Ask Lemmy

I was wearing an onion for a belt, as was the fashion at the time.

late 80s here. We had a nice world before 9/11. there was hope.

One of the things I miss the most about the 1900s is that people didn't expect you to be reachable 24/7. Even though cellphones had been around since the 80s very few people had one. That meant that most people could only be reached through the family landline. If you didn't answer people would just assume you were out of the house, thus unreachable. That all started to change in the 2000s when cellphones became common place. Now days I feel like everyone expects me to pick up when they call, and if I don't they expect a better excuse than "I don't feel like talking right now." As a very introverted person who often needs a lot of alone time, it sucks, and sometimes I really wish I could go back to a world without cellphones.

Everywhere smelled like an ashtray until the late 90s when smoking bans started picking up steam.

Instead of doomscrolling, I read the newspaper. Having to go out and get it was a nice little nudge towards sociability.

I would hang out at a cafe in the city, reading and having coffee, and inevitably, someone I knew would come along and have a chat, maybe get a cuppa, tell me about something crazy, etc. Like a group chat in real life. We would never really organise to meet there, you would just turn up if you felt like it.

The paper itself being curated was good, too, because while it was definitely skewed by its corporate masters, or the inclinations of its editor, the stories had more time to be well-written and well-sourced within those constraints.

With experience, you could read between the lines to infer what wasn't being said, or know that something was missing and to check by other sources. Since everyone else was reading similar things, you could sometimes talk about the issues in more depth, without having to explain the basic facts.

Oh, and most people agreed on those basic facts.

Also, people were casually racist and sexist and bigoted, and lots of things we care about today were not even acknowledged by the majority as being problems.

A friend of mine got gaybashed (there's a term you might need to look up, hopefully) and it was like he'd just suffered an accident. People just shook their heads and muttered sympathies, like it was an inevitable result of being gay in public, instead of a brutal fucking hate crime. That sort of thing didn't even make the news unless the guy died.

Mostly people miss it... Unless you were gay. Then you probably have some unhappy memories about that time. Of course there's nostalgia for other stuff, but civil rights were way worse for lgbtq.

I'm surprised no one brought this up yet. Being gay in the 90s would be about as controversial as being trans now, and it would not be okay to walk around holding hands with your same sex partner unless you were in a known gay area. it might not be illegal, but it would've attracted attention, probably people would've said slurs at least. The f slur was used in television and movies until around the 90s. People just used it like "nerd" or "dweeb". Cocksucker was a pretty bad insult, insinuating someone was gay being pretty damn insulting at the time.

Things were significantly worse for lgbtq people, and there was the fear of HIV being basically a death sentence, and it wouldn't have been long after people called it the "gay disease". Some people were very uneducated about that stuff. My mom, who believed that gay men were our equals and should have equal rights, told me not to touch my gay teacher or shake his hand or anything because he might have "a disease". Thankfully my father was more medically knowledgeable and told her it doesn't spread like that, even if he had it.

It wasn't until around after the 2000s at least that gay people were proudly saying, "HIV is no longer a death sentence". It used to be a disease running rampant that no one gave a shit about because of homophobia basically. Fucking Reagan.

I was born in 1999 and am therefore completely qualified to talk about life in the 1900s. It was a lot of milk drinking and shitting in diapers.

Everyone’s saying what was better.

Bullshit, lol.

We were still people, and we still had all the people problems. Misogyny was worse, racism was worse, homophobia was really bad still, and “trans” was just a guy who liked wearing women’s clothes. Not that any man would ever admit that. Schools were super clique-ish, bullying was public and not prevented. Rapes were swept under the rug even worse than today. Pollution was really bad. I don’t think anyone born after 1990 has a clue how shitty the air quality was in cities back in the ‘80s and earlier. I can personally vouch for how amazing the environmental laws are and have improved air quality. Want to buy something that wasn’t available at a local store? Plan on waiting a month or more for it to arrive on order. Cars were more unsafe, often only had lap belts, and wtf is an airbag, lol. Car seats for kids were all but nonexistent. Air travel was crazy expensive, too.

