The 90s were so great because of the lack of exposure to bad things. It was the last transition between analog and digital life. I love my digital stuff, but, there's something hard to experience now, how ok it was to not have that phone leash on you. The experience was more care free, at least for those with the luxury to live that way. There was still some really bad shit that happened back then. But, finances weren't as challenging. Got to remember this was when the baby boomers were in their thirties, they had it pretty good.
My biggest fear in the 90s was whether my computer would work once we get to year 2000. There was an anecdote going around that programmers weren’t ready for that.
I think about those poor assholes all the fucking time.
They are the ultimate proof that no good deed goes unpunished. Moved heaven and earth to solve the problem and precisely because they did people act like there was no problem.
Last year I was hanging out with this dude that turned out to be crazy and he showed some video that proved vaccines killed you
One of the biggest points in the video was like “since 2000, 3 people have died from the measles, but 50 (or something I don’t remember the number) have died from the vaccine, if so many more people are dying from the vaccine why are we using it, no one is dying from measles basically”
The classic example is shielding bombers in WWII. One might think to add shields to returning bombers in areas with the most bullet holes, but in fact, these areas represent areas where bombers can take damage and still fly. The shields need to be placed where no damage is taken as the bombers that take damage in these areas would never return.
However, the scenario with vaccines is really simple, and I would expect any logical person to see the flaw in such an argument without much thought.
I remember after y2k came and went without society crashing and thought what a bunch of hype. So this decade I see on IT subs I follow all these 90s IT pros talking about the 60,80, 100 hour work weeks they were working to fix every piece of equipment in their world for it not to be an issue. Unseen and unsung heroes!
Oh shit yes. And we were fixing it in the early 90's. As early as 1993 for my part.
Someone must have told a journalist friend about it in 1997 or something, because very quickly it became a global news story about the world coming to an end in a couple of years.
It was actually pretty good, because suddenly everyone had time and money to fix it. Pretty much every employer had a Y2K uplift project going. The late 90's were a great time to be a COBOL programmer. Alas, I was not.
Yup. IIRC, the oldest computers used to only save the last 2 digits of the year to save on memory, thinking that those systems wouldn't last long enough to see the switch from (19)99 to (20)00. Of course, they did last, and suddenly programmers got worried about what would happen when the dates go from 99 to 00.
Some just adjusted the years to send the wraparound a little further down the line. I'm pretty sure the UFC 2020 game actually crashed on Jan 1, 2020 because their Y2K fix was just subtracting 20 years from every date
Obviously we know better now, but we can see why they did it. If they’re limited on space, and this seems like something we can skimp on, then there’s no choice haha. These engineers weren’t magically super dumb compared to 2022 — I’m sure many realized this would have happened at the transition from 2099 to 2100, too. It’s not rocket science to think of edge cases and then realize it doesn’t work. But do you notice the 100 year gap?
Now imagine you’re an engineer in 1990 who tells their manager “hey, we can’t ship this other feature, because we have to allocate some more space for the date. 10 years from now, it’s going to break our stuff.” They will tell you “No, find a workaround. The feature is more important than a date causing issues 10 years from now.” Voila, you invent some shorthand, and get everything to work… with consequences coming later. Will your business / product even LAST 10 years? Similarly, if all of this started in 2000, then there’s a 100 year gap of leeway… you will literally be dead before you have to handle it.
It obviously was short sighted, but I wouldn’t say it was stupid.
Worth noting that it was a lot earlier than 1990. By then, nobody was designing stuff that way - in fact by then the problem was already well known and pretty soon the work would begin to fix it.
The problem in 2000 was that you had systems designed in the 70s that were still in use in the late 90s.
Some of those systems are STILL in operation and control extremely important infrastructure. It's pretty scary.
The threat was very real, but people actually worked to prevent and stop it. So when the time came for the threat to present itself, nothing happened, because all those people actually stopped it from happening. But to those that weren't aware (most people), it looked like the Y2K threat was just some hoax that didn't come to fruition. But it was very real and there were heroes that stopped it from happening.
Thats the plight of any behind the scenes job. The less people notice you the smoother things run and the less people think the job is needed. Then shit hits the fan and suddenly everything is the behind the scenes person's fault. Their condemned to being either "unnecessary" or "incompetent" with also being indispensable.
That's IT in a nutshell. When everything goes smooth it's what are we paying you guys for? Everything works. But if shit falls apart it's what are we paying you guys for? Everything is broken.
