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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

The Internet was slow and weird (in a good way).

The food wasn't great.

And the music was distressingly square.

Most people you'd meet in real life were still jerks, but there was less existential dread. It was more "you win some, you lose some" and less "humanity is doomed and the human condition is irredeemable."

Products were designed to last.

Most of the people you'd chat with on the internet were curious, benevolent nerds, not narcissistic political hacks.

We can’t bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways. One trick is to tell them stories that don’t go anywhere, like the time I caught the ferry over to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for my shoe, so, I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they call Shelbyville in those days, so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. So, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ‘em. Give me five bees for a quarter you’d say. Now where were we? Oh yeah! The important thing was I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn’t have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could was those big yellow ones.

Model 1964 human here.. Life in the past was a lot more free if you were a kid.

After school we'd be out the door with rocket boosters on and not come back inside until it got dark. Parents didn't know where we were, and usually didn't care as long as we did not get into trouble.

Rode bikes everywhere and played at the parks or would go to friends houses that had color TVs and watch afternoon cartoons. The closest we'd got to electronics would be a small AM/FM transistor radio. (If you got one of those, you were super lucky! I had this model.)

If you got 50 cents from the parents you were set for the day. Could get a can of Coke and a candy bar.

For the grownups, politics could be just as harrowing, Vietnam was a super hot topic and as kids, yeah you'd see lots of fucked up vets..

It's easy to look back and say "Ah, the good old days.." esp. if you were a kid - since mom and dad were doing the heavy lifting, but things were slower and the speed of stuff today seems to be down to the fact that people do not understand that they CAN slow down.

When we got internet in 1999, we bailed on the cable TV - having both was too costly. In the 27 years we're not had a TV (attached to cable service - I do game on a 50-inch 4k WalMart special (not-so) smart TV..) it's been a real show, watching friends and family get sucked up and into the maw of the mainstream media. Shit's poison.

You really want to slow down and touch grass, kick as much of the commercial-driven media as you can, to the curb.

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.

People were a lot less emotionally literate or aware of mental health issues. Autism and ADHD went undiagnosed if you were able to compensate half decently (you were just treated like you were being difficult on purpose). And kids were more brutal to each other.

The music was on point, though. I still enjoy me some Goldfinger.

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.

Not 90s but the 2000s in the middle east (keep in mind the same technology was released here at a similar time but adoption was slower due to prices and companies at the time not knowing how to market their products in non-western markets)

I have older siblings and younger siblings and I want say me and my friends in the same age group exist in this weird transitional generation. We are too young to have embraced the optimism and hope of the older generations but we are too old to have just accepting the current status quo as how we found the world to be.

As a child I have used the entire progression of the telephone. I have used landline, dumb Nokia phones, blackberry, smart Nokia phones, and Samsung smart phones. I remember watching both satellite TV and YouTube Minecraft let's play as a kid. My dad used to take family pictures using both a film camera and a digital camera. I remember when we had to go out I would schedule the VHS recorder (or whatever it's called in English) to record my favourite cartoon tv show.

But what I believe is the most impactful aspect is the politics. I can clearly remember the Arab Spring (a series of revolutions in 2011). I was too young to understand it at the time but I sure have felt this feeling hope, optimism, and freedom in everyone around me just to realise when I grew up that we've lost.

Also LLMs and AI became a thing while I'm in the middle of university so I have seen how the concept of education slowly change from who learnt the skills better to who can make it the fastest with least tokens spent.

I'm also an introverted nerd so the moment I had internet access I was totally invested. I have seen how it turned from wholesome (and totally not wholesome) forums, chatrooms, and personal blogs, to these gated gardens, to brainrot and then AI slop. And I miss just hanging around uninvited in a small niche online community and talking to people.

I think what would resonate with my age group and some older folks is the feeling and promise that certain things and the future will be ours when we grow up, just to loose it all before we had the chance to.

I was mid-late teens when the internet started to become widespread. I didn't like the idea, had a bad feeling about it. Then I relaxed a bit and the more I used it, became comfortable with it.

Social media is what I was initially worried about, though I wouldn't have been able to know it back then. I"d want the pre-internet world back if I had one wish.

People were generally more respectful and forgiving to one another. There was a sense of we're in this together that has steadily eroded. We had our problems mind you, but I was sure my generation and I would make things better. By and large the only people saying everything's fucked were the "end is nigh" crazies in the streets.

Maybe my perspective was just more idealistic back then (excluding the internet), and the world was just as grim as it seems today.

But having college graduates reject AI--that gives me a little hope.

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.

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.

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

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.

Them dang Krauts stirred up trouble not once, but TWICE! then some idiot teli personality with dementia up his hoohaw became president in the USA and things went to shit, also kind of TWICE! And now the same thing looky be happening again. At least this pandemic wasn't as bad as that Spanish Flu.

I miss the onion belts...

It was just easier. I grew up after the Vietnam war and before the gulf one.

There was more help for people from the government. There was more freedom in daily life.living was easier. A 17year old could get a roommate and support themselves living independently working part time at fast food places. Simply having a job was enough to live.

There was a difference between being poor and being in poverty.

College was something you could get a job and work through with minimal debt.

Computers were just getting popular when I was young and it was easy to get a job based On what would now be basic technical skills.

The internet made noises and was crunchy.

People still struggled but I was easier for my generation than it is for the current kids.

Get offa my lawn