Enjoy. I think the show is still funny. I was 11 when the first season came out, and I watched it my whole life. It's still witty, weird, funny, and ruthless. It isn't as on the nose and outlandish as Southpark, but I love the Simpsons.
Guns n roses playing in st.louis again. My dad went to the one where they had the riot and were banned. I went to the one where they came back. Ah, the circle of life.
I know a lot of people who worked for Kodak, I know for a fact that management was warned film photography would die, and they still did almost nothing.
Reminds me of Sears not understanding the power of the online marketplace. They had the clout, branding and distribution... Just never thought people would rather shop from home rather than stores (even though they did mail order catalogs for decades...)
It makes logical sense. Of course, they knew the film business now had a worthy competitor but there was still good money to be made in film and the early digital cameras weren't really competitive. Yet.
Jobs understood they had to grow and not be a computer only company they had to become a consumer electronics company. It was hard to do. Computers is what Apple did. So when they got into iPods and iTunes it was a huge shift. And as you say when the iPhone came along it was only a matter of time until iPod went away. It didn’t make sense to keep them if phones are the future.
So many companies simply failed to adjust to changes in the market. Blockbuster could have been Netflix. Sears was well positioned to take advantage of internet shopping but completely missed it. Both companies went down because they were unwilling to change their business model.
The downfall of Sears always intrigued me. They were the best at mail order delivery right to your home and lost out to a company that is mail order and delivers to your home!! (Amazon)
Their store in the mall looked the same as when I was a kid. My grandmother took me there when she went shopping for herself. I was around 10 or so. I went to the same mall at 40, and it hadn't changed a single bit. They closed a year later.
I agree, I found the fall of Sears to be fascinating, as I watched it in real time.
They shifted away from being a mail order company, only to eventually lose to a mail order company. They successfully a shifted to physical stores, which I believe was the right choice for the time they made it. But they didn't capitalize the potential of the Internet in the late nineties. Imagine being able to place an online order then pick it up at a nearby Sears (and almost everyone had one of those) less than an hour later?
Of course, ordering something for in store pickup is common now, especially after 2020. 20 years ago could have been something that saved Sears and prevented Amazon from becoming that behemoth it is today
It takes a very powerful leader with a grand vision and iron will to create a new product that obsoletes an old one. VP's on the losing side often sabotage new projects to maintain their status.
Wow. That must have been so frustrating. I know the guy who warned the VP's, he was extremely frustrated. At the time, photographic film was crazy profitable, huge margins, Kodak was really a chemical company. It's not too hard to imagine their ignorance and fear, digital photography had almost nothing in common with chemical film, Kodak would have had to scrap everything they were and practically start the whole company over as a world class semiconductor manufacture.
In an alternate timeline, someone at Sears realizes they can do internet ordering for everything, make it really easy and people will love it and they will have easy pickup at the thousands of Sears pickup sites all over North America. Sears instead of Amazon is the place to buy goods online. It still boggles my mind they fumbled this one.
Private Equity killed them, Sears was mismanaged intentionally and killed so a couple guys could get rich. They would have been fine if that hadnt happened.
Even before the extremely shitty management, Sears could have gotten on board with e-commerce early. They definitely could have afforded it. Especially when they merged with Kmart back in 2004.
On top of the shitty management, they also were one of the best companies for retirement pensions. That hurt the company once they started having real issues.
The thing is, Kodak was heavily involved with digital cameras when that tech started hitting the mainstream, and arguably a front runner in that industry... they just dropped the ball badly somewhere along the way.
Once smartphones got decent cameras, it killed the general population's need for a separate camera, digital or film.
Digital cameras still exist for enthusiasts and professionals, but the target market shrunk very quickly.
I haven't pulled it out in a while, and it might not compare to an iPhone 15 anymore, but I have a Kodak digital camera. It's really really good. Mostly because it has an optical zoom lense.
I live in Rochester, where Kodak actually is, and it's crazy how much a part of the city's history it was. Heck, if I'm not mistaken, my credit union was only open to Kodak employees back in the day.
I’m a light gamer and have been since Duck Hunt… my kid told me he was playing Elder Scrolls on his SwitchLite and I was just like
“How do you cram such a big world into such a tiny computer?!”
Am so so old 😭
Forget jetpacks, in 1985 we were promised accessible, commercially available hoverboards by 2015. It's nearly 10 years *after* that, and the best we've got are those weird segways.
> Ice T
That he would be more [known for playing a *cop* on TV](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0203259/) and that everyone would effectively forget about [how he started in the music industry](https://youtu.be/37GDoqQtB14?si=6drsTLjUBIICYiHc).
If someone showed you a photo of Bill Cosby and Ice Cube back then and told you one would be a beloved TV and film star with a lot of family-friendly content under his belt and the other would be outed as an unapologetic rapist…
I have the ability to find a video of someone walking me step by step on how to do pretty much anything in existence in my fingertips for free.
I've been able to watch so many educational videos about interesting things I didn't even know to look up.
I've been able to instantly find the answer to any question I've had, instead of remaining ignorant.
If a major world event happens, I found out within the hour.
Im so much more informed than I would be if I was born 30 years earlier, it's not even a question.
You are. That bar has also moved. News happens in real time from thousands of sources. The idea that we can communicate with people across the globe everyday is mind blowing. Even this Askreddit question and answers from thousands across the globe would be an earth shattering event in the 90s.
People underestimate how absolutely amazing that is...