All that said, yeah, there were some good things. We weren’t tied to screens all day. If someone stayed in and watched TV all day all the time you thought something might be wrong with them. We weren’t “on-call” 24-7 with cell phones. Basic jobs were easy to get. All my first jobs were walk in and ask if they needed anyone or just word of mouth, show up, and start working. Mass shootings weren’t the thing they are today. You actually owned the music or games you bought. Local stores had a huge variety of stuff and hadn't been crushed by walmart and big box stores (I actually remember when big box stores were new and touted as sources of better variety for consumers. Lol, that worked out great). Concert tickets to top bands were less than $10. Local radio was great, your DJ told you about local events, and we had Dr Demento and Casey Kasem on weekends. Nobody was forcing you to pay subscriptions for everything, homes and cars were more affordable, so was education, and health care hadn’t gone nuts yet. You could actually talk to your political opponents, you wanted the same things mostly, it was just how you wanted it to happen was different. Crazy wingnuts were just that. Crazy wingnuts and not mainstream. Nobody gave them platforms unless it was “The National Enquirer.”

So yeah. We had plenty of problems. But there was a lot of good shit too.

I'm not going to sugar coat it. There were good things and bad things, just like in any era.

On the good side, the standard of living was higher, especially for younger people. Wages, though already stagnating, had not reached the unliveability stage yet, and unions were still common. Communities were stronger because people hadn't holed up online yet and local media hadn't collapsed. What existed in terms of an online world was more open and trusting. They didn't even have encryption on the www before '95 if you can imagine? Politicians were as corrupt as ever, but the media in general were more accountable.

On the bad side, there were a lot more incurable diseases. The Cold War was fucked up. Just knowing everything you know and love could end in 20 minutes just because some idiot turns a key somewhere. The air was actually really dirty in a lot of places. I know there are a lot of parts of the world where that's still true, but clean air acts did work where implemented. Also, bars were all smoky as fuck. I couldn't go near one with my asthma.

I could go on, but I'll end on a more positive note. I was thinking just the other day how astronomy has been going through a golden age of discovery all throughout my life. In my childhood, they were sending out probes to give us the first close up looks at planets in our solar system. Then in the 90s we got the Hubble Space Telescope, we discovered our first exoplanets (planets around other stars) and that there is a 2nd ring system in our own solar system: the Kuiper Belt. Then we found a moon of Saturn with active geysers, Pluto sent us a ❤️, and now we have the James Webb Space Telescope joining massive ground-based telescopes that are just bursting with discoveries across the board. I just can't get enough of this stuff!

Well there were a lot more bugs and a lot fewer wildfires, for starters.

There are some very cool videos on YouTube of people from the late 1800's and early 1900's describing the experience, and worth listening to.

As for myself, life in the 80's and 90's was an adventure every fucking day. I grew up on county land with a huge forest behind it, and my brothers and friends and I were there so often that there were trails we'd made from walking so much. If we weren't in the woods we were on bikes zooming around the neighborhood or up to the gas station for snacks and drinks. I gained a love of reading and spent a lot of time at the school and local library picking up books and having more adventures in my head. We had huge video game arcades where you could spend hours with your friends too. We watched plenty of TV and movies, but you actually had to commit to it because streaming didn't exist. (Though VCR's later mitigated this somewhat.) Lots of us have great memories of video stores though, and yeah, I miss them. And without phones feeding you constant dopamine, it was easier to focus on these things and you enjoyed them more.

Most of us had very few rules and weren't as closely-minded by our parents as kids are now. We just had to be home by sundown. We took care of ourselves and figured shit out for ourselves, partly why GenX and elder millenials aren't complainers by nature now.

The downside is, when your friends moved away, they were just gone. You might exchange addresses or phone numbers, but you basically just never stayed in touch because you made new friends to replace the old ones. Long-distance calls were expensive and letters took too long to write when you had shit to do, and with such a big, wide world to explore as a kid, you always had shit to do.

For me, the best way to describe it was that it was just quieter and much more peaceful. It was really nice not being able to read everyone's mind all the time and not knowing everything that was going on in the world. If someone hated certain types of people, they actually had to say it, and most people weren't willing to translate their personal biases and hatred into action without the veil of anonymity.

I was born in 1979. Growing up, I remember laying on the floor in the summer, seeing the HBO title scene come on before watching Star Wars with my father on our little CRT TV. Then later, growing up in a trailer park, being raised by a single mom, me and my brother raised hell and had tons of friends. We'd ride our bikes, play in the woods, jump off the docks into ponds, sell golf balls we found in the creek back to the golf course to buy some superman ice cream.

