
Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity? - ciccionamente
If so, what in particular?
======
smacktoward
Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you?

Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from
my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today.
It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it
was a little harder to get a hold of people.

But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often
talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not
because of anything about the '90s; it's because _they were children during
the '90s_, and people of _all_ ages look back on their childhood as a simpler
time. This is true even of people who grew up in objectively much more
difficult times, like the 1930s and '40s. It's not that the world children
grow up in isn't complicated, it's that they don't comprehend all the
complications. You don't start to appreciate that stuff until you reach
adulthood. So to everybody, childhood is like a lost paradise.

This is part of why nostalgia is such a seductive trap. It's so easy to look
back on the past and think that it was something it wasn't. So if you try to
make it your mission to restore that lost paradise, to restore something that
never really existed in the first place, all you end up doing is chasing
shadows.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
> except it was a little harder to get a hold of people

Hmm. Really? Few call centres or queuing systems around yet. My bank had a
local number that was answered in 3 rings - often by the same person. So did
the phone and electric companies, and the tax office. They might _actually_
remember you.

I probably couldn't ping a friend if they were out with the dog, or on
holiday, and definitely not in the car - few had mobiles yet, though by the
end of the 90s they were getting common enough.

A lot of things were indeed simpler as we've added needless complexity to
loads of things. Adding complexity layers seems to be how we solve everything.
Even politics was simpler - note I don't say _better._

Then again a lot of things were fairly crap - VHS recorders, CRT TV,
cassettes.

Computing was _much_ more fun - far many more platforms - SunOS, Amiga, ST,
PC, Apple, BeOS, etc, and it was still feasible to know all of the thing. Now
it's more likely to be a small part of a much more complex whole, too big for
an individual. That speaks of maturing, but also of over-complexity.

Swings and roundabouts really.

~~~
rootusrootus
Cassettes? We had CDs before the 1990s, thankyouverymuch.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Course we did, but a CD in the car? I think that had to wait until about the
millennium. Tapes were still hugely popular through the 90s, even pre-
recorded. Never did understand that as pre-recorded tapes had abysmal quality
compared to home taping. :)

~~~
kasey_junk
CD players in cars were extremely common by the mid 90s.

~~~
rootusrootus
Yeah, I had a factory CD player in my 1994 Mustang GT, and IIRC it was
standard starting the year before that.

~~~
tptacek
I had a CD player in my 1994 Nissan Sentra.

~~~
idlewords
I insisted on the richer, warmer sound of in-car vinyl.

~~~
tptacek
You laugh, but:

[https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record-
play...](https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2014/04/record-players-were-
the-infotainment-systems-of-the-1950s-and-60s/index.htm)

------
CPLX
Yes. The thing I miss the most is the sense that I, and everyone around me,
used to be mentally in the same place they were physically.

Obviously people were distracted or preoccupied from time to time, perhaps
they had a sick far away relative, say, that dominated their thoughts.

But those kind of situations were the exceptions. Now literally every single
person you interact with is mentally in the middle of several conversations
with people who aren’t there over text, is halfway through an article or blog
post, and is in the midst of judging their own success in gaining attention
for the photo they just posted.

You can be in a room with 10 people, but only 10% of each of them is actually
present and engaged in the room they are in.

I count myself in this group too of course. In fact right now I’m having a
conversation on HN instead of being engaged in the real world.

It kind of sucks.

~~~
Arete314159
Truth. In the 90's, if you went to a party and sat in a corner reading a book,
it was usually....odd. The idea was that you were supposed to at least try to
be interacting with others. Some of us were geeks, some of us found social
interaction difficult, but since there wasn't a real substitute for it, we had
to stick it out and learn how to be with people. And then we got the benefits
of being with people.

Now there's always something else you can do at any moment. I feel like some
younger folks I know (in their 20's) don't have the same capacity for
understanding their place in the social universe. Social media / phones etc.
give a simulacrum of social experience so you never have to really stretch
yourself and grow these new skill sets.