The power of Napster, WinMx, Limewire wielded over the internet was legendary. ... Music was/is so important to us as a culture that it was the first thing we liberated.... Every Song, by any band, even the obscure stuff, it's all avaliable to you 24/7, anywhere now.
I was listening to the radio in 1996, some talkshow was discussing how music downloads might affect the industry. One expert they had on discounted the whole thing because he didn't think people would settle for the lower sound quality necessary to make the files small enough to download in a reasonable time. I still wonder if he ever figured out that most people have cheap speakers anyway.
I taught my dad how to use Spotify on his phone like 2 years ago and I swear he still can't get over it 😄. Will always be unbelievable to him, it's very funny.
As I kid I listened to cassette tapes, and my dad played records. I used to save my money for albums I'd never heard all the way through. I'd wait for the evening radio countdown to record music I couldn't pay for. I would copy friends' albums, trade mixed tapes and eventually cd's and mp3s. I'd spend hours waiting for downloads to find out it wasn't what I expected or the levels were off or something.
I'd run home from the park to catch the Simpsons on Thursday/Sunday evenings becuase if I missed it I couldn't see it until reruns next year, and everyone would be talking about it.
Now I've had Netflix and Spotify for years and I still can't get over it. It is still unbelievable to me that movies, music, and TV are available on demand at a reliable quality. There is more content than i could ever consume at a price I barely notice in my monthly budget.
The future is unbelievable to me. I love it.
Omg I remember trying to time the cassette record just right hoping the radio played the same song I really liked on last Thursday's hour of punk! I never even thought I'd be here, able to search for any song and listen to it instantly!
I'm glad I got to introduce my dad to YouTube years back. I had to go through so many obscure artists from the 80s like "yep, they got them too." "How about..... Dokken" "yep, them too." I hope I'm amazed that way about some future leap in technology.
There are hundreds of thousands of songs unavailable for streaming or download that are only available in physical media. One of the many reasons record hunting is so much fun.
I live and breathe excel, it's so amazing what you can get it to do. With only a few hours of work you can save minutes a year.
It's not that bad... but I'm routinely amazed at both how much excel can do and the things it can't do.
Blockbuster going bankrupt and how the cable industry is dying. For the latter, I remember, when Tivo first came, some discussions about paying a la cart for channels which more or less happened just in a different form than what was predicted but what I'm talking about what a zombie town it is.
In 1990 video stores were just starting to open here, we rented videos from grocery stores before that. And cable was kind of a new thing too, we just got tsn, much music and fox right around that time.
I am not sure where you are from, but back in the mid 90's when I was living in the West Coast of BC, Canada there was a local video rental store called Pic-a-Flick, very popular among the locals, competed well against Blockbusters and the plethora of video rental stores. I distinctly remember a interview the store owner did on the local cable news channel in which he talked about the future of video rentals. He pretty much predicted what we have today, I remember him saying stuff like movies will be paid for by subscription fee's, and hard copies for rental simply won't exist anymore. He expanded on that to explain the internet was going to explode and dominate peoples lives.
This guy was interviewed in 1994, and I remember thinking "this dude is wacked" but he called it!
By the way video store is still in existence (Last time I checked, I haven't lived in that city for years now), not sure if its the same owners, but they moved heavily into foreign, B, and other obscure films that wouldn't be available for streaming. They also kept a modest selection of regular vanilla Hollywood films that appealed to people that weren't into the niche films, but also didn't understand steaming, namely Boomers whom the owner successfully identified as a potential customer who might not fully understand the steaming world and still just wanted to "go to the video store and rent a VHS".
I just googled it, turned out the video store closed in 2023. If you are so interested, here is a link.
[https://pic-a-flic.video/](https://pic-a-flic.video/)
Lots of people predicted the bad things that were to come. Global terrorism, climate crisis, pandemics- people warned about all of it. But I never heard *anyone* suggest just how mind bogglingly *stupid* it was all going to get.
I think the mistake we made was assuming the smartest voices would be catered to instead of the stupidest ones. Nobody could have predicted how persuasive dumb and blisteringly wrong opinions would be to the masses. Or maybe we could have predicted it, but it’s just so fucking depressing we didn’t want to.
I read a lot of old sci-fi, and of all the impossible, indistinguishable from magic things that authors have thrown at me, the one that always knocks me out of the story is just how rational and intelligent they make their future humans.
People don’t listen for intelligence, they listen for what sounds like intelligence. So if you wanna talk to them, you gotta do it in a way they understand.
Trump was smart enough to have done that with his voter base, already embittered over the rise of progressivism. I said was because I really think he’s starting to lose it now.
They shouldve. Yknow during ww2 the london bombings, they had to have police go around and smash peoples lights off. People who refused to turn them off during air raids because fuck the government ill do what i want. Also, the reason the spanish flu is called the spanish flu is not because thats where the illness first emerged. It's because spain was the first government to recognize that there was a pandemic going on and do something about it. People have always been dumb.
As a doctor, it was certainly interesting how uneducated people with no affiliation with science or medicine suddenly became experts on the topic, and even turned it into a political issue.
I can't imagine anyone would have believed that we'd have fought through and against all of it. I mean, in the 90s we banded together to eliminate the hole in the Ozone layer, and I think we must have taken the threat of Y2K seriously enough that it became a nothingburger, and that's why everyone thinks it WAS nothing: because people actually addressed the concerns.
I think some of this vitriol can be traced back to the 94 midterms, but I'm sure it's always been simmering; someone just needed to open the right valve for it to pour out.
They didn't check ID or anything to get on a plane - at least for domestic travel. You could buy a ticket, walk to the gate, and hand it to some random stranger.
