11 ms·
Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?
If so, what in particular?
- greggeter 7y agoYep. I hope there's always ways to do things in a tech-light fashion. Otherwise, we'll be so tied to it we'll forget what it means to be human.
- inlined 7y agoI’m not sure what you mean by simplicity. Detecting whether your browser’s JavaScript uses document.layers vs document.all?
- suff 7y agoLike when the 'off' button meant 'off'? Yeah, I do.
- quickthrower2 7y agoThe switch that completely isolated power from your pc. Luckily that still exists at the wall .... for now. Phones are another story.
- badpun 7y agoNot if your PC is a laptop, and has a battery. You can tell it to go to sleep, and, sometime later, Windows 10 will wake it up and sneak up an update on you (with a complimentary restart included).
- Scoundreller 7y agoI miss buttons in general.
- tomjen3 7y agoMy appartment has shared laundry facilities. It finally died, but I still miss the previous laundry machine, which had these big physical buttons that had this satisfying clock when you pushed them in.
- dhkxh 7y agoThe more recent but quaint days of desktop programs where clicking on [x] would actually close the program.
- CPLX 7y agoYes. The thing I miss the most is the sense that I, and everyone around me, used to be mentally in the same place they were physically. Obviously people were distracted or preoccupied from time to time, perhaps they had a sick far away relative, say, that dominated their thoughts. But those kind of situations were the exceptions. Now literally every single person you interact with is mentally in the middle of several conversations with people who aren’t there over text, is halfway through an article or blog post, and is in the midst of judging their own success in gaining attention for the photo they just posted. You can be in a room with 10 people, but only 10% of each of them is actually present and engaged in the room they are in. I count myself in this group too of course. In fact right now I’m having a conversation on HN instead of being engaged in the real world. It kind of sucks.
- Arete314159 7y agoTruth. In the 90's, if you went to a party and sat in a corner reading a book, it was usually....odd. The idea was that you were supposed to at least try to be interacting with others. Some of us were geeks, some of us found social interaction difficult, but since there wasn't a real substitute for it, we had to stick it out and learn how to be with people. And then we got the benefits of being with people. Now there's always something else you can do at any moment. I feel like some younger folks I know (in their 20's) don't have the same capacity for understanding their place in the social universe. Social media / phones etc. give a simulacrum of social experience so you never have to really stretch yourself and grow these new skill sets.
- usaphp 7y agoI am sure there were as many people who did not like interacting with others as there are today, it's just because now its OK to be like that, you see them more often, back in the days they were just staying home because they felt uncomfortable by judgements of others.
- wbl 7y agoUsenet. Fandom. CW. I was born in 1991, and there has always been a technical subculture ever since Edison.
- neilv 7y agoOne big academia/industry thing about the early '90s is that CS students and business students were very different. Not that either category were bad people, but they thought and acted differently, and I'd say that diversity turned out to be more important than I realized at the time.
- smacktoward 7y agoLet me answer your question with another question. How old are you? Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people. But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not because of anything about the '90s; it's because they were children during the '90s, and people of all ages look back on their childhood as a simpler time. This is true even of people who grew up in objectively much more difficult times, like the 1930s and '40s. It's not that the world children grow up in isn't complicated, it's that they don't comprehend all the complications. You don't start to appreciate that stuff until you reach adulthood. So to everybody, childhood is like a lost paradise. This is part of why nostalgia is such a seductive trap. It's so easy to look back on the past and think that it was something it wasn't. So if you try to make it your mission to restore that lost paradise, to restore something that never really existed in the first place, all you end up doing is chasing shadows.
- njepa 7y agoI think that is true in the sense that everyone has their own reality. However I don't think that precludes things getting worse. For anyone who has a utilitarian view of housing, or buildings in general, this is certainly the wrong decade in most places.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- timClicks 7y agoAlso the 90s kind of sucked. Otherwise grunge and goth culture would have never taken off. Was a teenager then, but here are some of the things that I can think of: - recessions in many countries '91/'92 - Asian financial crisis '97 - higher crime rates - reunification in Germany (causing massive budgetary/cultural issues) - nuclear testing in the Pacific (was a big issue here in NZ at the time) - threat of nuclear material being "lost" from ex-Soviet military - collapse of Soviet economies, esp. Russia - WTO riots in Seattle 1999 - large absolute poverty worldwide (see also the Millennium Development Goals)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- notjustanymike 7y agoThings we have now that I would never want to be without: - Amazing browser debugging tools - Source Maps - Typescript - VSCode w/ Liveshare - Mostly standardized CSS - Automated build tools These are solutions to problems we had in the past.