~~~
wbl
Usenet. Fandom. CW. I was born in 1991, and there has always been a technical
subculture ever since Edison.

~~~
coldtea
That doesn't mean it has always been as prevalent, accessible, dominant,
acceptable, and so on...

------
craigsmansion
I miss 90s complexity!

Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing.

 _Mobile_ telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough
that could let you communicate everywhere.

3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book,
and even more, wizards had managed to capture things _in hardware for the PC_
with some sort of voodoo.

Now we have 1.5 dominant boring architecture where performance is bumped by
"Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11" and no one cares because
everything is ecmascript anyway, mobile telephones, or "telephones", are
devices that mildly entertain you as you wait for death, and graphics are a
matter of dumping the right shaders through the right libraries.

The future just looked a little more interesting. The 90s for me is where the
great tragedy of simplification began.

The present is still pretty okay though, I just would have liked it a little
"rougher" computing wise :)

~~~
ddingus
I think we are headed back that direction.

Custom hardware is coming again. It's coming because we've hit walls on
sequential compute. Multi-core parallel and concurrent models are building
nicely, but software lags behind, and those problems are hard.

Some problems do not benefit from either of those things too.

Enter custom silicon.

The combination of software and well realized custom silicon to enhance
performance, and that's peak performance.

Always is.

~~~
iamnothere
Also specialization into specific niches, with cool accessories, like the SBCs
are doing. It's pretty exciting. I mean, Python on a chip is pretty amazing.

~~~
ddingus
Totally. Smaller scale computing is a lot of fun right now.

------
mindcrime
[a deleted post said]

 _I miss the trajectory. Many things were exciting in the '90s, but many
things didn't turn out so well._

This is pretty much the same way I feel. I'm not sure exactly when things
changed, but there is definitely a sense that we went off the rails somewhere
along the way. Some time ago there was excitement, optimism, and a sense of
boundless opportunity, associated with the Internet and tech in general.
Now... well... there's still _some_ of that, but a lot of it has been replaced
by negativity, fear, pessimism, doubt, and suchlike. The overall zeitgeist is
definitely less pleasant these days, IMO.

~~~
twilight00
I think 9/11/2001 was that turning point. Then the crash almost exactly 7
years later made things even worse.

I can't speak for other countries, but both of these events were like a one-
two punch to the gut socially, politically, and economically here in America,
and we're still reeling.

~~~
mindcrime
Yeah, I'm pretty sure 9/11 was a contributing factor. Not sure it was _the_
thing, but then again, there probably wasn't just one "thing" that caused all
this. It seems like more of a sequence of things, some big, some little,
spread out over time, and gradually skewing the zeitgeist to a more negative,
pessimistic, unpleasant outlook.

In regards to tech and the Internet in particular, I think the Snowden
revelations and the PRISM stuff was a key moment, in terms of changing the
perception of the Internet. After broad public awareness of ubiquitous online
surveillance became a thing, the Internet lost some of it luster and became
more threatening and less welcoming.

More recently, the Cambridge Analytica stuff, along with all the major data
breaches over the past few years, probably contributed to that sensation as
well.

------
lousken
News websites
[https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.sezna...](https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.seznam.cz/)

no spying, popups, animations, autoplaying videos, clickbait thumbnails...
just a simple website with information

now I have to use three addons just to get back this clean look

~~~
return1
Seriously you dont remember the gifs, the flash , the unblocked
popups/popunders/popovers/hijackers etc? It was far worse back then but the
signal to noise was better. The reason: lack of social media which is
99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

~~~
krapp
>lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.

The purpose of social media isn't to provide "information," but to facilitate
communication between people. Making jokes or discussing trivial matters which
don't interest you personally, or not doing so in a way that maximizes
information density, does not make it garbage.

~~~
kthejoker2
What makes social media garbage is it takes every human cognitive bias and
multiplies it by infinity, and offers very little virtue by way of
compensation.

It is psychic damage entirely driven by the id.

It replaces expert advice and ombudsmen with popularity contests and
groupthink.

It is a neverending reinforcement loop of your filter bubble.

It mainstreams every fringe movement - because social media uses attention as
a key metric, it rewards controversy, outrage, and conspiracy.

It's a 24/7, infinite scale, effectively anonymous and entirely asymmetrical
amalgam of the Stanford Prison Experiment, Kitty Genovese, Jonestown, Alfred
Dreyfus, Jack Chick, Charles Mackay, the Hillsborough crush, 2 minute hate,
the banality of evil, "a lie flies around the world before truth gets its
boots on", cargo cults, suicide bombers, the Inquisition, Leon Festinger, "It
ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for
sure that just ain’t so", and 1000 other human failings.

------
thought_alarm
In 1995 I was making $6.75/hour as a line cook, and my combined rent,
utilities, phone, and cable TV was $180/month, renting a large old house
downtown with 6 other friends.

Dial-up Unix shell/internet access was free through the university. I picked
up an original 128k Mac and Mac Plus with 40 MB SCSI HD at a local thrift shop
for $40, both of which I still own.

A CD cost $25, a pack of cigarettes was $5, and pitchers of beer were $8.

Ten short years later I would be walking around with an always-connected
Blackberry in my pocket wondering how I ever survived without Google Maps,
push email, and IM.