Some other things I remember from that time:

• Doritos bags were clear with no foil and me and my brother would try to find the "flavor cube"
• Crush Apple pop was my favorite
• Listening to Michael Jackson's Thriller on a record player
• Renting Pitfall and River Raid for our Atari 2600 for $1 for a weekend at Believe in Music
  • Atari games were like $15 for most games, $20 for some
• Playing Smurf Rescue in Gargamel's Castle on our Colecovision or Mindstorm on our Vectrex with our friends
• Pizza Hut and the Book-it program
• The dual-sided styrofoam container from McDonalds that was used for breakfast or the McDLT
• Tato Skins chips
• My first Cherry Coke
• My first TV dinner that had to be baked in an oven - came in a foil tray
• Hi-C Juice
• Mr. T cereal
• My first Cherry 7-Up
• Jello Pudding Pops
• Bannanna Frosted Flakes
• Dialing phone numbers with a rotary dial
• Cartoons before school, such as Thundercats, GI Joe, Voltron, He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
• Pepsi A.M.
• Keebler Pizzaria Chips
• Getting my first Sony Walkman to listen to Micheal Jackson's Bad album on casette
• Short Circuit, Flight of the Navigator, D.A.R.Y.L. movies
• Mtv music videos and seeing Michael Jackson Thriller Video for the first time
• Seeing and playing Super Mario Bros. on our new Nintendo for the very first time was such an amazing experience
  • NES games were like $20-30 at the time
  • Our brand new NES was $250 - my mom and step-dad almost got a divorce over my step-dad buying one
• Going to Muzzy's or Ole Taco in West Michigan
  • Muzzy's was a burger chain that had "drippy cheese" and firedogs, which were spicy chili dogs
  • Ole Taco was a fast food mexican restaurant before Taco Bell and had by far much better food. The rice there was amazing!
• The first time I saw an Apple IIe computer and coding my very first line of code
• Seeing the Karate Kid, Goonies, Ghostbusters II and Back to the Future movies in the theater
• Seeing The Wizard in the theatre and then playing Super Mario Bros. 3 for the first time
• Saturday morning cartoons
  • ABC always had a marathon of cartoons from first thing in the morning until noon
• Saving money up to purchase a Super Nintendo with Super Mario World and Final Fight
• Satellite TV - having to change satellites for different channels
• Trying to see porn on the distored/scrambled cable channels
• Saving money up to purchase a Nintendo 64
• My very first Commodore 64 computer
• Clear Pepsi
• Salsa Rio Doritos
• Mr. Phipps Tater Crisps
• Sharkleberry Fin Kool-Aid
• Crunch Tators
• Viennetta Ice Cream
• Peanut Butter Boppers
• Whatchamacallit candy bars
• Shocktarts
• Skittles Bubble Gum
• Chips fried in Olean (olestra)
• Our first phone with push button numbers to dial phone numbers
• Party phone lines
  • Your entire neighborhood would share a "party line"
  • You would have your own unique phone number, but only one call in your neighborhood could occur at a time
    • So you could listen in on other people's conversations and you had to wait for their call to complete before you could make or receive a call
• Our first cordless phone
• Drawing the Stüssy logo on everything
• Sobe drinks
• My very first CD player
• Listening to and buying CDs from Musicland/Sam Goody
• Porn on VHS tapes
• Shopping/hanging out at the mall with friends
• Getting online for the first time with our 56k modem
• Renting games from Blockbuster
• Encino Man, Clueless, Cruel Intentions, Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead
• Drinking and playing Mario Kart 64 and Goldeneye with my friends all night long
• Watching Beavis and Butthead with my friends
• Playing Quake Arena on dial-up
• Watching porn pictures online download one line at a time
• Surge pop - so much sugar and caffiene - was practically the first energy drink
• Installing a Sony DiscMan in my car
• Black ganster movies became more popular: Menace II Society, Boyz N The Hood, South Central, Dead Presidents
• Napster and Limewire to download MP3s
• AOL Online
• ICQ messenger
• MSN messenger
• AOL messenger
• Preparing for Y2K
  • I had a paranoid roommate who stocked up on bottled water, sterno, canned goods, toilet paper, etc.
  • Nothing ended up happening and we didn't have to get groceries for the next 3 months
• Burning my first music CD
• Playing Ridge Racer, Siphon Filter and Final Fantasy on Playstation
• Pagers and sending codes to my friends
• Building my very first custom PC that ran Windows 98, then later Windows 98 SE and eventually Windows ME
• Installing my Nvidia Riva TNT II graphics card
• Getting our first cable internet connection with 1Mbps speed
• Splitting up Warez rar file downloads for Windows 2000 between friends, meeting up to extract and burn the ISO, then being disappointed when the operating system didn't even have support for sound cards or games
• Using Netscape Navigator to browse the web
• Installing a 50 CD disc changer in my car
• My first Nokia cellphone
• McDonald's Arch Deluxe and Chicken Fajitas
• DSL internet with speed up to 5Mbps
• Using Yahoo search, then later Google for the first time
• The very first time YouTube started up
• My first Motorola flip phone
• My first Vanilla Coke
• Building my first computer that ran Windows XP
• Building my first computer that ran Windows Vista with 2 GTX 260 on SLI
• My first cable modem with speeds over 20Mbps
• Downloading my very first torrent
• My first Compaq iPaq smart phone
• Burning my first DVD
• My first HP iPaq smart phone
• Subscribing to Netflix to get DVDs by mail
• Redbox movie rentals
• My first iPhone
• Movie streaming through Netflix