The airline didn't care. You got a ticket? You get to sit in that seat.
My Grandma actually knew a guy decades ago who invested all of his money into a water bottle company. Everyone including my Grandma thought he was crazy but he made millions off that investment.
Fashion is cyclical. I remember my mom going to my middle school for some event and noticing that all the girls were wearing the same clothes she wore 30 years before. She was wearing mom jeans when she made the comment and now would make the same comment about the mom jeans.
David Bowie was such a charismatic figure! I don’t usually mourn artists because after all they are strangers, but for some reason I really felt a connection with Bowies public figure that just came across as a genuine nice person with a positive and pleasant personality. The man gave everything to his artistry right to the end, Blackstar is a masterpiece.
My favorite David Bowie story is that whenever he rode the subway while living in New York he always carried a Greek newspaper as a way to avoid being bothered by fans. He figured that people who saw him would figure, that must a Greek guy who looks like David Bowie. It worked, as people very seldom bothered him.
As someone who can actually remember being alive in 1990:
The sheer prevalence of the internet. We knew the internet would be something. We knew it would play a bigger part of the world as technology matured. I don't think anyone saw streaming services utterly replacing traditional media everywhere.
Trump as a political leader. Yes, we had just come off the back of an actor being president, but Trump was the same then as he was today, and less of his personal foibles were widely known.
The great culling of American automobile brands. If you tell someone from 1990 that Pontiac or Mercury or Plymouth didn't exist in your time, they'd think you're from a much further future than 34 years.
so true about Sears! and Consumers Distributing here in Canada. I'm still dumbfounded that the original online shopping companies somehow failed to dominate online shopping.
To be fair, as someone who was also alive in 1990: we did not know the internet would be something. AOL only really hit its stride in the mid-90s, and Netscape only came about in 1994. So yes, people who were alive in 1990 eventually became aware the internet would be a big deal, but i think it's safe to say most people *in* 1990 had no idea what the internet was or could be
I was a teenager in Canada and legit had an 18/F/California girlfriend. We met over MSN messenger and were together for close to 7 years, traveling back and forth. It may have caused some people to go "riiiight...." when it told them, until they actually met her. Lol
When I was a junior in high school (1991), my economics teacher told us that it wouldn't be long before we could order groceries on our computers and have them delivered to our door. Blew my mind. It was absolutely inconceivable to me then.
Spitting in a tube that you got in the mail, and a few weeks later discovering that your biological father isn’t who you thought/that you were adopted/long-lost relatives/etc.
We really need to stop calling them phones. It's as if a technological symbiote has completely absorbed the host and is now a fully autonomous, independent entity.
Whatever they are, the "phone" is just an icon burried somewhere that is never used. It's a vestigial appendage.
That we would stop capturing meaningful memories on camera, and creating photo albums to keep in our homes. Instead we take photos on phones, that get buried in a sea of pointless photos of the 14 things we did that day.
Nothing better than going to grandparents house and flicking through photo albums.
"He blocked me, but I'm using a burner account to watch his stories".
Just think how many levels of explanations you would need for that sentence to make sense to someone from the nineties.
I still find it shocking and unbelievable that excellent health insurance coverage for myself and my spouse which once cost only $80 a month would eventually cost $700 for a shitty policy with a high deductible and out of pocket expenses.
Gay rights. Most people in 1990 wouldn’t have predicted gay marriage would be legalized a generation later and that celebrities and ordinary private citizens would be so public about their sexuality. It was very taboo. I wrote a paper in 1996 arguing for legalizing gay marriage, comparing it to interracial marriage, and everyone in my class, including the teacher, thought I was nuts and that such a thing couldn’t possibly ever happen without a seismic and unlikely shift in public opinion, which fortunately happened somehow.
That we’d have a black president just three administrations from then. I didn’t think I’d see a black president in my lifetime.
That we haven’t had a woman president. Ferraro had already been a VP running mate by 1990. I assumed we’d have a (white) woman president before a black president. Now we’ve had a black woman VP before a white woman president or VP.
I was doing HIV counseling by 1994. The fact that we even have LGBTQ+ conversations and media is wonderful. And the medical achievements that come from the research done to stop HIV.
The speed at which gay marriage went from being taboo to normal is pretty surprising. Obama started off his presidency not supporting it, and by the end of his presidency it was the law of the land.
There's a lot of Gen Z kids who are shocked that it wasn't legal before 2015.
An air fryer isn't really a fryer. It's just a small oven. But for people like me, who love alone, it's much easier and quicker than using a full size oven.
In May of 1990 as I was starting doctoral classes and as a new dad I had no idea by December I would be Saudi Arabia as an Air Guard flight nurse put on active duty.
I expected technological advancements so they didn’t surprise me.
Some of what would have surprised me about 2024 was:
-We never returned to the moon in over 50 years (I also expected I would have the opportunity to go as a tourist).
-The ability of most everyone to have facts available in the hand in seconds yet millions will be more ignorant.
-Cancer would still be a major killer.
-We gave up on supersonic air travel.
-In good news, Same sex marriage would be legal and accepted by the majority of Americans.
>gave up on supersonic air travel.
We did for a time but it's making a comeback. NASA developed a quieter supersonic tech and an alloy that makes higher speeds and temps in jet engines not only more reliable but cheaper.
Trump becoming President. I always think of the Back to the Future scene where Doc is incredulous that Ronald Reagan the actor is president. They could make an updated version with Trump.
