12 Things Gone FOREVER...1990s - Life in America 

It wasn't all consuming like it is now, it was still an amazing novelty in it's early days.

I think that goes for the 2000s as well. I was born in 2000 so I grew up all throughout that decade and even though the internet was well developed and used by that point, I still went outside to play with friends and toys, and only went on the internet to play games and watch videos for a bit. It wasn’t till like 2008 where the internet became a lot more involved and I started using it pretty much all the time.

what child has pressure of social media and cannot go outside lol?

this is the comment i clicked on this video to find.. kids not going outside and being obsessed about social media is a fallacy, if a child is naturally unadventurous or doesn't like going outside they would've found something else to do in any other period of time. If they are naturally self-conscious and insecure about how they compare to other kids they would feel the same way at school or watching tv etc in any other time period. Too many people blame kids for all these things, when in reality it's millenial parents being too protective to let their kids explore on their own, too careless to allow them access to any social media, not strict enough to limit their time online, and too lazy to bring them up properly. I'm only 19 myself and grew up doing typical outdoor kid stuff but it's getting tiring hearing the same people who can't bring kids up properly in a modern world preach about how much better they had it

@@JALC-x you make a good point on parents failing to discipline their kids, and yes introverts will be introverts. But the real culprit is social media’s method of making us sick. It’s far deeper than most people realize. Just another addiction. Look at Twitter, used to be fun, now it’s become a toxic place for people to rage. Just toxicity everywhere. That’s why I said we as a society peaked between the 00’s and early 10’s.

They were everywhere! They gave them out in grocery store checkout lines.

Yep, we got one mailed all the time, long before we got a home computer (2004), when by that time cable co. modems had internet access, for which we connect today.

I had a Word Processor at one time and all those AOL Install Disks that would come in the mail ended up becoming disks for my word processor as those disks could be re-formatted.

People used to make stuff out of those free AoL disks. Clothes, lamps, furniture... There was no shortage.

@@KaneshaDi That must of been when they were still mailing floppy disks. Most of the AOL disks I received were CD-ROMs and thus, not recordable.

Gaming and the early internet were totally amazing. Now it's made everything easier but also harder to turn off to enjoy non-connected life.

yeah.. really worse. when technologies came out. it was always exciting and powerful. each console came out was always powerful and new. now you have ps5.. likes ehh.. you have a 600 hp factory sport car is like ehhh. maybe we're just getting old

now the fringe idiots can find each other and increase their numbers

I was the same way.

@@BlueRice it's not just that we're getting old, if you look at how children act vs the 90s and prior, the raising, the legal limits etc, the school, everything, it's not the same, and that's why over time, kids have quit moving out at as young of ages, don't learn the basics of life in school anymore, are always on the internet or doing something with a mobile app instead of being out in social, which causes a lot to not know how to talk to people especially in a bad situation. A lot more kids are shooting kids now then before and I believe that's part of why.

Me too! So much

Me three. Like ANYTHING! Except that… Well, maybe.

“ANYTHING to go back” billy, born in 2039

One day soon,they will invent time travel so WE WILL.

Or it could get better than was before. The '80's started off awful. I thought the good times would never come back but most of the '90's put the earlier good times to shame.

@@robertd9850 What about the 80s didn't you like? Some people are divided about the decade because of things like hairstyles and clothing choices (yikes!) but it did kick off synthesizers gave us some of the best sci-fi movies still loved today. Still, a mixed pot of crazy.

@@DareToBeDeviant The early years were dreadful. High gas prices, hostages, threat of nuclear attack, dismal economy, heat waves and droughts where I lived. Really pretty awful. It got a little better middle decade and much better the last 3 years.

@@robertd9850 My condolences you had to ensure that. Over here on the Rust Belt nothing ever happens. The entire west half of the USA could be on fire and we wouldn't be notified for impending doom.

I wish we could rewind ⏪ to the 1990s

The 90's was great for 20-somehtings too. Image how great the 90's would have been without parental oversight? The education system was already pretty undermined by then, you guys got a bad deal there.

@@peterbelanger4094 The 90's job market was great too. Recent college grads could get jobs without having years and years of experience.