Bottom line, as a kid in the 80s and 90s we actually wanted to leave the house and do stuff all the time. Staying at home was boring. Even if it was just riding our bikes around with friends. Or riding a bike to a friends. Even as a teenager, staying at home was lame. There was the mall, arcade, pizza place, other friend's houses.

The Internet really had a huge impact on society in a way you cannot imagine. Life before the Internet was much less stressful. You had many more "real" connections with a lot more people. You may have had a computer, but you only really used it at home for homework or games and that's it.

Quick on the bathroom note... Meeting groups was wild. "Okay, everyone's gonna be at the food court at 2." And if you didn't make it we'd hang out and wait until the group decided you'd died or something and we'd hear about it in school in a couple of days.

Also, getting loser drunk in front of your friends was a learning experience, not a thing that would circle the school forever in video form.

Back then it was boring, but the trade off was you could be someone without being the best in the world. What used to be "let me tell you about my friend" became "let me show you this internet video." You didn't have to be the top player in the world to be the top player at the arcade. You didn't have to be a prodigy to have people think your art was cool. The internet moved the goal posts out of reach and we were all suddenly nobody, consumers, wannabe influencers at best. The technology thought to allow everyone to find an audience put us in our place and we're all nobody now. You get zero views, zero interest, the famous get a billion.

Things were getting better and people still had some hope.

Grew up in the 70s and 80s.

After school, kids would roam around on bikes. We'd go to grocery and convenience stores to play the latest arcade games.

Alternately we'd find an empty lot and make our own bike parks out of dirt and whatever scrap wood we could find.

No mobile phones, so nobody knew where anyone was, we'd just agree to meet some place at an agreed time.

Parents didn't care. "Come home when it gets dark." When the street lights kicked on, you knew it was time to head home.

You had to think for yourself, because nobody was there to help you. If you wiped out on your bike, blew a tire, got attacked by a dog, or threw a chain, you fixed it yourself or dealt with it yourself, nobody was coming to save you.

It was always fun calling your friends house on the land line and their dad picks up. You sheepishly ask if your friend is home and immediately hear their name shouted across their house through the phone.

You think of something you'd like to know. You check your encyclopedia set but it's not in there. Now you just can't know that thing. You make a mental note of it for the next time you're in a library, which you later forget. If you're feeling extra adventurous you ask Billy Bob down the street if he knows. Invariably he passes along some bullshit he heard someone say once.

Older-ish millennial here. We got just a taste of the 'fuck around' era, enough to mourn its loss and really appreciate how increasingly miserable the 'find out' era we live in today really is.

We had the Internet, but it was for dorks. We didn't have touchscreen phones yet, so if you wanted to "surf the web" as we called it, you had to have a dedicated desktop PC, and you connected via "dial up" where you plugged in the phone line¹ and it literally dialed up the Internet. Long story short, it was an obscure hobby for nerds, like D&D or birdwatching².