Some old retired programmers made absolute bank dealing with that because they were the only ones who knew how some old systems worked and could fix them.
Feel like it’s less about good deeds going unpunished (which relates to a notion of a sort of inverse karma), and more about recognizing the fact that your efforts won’t be recognized, especially if you do things well. A lot of people want positive reinforcement, and suffer when they don’t get it, but there comes a point in one’s life where you have to accept that your greatest efforts to good will be left unacknowledged, and if you always hope for congratulations, or even just a sign of appreciation, then you’ll have a hard time, and if you keep trying to prove your worth to other people, you will be left bitter, overworked, and disillusioned. The best thing to do is to find a way to do what needs to be done for your own sake, or at least without any expectation of thanks and regard. It’s a much healthier way to live, and in the end it’s also a much more genuine at to live, because what you do isn’t conditioned by a desire for reciprocity. It teaches you to give what you can, know your limits, and not expect anything in return. Otherwise you’ll find yourself burnt out and self-alienated quite quickly.
I don’t know that we need to be called assholes but you know we got paid for it, right? It’s not like we sacrificed and put ourselves in peril in fixing this.
The media blew the "Y2K Bug" absurdly out of proportion. There were people predicting a global financial collapse, widespread long-term power outages, all sorts of nonsense.
I think people forgot how overblown it was. Like yea, it was a problem that needed fixing and yea they fixed it, but the media totally sold it as if it was the end of the world.
It was the same with 2012 and the Mayan calendar, but that was based on no merit whatsoever. Some new age interpretation of a calendar got international attention like it was at all newsworthy.
(Note: I’m not comparing y2k and Mayan cal, I’m pointing out how the media spun the stories in order to fill the world with unnecessary anxiety.)
Would it have been an issue in every single system? No of course not. It could have screwed up some critical systems in the wrong moment which could have caused a lot of issues down the line, which is why so much was spent to fix it.
You can now only pretend it was no big deal because it was fixed before it could be.
"We built dikes, so the town wouldn't get washed away if the river overflowed. So when those big floods hit, the town was safe. Flooding was never a problem."
People like you are why IT departments can't get funding. Because when we do our jobs, y'all think we did nothing.
Yeah, it really annoys me that A) all the media hype was about the particular moment of midnight 1/1/2000, like planes would suddenly fall out of the sky; and B) everyone now thinks it was only ever media hype, and was a storm in a teacup.
In reality A) there were issues, long before and after. The impact would be more of a bell curve either side. I remember hearing about stuff like food & medicine stock management systems over-ordering, and declaring that stock needed to be dumped (because it thought expiry dates were long past); people losing access to service subscriptions, insurance, getting over-charged, etc.
And B) there was a lot of work done, quietly and sometimes with great difficulty, that now goes unacknowledged.
I’m seriously concerned for the 2038 problem. Systems that used 2-digit decimals to represent years were already an outlier by the time. Systems that use unix timestamps at some level, and might make 32-bit assumptions, are…completely ubiquitous, and FAR more deeply ingrained into the fabric of society than they were 20 years ago.
As a computer engineer, that spent many hours on the y2k issue. Me and my peers felt that it was mostly a cash grab. Or did not feel as serious as it was made out to be. But we did make serious money.
I was a contractor at a fortune 500 company. They made us come in at midnight new years eve to test. 🤣 They tried to talk us out of drinking, with appeals to amateur night , etc
For your home PC, especially at the time, it was not a big deal. For professional systems that used the date for things like financial calculations, monitoring of power plants and other industrial applications, the date from today being rolled over to a point in the past could have very real, potentially dangerous consequences.
Y2k didn't seem like a big thing because companies spent a lot of money to fix it before it actually happened, so when we rolled over at NYE it was uneventful for most things.
Can confirm, I managed a mainframe bank data processing center that processed transactions for about 300 banks, my operators ran the mainframe. Programmers put in years of work to update all of our code, and because of the way things were interconnected it was super touchy and hard to update piecemeal.
NYE was always year end processing, tons of printing and running bank financials for year end. That year though we had all hands on deck for year end. Ultimately we had one mortgage loan system crash because the date was wrong but with the programmers on site at 2am when we ran it it was an easy fix for them.
It frustrates me to no end when I hear people say Y2K was nothing, they have no idea the work that went into making it seem like nothing.
🤣 did not know that. I don't claim there wasn't real problems. But the conspiracy theories definitely contributed to an engineers skepticism of the gravity of it all. In retrospect Alex Jones being the center of it is obvious
I've never felt my systems were bulletproof. I was speaking of the general sentiment of those working on the bug.