- Torwald 7y agoA world dominated by effen Windoze? How could I miss that? I sure as heck miss the simplicity of my Amiga, if we are talking the 90s, but that's about it in terms of simplicity. All other aspects of "90s simplicity" sucked. Table based web layouts? Without the "complication" of CSS? I sure miss that. Calling the family landline and hoping her "complicated" father doesn't answer the phone? Fuck yeah, I miss that. Having to play cool with the artsy-fartsy kids to get the CD with the new fonts? Sure, I miss that as well. The simplicity of "obtaining" Emacs for the Mac in the 90s! Hell yes! I miss that simplicity. And last but not least, pixel pr0n, animated GIFs. Yeah, I miss the simplicity of the 90s. Fuck Micro$oft, remember that one? Oh do I miss that. And the "web crawlers" don't forget thet simplicity to submit your site to more than 100 search engines! The AOL CD, simply flip it away! Enviromentalism was still a European thing, or so, thought the European Gen X. Kurt Cobain didn't comit suicide and fuck Atari. Short answer: "No."
- zulgan 7y agoi really do, i mainly miss: * people not being able to contact me 24/7 * not knowing what is going on in the world all the time (this i miss the most) * things being local * way less crap people used to own
- EliRivers 7y agopeople not being able to contact me 24/7 You can still have that! I have it. Literally cannot remember the last time I answered the phone :)
- DoreenMichele 7y agoYeah, that's at least partially a social problem or how you relate to people and tech, not a tech problem per se. You have to manage your relationships to both people and tech.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe aspect 'zulgan is probably missing is that back then, you didn't have to manage this at all, as it was not a possibility. A problem not existing in the first place beats being good at dealing with it.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoThat line of thinking implicitly assumes no upside to being capable of connecting at will, 24/7. I live in a small town with a surprising amount of 24 hour service. I'm not obligated to run off to the store every night at 2am just because I can, but I sure as hell appreciate being able to do so when I need to or want to. There are upsides to our current ability to connect. Acting like "simply not having that problem is better" amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- gshdg 7y agoBack then the expectations were different. So if you didn’t want to be reachable at all times, there was less relationship management involved.
- mindcrime 7y ago[a deleted post said] I miss the trajectory. Many things were exciting in the '90s, but many things didn't turn out so well. This is pretty much the same way I feel. I'm not sure exactly when things changed, but there is definitely a sense that we went off the rails somewhere along the way. Some time ago there was excitement, optimism, and a sense of boundless opportunity, associated with the Internet and tech in general. Now... well... there's still some of that, but a lot of it has been replaced by negativity, fear, pessimism, doubt, and suchlike. The overall zeitgeist is definitely less pleasant these days, IMO.
- twilight00 7y agoI think 9/11/2001 was that turning point. Then the crash almost exactly 7 years later made things even worse. I can't speak for other countries, but both of these events were like a one-two punch to the gut socially, politically, and economically here in America, and we're still reeling.
- return1 7y ago9/11 was definitely the turning point - the end of optimism. I never expected that the world would not have recovered 20 years later.
- mindcrime 7y agoYeah, I'm pretty sure 9/11 was a contributing factor. Not sure it was the thing, but then again, there probably wasn't just one "thing" that caused all this. It seems like more of a sequence of things, some big, some little, spread out over time, and gradually skewing the zeitgeist to a more negative, pessimistic, unpleasant outlook. In regards to tech and the Internet in particular, I think the Snowden revelations and the PRISM stuff was a key moment, in terms of changing the perception of the Internet. After broad public awareness of ubiquitous online surveillance became a thing, the Internet lost some of it luster and became more threatening and less welcoming. More recently, the Cambridge Analytica stuff, along with all the major data breaches over the past few years, probably contributed to that sensation as well.