Anyway, they used to mail you a lot of CDs back then. Some people got on the Internet using a CD that came to your house like junkmail or a phone book³ That's how Netflix got their start actually. You'd surf to their webpage, set up a queue of movies you wanted to watch, and they'd mail DVDs to you one at a time like a mail order Blockbuster⁴.

Anyway, you put this CD you got in the mail into your desktop computer, and it would call the Internet, or as we called it the "information superhighway" on the phone. Once you got there, you were mostly doing what we're doing now; sharing silly pictures about Star Trek on message boards with anonymous nerds around the world. The whole Internet used to basically this, but with cheesy gifs.

Honestly the Internet was better when people would make fun of you for spending all your time on it. Normies ruined the vibe.

¹ Back then, a phone was an integrated appliance/utility in your home. It only did voice calls, and it was physically connected to the wall of your house by a wire. You'd push little buttons or twist a little dial (which is why it's called "dialing") in one part to to enter a phone number, and then pick up this other part that looks like the "phone" app icon, which was attached to the first part by this tight curly wire.

² Oh, back then, D&D wasn't streaming and there weren't birdwatching apps, so those were obscure hobbies for nerds.

³ A phone book was a big book with super thin pages that was periodically sent to your house, and it had the names, addresses, and phone numbers of basically everyone in town, and then there was a second one with the same but for all the businesses in town.

⁴ Blockbuster was a business that rented out VHS tapes⁵ and eventually DVDs. Like Netflix that you had to physically drive to and browse rows of physical movies. Then you took them home, watched them, and then returned the tapes when you were done like a library.

⁵ VHS tapes were little plastic boxes with a pair of spools inside wrapped in magnetic tape. You'd put them into special devices that plugged into your television⁶ that would physically turn the spools so it could read the magnetic data on the tape, playing the film on the screen. If you've ever heard the phrase "Be Kind, Rewind", it was a message printed on Blockbuster tapes reminding you to run the spools in reverse after watching the film, so that it would "rewind" to the beginning for the next renter to watch. That's where the word "rewind" comes from, you had to re-wind the tape around the first spool.

⁶ TVs back then were these huge glass tubes with a little particle accelerator in the back and phosphorescent powder in the inside of the screen. The screens were much smaller, but the device itself was massive, almost a cube. You couldn't wall mount them, you needed a sturdy piece of furniture, "entertainment centers" we'd call them.

there was no expectation to be constantly immediately available. you didn't have the world at your fingertips, so there was no pressure to immediately resolve all situations.

it was nice. slower. less pressure.

oh and the lower level of blatant exploitation and theft by mega corps and the uber wealthy was nice. not good enough still, but better than now

We walked to school in the snow. Uphill. Both ways!
Now get off my lawn!

Jokes aside, I think one thing we had pretty good was not having to live in constant fear of every stupid thing we did likely being put online immediately. And there not being an "online" where your mistakes would haunt you forever. I did a lot of stupid stuff in my late teens and early 20's. And there is thankfully very little evidence of any of it. Kids these days don't often have that luxury. We're all young and stupid at some point. As you get older, that stupid stuff should be something you and your friends laugh about over beers, not something you fear a current employer is going to find at the top of the results when they google your name.

That said, the easy access to media and information is insanely cool. If I want to learn about the mating habits of marmosets, there is likely an in-depth Wikipedia article with way, way too much information. And it's likely up to date and well edited. Compare that to whatever blurb might be in the encyclopedias at your local or school library, plus anything you could dig out of the periodicals and microfiche, and it's not even in the same universe of information availability. Sure, there's a lot more to sift through online. And it's getting easier and easier to get lost in a sea of misinformation. But, you still stand a much better chance today of finding more, faster, than what we had back then. It's funny to think back about instructors making a big deal about not using Wikipedia when it first came out. Now, it's likely recommended as the first stop in researching something.

Also, I have a fucking computer in my pocket with more processing power than the entire world had available when we sent men to the moon. And I can use that computer to communicate with nearly anyone in the world instantaneously. And that computer can access that insane wealth of knowledge I just mentioned above. Again, almost instantly, from most places I am likely to be. I can be taking a shit in the woods and reading up on marmosets fucking while chatting with someone shitting on Twitter. It's the goddamn future over here.