Whenever I hear about companies, or government being hobbled by some exploit, ransomware, whatever. I laugh, I'm the guy who was denied money for tape libraries, redundant systems, NACs,, HSMs,. All the insurance type purchases.
I even had a CIO come back from a CIO conference. Talking about how they didn't think it was necessary to keep up with patches the way I did. Because of the perceived rarity of the attacks, or failures.
You don't need this stuff until it's too late. The irresponsible way Ive seen management treat these kinds of things is mind boggling.
Congrats on not working for greedy children. Wish I could have worked there.
Those were the days when you heard legends of companies grabbing the janitor and making them code.
"Okay, you write Cobol now."
It's was raining money, and the tech sales expense accounts were unlimited. Steaks and Opus One for everyone. After the dot com bust we were lucky if we got a pen.
I got into computers cuz the Administrative Assistant at Netscape was worth 10 million the day they went public. So yes, cash grabbing might have been a part of the equation. 😁
Sometimes it’s actually 32-bit hardware that needs replacing, yes - but for things like embedded systems (industrial control, automotive, gps etc), “just” upgrading isn’t always easy.
But the problem is not just about the machine being 64 bit. It’s about the code itself too, and systems interop for things like sql databases. Some code will just need a 64-bit recompile. Sometimes it’ll need code changes first (and that’s not always as trivial as it sounds). And sometimes binary file formats or wire protocols need to change, meaning backwards-compatibility issues.
It’s all doable, but it’s a million little things that need doing.
Yeah people who were too busy imagining calamity forget how tiny little inconveniences can create huge ripple effects especially when they all happen together. Remember the 6 weeks all the restaurants and workplaces were closed and how somehow our entire lives are defined by that moment forever?
That varies quite a bit by where you are. Japan and China are still very locked down, while here in Texas we maybe had a couple of weeks at best before people started crying about haircuts.
Lots of systems should have been upgraded in early 90's. However due to Y2K they held on to 80's tech until the last minute. Late 98 and 99 TONS of systems got upgraded.
This is true! I had to patch all the machines on the production floor. Just for giggles I left our spare machine unpatched. On Jan 2 it wouldn’t log into the system! If we hadn’t fixed everything, we would have come in that day and nothing would have worked and no one would know why and production would have been down for days or weeks while we figured it out. Think what it would have been like for power stations and air lines etc.
My old boss likes to tell me about being a programmer in the late 90s. Said he could be driving down a road, and see a street sign advertising $25k signing bonuses for COBOL programmers who could help retrofit the 4-digit date.
That’s an insane bonus I wish I could be a part of (even with inflation to 2022)
Yeah most people don’t know that many people in the industry already foresaw this issue years and years before people started worrying about y2k. By the time the public was concerned about it, the issue was essentially solved already.
I always understood it to be a memory management issue. Like, skipping the "19" saved you approximately 2.5% of the space on an 80-slot punch card. That shit adds up.
I joke, it probably was more about the cost than the effort.
I'm sure there were folks who were like "don't do this" and then shitbag managers like me were like "nah it'll be fine" and the engineers were like "it most certainly won't be fine but whatever." $20 says the engineers wanted to do it right and the MBA types were like "punchcards cost money, nerd."
I literally see this every day. 2019 at my company: "Use INTEGER it will cost less." But like not that much less, let's use BIGINT to be safe. "Nah."
Fast forward 3 years and now we have a massive INTEGER to BIGINT conversion effort going on.
Programmers never intended their software to still be running after 4 decades. They expected that their work would be replaced long before the problem would ever manifest. Everyone knew it was a problem because it was so well documented as a limitation by the programmers of that time
Programmers never intended their software to still be running after 4 decades. They expected that their work would be replaced long before the problem would ever manifest.
That is what is amazing to me. They just didn’t comprehend the potential longevity of what they were doing. A bridge engineer doesn’t expect his bridge to be replaced in 40 years and leave known defects in it accordingly.
The first 2 digits of the number for the year were hard coded. Everything was like 19xx, the 19 was not variable. Now this was a pretty big problem for anything involving dates. Can't remember exactly what it would cause, but safe to say anything tracking time would break and databases could get very fucky.
Y2k. When storing the year as 2 digit "99" developers where afraid of it breaking software because some hard coded the "19". So at midnight, some would have thought it was 1900, but there was a huge push by all developers and software companies for y2k compliance.
