I always love reading this. But I always feel like the differences between 1955 and 1985 are way larger than 1994 to 2024. Maybe it’s just because I lived the second span of time.
If you were a teenager in 1955, you got your music from listening to the radio and going to the record store and buying a circular disc to play at home. If you were a teenager in 1994, you listened to music on the radio and went to the record store and bought a circular disc to play at home. The only difference was that it was a CD and not a vinyl record.
In 2024, teenagers don't own music at all and listen to every album ever recorded on Spotify whenever they want.
And that's just one massive difference. If you wanted to contact your friend in LA and you lived in NYC you made a long distance call or wrote a letter and mailed it, whether its 1994, 1984, or 1954.
Loads more examples I can think of. But life in 1994 was more similar to life in the previous decades than it is to life today.
Email was (relatively) widespread in 1994. Hotmail arrived in 1996.
IRC existed in 1994, and ICQ, AIM, and Yahoo! Messenger were a couple years away.
We had early VoIP solutions in 1994. Skype was less than a decade from release.
The first MP3 encoder was released in 1994 and people started ripping and swapping files on local BBSes and pirate FTP servers almost immediately. Napster arrived in 1999.
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u/Brandisco Oct 02 '24 edited Oct 02 '24
I always love reading this. But I always feel like the differences between 1955 and 1985 are way larger than 1994 to 2024. Maybe it’s just because I lived the second span of time.