I was a 20-something thru most of the 90s. I have a lot of fond memories of this decade, but it wasn't really because of anything inherent in the 1990s-it was because during this decade, my friends and I took a 1000+ km roadtrip almost every year. Now with them mostly married, and with other responsibilities that I have, those days are long gone (the last big roadtrip that I took with a friend (it was actually about 3000km roundtrip) was in 2005) I still do a lot of driving, but they are mostly work trips, and I am either by myself or with employees

@@SJHFoto you’ll get back out there, my dude. That spirit doesn’t fade away 🤙🏼

Being a kid in the 90s and a teen in the 00s was better.. you get the best of both worlds. The early 90s still had a lot of influence of the 80s and the early 00s saw the world shift to digital before it became the toxic wasteland that it has become. Over all.. Any decade where you didn't have the burden of bills would be the best.

It's technically 3 decades ago, '00s, '10s, now early '20's. 🤷

@@anthonycarlisle6184 Yes, it is. ... now here's a box of crayons.

It is a bit surreal seeing your childhood (I was born in '85) already being recollected. It also hits home when you see kids now having retro day at school and they're wearing clothes from the '90s. Now I know how my mom felt when I was looking for '60s and '70s clothes in the late '90s for my retro days.

@@strange4change_6 hopefully they aren't transitioning or invited to drag bars. Another 2 yrs of joey and US will be broken up by ....

@@stevestreet2825 🤣 sounds like another dramatic deplorable

Not sure if you played video games but the 90s was a golden age for them growing up especially in the early days of LAN and early internet networking. Younger generations born in the later 90s-early 2000s or later will never know what the world was like before the internet.

BEST TIME OF MY LIFE!!!

That is hilarious! I kept my Blockbuster and Hollywood Video cards for quite a while in my purse because I missed going into the stores! I think in life, we just deal with whatever technology we are given at the time. :)

Bro what?! XD THATS CRAZYY HAHA

😂😂😂wow

That Blockbuster card saved your life lmao

​@@deboraholsen2504 My sister still has a video from Blockbuster (Silence of the Lambs) it's like a trophy now lol. Still has the "Favorites" insert, too! We sometimes wonder how much the late fee would be now.

The 70s were the best years. Lol 😉

@@mariamercy7317 I grew up in the '70s, there's some parallels between those decades that I don't' think (sadly) apply in the LAST 20 years. My NIECE "turned me on" to "Brewstewfilms" (RU-vid channel) and, if you swap out the "pop culture", It's eerily remincent of my 1970s childhood. 🤷‍♂️

best decade to be a 20-something. the music was awesome.

@@jamesslick4790 You are sooo right. Sadly last 20 years are exactly that "Sad" 😢 I lived through the mid 50s, 60s, 70s. Times have changed so much. Wish I could say "For better." I was raised in NYC where children could sit on the steps of their building till late at night, without supervision of parents without fear... I'm about to cry.

@@mariamercy7317 Some things have got better, But overall In my humble opinion is that "our world" (us who grew from the 50's-'90s -The Post World War 2 era) pretty much ended on 9/11/01 😞

I remember taking upwards of 1 hour to connect...and the FRUSTRATION of being connected...and someone in your house picks up the phone...your computer freezes up but for a minute or so you don't realize you were kicked offline all because someone picked up the damn phone! lol

Me too! My Mom would sometimes kick me off the computer so she could talk to her friends. Getting online was pretty difficult sometimes with dial up. I remember watching the OJ verdict as it happened.

Those discs that were always in the mail 📬 😂

Even when I lived in the boonies in the US, it never took me longer than around 2 minutes to get online with dial-up. A dedicated line and a modem code to silence the connection sounds and I was good.

Well it is 2022 and it sometimes still takes up to 20 minutes for me to get connected to the internet with my cable modem, if I try to connect in the early evening when everyone else seems to be online. If I try in the middle of the night, it only takes a minute. (I turn off my computer and modem when I am not using them.)

If there’s one thing I have learned in my relatively short time on this Earth is that the future is full of uncertainty

💯🔥💯🔥

Well people tend to overlook that bad and remember the good and Nostalgia, the 80s and 90s were not all happiness and roses, alot of messed up shit happened to. If it's part of your formidable years you tend to look at it in a positive way. It's like really all generations have done and will do.

I feel terrible for kids these days. They shouldn't have to be so used to school shootings and the mass hysteria.

@@RF-vg5kv I completely agree, but with the events that have happened (unique to the 21st century) I think adults in the future will think of these decades as a semi dark age.

Yup, and all the amateur geocities and altavista crappy internet sites people made. The internet was totally novel and amazing in the early days, and now it's just omnipresent and created significant societal problems.

yeah that time. there wasnt no youtube, no reddit, nothing major social platform. but it was exciting because you read up on random things. surf the web about game emulator, breakdance moves, reading romantic drama story telling, underground rap and so on. high quality picture was nice back then since it takes so long to load and view.