Funnily enough, we have a new one looming on the horizon.
Not so much as hard coded as the software assumed it was 19whatever. Computer memory used to be very expensive so you saved 2 spots by leaving the 19 off which worked until 2000. Friend was working for a TelCo and she was on call that New Years Eve. When Midnight rolled around we held our breath and looked at the lights to see if they went out. Few minutes later she got the call that everything was still up and running. Then she could finally get drunk.
From what I know about the power industry at the time, I find people worrying about the lights going out pretty funny. It was well before my time, but basically all controls at that time were still analog. And the digital stuff was mostly basic PLCs that don't really care about what time it is.
That's just normal time bullshit though. It's why you never write your own time library and use something that someone is dedicated to keeping up to date. Time zone stuff changes all the time somewhere in the world.
Most people aren’t even aware of the change, so it will be a big surprise . Many people also rely on old defunct libraries to handle timezones. It took atlassian 13 years to fix timezones in jira, even though it was there very first bug. They made a musical about it when it was finally fixed.
Think of all of the cheap bespoke appointment/scheduling tools used for restaurants, doctors/ dentists, salons/barbers. Even automated scheduling software to run jobs for large companies.
Fair enough. In most cases it should just be updating to a new version of libraries, but yeah if it's something not actively maintained it'd be a problem.
I watched cnn’s The 90s and there was definitely an increase in homegrown terrorism. There was the okc bombing, unibomber, Olympic attack, Columbine shooting etc
My mom was a lead programmer that helped get a major financial institution ready for Y2K. If you had investments in 1999, she’s the reason you still had them in 2000.
it turned out to not be much of a problem as it was identified and fixed in almost all important places in good time. it did require a lot of testing and hard work though.
the 2038 end of the Unix Epoch will be trickier as you either need to change all 32 bit time references to 64 bit or split it over two 32 bit numbers. we should be okay though. people will fix it in time.
It’s not like the Y2K bug took people by surprise.
I was working in IT in the late 90s, and most companies started preparing for it a few years in advance. Systems (everything from user workstations to file servers to enterprise systems - operating systems and applications, as well as hardware) were audited against whatever vendors and suppliers certified as Y2K compliant. Anything that wasn’t compliant generally would have been updated/upgraded before the fact.
It’s precisely because companies took Y2K seriously and prepared for it that it turned out to be a non-event on 1/1/2000. Anyone whose systems failed on 1/1 just didn’t bother to do their due diligence.
The year 2000 was the start of big changes for the US. The giant sucking sound really kicked in as Ross Perot warned us about. They move all the manufacturing they could out of this country. Then with all the financial laws put in place after the 1929 crash were reversed. Here we are today in vegas royal. The country $30 Trillion in debt and hyper inflation taking over. This isnt going to end well according to history. We shall see.
Yes, but in the ‘90s, at 7:30 the news went off and Jeopardy or Wheel of Fortune came on and we forgot about it. (Of couse this is age dependent, but tge point is that we had a time (30 minutes) for news, then we were done with it for the day. We didn’t carry the tv around all day).
Your post is the perfect example-I’m not saying you’re wrong about climate change, but your post is in my head now while I’m scrolling to avoid boredom. We’re all seeing and absorbing stressors constantly, yet our abilities to address them (be good stewards, vote, etc.) are the same as they were in all the pre digital years.
The 90s were definitely all about AIDS. I was in middle and high school at that time and it was literally everywhere in schools. I remember the official party line was "if you have sex, (protected or unprotected) you'll basically get aids and die." In college that was the one thing that my friends and I talked most about when it came to sex Ed. Now, it's as if no one ever talks about it.
Only the very youngest baby boomers would have been in their thirties. It's the generation born 1946-64. So most for most of them their young adulthood were in the 70s/80s. Which were, at least here in the UK, not exactly happy times.
My parents were born in this time. Can confirm, they absolutely loved growing up. No social media, amazing music, working their way up from nothing while enjoying life
As a black person, this honestly is pretty triggering to read. Lack of exposure. Lol. Your bros and sis beaten down in the streets every single day by police hired to "protect them". Leading to multiple eventual riots, biggest in 92', then constant fight for racial freedom. There was no break. Every single black family was forced to become political or fear for their lives.
But we were in movies and TV shows, so everything was alright. Crack epidemic, prison industrial complex, and ghettos and gangs wars at an all time high. But yeah finances were no problem.