- tomjen3 7y ago
- lousken 7y agoNews websites https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.seznam.cz/ https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.sezna... no spying, popups, animations, autoplaying videos, clickbait thumbnails... just a simple website with information now I have to use three addons just to get back this clean look
- caymanjim 7y agoarchive.org isn't archiving the spam. Websites were far, far worse visual and interactive experiences then. Everything blinked and scrolled, popups were rampant and almost impossible to dismiss, there were no ad blockers. It was a nightmare. There weren't sophisticated ad tracking systems or geolocation databases for targeted advertising, but there was far less privacy and security.
- Aeolun 7y agoThe fact that all these databases were disconnected arguably gave you much more privacy than can be achieved now.
- caymanjim 7y agoI agree. I meant to expand on that a bit, in that no one used SSL and individual site security was lax or non-existent. Now the transport is secure but the data is intentionally shared to far more people. It was just a mess back then.
- lousken 7y agoI don't remember any popups back when I was on Windows 98, it started with XP and IE6 for me but czech sites might've been a little different. And yea, there were blinking and scrolling on personal sites but sites like seznam.cz were clean.
- return1 7y agoSeriously you dont remember the gifs, the flash , the unblocked popups/popunders/popovers/hijackers etc? It was far worse back then but the signal to noise was better. The reason: lack of social media which is 99.999999% absolute informational garbage.
- craigsmansion 7y agoI miss 90s complexity! Sparc, MIPS, and Alpha were still alive. Assembly was a thing. Mobile telephones for mortals were a marvel and technological breakthrough that could let you communicate everywhere. 3D graphics could run in software, and Abrash' Black Book was a black book, and even more, wizards had managed to capture things in hardware for the PC with some sort of voodoo. Now we have 1.5 dominant boring architecture where performance is bumped by "Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11" and no one cares because everything is ecmascript anyway, mobile telephones, or "telephones", are devices that mildly entertain you as you wait for death, and graphics are a matter of dumping the right shaders through the right libraries. The future just looked a little more interesting. The 90s for me is where the great tragedy of simplification began. The present is still pretty okay though, I just would have liked it a little "rougher" computing wise :)
- klingonopera 7y ago> Meh, just double the cores and crank it to 11 Too true. I'm flabbergasted everytime I think about Chris Sawyer having written everything in TTD, then TTDLX and finally RCT with Assembly (!), and yes, that also includes the window GUI system that was built into the game. [1]: https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-interview-with-chris-sawyer-the-creator-of-rollercoaster-tycoon https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-03-a-big-intervie... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/92zyo/chris_sawyer_on_creating_roller_coaster_tycoon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/92zyo/chris_sa... [3]: http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm http://www.chrissawyergames.com/faq3.htm
- ddingus 7y agoI think we are headed back that direction. Custom hardware is coming again. It's coming because we've hit walls on sequential compute. Multi-core parallel and concurrent models are building nicely, but software lags behind, and those problems are hard. Some problems do not benefit from either of those things too. Enter custom silicon. The combination of software and well realized custom silicon to enhance performance, and that's peak performance. Always is.
- 7y ago
- madengr 7y agoRecently I built a tube stereo amplifier kit and speakers. Bought an old fashioned CD player for it. Just put in a CD and push play. No screwing around with apps, streaming, etc. As a teenager in the late 80’s, you knew where your friends were on the weekends, but we didn’t have cell phones. You could find a party in a remote part of the county, but no one had a GPS. Computing was also fun, in the days of BBS and pre-WWW Internet.
- andrewstuart 7y agoIn 1981, Electric Light Orchestra wrote about remembering the good old 1980's.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0 Here's the lyrics: Remember the good old 1980's When things were so uncomplicated I wish I could go back there again And everything could be the same https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq...
- sosborn 7y agoIt's a refrain as old as time.
- amelius 7y agoYou mean when computers ran at MHz speed as opposed to GHz? It took a lot more work to get a decent user experience.