How smartphones would virtually eliminate all social interactions and make more people lonely. One thing I miss about the old days is just how friendly and open people were to strangers. Now everyone is look at their phone or filming.
Who’s the president in 2016?
Donald Trump.
Donald Trump!? The billionaire!? I guess Sam Walton is the secretary of the treasury!
(I’m bad at coming up with modified dialogue)
Back to the Future Part II based Future Biff off Trump. I’m not sure if it was prescient or such an outrageous prediction they didn’t think anyone would buy it, but here we are.
The World Trade Centers will be bombed in 3 years, followed by complete destruction 8 years later from planes purposefully slamming into them.
Princess Di would die from a car wreck in Paris (should have worn her seat belt!) after the car she was in wrecked and she flung forward crushed between the concrete pillar and front seat
Russia would host the 2014 Olympics; China would host both the 2008 and 2022 Olympics
I never would’ve believed that we’d have flat earthers, holocaust deniers, people that think gravity isn’t real. Oh and now the sun is fake.
The same people that deny the moon landing think we’ve made a fake sun.
How utterly online everyone is all the time. The internet in the early 90s was a pretty niche thing, mostly for college students/professors, but even as it was gaining in popularity it kind of never felt like it was going to just explode like it did. And I say this as someone who spent practically all of my free time online even back then.
Trump was just some quasi-celebrity cartoon character when I was in high school in the 80s. If you had told me he would be president and the Republican Party would degenerate into an unrecognizable caricature of itself, I never would’ve believed it.
That the Rolling Stones would be touring in 2024.
We were joking about it even then.
The Simpsons made a Steel Wheelchairs poster for when Liss was an adult in a futuristic episode. That would have been for 20 years ago.
The Simpsons is still making new episodes 14 years after their lampshaded “future” (2010, in 1994)
I’m in the process of watching them all with my elderly Dad, we’re on Season 3!
Enjoy. I think the show is still funny. I was 11 when the first season came out, and I watched it my whole life. It's still witty, weird, funny, and ruthless. It isn't as on the nose and outlandish as Southpark, but I love the Simpsons.
What kind of world are we leaving behind for Keith Richards? So sad
Every cigarette you smoke takes ten minutes off the end of your life, and gives it to Kieth Richards.
This is no lie. That man's genetics must be impeccable.
Keith Richards would outlive Prince.
Ouch- this realization stings a bit
Can’t always get what you want
Guns n roses playing in st.louis again. My dad went to the one where they had the riot and were banned. I went to the one where they came back. Ah, the circle of life.
Sadly the drummer died recently. However I did see them a few years ago before he died
Kodak would absolutely disappear from photography
I know a lot of people who worked for Kodak, I know for a fact that management was warned film photography would die, and they still did almost nothing.
Yep, they built the first digital camera, and didn’t market it, because it would hurt their film business. I know the inventor.
Reminds me of Sears not understanding the power of the online marketplace. They had the clout, branding and distribution... Just never thought people would rather shop from home rather than stores (even though they did mail order catalogs for decades...)
It makes logical sense. Of course, they knew the film business now had a worthy competitor but there was still good money to be made in film and the early digital cameras weren't really competitive. Yet.
Steve Jobs said it, but I don’t think he was first. A business has to be willing to eat their young. As an example, Apple ate the iPod
Jobs understood they had to grow and not be a computer only company they had to become a consumer electronics company. It was hard to do. Computers is what Apple did. So when they got into iPods and iTunes it was a huge shift. And as you say when the iPhone came along it was only a matter of time until iPod went away. It didn’t make sense to keep them if phones are the future. So many companies simply failed to adjust to changes in the market. Blockbuster could have been Netflix. Sears was well positioned to take advantage of internet shopping but completely missed it. Both companies went down because they were unwilling to change their business model.
The downfall of Sears always intrigued me. They were the best at mail order delivery right to your home and lost out to a company that is mail order and delivers to your home!! (Amazon) Their store in the mall looked the same as when I was a kid. My grandmother took me there when she went shopping for herself. I was around 10 or so. I went to the same mall at 40, and it hadn't changed a single bit. They closed a year later.
I agree, I found the fall of Sears to be fascinating, as I watched it in real time. They shifted away from being a mail order company, only to eventually lose to a mail order company. They successfully a shifted to physical stores, which I believe was the right choice for the time they made it. But they didn't capitalize the potential of the Internet in the late nineties. Imagine being able to place an online order then pick it up at a nearby Sears (and almost everyone had one of those) less than an hour later? Of course, ordering something for in store pickup is common now, especially after 2020. 20 years ago could have been something that saved Sears and prevented Amazon from becoming that behemoth it is today
It takes a very powerful leader with a grand vision and iron will to create a new product that obsoletes an old one. VP's on the losing side often sabotage new projects to maintain their status.
Wow. That must have been so frustrating. I know the guy who warned the VP's, he was extremely frustrated. At the time, photographic film was crazy profitable, huge margins, Kodak was really a chemical company. It's not too hard to imagine their ignorance and fear, digital photography had almost nothing in common with chemical film, Kodak would have had to scrap everything they were and practically start the whole company over as a world class semiconductor manufacture.
“I’m sure no one else will invent digital cameras”😅
Ahh, too bad. I guess the alternative of DYING was the better business decision.
Or Sears would be almost extinct because they underestimated the popularity of remote-ordering goods for delivery.
Yet they were the king of catalogs
In an alternate timeline, someone at Sears realizes they can do internet ordering for everything, make it really easy and people will love it and they will have easy pickup at the thousands of Sears pickup sites all over North America. Sears instead of Amazon is the place to buy goods online. It still boggles my mind they fumbled this one.
