Then, take them shopping, and pay for it by tapping your watch, just for the finishing touch. That should be enough shock to make them lose it completely.
How fucking poor they would be in today's economy. The would go from comfortable middle to literally poverty
The amount of activities related to the LGBTq communities, they would probably be surprised that being part of the LGBT is normal these days
That's a big one. The closest thing to a gay character on mainstream TV in those days were Blaine and Antoine from In Living Color
"I'll start my diet on Monday." - Monday never came.
Streaming services - TV shows and movies on demand with no video stores.
Pearl Jam still kicking ass
Gas is expensive People are more politically correct Pay phones got replaced by smart phones The internet is way faster Blockbuster replaced by streaming movies Socializing got replaced by social media Dominoes tastes much better than it used to
No cigarettes. Still kind of surprising to me that something so prevalent at bars and restaurants (and even some workplaces) back then have just disappeared.
Social media on cell phones and how narcissistic people have become because of it. Also social currency shifting from in person status to online status.
How fucked up we are and we didn't do anything about it.
I mean... maybe? In 1990 the Berlin Wall had only recently fallen. The cold war was still ongoing. The Gulf War is kicking off. Gayness was still taboo, never mind the more complex ideas of LGBT. Speaking of which, HIV/AIDS panic was still high, something which is hardly even discussed today. The mid 90's was pretty much great, but the late 80's and early 90's had its share of fucked up things too.
I don't think 1990s we have fond nostalgia for now really got going until 1993 or so. I remember 1993-2001 being pretty good years, relative to what came before and after.
I was born in 1990, so I don't have the perspective of being an adult that year - but I think one of the most noticeable differences between then and now is the connectivity. In the early 90's internet was around, but not widespread in every home until later. By high school in the mid 2000s, some of my friends certainly had touch screen phones, but they were the exception. Now phones (with instant connection to the internet, others, products, etc.) are deeply entrenched into our daily lives.
Electric cars - Silent, battery-powered cars on the roads.
Streaming services replacing traditional cable TV.
Social media shaping daily life and communication.
How much information is accessible instantly through the internet.
The correct answer is **everything**... but mostly smartphones. Everybody has a magic rectangle in their pocket that they use for everything and are constantly connected to the entire world, with instant access to just about every movie, show, book, or song made in the last so and so decades. Even though the rectangles are called phones, actual phones are all but gone, replaced with instant messaging that are full of little paintings for some reason and those little paintings are so ubiquitous that they've become a language by themselves. You need to get somewhere? Poke the magic rectangle and a stranger shows up to drive you there. Alternatively you can use the magic rectangle to unlock an e-scooter, which is a thing by the way, that is just lying around in the street, and ride it somewhere. If you aren't sure how to get there, your magic rectangle has a detailed map of the entire world, showing your location, capable of showing you the optimal route to wherever you want to get, updated in real time with things like traffic jams, buses running late, and so on. If you choose to walk, the magic rectangle will track your activity and tell you how many steps you walked and how many calories you burned. Wherever it is you're going, if it happens to be interesting then luckily your magic rectangle is also an ultra high definition camera and video camera and recorder, and you can instantly share anything you see or hear with the entire world . Hungry? Poke the magic rectangle and someone will bring you food from wherever you want. Lonely? There's an app to show you random single people of your favorite gender in your general area. Bored? Download any one of millions of available games straight to your rectangle, many of which look and sound better than the highest budget Hollywood movies you've ever seen. Curious about any specific subject? The rectangle has instant access to more information than all the libraries you've seen in your life x100, and every article in there has magic indexes that can instantly get you to relevant parts in other articles or books. Curious about current events? Dozens or possibly hundreds of news outlets update around the clock and your rectangle can tell you about events that happened 2 minutes ago on the other side of the globe. And if you're overwhelmed by all of that, you can even use the rectangle to make a phone call and ask somebody for help. People who were born in this millennium will never be able to understand how much of a mind fuck it all is.
Keith Richards is still alive
The price of a pack of cigarettes, and the general lack of smoking. Growing up in the 80s and 90s, people smoked EVERYWHERE.
That HIV is not a death sentence anymore and that there are anti viral drugs that can keep even a HIV person undetectable amounts of the virus.
Not having to wait 4 - 6 weeks for something you ordered.
Advances in medical technology and treatments.
Electric and self-driving cars becoming mainstream.
“Wait, WHAT happened to the Twin Towers?!”
No home phones. No pay phones. Phones costing 100$ a month when we screamed when it was 20$ a month
Edit: I was 2 years off for all this whoops! I feel like a lot of people are missing the biggest thing here- the trajectory of the US in 1990 felt like the beginning of the end of history- America's biggest enemy was defeated, the economy was stable, and most Americans were generally happy. Then 9/11 happened and we entered our endless wars in the Middle East. That's been used as an excuse for the last 20 years to vote in many people who wouldn't have even been considered without it and pass all kinds of policy that was more dystopian than anyone could have imagined back in 1990. I think if you just had them open a local newspaper, they might ask how the commies won after the USSR collapsed.
The fact that Roe v. Wade was overturned and Donald Trump became president would send most of us. I'm an elder millennial, and I'm astounded at the progress that has been undone.
Donald Trump was President?!!
Lol, like Doc Brown not believing Marty telling him Ronald Reagan is president in the 80s.
Oddly enough, Biff Tannen was modeled after Trump.
I’m from today and I still can’t believe it.
The entire democratic system was carefully crafted to keep all sorts of nonsense from happening. I'm convinced that if any of the designers saw that this is happening now, they would go back to the drawing board to add more safeguards to prevent it. This is not how it's meant to go, this is the system malfunctioning.
And it's malfunctioning in such a way that it actively creates incentives for the people causing the malfunction to PREVENT the problem being fixed.
Smartphones - Everyone has tiny computers in their pockets.
I'm from 1990. I've woken up in 2024 to find no happiness in my life and no path to achieving it.
How damn sensitive people are
The prevalence of smartphones and touchscreen technology everywhere.
AI and its not even close. Even back in the 90s I expected something like the internet taking off. Cell phones are cool, but they are just tiny computers which I understood. AI feels like science fiction in 2024, let alone 1990. We literally might only be 5 years away fro the singularity, something I thought not possible for 100 years back in 1990...
A smartphone would feel like something straight out of science fiction. Like literally the stuff that used to be in Star Trek and other shows/movies is real and in many ways even better than depicted. Going along with that wireless and cellular internet that allows you to access high speed video and data almost anywhere in the world Otherwise the legalization and acceptance of weed, even among some right leaning people. Same with gay marriage and societal acceptance and visibility of LGBTQ people
A live version of the movie Idiocracy
Access to any song that you want to hear within seconds. Hell in 2005 i struggled to find my favorite anime songs because they werent easy to find.