Yep, and everything was even working and efficient. No need for gigabytes and gigahertzes to render simple websites like today.

@@TheSimoc petium 1 cpu still can sruf the website today. Higher performance mean for better graphic and computing power. You can do more with better performance.

@@BlueRice Depends wholly on what website. Not many modern websites work with Pentium 1 and even less with a browser that can be run by such. Of course more performance allows you to do more, but unfortunately most of it isn't utilized for that nowadays, instead it is mostly wasted on unnecessary bloat. Even simple textual content and UI of many today's webpages is often more resource hogging than fancy interactive animated graphics of 90s and early 00s.

Courtesy, thoughtfulness and kindness seem to have disappeared as well.

The internet has changed almost everything about how we live, similar to the way electricity affected the modern world.

Hopes and Dreams was reintroduced in 2015

@@39zack huh?

Well, also normalised omophobia and child abuse seems to be gone, so I wouldn't say it was all better.

9-11-2001 to be exact.

​@@richierich3541 9+1+1= 11

ehhh we mostly all had those Nokia candy bar phones when they got really mainstream, and then everyone had the Motorola Razr after that in the early 00s. But definitely late 90s was a little less common.

I got my first cellphone in 7th grade in 2003/2004 ... it was a flip phone 😭.. but ya everyone was always amazed by it at the time I don't remember any of my friends at the time having one 😂

We all didn’t know this was the best it would get. I wish I would’ve appreciated it way more than I did. I would gladly go back in a heartbeat if I could

that’s literally the whole point of Nostalgia. You don’t appreciate the present until its the past. The best version of the past are your teenage years and you only remember the good feelings not the bad. We all do it.

We never do.

Same here.

We had a Vic 20, I remember playing space invaders on it as a kid.

I have one I need to fix. Somewhere there's a TI99/4A that still works floating around too. Oh... And an Atari 130XL.

@@misterhat5823 I had a TI 99 / 4A as well, Tombstone was my game!

@@cdldriver2348 I remember that. I spent most my time typing in BASIC programs.

@@cdldriver2348 FUN FACT: The TI-99/4 (the TI-99/4A' s predecessor) was the first "consumer" PC with a 16 Bit microprocessor! Pretty heady tech in an innocent looking little box in 1979! 👍😊👍

I actually have two players and 300 plus vhs tapes! Everything works!!

All my tapes went into the trash about 10 years ago.

I have an ex-girlfriend who insisted I get a VCR when we were living together, because she thought VHS was the only correct way of watching her favorite Disney movies.

I remember picking up some French girls when I was in Northern Ontario because their RV broke down. Poor kids-in that area there was no cell reception (this was around 2010) and I worried about them. We went all the way back to Sault Ste Marie (about 150km from where I was) but I had time and they got to a spot where they could rent another vehicle safely

Did you die of dysentery?

I remember those and a salesman telling me they were going to take over the market, the machines were very expensive, thankfully I never bought one. They were gone as fast as they appeared.

@@bearforce187 They actually survived quite some time in home theater and industrial applications.

I still have a Laserdisc machine and a small collection of movies.

The technology of bouncing a laser off of the reflective surface of a disc to produce sound and video did survive though. It was refined into a much more compact, cost effective format and renamed the Compact Disc, then later, the DVD.

Laser disc is from the 80s

Now a days kids stream movies eat pizza and look at there iPads while they are all in the same room. Us 90’s we had it good. Best decade ever

My response to your mentioning that 9/11 has ruined a lot of things is this: I remember my elementary school principal talking to us students in an all-school assembly in our school auditorium. This was back in the 1950's. He told us that all it takes is ONE PERSON breaking the rules to ruin it for everyone else!!!!! That principle plays out each and every day to this day!!! All it took was ONE hijacker on 9-11 to ruin air travel forever for all of us. (Of course, there were several other hijackers on other planes as well). The wife and I used to enjoy air travel, but not anymore!!!

Me too. I even have combination DVD/VCR so I can still use them if need be. ^_^

I know that’s right Cole 😂🔥🔥

I still have my parents old vinyl, compact cassettes, and 8- track cassettes! What can I say? We grew up with great music in the house 🎶🎸📻

I have some that are for "mature audiences only".😆

@@stephendacey8761 ahahaha!

We still have a VCR. It's wonky, though. But I used it to record figure skating about a year ago. We even have some unopened VCR tapes.