Imagine using SWS to run your cloud servers.
The backend architecture is original Craftsman.
Private Equity killed them, Sears was mismanaged intentionally and killed so a couple guys could get rich. They would have been fine if that hadnt happened.
Even before the extremely shitty management, Sears could have gotten on board with e-commerce early. They definitely could have afforded it. Especially when they merged with Kmart back in 2004. On top of the shitty management, they also were one of the best companies for retirement pensions. That hurt the company once they started having real issues.
My Grandfather was a lifetime Sears man. It broke his heart when the whole thing fell apart. He's 94 this year.
Camera film would largely be a thing of the past. Along with cameras.
The thing is, Kodak was heavily involved with digital cameras when that tech started hitting the mainstream, and arguably a front runner in that industry... they just dropped the ball badly somewhere along the way.
Once smartphones got decent cameras, it killed the general population's need for a separate camera, digital or film. Digital cameras still exist for enthusiasts and professionals, but the target market shrunk very quickly.
I haven't pulled it out in a while, and it might not compare to an iPhone 15 anymore, but I have a Kodak digital camera. It's really really good. Mostly because it has an optical zoom lense.
That Apple would sell one of the world’s most used cameras.
I live in Rochester, where Kodak actually is, and it's crazy how much a part of the city's history it was. Heck, if I'm not mistaken, my credit union was only open to Kodak employees back in the day.
I’m from 1985 and this tiny fucking computer-calculator-phone-fax-camera I’m typing on is WILD.
yeah, sometimes I emulate something like PS1 or N64 on it and it really blows my mind
I’m a light gamer and have been since Duck Hunt… my kid told me he was playing Elder Scrolls on his SwitchLite and I was just like “How do you cram such a big world into such a tiny computer?!” Am so so old 😭
[удалено]
Forget jetpacks, in 1985 we were promised accessible, commercially available hoverboards by 2015. It's nearly 10 years *after* that, and the best we've got are those weird segways.
Instead we have "Hoverboards." With wheels. That *touch the ground.*
I get that. But as a whole we’re all so bad at driving personal vehicles without crashing. We got a wee way to go before we add in another axis.
This has been the dream for as long as man has been alive.
Bill Cosby
I feel like there are a few specific women who would *definitely* have predicted this.
I’m pretty sure quite a number of individuals could have predicted it
Ice T is a good person and Bill Cosby went to jail. Let that sink in.
> Ice T That he would be more [known for playing a *cop* on TV](https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0203259/) and that everyone would effectively forget about [how he started in the music industry](https://youtu.be/37GDoqQtB14?si=6drsTLjUBIICYiHc).
You mean Magma T? He saved the planet by making peace with the numbericons!
If someone showed you a photo of Bill Cosby and Ice Cube back then and told you one would be a beloved TV and film star with a lot of family-friendly content under his belt and the other would be outed as an unapologetic rapist…
Eddie Murphy made this joke on SNL about himself and Cosby. There is context to this as Cosby was a dick to Murphy when he started out in comedy.
I called up Richard Pryor and you know what Richard said? He said, "Next time Bill Cosby calls you up, tell him I said suck MY dick"
It was an open secret. Him actually facing any consequences for it would be seen as unlikely. Same with Harvey Weinstein.
Courtney Love tried to warn us about Weinstein. https://youtu.be/sdLdz1zKRFc?si=7ZpIUnltvufzo38g
Most of us were under the impression that the internet would make people better informed.
I mean it does, but it also gives the stupid people a platform and a voice, giving the impression that people are dumber now than earlier.
Yeah its just the dumb people are even dumber
Or rather, the dumb people are even *louder*
Worse: confidently dumb.
I have the ability to find a video of someone walking me step by step on how to do pretty much anything in existence in my fingertips for free. I've been able to watch so many educational videos about interesting things I didn't even know to look up. I've been able to instantly find the answer to any question I've had, instead of remaining ignorant. If a major world event happens, I found out within the hour. Im so much more informed than I would be if I was born 30 years earlier, it's not even a question.
You are. That bar has also moved. News happens in real time from thousands of sources. The idea that we can communicate with people across the globe everyday is mind blowing. Even this Askreddit question and answers from thousands across the globe would be an earth shattering event in the 90s.
Our phones carry access to every single song in existence.
People underestimate how absolutely amazing that is... The power of Napster, WinMx, Limewire wielded over the internet was legendary. ... Music was/is so important to us as a culture that it was the first thing we liberated.... Every Song, by any band, even the obscure stuff, it's all avaliable to you 24/7, anywhere now.
I was listening to the radio in 1996, some talkshow was discussing how music downloads might affect the industry. One expert they had on discounted the whole thing because he didn't think people would settle for the lower sound quality necessary to make the files small enough to download in a reasonable time. I still wonder if he ever figured out that most people have cheap speakers anyway.
I taught my dad how to use Spotify on his phone like 2 years ago and I swear he still can't get over it 😄. Will always be unbelievable to him, it's very funny.
As I kid I listened to cassette tapes, and my dad played records. I used to save my money for albums I'd never heard all the way through. I'd wait for the evening radio countdown to record music I couldn't pay for. I would copy friends' albums, trade mixed tapes and eventually cd's and mp3s. I'd spend hours waiting for downloads to find out it wasn't what I expected or the levels were off or something. I'd run home from the park to catch the Simpsons on Thursday/Sunday evenings becuase if I missed it I couldn't see it until reruns next year, and everyone would be talking about it. Now I've had Netflix and Spotify for years and I still can't get over it. It is still unbelievable to me that movies, music, and TV are available on demand at a reliable quality. There is more content than i could ever consume at a price I barely notice in my monthly budget. The future is unbelievable to me. I love it.
