Ah, the 90s. Technology was really picking up speed and the World Wide Web was beginning to unite the planet. Looking back, it’s easy to laugh at how bizarre or quaint some of the tech was. From the cast of Friends teaching you how to use Windows 95 to that ubiquitous AOL connection screen, here are some of our favorite tech from the 90s to help spiral you off into nostalgic-fueled daydreams!
10. Tamagotchi
Be honest, how many of you killed your Tamagotchi pet? This wasn’t a fad that lasted long (at least where I lived), but for a short while every kid at school was taking breaks to feed and play with this primitive digital pet. The interface was horrid, the graphics were stick-figure-simple, but it captured the imagination of kids around the world.
Tamagotchi was relaunched by Bandai in 2017 without much critical fanfare – We think people remembered how much of a pain they were.
9. “You’ve Got Mail!”
You remember the internet before broadband, right? When you had to check with the family to make sure they didn’t need to use the phone for a while? When the sound of the Internet was a piercing, screeching noise that simultaneously irritated and excited you.
In those days, America Online was the ISP of choice and geeks judged people on whether they used the built-in AOL browser or the infinitely better Internet Explorer. Let’s not even get into what adolescents were up to in chat rooms back then. A/S/L anyone?
8. Handheld Games Like This
This was a weird in-between period for video games. The old style handheld games popular in the 80s (think baseball, football and the like) had been completely surpassed by the Nintendo Gameboy. But Gameboys were expensive, so for a while, these single-game, two-color tech monstrosities continued to find some level of profitability. These days you might find a hipster playing his OG Gameboy on the subway, but one of these things? Likely not!
7. The Windows 95 VHS Starring Rachel and Chandler
Windows 95 was a really big deal. Before then, people were using DOS and Windows 3.1, which were old-fashioned even by 90s standards. Even still, it’s funny to look back at how incredibly quaint it is to bring in some television stars for a VHS release on how to use Windows 95. The only thing it proves, I think, is that old people of every generation need a little extra help with these newfangled contraptions the kids like so much.
6. Pokémon
Okay, so Pokémon never really went away and by some accounts is as popular as it ever was. But 90s kids remember the origins of Pokémon… These are the true Pokémon veterans. Coming out of Japan and landing in the US in the late 90s, every kid who did not have a Gameboy Color to play Pokémon was looked upon with pity. These days there are more Pokémon games than you can count on your fingers and toes and the popularity seems to have a Star Wars-like longevity. Here’s to the OG fans of the 90s!
5. Video Rental Stores
Before digital streaming or even digital media like DVDs, VHS tapes were the only way most of us were able to watch movies. I mean, who had Laserdisc? Going out to the video store to rent movies for the weekend was a family tradition for myself and many other people. Rows and rows of movies to choose from and the sheer joy when Blockbuster started renting video games. These are some of the best memories for many 90s kids.
4. Tape Rewinders
Speaking of renting movies, do you remember the “Be Kind Rewind” stickers on every single VHS you brought home from Blockbuster? Those were the days. The problem was that rewinding video tapes was actually bad for your VHS player and you couldn’t do anything else with it while you waited for the tape to be rewound. Enter the tape rewinder – an extra device that most of us owned whose sole purpose was to rewind VHS tapes. Somehow that made sense to everybody.
3. Floppy Disks
Holding a whopping 1.44 megabytes of data, the floppy disk was the ubiquitous mode for moving data around. Kids from the 90s probably remember carrying around at least one floppy disk for the one or two classes in school that required using word processors. CD-ROMS may have increased the amount of data storage available for software, but CD burners were somewhat of a slow luxury that many of us did not have.
2. Encarta
Did your family have a bookshelf full of massive encyclopedia volumes? I know mine did. And I can remember the utter disbelief painted across my father’s face when our Packard Bell family computer came with an Encarta CD-ROM. “All of that?” he asked, pointing at tomes on the shelf, “In this?” Yeah dad, with video and sound, too. Welcome to the future!
1. Giant Car Phones
In the 90s, I had a friend who drove to high school every day in the ugliest, brownest, most beat up car I had ever seen. We called it “The Brown Thing” and most people would have been embarrassed to be seen in it. But The Brown Thing had something I had never seen before – a giant phone console. This tech blew my mind and put my friend at Zack Morris levels of cool. “Wait a second, you can make phone calls from your car?” To which he replied, “Well yeah, but I can only call my mom.”
Decades may change, but moms never do.
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