15 Curiosities of Life in the 90s That Many Have Already Forgotten

Surprising as it may seem, the 90s ended 20 years ago! Yes, time has passed quickly and advances in technology have made two decades pass almost unnoticed.

The team of incredible.club woke up very nostalgic today and decided to make a list of typical customs of the 90s.

When was the last time you spent hours on the landline talking to someone? And who remembers calling only after midnight just because the rates are lower? After the rapid evolution of the cell phone, less and less people remember the old landline to make a call, as instant messages have considerably replaced telephone calls. If it continues like this, perhaps the next generations will not even know what the sound of a ringing telephone is.

It would be very interesting to ask those born after 2000 if they know what a fax is. Generations before millennials remember this electronic device long before the appearance of the scanner. Its function was to transmit images from one line to another through the telephone system. In the 1990s this seemed like pure magic, as the receiving fax machine transformed the encoded image and printed it on paper. Maybe some companies still keep the fax machine, but surely it is forgotten somewhere. It is now possible to scan documents with mobile device apps. Or simply take a photo with your cell phone and send it.

A few years ago, stores specializing in music and movies used to be very busy on a daily basis. However, in the last 15 years, music buying has migrated to digital. Thanks to streaming, that is, the digital distribution of content, it is possible to listen to the release of a song in real time. The value of the CD “box” was lost a little. However, everything that refers to the retro is gaining value and can be found at a higher price, as is the case with vinyl, whose market has been reborn in recent years.

Remember your uncle or father wearing a fanny pack on a Sunday outing? Want something more “90s” than that? Yeah, nowadays, almost nobody still uses that accessory – luckily.

Even television is not the same as before. If your favorite show aired only on Saturdays at 8 am, you would not only do the impossible, but also turn on the VCR — the four-headed one — to record the entire show (commercials and all) so you could watch it at another time. . Who knew that, years later, you could watch whatever you wanted on YouTube or your favorite series and movies on Netflix, for example?

One of the best things to do when you go to your grandparents’ house, without a doubt, is to look through old photo albums. But, curiously, developing and saving photos is already something that was left in the past. Most people prefer to keep their photos digitally and show them to the world through social networks without bothering to go to a specialized photo development store. Anyone who lived in those times knows how people thought twice before taking a picture. After all, developing a film was expensive and each roll placed in our old analogue cameras had a maximum capacity of 36 frames.

In the 90s, the thrill of going to the movies could only be compared to the thrill of going to a video store to rent your favorite movie. However, the ease that technology brought through the Internet ended this market. In fact, five years ago, Blockbuster, the most famous group of rental companies in the US, which had many stores here in Brazil, closed its doors definitively to also become an on demand service. One store remains in the interior of the state of Oregon, which only survives because of the homesickness of its residents.

In the past, it was possible to take advantage of numerous promotions to watch movies. And you could even pay a certain price to watch more than one movie a day, spending hours inside the movie theater. These days, even though many people still enjoy the movie theater vibe, sometimes it’s easier to wait for a certain film to be released digitally than to endure queues and queues. Who hasn’t waited a long time in a movie line and, in the end, didn’t get a ticket because the theater was full before it was your turn to get a ticket?

There was nothing more romantic than receiving a K7 tape from the hands of someone special, with your favorite songs. Sometimes the recordings were made directly from the radio, so the effort involved paying attention to the smallest details to capture the right moment. And those who lived in those days probably remember the trick of putting tape in the two small holes at the top of the tape so that you can record on it more than once.

Did you used to use the pay phone? And the chips and later the phone cards, do you remember? Today, the more mobile telephony advances and the devices evolve, the more those cards to make a call from a pay phone become collection items. Here in Brazil, the National Telecommunications Agency (Anatel) has foreseen, among its performance goals, the reduction of the number of payphones by operators by 2020. What will remain of this Era will be the expression “falling the plug”. that everyone uses to this day.

Those who used typewriters certainly know how important a typing course was, remember their indescribable sound and the tremendous pain when you miss the key and your finger hits the middle part between the keys.

On interactive radio programs, anyone could call and request a song of the moment; even if you spoke directly to the announcer, you could dedicate the song to someone. Furthermore, when one of them was requested, it could be played at another time in a playlist with the most played ones at the moment. Even though the radio is fortunately still a super popular communication vehicle, many of the programs are losing ground to streaming services such as Spotify and Deezer. We believe that radio will never die, but the way it operates must continue to change.

Before Wikipedia, people had to go to libraries to look up encyclopedias. The creation of Wikipedia and reading devices like the Kindle changed that game. As with radio, it is unlikely that libraries will ever appear definitively. But we do believe that its way of acting must change.

Do you usually write letters to this day? Probably the answer will be “no” and even your mailbox will only receive card invoices or water or electricity bills. Even though the ease that WhatsApp has brought has been phenomenal, we believe it would be amazing if people started exchanging letters again!

In the 90s, social networks did not yet exist; therefore, few people knew if you had gone away on vacation, if you had been hired at a new job or if you had decided to be a fitness person and started eating more salad for lunch. That is, there were no instant ways to record details of your day for your friends via your cell phone because the technology simply wasn’t there. So, introspective moments in your room or simply enjoying a walk or a trip without touching your electronic device were much more common behaviors.

We hope you enjoyed this trip to the past and, above all, that you remembered good times that 20 years ago were still common, but that are now very rare. Have we missed any details of everyday life in the 90s? Comment!