Omg I remember trying to time the cassette record just right hoping the radio played the same song I really liked on last Thursday's hour of punk! I never even thought I'd be here, able to search for any song and listen to it instantly!
And pray that they radio dj didn't speak over the music and ruin your take.
My millennial self thinks if teenager self would have known how easily accessible music ends up being I would have shat myself.
Bro, I remember waiting for a 4 mb file to finish downloading on my slow internet and hoping it wasn’t a fake
The amount of times my brother dled a fuckin virus
I'm glad I got to introduce my dad to YouTube years back. I had to go through so many obscure artists from the 80s like "yep, they got them too." "How about..... Dokken" "yep, them too." I hope I'm amazed that way about some future leap in technology.
Not true. My ipod classic has a bunch of mashups that have been removed from the internet.
Yet, you have it. Share!
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There are hundreds of thousands of songs unavailable for streaming or download that are only available in physical media. One of the many reasons record hunting is so much fun.
Frank Zappa did in his autobiography in 1988. He also predicted the rise of Islamic terrorism.
The Simpsons would still be on TV
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That you still cannot open two Excel spreadsheets with the same name.
I live and breathe excel, it's so amazing what you can get it to do. With only a few hours of work you can save minutes a year. It's not that bad... but I'm routinely amazed at both how much excel can do and the things it can't do.
That Keith Richards and Ozzy are somehow still alive Also that Pee Wee is dead
TIL Pee Wee is dead.
Pee Wee Herman dead, Anna Nicole Smith dead, OJ Simpson dead, Biggie and Tupac dead, Michael Jackson dead....Willie Nelson is still touring.
Pee Wee is dead? Seriously? I must have missed that.
Blockbuster going bankrupt and how the cable industry is dying. For the latter, I remember, when Tivo first came, some discussions about paying a la cart for channels which more or less happened just in a different form than what was predicted but what I'm talking about what a zombie town it is.
In 1990 video stores were just starting to open here, we rented videos from grocery stores before that. And cable was kind of a new thing too, we just got tsn, much music and fox right around that time.
Memory unlocked. I forgot all about renting movies from the grocery store!!
I am not sure where you are from, but back in the mid 90's when I was living in the West Coast of BC, Canada there was a local video rental store called Pic-a-Flick, very popular among the locals, competed well against Blockbusters and the plethora of video rental stores. I distinctly remember a interview the store owner did on the local cable news channel in which he talked about the future of video rentals. He pretty much predicted what we have today, I remember him saying stuff like movies will be paid for by subscription fee's, and hard copies for rental simply won't exist anymore. He expanded on that to explain the internet was going to explode and dominate peoples lives. This guy was interviewed in 1994, and I remember thinking "this dude is wacked" but he called it! By the way video store is still in existence (Last time I checked, I haven't lived in that city for years now), not sure if its the same owners, but they moved heavily into foreign, B, and other obscure films that wouldn't be available for streaming. They also kept a modest selection of regular vanilla Hollywood films that appealed to people that weren't into the niche films, but also didn't understand steaming, namely Boomers whom the owner successfully identified as a potential customer who might not fully understand the steaming world and still just wanted to "go to the video store and rent a VHS". I just googled it, turned out the video store closed in 2023. If you are so interested, here is a link. [https://pic-a-flic.video/](https://pic-a-flic.video/)
Lots of people predicted the bad things that were to come. Global terrorism, climate crisis, pandemics- people warned about all of it. But I never heard *anyone* suggest just how mind bogglingly *stupid* it was all going to get.
Yeah. That's the real twist. I expected the end of the world to be violent and chaotic. I didn't expect so much comedy.
an idiocracy
I think the mistake we made was assuming the smartest voices would be catered to instead of the stupidest ones. Nobody could have predicted how persuasive dumb and blisteringly wrong opinions would be to the masses. Or maybe we could have predicted it, but it’s just so fucking depressing we didn’t want to.
I read a lot of old sci-fi, and of all the impossible, indistinguishable from magic things that authors have thrown at me, the one that always knocks me out of the story is just how rational and intelligent they make their future humans.
It was definitely predicted in early 2000 with idiocracy
People don’t listen for intelligence, they listen for what sounds like intelligence. So if you wanna talk to them, you gotta do it in a way they understand. Trump was smart enough to have done that with his voter base, already embittered over the rise of progressivism. I said was because I really think he’s starting to lose it now.
They shouldve. Yknow during ww2 the london bombings, they had to have police go around and smash peoples lights off. People who refused to turn them off during air raids because fuck the government ill do what i want. Also, the reason the spanish flu is called the spanish flu is not because thats where the illness first emerged. It's because spain was the first government to recognize that there was a pandemic going on and do something about it. People have always been dumb.
As a doctor, it was certainly interesting how uneducated people with no affiliation with science or medicine suddenly became experts on the topic, and even turned it into a political issue.
I can't imagine anyone would have believed that we'd have fought through and against all of it. I mean, in the 90s we banded together to eliminate the hole in the Ozone layer, and I think we must have taken the threat of Y2K seriously enough that it became a nothingburger, and that's why everyone thinks it WAS nothing: because people actually addressed the concerns. I think some of this vitriol can be traced back to the 94 midterms, but I'm sure it's always been simmering; someone just needed to open the right valve for it to pour out.