Funny you say that I just bought 2 of them about 45 minutes ago haha true

@@L.Spencer I have one too. The belts need changed.

I still have a bunch of VHS tapes! Just nothing to play them on!!

@@charleso8826 I have about 15 VCRs & hundreds of tapes, including over 100 sealed blanks. (I can't fix them, so I got them when the transition was happening---$5 to $20 each.)

The original Google

Yeah, back before they sold out our manufacturing capacity to other nations.

The mid-late nighties are still the highest period of jobs created in US history, and seen as the most stable period internationally between the end of the cold war and into 2001. Ever since then it feels like the US has been on a seesaw of moving from one crisis to another.

I remember the special tape rewinding machines. You used those so you could play another tape immediately while the one you just watched rewound.

@@incog99skd11 We still have our VHS rewinder.

Well, I appreciate the staff having prepared for it, certainly there has been less and more needs with critical systems. But, honestly, after all the convoluted alarmist fearmongering, it was just too "funny disappointment" to see how my offline home computer just booted up normally after all. The point of all its funniness was in that the systems that might have really suffered from the y2k problem, didn't anyhow touch average punters (as it was rather simple and affordable for maintainers of such systems to prepare for it and they were very technically concious of the applicable issues), yet all the the far-fetched worst-case-scenario fearmongering news were targeted for average punters, whose only touch with computers were the home computers, with main usage being gaming, word processing, and... just a status symbol. Minority even had an internet connection. Yet majority of home computer owners were not technically savvy, so they fell into fear of the y2k journalism with complicated technical explanations and far-fetched example scenarios, thinking it will make their offline home computers to explode due to RTC overflow. Well, it is what we call "click journalism" nowadays - then you just needed to pay for the paper.

They way things are now they should have just let it crash

@@TheSimoc True, there was a lot of overblown hype. I was one of the people fixing software etc to head off the problem, and it was annoying to have to waste time reassuring customers who'd been told by some "snake oil salesman" Y2K consultant that they were at risk when in reality they had nothing to worry about. Often they wouldn't believe us ...

I remember Friday's were pizza night along with whatever the newest movie rental releases were at blockbuster if they weren't all rented out. Life just seemed a lot simpler back then.

ABC ruled Friday nights in the 90s. Every other day, well...

I liked Lori Loughlin on "Full House".

Yet, we spent so much of our childhood wishing we were grown-ups....

@@bigred3164 I know that feeling too well, I was born 1989 and so remember many of the 90s tech, how awesome the future would be for me when I got older (or so I thought) 🥵

Mad. Maze.

Oh my, I had forgotten Prodigy!!

We also used prodigy

Same brother , I was Born in 1998 we are the last generation,who enjoyed their childhood before tech took hold of people's life's

I was born 1997 and experienced having an Chirp phone and having 90s Computer and be outside until 8:00PM from 2-8 seven hours of outside

DVD covers with locking tabs to open and thick, thick solid plastic construction.

I saved up for 2 years to buy a Jaguar. I was disappointed with it, so decided to save up for another 2 years to buy Jaguar CD when it came out, thinking it was what was missing. I was wrong again. It sat in a box for 25 years until I sold it last year on eBay. I wasn't disappointed anymore!

One thing I would like to see gone forever is Joe Biden and everyone associated with him.

@@JUVI9596, sounds like a plan.

I remember my brother and sister and I, along with all of our friends and even some of the other neighborhood kids, used to watch TGIF together. We would blow whatever money we had on snacks and pop, and just sit down in front of the TV and watch Urkel, or Step By Step, Boy Meets World, whatever shows they would cycle on there. Our parents never had to worry about what we were doing on Friday nights. It was either watch TGIF, or go to a high school football game during football season. Good times.

Yup, even now flash memory outside of hard drives isn't really needed with all manner of cloud based storage. You can just send yourself an e-mail or throw it on a file share.

@@aeroripper Absolutely.

CDs came first. Flash drives were invented in 1984 but didn’t become popular until USB 2.0 in 2000.

I have so many vhs tapes that I love. I recorded lots of tv shows back in the day. I purchased a high end professional Sony VCR (used) years ago to make sure I could still watch them. I also have 4 or 5 backup VCRs in a closet. Sure I could convert stuff to DVD, but I like the nostalgia of watching the tapes.

He said "high resolution".

Don't forget about *69 to see who called you

Even had a Thomas guide that had all the So. Cal. fault lines in it.

I did.

Jihad