I was born in 1979. Growing up, I remember laying on the floor in the summer, seeing the HBO title scene come on before watching Star Wars with my father on our little CRT TV. Then later, growing up in a trailer park, being raised by a single mom, me and my brother raised hell and had tons of friends. We’d ride our bikes, play in the woods, jump off the docks into ponds, sell golf balls we found in the creek back to the golf course to buy some superman ice cream.
Some other things I remember from that time:
Doritos bags were clear with no foil and me and my brother would try to find the “flavor cube”
Crush Apple pop was my favorite
Listening to Michael Jackson’s Thriller on a record player
Renting Pitfall and River Raid for our Atari 2600 for $1 for a weekend at Believe in Music
Atari games were like $15 for most games, $20 for some
Playing Smurf Rescue in Gargamel’s Castle on our Colecovision or Mindstorm on our Vectrex with our friends
Pizza Hut and the Book-it program
The dual-sided styrofoam container from McDonalds that was used for breakfast or the McDLT
Tato Skins chips
My first Cherry Coke
My first TV dinner that had to be baked in an oven - came in a foil tray
Hi-C Juice
Mr. T cereal
My first Cherry 7-Up
Jello Pudding Pops
Bannanna Frosted Flakes
Dialing phone numbers with a rotary dial
Cartoons before school, such as Thundercats, GI Joe, Voltron, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Pepsi A.M.
Keebler Pizzaria Chips
Getting my first Sony Walkman to listen to Micheal Jackson’s Bad album on casette
Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, D.A.R.Y.L. movies
Mtv music videos and seeing Michael Jackson Thriller Video for the first time
Seeing and playing Super Mario Bros. on our new Nintendo for the very first time was such an amazing experience
NES games were like $20-30 at the time
Our brand new NES was $250 - my mom and step-dad almost got a divorce over my step-dad buying one
Going to Muzzy’s or Ole Taco in West Michigan
Muzzy’s was a burger chain that had “drippy cheese” and firedogs, which were spicy chili dogs
Ole Taco was a fast food mexican restaurant before Taco Bell and had by far much better food. The rice there was amazing!
The first time I saw an Apple IIe computer and coding my very first line of code
Seeing the Karate Kid, Goonies, Ghostbusters II and Back to the Future movies in the theater
Seeing The Wizard in the theatre and then playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time
Saturday morning cartoons
ABC always had a marathon of cartoons from first thing in the morning until noon
Saving money up to purchase a Super Nintendo with Super Mario World and Final Fight
Satellite TV - having to change satellites for different channels
Trying to see porn on the distored/scrambled cable channels
Saving money up to purchase a Nintendo 64
My very first Commodore 64 computer
Clear Pepsi
Salsa Rio Doritos
Mr. Phipps Tater Crisps
Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid
Crunch Tators
Viennetta Ice Cream
Peanut Butter Boppers
Whatchamacallit candy bars
Shocktarts
Skittles Bubble Gum
Chips fried in Olean (olestra)
Our first phone with push button numbers to dial phone numbers
Party phone lines
Your entire neighborhood would share a “party line”
You would have your own unique phone number, but only one call in your neighborhood could occur at a time
So you could listen in on other people’s conversations and you had to wait for their call to complete before you could make or receive a call
Our first cordless phone
Drawing the Stüssy logo on everything
Sobe drinks
My very first CD player
Listening to and buying CDs from Musicland/Sam Goody
Porn on VHS tapes
Shopping/hanging out at the mall with friends
Getting online for the first time with our 56k modem
Renting games from Blockbuster
Encino Man, Clueless, Cruel Intentions, Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
Drinking and playing Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye with my friends all night long
Watching Beavis and Butthead with my friends
Playing Quake Arena on dial-up
Watching porn pictures online download one line at a time
Surge pop - so much sugar and caffiene - was practically the first energy drink
Installing a Sony DiscMan in my car
Black ganster movies became more popular: Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, South Central, Dead Presidents
Napster and Limewire to download MP3s
AOL Online
ICQ messenger
MSN messenger
AOL messenger
Preparing for Y2K
I had a paranoid roommate who stocked up on bottled water, sterno, canned goods, toilet paper, etc.