Born in 1967. I remember as a kid during the summer that pretty much every afternoon 10-20 neighborhood kids would get together to play games like hide and seek or kick the can. We were in a semi-rural neighborhood so kids could live up to a mile away or so. The parents were more than happy for us to be somewhere random with a bunch of other kids.

When parents had to call kids home for dinner they’d use bells, whistles, or other noisemakers. Pretty much every kid recognized the different sounds and knew which kids it applied to.

My grandparents lived in New Hampshire. Their telephone was on a party line shared with 4 or 5 neighbors. We learned to answer it only if it rang twice in quick succession.

Sometimes you'd wait a year for a TV show to come back and it didn't.

It was a fucking paradise. Especially in the school summer holidays. Endless long summer days (it didn’t get dark until 10 at night) and nothing to do but play with friends. I grew up in rural SW Scotland, so we had woods, forests, beaches, hills, rivers, streams, farmland etc. at our disposal. Our parents were all at work so we had total freedom - as long as we were home in time for dinner we’d be good. Our bikes were everything, we’d meet up and decide what we were going to do and where we were going to go. Sometimes it would be someone’s house for video games (Commodore 64 or Spectrum), or building a camp in the woods, or fishing a stream up in the Galloway Forest, or cycling to the nearest beach and swimming in the sea.

You could be unreachable and your job would have to accept that fact. There was typically a single landline per house so if it was busy or you weren't there then they had to suck it up.

You weren't pressured by society that you must be efficient in your leisure time. Play a game, best become the best at it otherwise you're a loser now. Painting something? You best be Van Gough in quality or it's shit. Feels like people forgot you're not supposed to monetize your hobbies, there were there to get away from work.

As someone born in the 90s, life is definitely simpler back then, and it's not nostalgia, it's REALLY simple, as in technology isn't as abundant and advanced and people aren't min-maxing everything they do. Street have less car so kids can run around without supervision and go to the nearest playground to basically doing kids stuff. It's also simpler because we don't have socmed blasting every issue to us and blow everything out of proportion. News are slow to travel, which also mean fakenews and misinfo are not readily available 24/7.

Also all gadget have philips screw, nowadays it's all clip on or glued on, no one can fix that, no one can tinkering that.

What 1900s? Oh, you mean the 20th Century?

Anyway, there was all sorts of bad stuff going on, but at least there was optimism and when they discovered things like, say, the hole in the ozone layer, they did something about it instead of pretending it wasn't happening.

If you want an example of how far shit has fallen...

My dad, as a recent college grad on his first job, was able to afford a house, support himself, my mother, and 4 kids, and purchase 2 nice used cars.

My family was considered relatively poor at the time. Not poverty poor, but definitely at the bottom of middle class.

This was in the mid 90s.

Slower. Funner.

I think the biggest difference was having/getting to discover things for yourself. No internet to look up whatever. We had to mail order cheat books for our video games if we got stuck. You had to actually watch the movie to see what happened instead of a highlight reel on youtube. For good or bad, it was different.

I had a bike that I would ride on the side of the highway to get to town and spend the $8 I got for my allowance on some soda and whatever toy struck my fancy at the Eckerds. Sometimes my parents would let me rent a video game from the Blockbuster, which would always be Chrono Trigger. On Friday nights we would go to Pizza Hut and I would get a plastic cup that was a tie in to whatever kids movie was out at the time. Usually I'd have some Book-it stars to turn in to get my free personal pan pizza, which was always pepperoni.

There always seemed to be a fair at the fairgrounds. When I was old enough, I started working the parking lot in exchange for a free ride bracelet, and then I'd go in and ride The Zipper till I puked up my nachos. My friends would all meet me there, though we had no way to communicate where we'd be, we always found each other. Sometimes there would be a girl I liked, and I'd walk next to her and make small talk and that would be good enough.

I didn't watch a lot of TV. Sometimes a show like Sliders would come along and the family would all settle in to watch it, but for the most part, visual entertainment wasn't a big part of my life. There were free weekends where you'd get premium channels like HBO or Showtime and I would use blank VHSs to record movies. Some of them had 8 hours worth of recording time on them, so you'd have to label them with really small writing so you could read Captain Ron, Ghostbusters II, Backdraft, and Power Rangers Movie. I read more than I watched, and I played outside more than inside. Goosebumps and Animorphs over The Hardy Boys and The Babysitters Club. Encyclopedia Brown is still the goat, though.