~~~
switch007
180/6.75 = 26.6 hours

I wonder how many hours are required in 2019?

------
jon-wood
The thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web
application (such as they were) didn’t involve knowing at least two tech
stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML. In
many ways the way we do it now is far superior, and there’s a swathe of things
you simply couldn’t do in a web browser back then, but at least it was simple.

Outside of tech? Life was not simple. These days I can arrange more or less
anything with a few taps on the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket,
with an internet connection that would have put anything but a large
institution to shame in the 90s.

Want to listen to some obscure 70s album? In the 90s that’s weeks of scouring
record stores.

Order some food? First I have to rummage around for the menu, then call them
up and place the order, and finally hope they can find your place because if
not your food’s arriving cold after they get back to the restaurant and call
you for directions.

Watch a recently released film? You’ll have to drive into town and hope the
video store has it in stock.

Go to a wedding in a town you don’t know? Lots of planning, and hope you don’t
get lost along the way. I sometimes joke that I couldn’t make it to the end of
my road without GPS now.

~~~
return1
> didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a
> database and then spewed out some HTML

Actually this hasn't changed, you can still work the exact same way with a
LAMP stack. The perceptions have changed, for some reason needless complexity
has become the norm.

------
linguae
One of the things I miss about the 1990s is the degree that Microsoft, Apple,
and other vendors of desktop operating systems such as NeXT and Be invested in
refining the desktop computing experience. I personally believe that the
Windows 95 interface is the most usable and most well-designed Windows user
interface, with further refinements made in Windows 98 and 2000. For many
years I would use Classic Mode in newer versions of Windows such as XP and 7;
I wish Windows 10 had a classic mode. And while I love Mac OS X's Aqua
interface, I love the Platinum theme that was developed for Copland and was
introduced in Mac OS 8.

While there was still an effort in the first half of the 2000s to continue
refining the desktop user experience (e.g., Aqua, GNOME 2 [which is personally
my favorite Linux desktop], KDE 3), once mobile computing and Web 2.0
technology took off a little over a decade ago, I feel that emphasis has
shifted away from refining the desktop experience. Moreover, there has been an
emphasis on trying to make the desktop computer experience more mobile-like,
leading to products such as Windows 8 and GNOME 3 that, in my opinion, are
worse than their predecessors. Even Windows 10 still has mobile-like
influences such as its penchant for large title bars and ribbons that take up
a lot of vertical space (ever since Windows XP's Luna theme, Microsoft has had
an obsession with using a lot of vertical space for bars). In my opinion, Mac
OS X peaked in the Snow Leopard era, and while I still prefer Mac OS X to
Windows 10, I feel that certain parts of the Mac experience have downgraded
over the past decade (some pain points include the transition from iPhoto to
Photos.app as well as the differences in font rendering in macOS Mojave that
affect users who don't have 4K or higher resolution displays). I'm also very
concerned about the implications of Marzipan on future versions of Mac OS X,
but I guess we'll find out very soon when WWDC 2019 takes place.

I would like to see more investments being made in desktop computing. Despite
some pundits prematurely proclaiming that desktop computing is dying, the fact
is many people rely on desktops and laptops to do their work, and tablets and
smartphones cannot replace all tasks that we use our desktops for. I still
believe that the personal computing revolution is far from over; there is
still a lot of room for improvement, refinement, and innovation.

------
hatmatrix
On the other hand, traveling was not so simple - you couldn't just carry your
mobile phone and pull up Google Maps once you got there - you had to know
where you were going and either buy the maps or print out maps beforehand.
Meeting up with someone also involved a lot of planning and sometimes you go
to the meeting point and then go home having missed each other because you
misunderstood the exact location.