Nothing ended up happening and we didn’t have to get groceries for the next 3 months
Burning my first music CD
Playing Ridge Racer, Siphon Filter and Final Fantasy on Playstation
Pagers and sending codes to my friends
Building my very first custom PC that ran Windows 98, then later Windows 98 SE and eventually Windows ME
Installing my Nvidia Riva TNT II graphics card
Getting our first cable internet connection with 1Mbps speed
Splitting up Warez rar file downloads for Windows 2000 between friends, meeting up to extract and burn the ISO, then being disappointed when the operating system didn’t even have support for sound cards or games
Using Netscape Navigator to browse the web
Installing a 50 CD disc changer in my car
My first Nokia cellphone
McDonald’s Arch Deluxe and Chicken Fajitas
DSL internet with speed up to 5Mbps
Using Yahoo search, then later Google for the first time
The very first time YouTube started up
My first Motorola flip phone
My first Vanilla Coke
Building my first computer that ran Windows XP
Building my first computer that ran Windows Vista with 2 GTX 260 on SLI
My first cable modem with speeds over 20Mbps
Downloading my very first torrent
My first Compaq iPaq smart phone
Burning my first DVD
My first HP iPaq smart phone
Subscribing to Netflix to get DVDs by mail
Redbox movie rentals
My first iPhone
Movie streaming through Netflix
Bottom line, as a kid in the 80s and 90s we actually wanted to leave the house and do stuff all the time. Staying at home was boring. Even if it was just riding our bikes around with friends. Or riding a bike to a friends. Even as a teenager, staying at home was lame. There was the mall, arcade, pizza place, other friend’s houses.
The Internet really had a huge impact on society in a way you cannot imagine. Life before the Internet was much less stressful. You had many more “real” connections with a lot more people. You may have had a computer, but you only really used it at home for homework or games and that’s it.
Yes, I may be younger, but I also feel that some things were lost because of the internet. It now seems to me that the oversupply of content has, unfortunately, led to a decline in the appreciation of content—or rather, in the value attributed to it.
It’s a bit like Christmas for kids: you look forward to it for a long time, and finally the day comes when you get presents. Today, however, every day is Christmas, and the presents aren’t as special anymore because there are so many that you don’t even have time to really appreciate them—you can binge-watch one series after another and somehow lose your sense of proportion and the feeling of when enough is enough, or so it seems to me.
This is certainly a nostalgic impression, yet it seems to me that “more” is only positive to a certain extent, since this “more” can easily turn into “too much,” which is more of a burden than a joy.
Splitting up Warez rar file downloads for Windows 2000 between friends, meeting up to extract and burn the ISO, then being disappointed when the operating system didn’t even have support for sound cards or games
eh, I didn’t have many problems, but opengl was MUCH faster than dx. Windows 2000 supported multiple processors (dual and quad) and gobs more memory than 9x.
I was born in 1979. Growing up, I remember laying on the floor in the summer, seeing the HBO title scene come on before watching Star Wars with my father on our little CRT TV. Then later, growing up in a trailer park, being raised by a single mom, me and my brother raised hell and had tons of friends. We’d ride our bikes, play in the woods, jump off the docks into ponds, sell golf balls we found in the creek back to the golf course to buy some superman ice cream.
Some other things I remember from that time:
Bottom line, as a kid in the 80s and 90s we actually wanted to leave the house and do stuff all the time. Staying at home was boring. Even if it was just riding our bikes around with friends. Or riding a bike to a friends. Even as a teenager, staying at home was lame. There was the mall, arcade, pizza place, other friend’s houses.
The Internet really had a huge impact on society in a way you cannot imagine. Life before the Internet was much less stressful. You had many more “real” connections with a lot more people. You may have had a computer, but you only really used it at home for homework or games and that’s it.
Yes, I may be younger, but I also feel that some things were lost because of the internet. It now seems to me that the oversupply of content has, unfortunately, led to a decline in the appreciation of content—or rather, in the value attributed to it.
It’s a bit like Christmas for kids: you look forward to it for a long time, and finally the day comes when you get presents. Today, however, every day is Christmas, and the presents aren’t as special anymore because there are so many that you don’t even have time to really appreciate them—you can binge-watch one series after another and somehow lose your sense of proportion and the feeling of when enough is enough, or so it seems to me.
This is certainly a nostalgic impression, yet it seems to me that “more” is only positive to a certain extent, since this “more” can easily turn into “too much,” which is more of a burden than a joy.
Veinetta mentioned!!
The marketing worked on me for SURE but not my parents so I only had this like once at a friends house.
eh, I didn’t have many problems, but opengl was MUCH faster than dx. Windows 2000 supported multiple processors (dual and quad) and gobs more memory than 9x.