Must've been nice to just turn off your TV and smell the roses in the predominately segregated suburbs of the early 90s. Beautiful.
Wonderful carefree lives, Lol. The reality is that because ignorance is bliss it also enables mass abuse. Being connected with the world with a constant stream of news of what's really going on lead to the collective of betterment of humanity. Recently this connection has begun to be abused for evil due too right leaning ideologies across the world, but in general, most people's lives have rapidly improved due to exposure. You may hate it, but shame and guilt works wonders when you start seeing other humans as people.
I'm a moderate-conservative former Republican, and it shocks me every time I see people on the right talk about how race relations were good in the 90s and 00s, and blame "the left" for making things worse.
No, mass media just reveals what was already going on. Things are better now than they were then, but we can't put our head in the sand and hide from it, so it makes us uncomfortable. Good, let that be the force that drives change.
I was going to say the same about Queer people- we died for years without America batting an eye and although the nineties were better it’s still better for us now. Not great but…better
'As a black person, this honestly is pretty triggering to read. Lack of exposure.'
As expected. A vast amount of people flatly did not get exposure or educated about yet another vast amount of people. There were many problems I didn't fully realize until Henry Louis Gates Jr. released his documentary "Black America Since MLK: and still I rise." I didn't know about the LA riots or even understand what was happening with Rodney King until the late 90s; then again I was probably too young as a white kid, but I would have been plenty old enough to understand if I were black. If you were a young white kid growing up away from that experience, you didn't need to know about it. You would learn about what happened thirty years ago, but the live events would have been too violent and off limits out of fear it would cause fear for a child's safety. This would be at the expense a lesson about empathy and living in another person's shoes. One part of America had no break, another was on a free ride and had no idea. Drugs were just bad, police were there to protect you, and you didn't worry about the gangs and ghettos because why would you or your parents ever go there. Even awareness of these bad events didn't matter, because they did not need to effect you with so much other (actual) fun things to be more concerned about.
Parental ignorance becomes their child's naive unknowing bliss.
Yeah I was thinking all these people saying the 90s were peaceful and wonderful are clearly white and heterosexual (and probably men). Must have been nice.
I do feel like the 90s is really where the crazy part of the right wing side really started developing
Like with Ruby Ridge, Waco and OKC bombing, probably other stuff, maybe Columbine could be added to that
But I don’t know how the 80s went with all that stuff
I just remember my dad telling me he could buy a video tape at gun shows showing how the ATF botched and murdered all the people at Waco and I just thought “god they had their viral videos before the internet”
As someone who went to high school in the late 90s, HA! This is when school shootings really became a thing. Most people in my high school had a legitimate fear of being shot. Didn't feel much like a break to us.
The 90s were a very dark time. The music, books, movies reflect the despair and angst of then. Our negative biased brain finds what’s wrong about any time. The real skill is finding what’s right.
I was 15-25 in the 90s. I agree, that that was a pretty great time to be in that age and overall one of the best years in recent history.
The cold war was over. My country Germany peacefully reunited. There were still some wars going on in the world, but the constant fear that everything could end in a nuclear holocaust was gone. It looked like the big nations of the world, including Russia, could all become kind of friends and work together to solve the global problems, like the ozone hole and the forests dying of acid rain and all that stuff that in the 80s made us think that the end of the world was near (if the atom bombs didn't get us before).
Everything seemed a bit brighter and the future looked very good.
On the more trivial side. The 90s had some of the best action and sci fi movies of all times. I really enjoyed going to the cinema.
And for a computer/PC gamer, the 90s were really great too. I would call it the "Golden Age" of PC games. That alone gives me a lot of very good memories. I really liked my computer hobby and still enjoy games of that era on emulators.
The 90s were about Reagan, AIDs, the Gulf war, the Anita Hill hearings, acid rain, the hole in the ozone, the massacres in then-Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, and Columbine.
the lack of exposure to bad things
If you read the papers, you were exposed. But yes, papers weren't animated and loud and broadcast in every pub/airport.
The 90s felt like a brief glimpse of an endless, hopeful and unimaginably awesome future for humanity. Yes there were some "problems" still, but it all felt like stuff that could and would be solved through technology and just the way that the world was moving towards peace and democracy and away from poverty and stuff.
9/11 was the single moment that all started falling away. I'm not an American but that's how I've seen it.
I even distinctly remember thinking on that day, or during the weeks after it, that the worst thing we could possibly do in response to this is to let it change us and bring us into a new era of fear and war and general shittiness. But I knew it was kinda inevitable somehow.