~~~
Scoundreller
At least people learned the importance of giving good descriptions the first
time in real life.

Too much these days feels like people just leave a message prompt and expect
you to return contact and fill in all of their blanks.

E.g. my telephone messages will specify who I am, why I’m calling, what I’m
looking for, when to contact me and my phone number (always twice!).

Dunno if others were any better in the past, or if I’m bitter about forums
that cater to less advanced users that chronically leave out critical details.

------
zulgan
i really do, i mainly miss:

* people not being able to contact me 24/7

* not knowing what is going on in the world all the time (this i miss the most)

* things being local

* way less crap people used to own

~~~
EliRivers
_people not being able to contact me 24 /7_

You can still have that! I have it. Literally cannot remember the last time I
answered the phone :)

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yeah, that's at least partially a social problem or how you relate to people
and tech, not a tech problem per se. You have to manage your relationships to
both people and tech.

~~~
TeMPOraL
The aspect 'zulgan is probably missing is that back then, you didn't have to
manage this at all, as it was not a possibility. A problem not existing in the
first place beats being good at dealing with it.

~~~
DoreenMichele
That line of thinking implicitly assumes no upside to being capable of
connecting at will, 24/7.

I live in a small town with a surprising amount of 24 hour service. I'm not
obligated to run off to the store every night at 2am just because I can, but I
sure as hell appreciate being able to do so when I need to or want to.

There are upsides to our current ability to connect. Acting like "simply not
having that _problem_ is better" amounts to throwing the baby out with the
bathwater.

------
iamnothere
Development was more approachable for the newcomer, because there were fewer
choices and tooling was less mature. Obviously professionals are better off
now, but as a newbie in the 90s it was pretty amazing to develop a website on
Notepad and be one of the only people you knew who had a web presence. That
and all the BASIC platforms (QBASIC, Commodore, etc) allowed you to build
simple text-based games at a time when text-based games weren't uncommon. It
felt like with just a little bit of practice you could run with the pros; not
necessarily true, but it was really encouraging.

I feel pity for people entering development now. The industry must seem like
this colossal, endlessly complex, ever-changing mess filled with experts who
know 1000x more than you ever will. There's an overwhelming amount of
information, and there's so many partially overlapping disciplines that it's
easy to feel lost.

------
andrewstuart
In 1981, Electric Light Orchestra wrote about remembering the good old
1980's....
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0)

Here's the lyrics:

Remember the good old 1980's

When things were so uncomplicated

I wish I could go back there again

And everything could be the same

[https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq...](https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon)

~~~
sosborn
It's a refrain as old as time.

------
CM30
Yes and no.

I do miss how web development/software engineering was simpler in the 90s,
since it felt like it was a lot more accessible when you didn't have all these
JavaScript frameworks to learn, CSS tricks to master, and programming
languages to mess around with. Also felt like standards were a lot lower in
general online back then, so non designers could create comparatively decent
looking sites/apps and people weren't so fussy about UX design/usability in
general.

And I definitely enjoyed the simplicity of your typical video game back then
too. No DLC, no pay to win, no microtransactions, no lootboxes, you just
bought a game, and everything on the disc/cart was yours to play. Yeah game
design wasn't quite as polished back then, but there were plenty of great
games to enjoy none the less, and when they were good, they just worked.

Additionally, I guess the world felt simpler in its optimism too. The Soviet
Union had just fell, the internet was new and exciting and the War on Terror
hadn't started. Everyone felt like things were getting better, and in Western
countries, people's rights were arguably at their most respected. It wasn't
perfect by any means, and some rights still needed to be fought for, but it
felt peaceful.

Still, I don't miss all of it. Today's tech is better. Science has obviously
advanced and moved on. Many sporting achievements happened between the 90s and
today. Thousands or even millions of great works of fiction got released, and
many things considered impossible happened too.

