

Redditors share the way the world was 20 years ago - socratees
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/esid8/from_sex_to_phones_to_star_wars_what_would_older/

======
melling
About twenty years ago I was trolling around the Internet explaining how
Microsoft was going to screw over IBM and OS/2. I went by melling back then
too:

<http://www.skytel.co.cr/advocacy/research/1991/0817.html>

And for hacking fun, I was enamored with Steve Jobs' NeXT computer. Among
other things, I worked on the Tetris port:

<http://www.artizia.com/tetris/contributors.html>

A year later, I found my first developer job via the Internet and ended up in
the NYC area. About a year out of college I bought a used 386 computer, got
Linux running and a PPP connection, then I was back on the Internet.

Today, the Internet is just bigger and faster, while Steve's NeXT computer
fits in your front shirt pocket.

------
wallflower
> We played _outside_ (there was nothing to do inside anyway)

Having happily spent hours playing with the dirt under a bush in my front yard
with Star Wars action figures when I was young, lost in my imagination, aided
by props, I lament the complete shift that has occurred for many kids. It's a
sea change, and I was ecstatic recently when my toddler niece played in the
dirt on my watch - only got caught because she got dirt on her cheeks - I hope
she never loses that curiousity - her parents were away...

Now my nephews - my sister has successfully resisted the introduction of video
games for at least six years - hope she can continue to fight. For when the
video game console gets in, it will change expectations forever.

~~~
axod
> my sister has successfully resisted the introduction of video games for at
> least six years - hope she can continue to fight.

idk. I bought my son a Nintendo DS when he turned 3 (reward for potty
training). I'm really glad I did as he's already showing off some cool
mathematical and logical thinking ability. There's good games and bad games,
plusses and minuses as with everything. I think the key is variety and
moderation.

~~~
eru
Where are you from? The US?

Is it normal to do potty training so late?

~~~
sliverstorm
Talk about shaping the evidence to suit your hypothesis.

~~~
eru
I don't know. I recently borrowed a book from a co-worker, a young mother,
about potty-training. They talked about different approaches in different
parts of the world. The author was American, so I thought this would be a good
opportunity to cross-check what she wrote. (And most people on HN are from the
US, that's why I assumed so.)

------
ilamont
20 years ago today people were very scared about what was about to happen to
the Middle East. This was about two weeks before the first Gulf War erupted,
and a lot of people thought (correctly) that Iraq would try to drag Israel
into it.

I remember two technological developments that year: I saw email for the first
time at the Boston public broadcaster WGBH, and one of the larger American
airlines installed phones in the backs of economy seats (I still see them
every now and then, but don't think they work anymore). The calls were
expensive as hell.

Some people had car phones, and "beepers" had spread out from professional
occupations to youth culture (the Tribe Called Quest song "Sky Pager"
references this) but I did not know anyone who had a mobile phone in the US in
1990. I saw my first mobile phone in London in 1991.

GUIs were very widespread on campuses, but there were still a surprising
amount of command-line based software being used in the workplace. At one of
my first jobs at a UK record label in 1991 they had me using Word Perfect (?)
which involved green text on a black screen, and lots of keyboard shortcuts.
Aside from the email example mentioned earlier, every business I dealt with in
1990-1991 used faxes or the post to send documents.

EDIT: added beeper/mobile phone/GUI/fax recollections

------
srean
A few odd couple short of 20 years ago, but nevertheless, Linux was a new
wonder to me. Red Hat CDs came packaged with issues of a computer magazine.
This was in India. 7 KB/sec was fast, and it lasted a burst or two per day.
Was absolutely new to programing. Wrote a p2p service for sharing rpm
packages, because downloading them from upstream was so slow. Wrote it in TCL,
it went nowhere. But a few snippets of that code found its way into the tcl
library.

Laser printers were a frightfully expensive piece of equipment and wasting
toner bothered me. So went through ghostscript code to realize for the first
time how beautiful code can truly be. Patched a part of the driver to handle
economy mode.

Had it not been for FSF and open-source, I would perhaps have never learned
programming. I did not major in CS, but for those who did, without FSF it
would have been unaffordable.

------
blhack
Hmm.. I'm not that old (I'm 23) and a lot of this stuff was also normal when I
was a kid. I wonder if things are _that_ different for 8 year olds now (the
stuff about being a kid and getting into trouble, I mean).

I had to dress up to go to church.

From the time I can remember forward, the rule was that I just had to be
home...eventually. I couldn't actually spend the _night_ in the woods, but I
could explore them to my heart's content.

I rode my bicycle _everywhere_. I rode my bike to school starting the summer
of 4th grade, 3 miles each way down a highway and through town, but I didn't
even get killed a little bit.

