Ask Lemmy

Mid of the 80s in Europe.

When I was in primary school a corruption scandal wiped out our political class and this gave us 20 years of tycoonism.

It was the free-est, most affordable, and happiest days that the world will be in my lifetime.

I’m ~~a little earlier,~~ mid 80s. Can’t recollect exact years so the order will probably be wrong but here are a few things I remember:

I grew up when vinyls were on the way out but we still had some and I was listening to old children’s stories on it. Newer ones on cassette.

I used to record songs on cassette from the radio. Annoying hosts kept talking over it.

I also secretly recorded the movie Halloween over a bought VHS of The Little Mermaid, which my parents were furious about.

I didn’t have my own stationary gaming console until the N64 because we didn’t have a lot of money. So I visited friends to play. But I did have a game boy. With a transparent case, it was awesome. Kids with money had a bunch of attachments for it, like a magnifier, light, better speakers. One friend (who had everything) owned a Sega Game Gear. It was huge and had a color screen but it ate batteries like crazy, so it was always attached to the outlet. Sega was always weird to me.

Console games often didn’t have any way to save progress, so some of them showed you a code after each level, which you would write down so next time you could begin at that point. Some games didn’t have that either so you had to play through it in one sitting. But they were also much shorter. Later we also had memory cards.

My second Gameboy was the Color and I also got the Gameboy Camera attachment. It had such a bad quality but somehow it was fun. It had little games on it as well. I still have both in a drawer somewhere.

Computers were much larger in the beginning and software would come on multiple (!) floppy discs. The installation would take FOREVER and make make loud noises. Later it was on CDs.

People used to buy gaming magazines with CDs included to play the hottest new game demos and sometimes full versions. Games also came bundled with computers.

Games also had huge instruction manuals which were fun to read on their own.

In dial-up internet times we could only either be online OR use the landline phone (which was just „the phone“ because there was no mobile). It was also extremely expensive, billed by the minute. To get the cheapest we used a list of dial up numbers with prices on it which would get updated weekly or so. I think it was in the newspaper or TV guide magazine? So internet time was rare.

Before everyone started to be glued to computers 24/7 we used to roam around town and in the woods a lot.

Personally I was big into Lego. I had a huge box full of it and just emptied it on the floor to build whatever came to my mind. I could get lost in it and I was so much more creative back then. I also had some action figures, mostly He-Man and Ninja Turtles.

I had my own first computer when I was around 18 or so. That was Windows XP time (or was it Vista already?). Before that I always used my parent’s to play games or go online. And I was one of the first to own an LCD screen then. This was not ideal for Counterstrike because refresh rates were low, but it was a good trade off in my opinion. I had less weight to carry around to LAN parties, which was a thing back then. Just us friends in the basement or big events with hundreds of people. We all connected our computers together and it usually took an hour or so to even get it working and then everyone needed special patches and software to be compatible with each other.

Game patches… that was a crazy time. Nowadays games update automatically and frequently. Back then you would get instructions on what files you need to open in a hex editor to fix some bug. The patches would need to be implemented one by one in the right order, or everything was fucked. Or you just got complete new files from somewhere to replace existing ones. Then later patch programs would do that for you but they only worked half the time.

Ok I should stop now, new memories keep popping up.

The 90s was the last good decade.

I'm seeing a lot of nostalgia glasses here so just going to say some things were markedly worse (90s perspective): it was much harder to verify information whether that be for scientific research (the hole in the ozone layer was a big one at the time), directions, movie/game reviews or even geopolitical situations

The smell of vehicle exhaust was more common as many vehicles on the road predated the requirements of catalytic converters and you can bet there were a lot more people who would claim seat belts are more dangerous because they can trap you in a drowning vehicle (no matter how far inland they lived)

Buying batteries on a regular basis from the grocery store was a normal occurrence as rechargeable ones were either prohibitively expensive, unavailable or had iffy chargers and you needed them for a lot of stuff smartphones do today: clocks, answering machines, CD/cassette players, etc

Answering machines (though largely digitized by the late 90s) generally required tiny tapes to record voicemails while vacuums almost always required bags. Neither were large expenses but both were recurring as was using payphones but that's a topic unto itself

There was a monoculture that we took for granted which I feel was both the best and worse part. Basically all your classmates and coworkers likely watched the same shows/movies as you which legitimately helped the community bond as a whole but those shows seldom challenged (or even could challenge) the status quo with "dangerous ideas" like same sex parents or non-white superheroes but I'm not gonna pretend I don't miss the phenomenon of people excitedly going "hey, did you see Friends last night?" or the energy of Pokemania