So it depends really.

~~~
Scoundreller
Probably for the reasons you mentioned, I have a tradition of playing
SimCity2000 every time I’m on a flight, and never anytime else.

It’ll be the same experience, every time, and it’ll never break.

------
corodra
Only thing I really miss, memorizing phone numbers and just somehow always
knowing where all my friends were no matter what. We could always find each
other in town because we just... knew. Now if I go with friends to a store, I
have to text them to find out where they are. And I miss having such a good
memory on something practical, at the time, as phone numbers. You had
everyone’s number in your head, pizza, most of their work numbers, etc.

------
GuB-42
No.

And I was a teenager in the 90s, peak nostalgia, but the answer is still no.

The 90s weren't that simpler, we just had different problems. In fact, I have
a bit of trouble finding things that really were simpler from a personal
perspective.

The one thing I can think of is security. We didn't have security checks
everywhere, kids could do plenty of "dangerous" things, we didn't see
pedophiles everywhere etc... And I kind of miss it. But it may just be the
result of living in a safer society: human lives are becoming incredibly
valuable, resulting in over-protection.

Other than that, think about how simpler internet made things. Want to buy
something unusual: buy it online with a few clicks. Access to knowledge is
almost limitless. I don't miss going to the bookstore at the other side of the
town, noticing that the book I wanted isn't available, take an order, and come
back 2 weeks later to pick it up. All these forgotten details were really
annoying thinking back.

Another example: cars. Cars used to be mechanically simpler, which was great
for the DIY types. But modern cars are so much more reliable. Smoking cars on
the curb were a much more common sight back them. So maybe cars were simpler
to repair, but not having to repair make life much simpler.

Now about computers. Sure computers were simpler under the hood. Understanding
a CPU and assembly was comparatively easy back then. But nowadays, we have
abstraction layers that make computers more accessible at every level. We just
shifted a few layers up. Truth is, even oldschool computers hid a lot of
complexity regarding the electronics inside it that we, as kids, didn't
realize and older people did.

~~~
Scoundreller
The cars are more complicated, but if you drive something common, you can
always find a video for the common failure modes.

The manufacturers have sure done what they can to eliminate any empty spaces
though.

------
seventhtiger
I think culture used to be more united. There were significant limitations in
the channels for producing and consuming culture.

Used to be, to get people to read your writing, you had to go through either
the effort of printing and distribution, or you had to submit to some
editorial selection and review. Then the only channel people had to consume it
was to get a physical print of it.

Now anyone can write anything and anyone can read it. The channels of culture
have exploded to infinity. This has caused culture to be fractured.

Used to be that most people watched what was on tv, read what's in the paper,
and listened to what's in the radio. This formed a foundation of shared
cultural experience. It's more varied and accessible compared to centuries of
only oral tradition and limited printing, but compared to today, pretty much
everyone experienced the same culture.

Today it feels like culture has fractured. Even members of the same household
might not watch, read, or listen to the same things. The physical proximity no
longer guarantees any shared culture.

Now if you want to enjoy culture in a group, you must either find it online,
or you must be a cultural advocate for whatever your views or media are and
build a community around you.

Game of Thrones has been one of the most popular TV shows at all time, yet
almost no one has found it just by flicking through the TV in that time slot.
Game of Thrones was advocated for by superfans.

Although there are certainly advantages to access any type of culture we want,
it's definitely more complex. I can't just talk to someone about sports, the
show last night, or the new hit song. Because even though I might live or work
with someone, first I have to figure our the cultural choice they've been
making.

~~~
kthejoker2
To be fair, the monoculture was almost exclusively white, Western, Judeo-
Christian approved media. It created a giant tidal wave of conformity on which
progress rose, but it drowned out a lot of other voices.

Always tradeoffs.

~~~
seventhtiger
Perhaps where you lived. I experienced this fracturing of culture in a non-
white, non-western, non-Christian country. I think it is a global effect.

I agree that the centralization of culture allowed the people in power to
suppress diversity and control the cultural narrative. But now there is no
longer a cultural narrative at all. It is too fractures to make any holistic
sense.

------
rdiddly
Not so much the simplicity as the idea that if someone wanted to spy on me,
they actually had to _work_ at it.

------
neilv
One big academia/industry thing about the early '90s is that CS students and
business students were very different.

Not that either category were bad people, but they thought and acted
differently, and I'd say that diversity turned out to be more important than I
realized at the time.

------
gaze
It seems rare to me that software is carefully engineered and thought out in
advance anymore. There's a "move fast and break things" and "worse is better"
attitude where designing things carefully is largely seen as a waste of time.
Why bother when there's a hundred "good enough" solutions that you can glue
together and hardware is so powerful you figure that it won't matter.

