Discussion UsefulNotes / The90s

Also, describing how anime first look off in the US, and the most notable things are kid-oriented distributions like Sailor Moon, Dragonball Z and Pokemon? What about Akira? Ghost In The Shell, even?

I also think this point in the technology section needs a thorough rewrite:

• For most of the Nineties, though, personal computers were a minor luxury. Like televisions in the '50s, most homes had only one computer for the whole family to use. The age of the model and operating system varied, but Windows 95 became the standard after, well, '95. Most printers were of the dot matrix variety, and laptops were rare, bulky luxuries. For many young people, the only time when they had access to a reasonably modern computer was in school, and then, it was usually only in the computer lab (if the school even had one).

Although I will agree that most households rarely had more than one computer for the entire family, it's worth bearing in mind that this was the decade they stopped becoming a novelty. Dot-matrix printers? Maybe in the early '90s, but they were soon being replaced by early inkjet devices (we had a colour inkjet in '94, despite not exactly being ueber-rich).

I think it might also be worth adding to the Windows 95 point by elaborating on the growing dominance of what was still back then known as the "IBM compatible" or "PC clone" standard over rival platforms such as the Apple Mac, Amiga and even Acorn Archimedes in the UK. Also, since it's been mentioned that many people were still using older computers, it might be worth mentioning that some of the old 8-bit micros, like the Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum, were still being made up until the early part of the decade!

Note: I think this page needs a fair bit more to make it less US-centric, although it's not too bad on that score. I've already a few ideas for extra examples, but anyone else with any ideas of their own?

I changed the line about jeans in the fashion section because by 1999, anyone who wore high-waisted jeans (or tapered jeans) was laughed at. It had started dropping by about 1997, though it wouldn't reach the extreme, can't-sit-down-in-them levels until the next decade. (I graduated in 1998 and still have a couple pairs of Levi's from high school, and the waistlines are several inches below waist-level.)

The fashion section could use a bit of a clean-up, I think, because it mostly reflects fashion in the early 90's. By the latter half of the decade, early-90's fashion was considered as ridiculous as the 80's was. For teenagers at least, wide-legged jeans and flared jeans were the norm by 1998, to the point where it could be hard to find anything else in the junior's section of any given store. Likewise, acid-washed jeans were a joke by the middle part of the decade. Movies and TV made in the late 90's are usually a close approximation of what people were actually wearing, which was very different from the clothes in the first part of the decade, which really was culturally a holdover of the 80's.