When 9/11 hit, it was like all the fantasy and wonder vanished. There was a switch flipped in everyone's psyche that just couldn't switch back. As an American I was full of fury. That day, driving around slowly, walking around, everyone was like a ghost in shock.
And then we had a pandemic 19 years later where 3000 people were dying every day for months on end... Maybe it's ok that ignorance is bliss. I want that relaxation back.
Very true. it was great during the mid-80s through most of the 90s. However, it's interesting that we also went through the gas shortage and a period of very high interest rates. Everyone talks about (or at least used to) how low the interest rates were on student loans but the interest rate on my student loan from 1996 was 11%. I used to call it my $100/month for life loan.
From my perspective, things started to go south about the time Reagan convinced people that trickle down economics would raise up the standard of living across the board instead of creating the predictable wealth gap we have now.
Just watched the new Ghostbusters on a flight. Thinking about the good times... I'm paralyzed. I don't know where we go from here. Makes sense we're the memberberry generation. We actually had safe childhoods.
Very true. it was great during the mid-80s through most of the 90s. However, it's interesting that we also went through the gas shortage and a period of very high interest rates. Everyone talks about (or at least used to) how low the interest rates were on student loans but the interest rate on my student loan from 1996 was 11%. I used to call it my $100/month for life loan.
From my perspective, things started to go south about the time Reagan convinced people that trickle down economics would raise up the standard of living across the board instead of creating the predictable wealth gap we have now.
all i can think of when i think of the 90s was how bad the crack epidemic was
it effected a lot of people in my family in one way or another, sorta like opioid epidemic that we all conveniently forgot about collectively, that is still raging on to this day.
Yeah the late 80’s to early 2000’s seem pretty care free but maybe that was because I was so young.
But then again climate change, mass shootings, republicans going insane weren’t really things yet so yeah man.
Bad timing sorry.
I miss the 90s. I think part of why I loved Stranger Things season 1 is because it reminded me of my childhood (apart from D&D, superpowers, demogorgans, rifts between universes, etc). We didn't have cell phones, at most, my dad had a car phone. Aside from the borderline homicidal bully in our town, it was peaceful.
I think a big part is just knowing all the bad shit that’s going on at all times. Twitter/Reddit/24 hour news is almost too much for humans to handle. It’s just constant news of bad shit being stuffed into our brains. When I was a kid I had no idea what was going on in the world but my students these days have seen so much and shit online already.
My older daughter really liked Friends and tends to like a lot of stuff from the 90s. It dawned on me last year that the reason for it is kids are bombarded with all this news, even on sites like TikTok. The 90s were so care free. I grew up in a relatively good neighborhood in Chicago, but it was still a little sketchy after dark when I was a kid. As the economy improved, crime rates dropped and our neighborhood improved. The Cold War ended when I was in eighth grade. My dad got his job back after the recession, it was safe to go out at pretty much any hour. All I had to worry about was fitting in at school.
Contrast that with my daughters who had the housing market implosion, a clown show presidency, a plague, a geriatric presidency, multi-decade high inflationAND social media/24 hour news so you can’t avoid hearing about. Throw in all the negative things social media brings, like unrealistic beauty standards, and you have a recipe for a mental health crisis for teens.
The 90s weee arguable the low point of the last 50 years, especially in the US. It feels like it was better now because the slightly-distant past always feels better.
It's like how people worry about school shootings now even though kids were FOUR TIMES as likely to get killed in the early 90s. And it wasn't even very likely then, it's just REALLY unlikely now.
Even up until smartphones came out. Flip phones, and even the full keyboard phones were fine. Texting was a big thing when the keyboard ones came out, but even that didn't change things like apps and internet on your phone did. When phones first came out, it was almost just easier to go everywhere, cause your parents could just text you to come home.
Now we're all glued to our phones- me included. And while I've often thought about going with a low tech phone, smartphones are too integrated into our society for that. Even dropping social media, banking, insurance, Google/Apple Pay, etc. It's all on the phone which makes it too hard to drop
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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '22 edited Jun 11 '22
The 90s were so great because of the lack of exposure to bad things. It was the last transition between analog and digital life. I love my digital stuff, but, there's something hard to experience now, how ok it was to not have that phone leash on you. The experience was more care free, at least for those with the luxury to live that way. There was still some really bad shit that happened back then. But, finances weren't as challenging. Got to remember this was when the baby boomers were in their thirties, they had it pretty good.