------
iwwr
_If you wanted to know something, there was no Google or Wikipedia. You might
be able to find out a basic fact if you had a set of encyclopedias. But most
information, from important stuff to basic trivia ("who was in that movie?")
was not available unless you had a reference book or went to the library and
really searched._

Rumors, lies, media manipulation, thwarted by a few seconds of research. If
more people bothered, it would be a better world.

Off topic, but obligatory Monty Python piece
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo>

~~~
Create
SEO and its opposite, Googlewash [1]. Writing on the Googlewashing episode in
the New York Times, Stanford linguist Geoffrey Nunberg warned [2] that:

The rankings give disproportionate weight to opinions of the activists and
enthusiasts that may be at odds with the views of the larger public. It's as
if the United Nations General Assembly made all its decisions by referring the
question to whichever nation cares most about the issue: the Swiss get to rule
on watchmaking, the Japanese on whaling.

That seems quite prophetic now. And there are links between gaming the system
for political gain then and now. [3]

Oh, and the feedback loop [4].

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/03/antiwar_slogan_coine...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/03/antiwar_slogan_coined_repurposed/)

[2] <http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/18/weekinreview/18NUNB.html>

[3]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/28/web_politics_how_rea...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/04/28/web_politics_how_real/)

[4]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/britannica_slaps_goo...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/01/26/britannica_slaps_google/)

------
Semiapies
What's the "20 years go" bit about? It's not in TFA's title.

Twenty years ago was (late) 1990, not $700 VCRs, no video games, or people
kicked off of airplanes for wearing sweatpants.

------
ben1040
> No Facebook or email. Long distance calling was expensive... Sundays were
> the days to call family and friends, because rates were cheaper.

I remember as a kid being told by my father to go play somewhere else, because
I was bothering my mother who was on the phone _long distance._

Even when I went to college in 1999, I remember it being an issue since not
everyone's cell plan featured long distance included, but everyone came with a
cell phone that had a number local to their hometown. People would end up
racking up long distance charges on their cell phones just to call a friend in
the next building over.

Thought: mobile data charges are the next generation's "long distance" (or are
at least headed that way).

~~~
ghshephard
Yes, I'm currently paying $15/Megabyte on my iPhone. Nobody in Vancouver
(Virgin, Rogers, Bell, Telus) is willing to sell me a "Pay-as-you-go MiFi) for
a reasonable rate (< $200) - so I ended up buying a rogers Rocket-Stick for
$150 and putting data on it, one day at a time for $15 @ 1 Gigabyte/day (or $5
for 50 megabytes/day - how's that for a curve), connecting to it from my
MacBook Air for all my data needs.

------
tzs
The original poster is talking about way more than 20 years ago, as far as I
can tell. It looks like his items cover a range, going as far back as 40 or 50
years ago, up to about 10 years ago.

------
ghshephard
" People lined up at banks on Fridays, to deposit their paychecks and withdraw
cash for the weekend. If you ran out of cash over the weekend, too bad."

Not in 1990, that's for sure. Heck, in _1981_ we had ATMs all over my small
town of Vernon, BC. Wikipedia (which _wasn't_ around in 1990, and I would
sorely miss) tells me the first ATMs came into the United states around 1969 -
and browsing through that article, the appear to be fairly common by 1975)

~~~
adestefan
It was at least the early 90s before the first ATM showed up in the large
central PA town I grew up in. I still remember waiting for the mail on
Thursday for my dad's paycheck. My mom would sign his name and we'd go to the
bank, same teller every week, and get $100 in cash and the rest into the
checking account.

~~~
ghshephard
Okay, name the town with > 2000 people in the United States that didn't have
an ATM until 1990. I'm genuinely curious as to how that came about.

~~~
adestefan
It was Altoona, PA and in 1990 the population was somewhere in the 50,000
range. I'm not saying there were no ATMs just that I remember when they put
the first one in at our bank. It was a big deal that they were giving out ATM
cards.

------
erreon
Aww, I remember the outside.

Seriously though, I'm grateful to my brother who's kept my nephews on a strict
time limit and filter when it comes to TV and video games. They play outside
and put their amazing imaginations to use.

------
ck2
You don't even have to be that old to remember most of that. Except for milk
deliveries, well-dressed for airplane trips, and a few other things on there I
remember how things were...

If you think about it, it's all before super cheap labor/parts from China, not
just a technological gap.

One of my more earlier memories is standing in line for Star Wars. It went
clear around a building or two and as a child it was the most spectacular
thing to see that many people in a row.

Oh and I remember being given a nickel to buy a bagel. Damn I've gotten old
:-(

------
juiceandjuice
This article is mostly only relevant to people under 20.

In my opinion, the real generation gap begins close to the current age of 22.
People 22 or younger very likely had the internet in Elementary schools, a
computer before they entered middle school (probably with the internet), video
systems with 3D accelerators, broadband before they got out of high school,
and Wikipedia for the entirety of their college career, among other things.