The Florida summers were hot, and the winter's temperate. I wore shorts with cargo pockets because no one really cared, and I could carry extra stuff that I always seemed to have a reason to drag around.

Church was something you did because it's what you did, but no one really took it that seriously. That would change in my teens, but for most of my childhood it was really just something to do on a Sunday to have an excuse to socialize. I used to volunteer to clean up after the whole bread and wine thing we did once a quarter because the bread was fresh and the wine was welch's grape juice, and I could eat all of the bread and drink all of the juice. My pastor liked black people.

We had swimming classes, which were put on by professionals that, when I look back on it, were probably 16 year old kids with their lifeguard permits. I remember someone jumped into the pool and landed on a girl that was swimming under the water, and her collarbone broke. That was the only time those 16 year olds were put to the test. We just kept swimming while Christine was taken to the hospital.

All in all, it was different, but the same. I have good memories, and bad, and some that make me feel a certain kinda way. I don't wish I could go back, but I'm happy I got to enjoy them the first time around.

For the US, my experience:

• Way more smoking (which people also mentioned last time this was asked). Cigarette butts everywhere.

• Government was more dignified.

• Houses were smaller.

• Cars were smaller. And more colorful -- the last decade or so has really favored colors between white and black. Oh, and a wider variety of interior upholstery.

• Telecommunications were much more expensive.

• People smashed trees into pulp, bleached it, rolled it into sheets, and then put their messages on them.

• Libraries were more important.

• Store selection was way, way more limited, and if you lived somewhere rural, even more so. Amazon and similar let you have anything delivered anywhere today.

• I kinda miss some of the styles, like 1980s denim jackets, but there were also things that I disliked compared to today. Oh, yoga pants were not typically worn in public. Or flannel pajamas pants

that seems to be a thing where I am now. If you were female, you were a lot more likely to be wearing a skirt or dress than today. Clothing was more formal, in general.

• On that note, the necktie was still a thing. It's pretty dead today.

• Carpeting in houses was more popular.

• People spent a lot more time staring at the TV, which I think is a lot more mindless than Internet use today. Oh, and you had far fewer channels than you do on a TV today.

• Lighting was yellower, because of the use of incandescents. Nighttime in houses was darker and yellower.

• The logistics of communication and navigation were more complicated without GPS-equipped smartphones. One typically kept maps in the car. Asking for directions was a thing. You might even have a car compass. Finding payphones was a thing.

• Much less omnipresent surveillance, like the security cameras and automated license plate readers of today.

• If you had a computer, it was much more likely not to be connected to a network, so software couldn't rely on network access. It couldn't phone home or transmit information about you.

• Video games were much less mainstream, especially before the 1990s. Not many adults playing them.

• Way more handwriting done. The fancy pen was more of a thing.

• Flashlights and penlights were more prominent, since everyone wasn't carrying a smartphone that could act as a flashlight.

• I'd say that probably the majority of people wore a wristwatch.

• Computers were much more expensive than they are today, and became obsolete far faster. The rate of computation speed increased such that about every 18 months, computers ran software twice as fast as before. This has a huge impact on other industries, since that constantly made new things viable.

• Lots of devices with disposable batteries.

• Dedicated portable music players with far less battery life were much more common. You carried around much less music.

• Cars, IMHO, looked more interesting. Certainly more varied. Mileage was worse.

• You certainly didn't omit spare tires in cars. Much harder to get roadside assistance.

• I'd say that woodworking skills were more common. A lot of guys could and would do basic projects.

• People spent more time outdoors.

• People were thinner.

• Motor noise was more obnoxious along roads. Cars are quieter today.

• Airline security was way less obnoxious. Didn't have all the security screening stuff that 9/11 spawned. Air travel was more expensive.

• More casual conversations with strangers that one sat near, I'd say. Smartphones severely degraded the custom of chatting with strangers.

• Magazines and newspapers were much more common.