What I'm saying is that there's an emergent complexity from bolting together a
ton of things together in ways that work "well enough." Things that are
working well out of the scope in which they were originally engineered... or
things that just carry a ton of baggage with them. This creates complexity.

------
taf2
I’m not yet in my 40s but can postulate that the 90s was not simpler from a
tech perspective let me explain.

1\. Today we have google in the 90s we had mailing lists . It is much easier
to use google than it is to construct a well thought out question.

2\. At the start of the 90s we had very little access to mobile phones. We had
no uber. Imagine landing at an airport and having to use a pay phone- or
calling collect. This is much more complex and difficult then what you can do
today with a smart phone.

3\. Say you wanted to build a website. There was no simple answer or Ruby on
Rails to make give you a right way to approach it. You had to figure it out
without google. For reference lookup corba. Software engineering was
definitely not simpler

------
zzo38computer
Yes, including analog television. The new television system is stupid and is
no good.

Now we have many bad thing such as: the mess being made of WWW (they try to
put everything in there, even though many things are better without),
complicated computer design with anti-features and other stupid stuff, blu-ray
movies, DMCA, USB, etc. Much of that stuff they did not have so much in the
nineties.

Of course, we do have good stuff now too, not only the bad stuff. Many
improvements are made, but stuff is also made worse stuff too.

------
ulisesrmzroche
I miss the Internet. Like the culture of forums, geocities, all that. It does
feel like we're getting lamer. I even miss the blink tag, even though I hated
it at the time.

------
zackmorris
Yes, very much (I'm 41). The running joke with my friends is that my tag line
should be "I miss the 90s".

Some things were much better then than today, for example:

* Children and adolescents had freedom that seems to have been lost today. However, I think that a young person's virtual self extends far out into the aether compared to Gen X.

* The lack of cynicism today concerns me. There are so many very.bad.things happening in the world that I find blind optimism offensive. I just read that 40% of the world's species have gone extinct in 40 years. It doesn't matter if that's precisely true - what matters is that the order of magnitude is likely accurate, and that humans only have about one more generation before Earth's wildlife can only be seen in museums.

* Politics was better. Everything since 9/11 has been a blind alley on the fractal of possibilities. Young people maybe aren't aware that the world wasn't always this... dystopic.

* One thing was worse - weed was illegal everywhere except like, Amsterdam.

* Video games were better. But the quality was partially due to suspension of disbelief and using one's imagination.

* Grunge/alternative was a revelation that can't be expressed in words or replicated. But, around 2013 I noticed a similar cultural revolution, the rise/return of the Burning Man sentiment and a reconnection with creation via psychedelic drugs which seems to be changing the world like a mix between 60s hedonism and cyperpunk. YOLO might be the only thing Gen X truly envies about today hahah.

* Basement parties, raves, skate and punk culture, underground internet geekdom. Vans. Airwalks. Corduroy jeans. All better, but somewhat make-believe.

* Web metaphors were better (declarative and data-driven programming, UNIX theology). Programming languages like C++ and platforms like Windows set us back at least 10, maybe 20 years. But they were FUN.

I knew a guy from my parents' generation when I was growing up who wore
Hawaiian shirts everywhere and would never leave the year 1985. Now I am him,
forever trapped between the years 1992-1999 like a character in The Matrix. So
while I could go on forever, I'll stop here.

