The 90s Nostalgia Thread

Our family had a Pansonic Dot Matrix printer because my dad's generic printer bit the dust and they stopped making parts for it.

It was Epson compatible so he had his TRS-80 hooked into it when I wasn't using it.

Then we got the HP and an Iomega Zip drive - so many Anime, Star Trek and Babyon 5 pics....

Now when DVD's came out, the first drives had to have an MPEG card so you could watch the movies on your PC.

Then ~1998 graphics cards got powerful enough that you just needed the drive. It was 1999 when I built my P][ 400 and I remember the first movie I watched - The Matrix.

The '90s were the zenith of the electronics and computer stores.

In The '80s, my Daddy used to take me with him when we went to electronics or computer stores. He'd ask questions and get help.

I did the same in The '90s - I'd ask questions or go look at the displays and read boxes of stuff.

Same with electronics - A lot of trips to RadioShack for hi-fi or gizmos. My fav with the "itty bitty book light" - so many books read by the tiny light I got at the mall. Daddy asked a lot of questions at RadioShack and at some of the stores at the mall when we had issues with our TV or other gizmos.

But all changed around 1997. I gots me an issue of Computer Shopper and built my first compy - a P166 with a CD-ROM and sound card from CompUSA. My next computer was a P][ 400 that was built with parts that I got online. I had friends who started to use the internet to buy stuff.

The 2000's saw the death of a lot of the gizmos that were the reason we went to the mall and the internet took away our reason to shop for computer stuffs.

But The '90s were a decade where you could go and have the interaction with your fellow nerds you just don't get or forums.

I posted this in on r/Nostalgia in response to a question as to why the 90's were cool:

When I was little, I remember thinking the 1950s were A Long Time Ago, in large part because, even by then, technology had advanced so much. Flash forward to now, when I have two computers from the mid-1990s around still (the time equivalent of having a 1950s mainframe in the 1980s), and the changes aren't nearly as dramatic, at least with PCs.

For general applications, there wasn't much of a change.

Video and audio grew by leaps and bounds. Storage took a quantum leap. I was a Sophomore in college when the first gigabyte hard disks appeared. Then a Senior when 75 and 100 GB HDD's hit the market.

In the words of one computer magazine "Who has enough pr0n, warez and mp3's to fill 75 GB?".

Now I have not one, but two 4 Terabyte external USB drives and a 100 GB USB flash memory stick.

But for those of us who had to keep tons of floppies around, the larger and larger drives were a godsend.

File sharing locally was easy - this was the decade that coined "sneakernet". We traded floppies, then zip disks.

Edited by TairaMai on Apr 5th 2022 at 9:31:23 AM

Barney was the shit, I loved to watch Barney back in the 90's. I still do to this day, the show is just that good.

There was such massive Barney hate - the only hatedom that was higher was the utter nerd RAGE that was the hatedom for "Acting Ensign Wesley Crusher".

There was a usenet newsgroup "alt.ensign.wesley.die.die.die".

Barney haters did have a Doom .wad file "Barney DOOM" - replaced the Baron of Hell with the purple one.

I remember most of the Barney hate coming from slightly older Elementary schoolers (mostly boys) I guess just out of sheer it's uncool to like "baby stuff".

The problem was that Barney's titular show aired at or around 3 PM in the afternoon. When moms needed to put their little ones down for a nap - but also when school age kids were just getting home from school.

Some stations would air cartoons, but many aired more adult programming (many shows that kidlets weren't allowed to watch).

So if you were too older for Barney and the cartoons weren't on - his purple face was the only show parents would allow their kids to watch.

If you were home sick, Barney was there.

So for the target audience, the Kiddie Kid who didn't care or the parent who needed to pacify either one - Barney was alright.

But the rest of the young got overexposed to Barney - the hate came from that overexposure.

Bear in the Big Blue house got it a little bit.

Then the internet really took off towards the end of The '90s - it was much easier to escape Barney and shows like it.

Ah yes generally watching preschool shows when you are home sick is terrible, but hardly unique to Barney, though on at 3pm checks out.

The Barney hate was one of the first memes of the 90's that really took off.

Like I said, there was "Barney DOOM" - one of the first pop culture meme DLC's for a video game.

The internet took what would have just been a word-of-mouth thing to new heights.

When the Quake series took off, some brands were happy to use it to promote themselves, others took steps to control their image. The creator of Wallace and Grommit got Planetquake to take down a Wallace & Grommit model set for Quake 3 (it would have been either model or both riding a bike).

I remember when Chex cereal had it's own videogame made using the DOOM engine. It was the last gasp of the "free prize at the bottom" era.