~~~
adestefan
I remember the day a 56kbps frame relay circuit was installed in our house in
1997. It was connected back to my dad's office and I could use it to access
the Internet via their connection. It was amazing the day that I didn't have
to dial anything.

I think I was the only person who was in my freshman college class in 1998
that knew you didn't need disk up to connect to the Internet. Sharing that
single T1 with 2000 other students sucked.

------
notJim
The nostalgia in this article really bothers me, in some ways. Maybe I'm just
oversensitive, but it just seems like there's a lot of unacknowedged white
male bias. Where are the women talking about how incredibly sexist everyday
society was, or the black people talking about open, shameless racism?

I am about to take off on a plane so I don't have much else to say, but this
was really bothering me.

~~~
Untitled
> Where are the women talking about how incredibly sexist everyday society
> was, or the black people talking about open, shameless racism?

Really?

How about today's white self-hatred? I lived in Japan for quite a time, and it
is a breath of fresh air not to year people go on and on about how ashamed you
should be because god gave you a white skin (and that all social ills of other
groups are due to you).

~~~
notJim
I think that's orthogonal to my point. All I was saying was that many of the
answers presented only a majority view of the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and that
if you were to ask women and blacks what they thought, you might see some
different answers.

Maybe I didn't express myself clearly enough, but I don't think there's
anything wrong with pointing out that you're only seeing one side of the
story.

> year [sic] people go on and on about how ashamed you should be because god
> gave you a white skin (and that all social ills of other groups are due to
> you).

Also, maybe I'm hanging out with the wrong crowd, or don't watch enough CNN,
but I have never experienced this in my life.

------
david927
About 25 to 30 years ago:

\- I got my first computer: an Atari 400 computer with 16k of RAM and no
storage, so I would write a program and then just turn it off. The OS and a
BASIC interpreter also fit in that 16k so it wasn't hard to write a program
that would be too big to fit into memory.

\- The APPLE ][ was a spark of pure genius. The first time I played with it,
it changed my life. I would walk a couple miles to the computer store on
weekends so I could work on one. (I rememeber the Lisa and then Macintosh
coming out and somehow not being impressed.)

\- Software piracy was rampant. Software was sold through publishers, like
books.

\- Elephant memory was the cool makers of floppy disks. I had this big poster
in my room: [http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/ems-mag-
ad-2-smal...](http://home.comcast.net/~kevin_d_clark/ems/ems-mag-
ad-2-small.jpg)

\- My first modem was 300 baud. That was so slow, it took a second or so for
each character to appear.

------
protomyth
20 years ago today, I was getting ready to head back to my final semester of
my undergrad in CompSci. I had just completed my last course that used the IBM
370 with Modula-2 (the base language for UND at the time). The Internet for me
was mostly mailing lists and USENET. I so wanted a NeXT cube but there was no
way I could afford it. My last papers were completed on a Mac SE/30. No class
I had touched a GUI. The one class that had Lisp was a nightmare because the
VAX had too little memory so the REPL became batch processing with 2 or more
students working at the same time. The only computer I bought was an Atari
130xe to replace my old 400, and all it was used for was electronic fun with
the joystick/paddle ports (or the occasional MULE game).

------
david2777
I'm 17 and this makes me wonder what my generation will write about in 20
years. Pretty crazy how many things change in such a short period of time.

------
The_Igor
No one mentioned burning ants with a magnifying glass.

------
parbo
I made a database for my LP's (and maybe a CD or two) in Turbo Pascal on my
dad's laptop. Yes, he had a laptop. It was a Compaq with a 386DX20 and a
grayscale screen. I didn't really know any sorting algorithms so I came up
with the world's worst bubblesort. I think it was O(n³), possibly O(n⁴).

Note: my memory is a bit fuzzy, this might have happened anywhere from
1990-1993.

------
socratees
One comment talks about "rewinding cassette tapes".

~~~
protomyth
The "spin it using a pen" technique was the true winner.

~~~
Timothee
Until you did one spin wrong and it would start spinning the other way :)

It's interesting though that the most common 6-sided pencil would fit
perfectly for the cassettes. Had the hole been just a bit bigger or smaller
and it wouldn't have worked.

I remember a friend in junior high using a pen to rewind to spare his walkman
batteries…

~~~
protomyth
We did it because Pioneer car stereos took forever to rewind. They went faster
on fast forward then the rewind (so flip, ff, flip). I really wish I could get
a transcript of the meeting that affected the rewind speed.

------
lhnn
Almost everything in this discussion can be simulated by not having digital
appliances: No instant communications, photos, information, banking, trade, or
travel.

Basically:

You had to be more diligent when taking care of business; You had to be clean
when going places (no pajamas on a plane); There was no bull __ __security
theatre when travelling; There were fewer distractions for children.

------
kingkilr
20 years ago I was about 2 months old. I don't remember shit.