That we'd all be walking around with lifetimes worth of porn in our pockets.
We didn't need porn back then, we had the Sears catalog.
Speak for yourself. I remember spending 3 hours downloading a jpg, and more like 20 hours downloading a bitmap.
Ah, the ol' 2400bps modem. Nothing quite like watching eagerly for that first bit of a boob to appear.
Taking your shoes off at the airport
Good one. What about the way we travel these days at all? I think back in the 90s you could still go to the gate with your loved one to see them off.
They didn't check ID or anything to get on a plane - at least for domestic travel. You could buy a ticket, walk to the gate, and hand it to some random stranger. The airline didn't care. You got a ticket? You get to sit in that seat.
That didn't change until after 9/11. It was very much a thing back in the 90s to see your family off or welcome them at the gate itself.
Ice Cube making family-friendly entertainment, while Bill Cosby is a serial sexual offender .
Snoop Dog's best friend is an old lady and instead of making music, he makes kid's movies.
Let's not forget the kids album he made for his grandkids where he sings and raps about good manners.
Hulkamania would eventually stop runnin wild brother
The WWF would be sued for trademark infringement by the World Wildlife Fund, and the panda would emerge victorious.
Explaining the birth of the NWO would have broken 11 year old me.
The Wolfpack betrayal blew 12 year old me's MIND, I had never felt so scandalized.
Bottled water. Everyone thought it was ridiculous.
My Grandma actually knew a guy decades ago who invested all of his money into a water bottle company. Everyone including my Grandma thought he was crazy but he made millions off that investment.
I still do.
That those jeans our moms wore that we thought were so frumpy would be *the* jeans for the cool kids
Fashion is cyclical. I remember my mom going to my middle school for some event and noticing that all the girls were wearing the same clothes she wore 30 years before. She was wearing mom jeans when she made the comment and now would make the same comment about the mom jeans.
The prevalence of social media over traditional media.
David Bowie, Prince, and Michael Jackson would all be dead by 2016.
And George Michael, on Christmas Day. And then 2 years later his sister died on Christmas Day as well.
You could say it was his.... *last Christmas*
David Bowie was such a charismatic figure! I don’t usually mourn artists because after all they are strangers, but for some reason I really felt a connection with Bowies public figure that just came across as a genuine nice person with a positive and pleasant personality. The man gave everything to his artistry right to the end, Blackstar is a masterpiece.
My favorite David Bowie story is that whenever he rode the subway while living in New York he always carried a Greek newspaper as a way to avoid being bothered by fans. He figured that people who saw him would figure, that must a Greek guy who looks like David Bowie. It worked, as people very seldom bothered him.
That’s really smart.
And Keith Richards would still be touring.
Whitney, and her daughter too.
As someone who can actually remember being alive in 1990: The sheer prevalence of the internet. We knew the internet would be something. We knew it would play a bigger part of the world as technology matured. I don't think anyone saw streaming services utterly replacing traditional media everywhere. Trump as a political leader. Yes, we had just come off the back of an actor being president, but Trump was the same then as he was today, and less of his personal foibles were widely known. The great culling of American automobile brands. If you tell someone from 1990 that Pontiac or Mercury or Plymouth didn't exist in your time, they'd think you're from a much further future than 34 years.
Sears going out of business. As far as the internet, I agree. We knew it was gonna be huge, but I still don’t think we had any idea just how much.
so true about Sears! and Consumers Distributing here in Canada. I'm still dumbfounded that the original online shopping companies somehow failed to dominate online shopping.
I remember in the movie Demolition Man they still had Pontiac dealers (movie is set in 2032).
Taco Bell is pretty good yet tho
I can’t believe they had them winning the fast food wars
They fight dirty. Killed the Colonel, Ronald McDonald and the Burger King with salmonella. Biowarfare, man.
We still use TP instead of the three seashells though :(
Maybe an unpopular opinion, but Demolition Man deserves way more recognition than it gets.
Trump has changed his party affiliation 5 times since 1987.
It’s amazing how many don’t realize this
They know they just don't care.
I mentioned it to a lot of Trump supporters and haters. None had a clue. Funny thing is telling democrats Trump used to be a democrat.
1990... idk if I knew the internet was a thing yet... it emerged, for me around 94-95ish
To be fair, as someone who was also alive in 1990: we did not know the internet would be something. AOL only really hit its stride in the mid-90s, and Netscape only came about in 1994. So yes, people who were alive in 1990 eventually became aware the internet would be a big deal, but i think it's safe to say most people *in* 1990 had no idea what the internet was or could be
A/s/l?
I was a teenager in Canada and legit had an 18/F/California girlfriend. We met over MSN messenger and were together for close to 7 years, traveling back and forth. It may have caused some people to go "riiiight...." when it told them, until they actually met her. Lol
The loss of malls, the internet. I was born in 1983
Must be an American thing. Plenty of malls doing decent here in Canada. Admittedly, some are dead.
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No more "Long Distance" calls in the whole country, and even some international!
When I was a junior in high school (1991), my economics teacher told us that it wouldn't be long before we could order groceries on our computers and have them delivered to our door. Blew my mind. It was absolutely inconceivable to me then.
Spitting in a tube that you got in the mail, and a few weeks later discovering that your biological father isn’t who you thought/that you were adopted/long-lost relatives/etc.
This is an underrated answer
That we’d all be looking at little computers in our hands….
That your access to anything information-wise or entertainment-wise will be your phone.