Edit: somehow I left out music. Listen to Green Day or Stone Temple Pilots or
Alice in Chains chronologically and you _might_ if you're _lucky_ get the
slightest glimpse into what it was like to watch Beavis and Butthead in your
friend's trailer home before going out to ride BMX in the gravel pits and then
coming home and playing Nintendo until 4 in the morning, staying up all night
and then going to a party the next night and getting a ride home with random
girls like on Dazed and Confused. I assume all that is even better today (what
with your Uber and Tinder), but the shear bleakness and transcendental
euphoria that the future was arriving before your eyes and nobody older than
30 knows it yet has perhaps diminished.

~~~
dvtrn
_The lack of cynicism today concerns me_

Interesting. I’m 6 years your junior and quite vividly remember the optimism
of the 90’s but I find myself equally...erm...annoyed with the volume of
cynicism now and kind of wish for a more optimistic vox politic.

And that statement alone comes with all sorts of caveats and qualifiers that
would end up with this post being several volumes long just to point out “I
recognize the challenges of both eras; today and yesterday but I’m sticking by
the argument as delivered because reasons”.

In fact I had a quite literal shower though this afternoon after a jog through
my neighborhood “I wonder if it’s possible to plot out the
empowerment/cynicism index across generations and what that system of
measurement would look like”

It’s fun to ponder.

Until it isn’t.

That’s not a value judgement. That just an opinionated observation.

------
api
I don't think the 90s were any simpler, but I do miss some things.

Popular music was IMHO objectively better even in a pure composition sense and
was much more interesting.

I also miss 90s cyberculture. There was a more genuine ethos of inventing and
exploring and people would never have tolerated today's lockdown and
surveillance stuff. I'm amazed at how the mobile revolution boiled that frog.

~~~
Parcle
> IMHO objectively

I don't think that's legal, my guy.

------
gshdg
It’s so weird to me that more than half the answers here focus primarily on
computing and programming. I mean, this is a tech-oriented community, but
surely our experiences of the 90s and of the present day weren’t limited to
tech.

------
notjustanymike
Things we have now that I would never want to be without:

\- Amazing browser debugging tools \- Source Maps \- Typescript \- VSCode w/
Liveshare \- Mostly standardized CSS \- Automated build tools

These are solutions to problems we had in the past.

~~~
wbl
Make has been around far longer then you think.

------
onnnon
Yes. Simplicity, getting piercings, tribal tattoos, singing about saving the
planet and forming bands.

[https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew?t=23](https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew?t=23)

------
LargoLasskhyfv
Usable bicyles at reasonable price points with longer lasting parts. Nowadays
it seems like almost exclusively fashion driven, with parts wearing out fast,
even if they are expensive. CONSUME MORE!

------
crx07
Can I suggest that "90s simplicity" is an oxymoron?

I was alive back then, and I've always been under the impression that the
nineties were extremely fast paced and increasingly complicated.

------
inlined
I’m not sure what you mean by simplicity. Detecting whether your browser’s
JavaScript uses document.layers vs document.all?

------
sys_64738
For the first part of the 90s we still had Commodore. Now they’ve been
airbrushed from history by those left.

~~~
caymanjim
No one has airbrushed Commodore from history. The company went away. Many of
us learned on the C64 and moved on. You make it sound like there's some
conspiracy against them.

------
perilunar
90s? I miss the late 70s / early 80s. The world before personal computers was
better in many ways.

------
amelius
You mean when computers ran at MHz speed as opposed to GHz?

It took a lot more work to get a decent user experience.

~~~
ricardobeat
But did it? Perceived speed has remained steady, using a computer in the 80s
was not that different from today, only a lot less powerful. The UI for
software like Photoshop is essentially the same 30 years later. VisiCalc and
Lotus 123 were not that much slower than GDocs today. And we still have a hard
time beating input latency from an Apple II: [https://danluu.com/input-
lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

------
rgrieselhuber
The 80s were even better

------
andrewstuart
I miss not worrying about the earth dying.

~~~
DoreenMichele
If it helps any, the earth is probably not dying. There have been mass
extinctions, climate change, etc before.