The streets were paved with gold and everyone said "hello" to strangers in the street with a smile. Getting a job was a matter of walking up to a person in a suit and giving them a firm handshake. VAR wasn't a thing in sports because the referees got every decision right. Cats and dogs got along fine with each other. Everyone had enough friends to play Goldeneye on N64 multiplayer. People didn't gain weight despite eating no vegetables. They hadn't invented 2nd hand smoking yet so everyone was free to smoke inside without it affecting anyone else. Musicians did drugs but never OD'd, just produced classic albums on demand. People read books constantly and you could expect to strike up a conversation with a petrol station employee about Satre where you'd get caught for hours marveling at their insight. You could have 3 pints at lunch during the working day with your boss. Concorde took you across the Atlantic in a matter of hours. Everyone had a tamagotchi and none of them starved.

I'm guessing you mean the 20th century in general rather than 1900-1910? Because not many of us are going to be that old.

It was... wonderful and fucking awful in equal amounts. The details have changed between then and now, but the ratio is probably about the same.

Born 1981. Suburban parents but my grandparents still had a small farmstead so I got the best of both worlds. Like a lot of kids of that era, plenty of free reign to wander neighborhoods, explore the woods and creeks, and when I went to my grandparent’s place I learned how to ride horses, pull lambs, garden, how to care for chickens, and that a gun isn’t a toy or fashion accessory but to be handled responsibly. Got a Nintendo the first Xmas they dropped and was the envy of all my classmates a few years later when I got a Powerglove, which was cool for about 5min until we realized it looked way cooler than it was. If you were lucky you or a friend had an older sibling who’d find a way to grant you access to R-rated movies, which were pretty much guaranteed to contain at least a few boob shots but mostly practical effects violence so over-the-top it was cartoonish. Everybody knew about the scenes in Robocop and Batmania when ‘89 dropped was a big deal.

In elementary school we had an annual Idaho history jamboree where reps from the tribes and mountain men reenactors would come to school and we’d spend a day outside grinding corn, being shown how to flint knapp, skinning a deer, tanning hides with deer brains, throwing hatchets, and the mountain men would do black powder demonstrations. In high school the rednecks would hang their rifles in the back window of their truck at school. I’m the same age/grade as the Columbine murderers, watched that real time in class as the normal school day ended that day. That day was the end of normal as we had accepted it and the change came overnight.

There’s all the fun stuff. The bad stuff. We were drilling for nuclear annihilation like kids now drill for mass shootings. The atomic holocaust never came but it’s still rather terrifying to subject kids to that, particularly when as an adult you know that desk isn’t going to do much to save your ass from the bomb. The AIDS crisis was also terrifying because it was so deliberately mishandled because politics and bigotry ignored it to achieve their own goals; then suddenly it wasn’t just gays and druggies who could get HIV, anyone could, but people didn’t understand how and why due to misinformation. Despite nostalgic takes on the 80s/90s, racism, bigotry, misogyny, “16 is old enough”, homophobia, and poverty were normalized to varying levels and each had folks working hard to address those in various ways. Nothing got “solved” or “fixed”, but I do think the progress of that era and the contributions of the activists and artists had an impact on the youth of that era. It’s why so many people my age have cut their hateful boomer parents off. They were so busy indulging themselves and ignoring their kids they failed to notice we weren’t adopting their mindset but that Captain Planet, Tupac, Rage, Philadelphia, X-Men, and a lot of other quietly (or not so quietly) coded media was pushing us to reject their worldview.

We still had a lot of access to Holocaust survivors, WW2 vets, Civil Rights/Vietnam vets, and as queerness broke out of the closet, the old guard who had been forced to hide for most of their lives. We got to talk to the people who’d lived through “when shit was really, really bad”. I think that too was a root of the boomer/X-Mil split. Talking to people who lived the shit of history makes one realize that the American Dream narrative is fiction.

It was a pretty good run and the hype that the last few decades of the 1900s were a great era to be a kid in the US aren’t without merit, but they’re fast becoming the new 50s/60s nostalgia fantasy of “it was the best”, so if we don’t want to become boomers we can’t forget that not all of us got that experience, not all of us were that safe & secure, and we definitely hadn’t “solved” American hate and bigotry.

Edit: fixed a formatting issue.

We all wore onions on our belts, which was the style at the time.

More srsly by the 1990s we were about as internet addicted as we are now. There just weren't smartphones, so you were offline when you went out of the house away from your computer. You usually did have a voice cell phone, initially analog (AMPS) but later digital with SMS messages. Also, when you were online, the web didn't suck as badly as it does now. There was less bandwidth for megabytes of javascript bloat, etc.