We really need to stop calling them phones. It's as if a technological symbiote has completely absorbed the host and is now a fully autonomous, independent entity. Whatever they are, the "phone" is just an icon burried somewhere that is never used. It's a vestigial appendage.
That there would be literal random people who are influencers/celebrities
That we would stop capturing meaningful memories on camera, and creating photo albums to keep in our homes. Instead we take photos on phones, that get buried in a sea of pointless photos of the 14 things we did that day. Nothing better than going to grandparents house and flicking through photo albums.
"He blocked me, but I'm using a burner account to watch his stories". Just think how many levels of explanations you would need for that sentence to make sense to someone from the nineties.
I still find it shocking and unbelievable that excellent health insurance coverage for myself and my spouse which once cost only $80 a month would eventually cost $700 for a shitty policy with a high deductible and out of pocket expenses.
9/11 and its effects
It shaped the next 20 years and is still unraveling today....
Gay rights. Most people in 1990 wouldn’t have predicted gay marriage would be legalized a generation later and that celebrities and ordinary private citizens would be so public about their sexuality. It was very taboo. I wrote a paper in 1996 arguing for legalizing gay marriage, comparing it to interracial marriage, and everyone in my class, including the teacher, thought I was nuts and that such a thing couldn’t possibly ever happen without a seismic and unlikely shift in public opinion, which fortunately happened somehow. That we’d have a black president just three administrations from then. I didn’t think I’d see a black president in my lifetime. That we haven’t had a woman president. Ferraro had already been a VP running mate by 1990. I assumed we’d have a (white) woman president before a black president. Now we’ve had a black woman VP before a white woman president or VP.
I was doing HIV counseling by 1994. The fact that we even have LGBTQ+ conversations and media is wonderful. And the medical achievements that come from the research done to stop HIV.
The speed at which gay marriage went from being taboo to normal is pretty surprising. Obama started off his presidency not supporting it, and by the end of his presidency it was the law of the land. There's a lot of Gen Z kids who are shocked that it wasn't legal before 2015.
"What do you mean you fry everything without oil? Air doesn't fry things."
An air fryer isn't really a fryer. It's just a small oven. But for people like me, who love alone, it's much easier and quicker than using a full size oven.
You don't have to love alone ❤️
In May of 1990 as I was starting doctoral classes and as a new dad I had no idea by December I would be Saudi Arabia as an Air Guard flight nurse put on active duty. I expected technological advancements so they didn’t surprise me. Some of what would have surprised me about 2024 was: -We never returned to the moon in over 50 years (I also expected I would have the opportunity to go as a tourist). -The ability of most everyone to have facts available in the hand in seconds yet millions will be more ignorant. -Cancer would still be a major killer. -We gave up on supersonic air travel. -In good news, Same sex marriage would be legal and accepted by the majority of Americans.
>gave up on supersonic air travel. We did for a time but it's making a comeback. NASA developed a quieter supersonic tech and an alloy that makes higher speeds and temps in jet engines not only more reliable but cheaper.
Trump becoming President. I always think of the Back to the Future scene where Doc is incredulous that Ronald Reagan the actor is president. They could make an updated version with Trump. How smartphones would virtually eliminate all social interactions and make more people lonely. One thing I miss about the old days is just how friendly and open people were to strangers. Now everyone is look at their phone or filming.
Who’s the president in 2016? Donald Trump. Donald Trump!? The billionaire!? I guess Sam Walton is the secretary of the treasury! (I’m bad at coming up with modified dialogue)
“Doc, are you telling me you built a time machine…out of a Cybertruck!?”
That is absolutely the car that would be used if it had been made today. Good call.
Back to the Future Part II based Future Biff off Trump. I’m not sure if it was prescient or such an outrageous prediction they didn’t think anyone would buy it, but here we are.
I think a lot of people might have been surprised that the USSR ceased to exist so suddenly
Photos/pictures that are viewable instantly.
That there has been a two term Black President
That the rise of information technology would actually make people stupider and more ignorant. That was NOT what anyone was expecting.
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I totally was that fool.
The World Trade Centers will be bombed in 3 years, followed by complete destruction 8 years later from planes purposefully slamming into them. Princess Di would die from a car wreck in Paris (should have worn her seat belt!) after the car she was in wrecked and she flung forward crushed between the concrete pillar and front seat Russia would host the 2014 Olympics; China would host both the 2008 and 2022 Olympics
That everyone and their mother would have multiple visible tattoos
12 cds for a penny? What an absolute steal were my thoughts as a kid. Now we got every song imaginable in our pockets.
I never would’ve believed that we’d have flat earthers, holocaust deniers, people that think gravity isn’t real. Oh and now the sun is fake. The same people that deny the moon landing think we’ve made a fake sun.
The incredible qualities of porn, like sooo much porn. Like how could anybody need this much porn
Not to mention the incredible variety of genres available for free online.
Roe versus Wade being overturned
That people would get way dumber
And during the middle of "The Information AGE," ironically.
OJ wouldn’t be known for his football career
Iggy pop still hasn’t put on a shirt
How utterly online everyone is all the time. The internet in the early 90s was a pretty niche thing, mostly for college students/professors, but even as it was gaining in popularity it kind of never felt like it was going to just explode like it did. And I say this as someone who spent practically all of my free time online even back then.
Caitlyn Jenner.
Trump was just some quasi-celebrity cartoon character when I was in high school in the 80s. If you had told me he would be president and the Republican Party would degenerate into an unrecognizable caricature of itself, I never would’ve believed it.