I'm not trying to say it was strictly better or worse but the rise of the internet, smart phones, rechargeable batteries and widespread adoption of international standards (USB, various EU policies, Bluetooth) undoubtedly democratized many things previously held behind gatekeepers

Sometimes those gatekeepers were legitimately excellent at their craft, sometimes they were out of touch, sometimes they were manipulating the lack of info gathering tools at the time, or even (often) some combination of the three but that friction between us and the next piece of media made it easier to appreciate the 15th rewatch of The Mask on VHS while simultaneously helping to enforce the college textbook scam so well-known today

Born in 1979. I've seen rotary phones, touch tone phones, cordless phones, pagers cellphones, PC computing pre windows (DOS anyone,) floppy discs (they didn't just used to be a save icon,) the internet before the internet when it was just hyperboards you dialed up manually and then put the receiver into a baud modem, cassette tapes, CDs, MP3s and ipods, car windows that had to be manually rolled down. I had a TV where you had to get up and manually change the channel.

I'm in that weird space where I could be a millenial, or could be gen x. I was a latch key kid and had no parental supervision. As an 9 year old, I came home from school and cared for my 4 y/o sister. We played outside, in the street, we walked to the park. I'd ride my bike and put my sister on the seat and we would go get ice cream, or go to the comic shop. It was normal to just be a kid doing your own thing and for your parents to have no idea where you were or how to contact you.

If you didn't know where you were going, you had to purchase a map/atlas and learn how to read it to get directions.

I lived through the contra scandal/Iraq Iran war, the war on drugs, desert storm, the war on terror, and whatever the fuck this new Iran straight of hormuz war is. I've seen lived through lots of genocide, (I'm not a victim, just got to see it play out in the news;) Sabra and Shatila massacre, Anfal campaign, Isaaq genocide (somali), Bosnian genocide, Rwandan genocide, Massacres of Hutus during the First Congo War, DRC and ethnic cleansing of Pygmies from the Congo's eastern region, Darfur genocide (2003–2005), Yazidi genocide, Ukrainian genocide (via Russia and still ongoing,) Persecution of Uyghurs in China, Rohingya genocide, and Gaza genocide. We have always been at war.

Pre-internet, there was tons of news you would never hear of, or if you did you got the propaganda version because there was no way to access the facts. The newspaper and TV news were still considered reputable. Now with smartphones and cameras everywhere, people can share information with each other directly and we can all call bullshit on misreporting and propaganda, for all the good it does.

Life was hard then, and it's hard now. It's just hard in different ways.

Everything was in black and white.

Perhaps it’s just nostalgic romanticization, but I seem to recall that product quality used to be far more important: Manufacturers vied for customers’ favor and therefore focused on offering the best value for money or innovative products to outdo the competition.

This seems to me to have been lost to a large extent due to the fact that unbridled capitalism—likely exacerbated by the Internet’s tendency toward centralization—has led to increased monopolization, so that providers have now shifted to exploit their customers to the maximum, since they no longer have the option of switching to any provider other than perhaps two or three gigantic corporations that dominate their respective business sectors unchallenged.

This seems to me to be a development that was certainly already in the making in the 1990s and early 2000s, but which has intensified—largely due to the internet’s trend toward globally centralized platforms—to such an extent that now even fewer, even more unscrupulous billionaires can abuse their unrestricted market power not just nationally or at least to some extent locally, but internationally.

It seems to me that this development has to do with the fact that the internet represents a global market, but there are simply no global authorities that could counteract the formation of monopolies on an international level.

It seems to me to be the logical consequence of the predominantly U.S.-led cutthroat capitalism that has essentially lost its social function of distributing goods in favor of becoming an instrument of power for the multi-billionaires who have become far too powerful. The result, it seems to me, is a kind of new monarchy of billionaires who have become so powerful that they have been able to place themselves above the community and the law—with fatal consequences for the general public.

Of course, these immensely influential private individuals with their boundless greed already existed in the 1990s, but in my opinion, their influence wasn't quite as far-reaching back then.

I was five.

Before video games and cable TV, I read a lot of books. I can remember reading Call of the Wild and White Fang in elementary school, "childrens" classics like Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 20000 Leagues. Encyclopaedia Brown was a favourite childrens series of mine.

AAA games were actually good.