After we cut our own throat as a species, Mother Nature will deal herself a
new hand and continue her game of solitaire without us.

~~~
andrewstuart
I have no doubt it's not the end of life on earth - the earth will recover and
life will continue for another 3 or 4 billion years, probably.

I'm more concerned about the short term - i.e. what will happen to us and our
children and future generations.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I'm sorry this weighs on you.

FWIW:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838229#19843507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838229#19843507)

------
return1
simplicity of what? getting any kind of information was ecruciatingly hard
until broadband became available. There were wars, politics, same or worse
than today's (yugoslav wars, gulf wars, palestine). You can have a roadtrip
nowadays easily (simplicity), try that in the 90s. I think you have it
backwards, today is simpler. I mean just catching up with the music genres of
the 90s was an arduous task!

------
oceanghost
Yes. This is something I have given a lot of thought to. I mean, A LOT.

Before about, 1996-- (I'm estimating)-- before network connectivity was the
norm-- I understood how every processor in every system I dealt with worked.
Two things happened in the mid to late 90s.

First-- an explosion of silicon. The days of understanding how the system
worked, in its entirety, were over. I had a copy of "80386 systems designers
guide", and I can't remember the name- but the Michael Abrash's guide to VGA
video cards and a PC Interrupts were all that were needed to _master_ computer
architecture. If you were super fancy you understood the Pentium math
extensions (whose names I cannot recall), that let you do a crossbar in a few
cycles, and you understood how common chips like the 16550 worked, which is an
addendum to PC Interrupts if I recall.

Second, and this is the key thing, technology started working AGAINST us. As
complexity exploded, so did network connectivity. We had this era in which
Operating Systems complexity exploded (win95), silicon complexity exploded,
and connectivity exploded. The thing about connectivity is this-- that's when
our computers went from isolated things to these things that are always
online-- they started working against us. They could now talk to other
computers, other people, and that changed computing fundamentally.

Computers went from these things that were our helpmates to our masters. This
is what I lament the most. I don't miss bit-banging, assembly programming
(well, a little). I fudging love Ruby/Python, as opposed to C++ being
considered "High Level." I love that I can buy a computer for 35$ (RPI) that
is fantastic. RPi's are so cheap I employ half a dozen just to run my 3d
printers (yes I have a problem). But I do so much not miss being scared of my
computer. Miss being scared of the ne5work. I miss the sense of wonder at what
a computer could be or do. You have to understand technology as it exists now,
is beyond my wildest dreams. I watched Star Trek TNG as a child and the
devices we have now, legitimately have exceeded my wildest dreams. The
simplest cell phone now has as much computational power as every computer
combined at the time I graduated high school.

But, I do miss simplicity. So much so, I've been considering writing an NES or
Sega game; I'm precisely 40 years old, and I've finally come to understand
that art and constraints are intimately connected. That they press on each
other, and neither is possible without each other.

I have so few restraints on modern systems that I... am constrained. I miss
the constraints of my earlier years that were, in fact, my freedom. I miss
software that shipped and worked on the first day. I, like everyone, miss my
childhood. Because the universe is an explosion of complexity-- and when we
look back, we will always feel like things were simpler-- because they god
damned actually were.

------
suff
Like when the 'off' button meant 'off'? Yeah, I do.

~~~
quickthrower2
The switch that completely isolated power from your pc. Luckily that still
exists at the wall .... for now.

Phones are another story.

~~~
badpun
Not if your PC is a laptop, and has a battery. You can tell it to go to sleep,
and, sometime later, Windows 10 will wake it up and sneak up an update on you
(with a complimentary restart included).

------
madengr
Recently I built a tube stereo amplifier kit and speakers. Bought an old
fashioned CD player for it. Just put in a CD and push play. No screwing around
with apps, streaming, etc.

As a teenager in the late 80’s, you knew where your friends were on the
weekends, but we didn’t have cell phones. You could find a party in a remote
part of the county, but no one had a GPS.

Computing was also fun, in the days of BBS and pre-WWW Internet.

------
Torwald
A world dominated by effen Windoze? How could I miss that? I sure as heck miss
the simplicity of my Amiga, if we are talking the 90s, but that's about it in
terms of simplicity.

All other aspects of "90s simplicity" sucked.

Table based web layouts? Without the "complication" of CSS? I sure miss that.
Calling the family landline and hoping her "complicated" father doesn't answer
the phone? Fuck yeah, I miss that. Having to play cool with the artsy-fartsy
kids to get the CD with the new fonts? Sure, I miss that as well. The
simplicity of "obtaining" Emacs for the Mac in the 90s! Hell yes! I miss that
simplicity. And last but not least, pixel pr0n, animated GIFs. Yeah, I miss
the simplicity of the 90s. Fuck Micro$oft, remember that one? Oh do I miss
that. And the "web crawlers" don't forget thet simplicity to submit your site
to more than 100 search engines!

The AOL CD, simply flip it away! Enviromentalism was still a European thing,
or so, thought the European Gen X. Kurt Cobain didn't comit suicide and fuck
Atari.

Short answer: "No."

~~~
woah
My SEO consultancy can handle that. We'll submit your site to hundreds of the
top search engines and web directories.

~~~
Torwald
Cool, but how did you find out my email address?