- ricardobeat 7y agoBut did it? Perceived speed has remained steady, using a computer in the 80s was not that different from today, only a lot less powerful. The UI for software like Photoshop is essentially the same 30 years later. VisiCalc and Lotus 123 were not that much slower than GDocs today. And we still have a hard time beating input latency from an Apple II: https://danluu.com/input-lag/ https://danluu.com/input-lag/
- rleigh 7y agoI have to disagree. The current state of computing is a disgraceful state, squandering multiple GHz of compute power to give worse performance than much software from the 386 era. It might be marginally more featureful, but those gains don't account for the huge amount of bloat and waste. And in practice, much of the software I used in that era had was both more featureful and more powerful than the equivalents today, which have been progressively dumbed down pandering to mobile users. Low tens of MHz and low memory required careful and thoughtful design to make optimal use of the available resources and provide an interface with minimal latency. Today, it's wasted with gleeful abandon.
- return1 7y agosimplicity of what? getting any kind of information was ecruciatingly hard until broadband became available. There were wars, politics, same or worse than today's (yugoslav wars, gulf wars, palestine). You can have a roadtrip nowadays easily (simplicity), try that in the 90s. I think you have it backwards, today is simpler. I mean just catching up with the music genres of the 90s was an arduous task!
- rdiddly 7y agoNot so much the simplicity as the idea that if someone wanted to spy on me, they actually had to work at it.
- zackmorris 7y agoYes, very much (I'm 41). The running joke with my friends is that my tag line should be "I miss the 90s". Some things were much better then than today, for example: * Children and adolescents had freedom that seems to have been lost today. However, I think that a young person's virtual self extends far out into the aether compared to Gen X. * The lack of cynicism today concerns me. There are so many very.bad.things happening in the world that I find blind optimism offensive. I just read that 40% of the world's species have gone extinct in 40 years. It doesn't matter if that's precisely true - what matters is that the order of magnitude is likely accurate, and that humans only have about one more generation before Earth's wildlife can only be seen in museums. * Politics was better. Everything since 9/11 has been a blind alley on the fractal of possibilities. Young people maybe aren't aware that the world wasn't always this... dystopic. * One thing was worse - weed was illegal everywhere except like, Amsterdam. * Video games were better. But the quality was partially due to suspension of disbelief and using one's imagination. * Grunge/alternative was a revelation that can't be expressed in words or replicated. But, around 2013 I noticed a similar cultural revolution, the rise/return of the Burning Man sentiment and a reconnection with creation via psychedelic drugs which seems to be changing the world like a mix between 60s hedonism and cyperpunk. YOLO might be the only thing Gen X truly envies about today hahah. * Basement parties, raves, skate and punk culture, underground internet geekdom. Vans. Airwalks. Corduroy jeans. All better, but somewhat make-believe. * Web metaphors were better (declarative and data-driven programming, UNIX theology). Programming languages like C++ and platforms like Windows set us back at least 10, maybe 20 years. But they were FUN. I knew a guy from my parents' generation when I was growing up who wore Hawaiian shirts everywhere and would never leave the year 1985. Now I am him, forever trapped between the years 1992-1999 like a character in The Matrix. So while I could go on forever, I'll stop here. Edit: somehow I left out music. Listen to Green Day or Stone Temple Pilots or Alice in Chains chronologically and you might if you're lucky get the slightest glimpse into what it was like to watch Beavis and Butthead in your friend's trailer home before going out to ride BMX in the gravel pits and then coming home and playing Nintendo until 4 in the morning, staying up all night and then going to a party the next night and getting a ride home with random girls like on Dazed and Confused. I assume all that is even better today (what with your Uber and Tinder), but the shear bleakness and transcendental euphoria that the future was arriving before your eyes and nobody older than 30 knows it yet has perhaps diminished.
- hatmatrix 7y agoOn the other hand, traveling was not so simple - you couldn't just carry your mobile phone and pull up Google Maps once you got there - you had to know where you were going and either buy the maps or print out maps beforehand. Meeting up with someone also involved a lot of planning and sometimes you go to the meeting point and then go home having missed each other because you misunderstood the exact location.
- Scoundreller 7y agoAt least people learned the importance of giving good descriptions the first time in real life. Too much these days feels like people just leave a message prompt and expect you to return contact and fill in all of their blanks. E.g. my telephone messages will specify who I am, why I’m calling, what I’m looking for, when to contact me and my phone number (always twice!). Dunno if others were any better in the past, or if I’m bitter about forums that cater to less advanced users that chronically leave out critical details.
- linguae 7y agoOne of the things I miss about the 1990s is the degree that Microsoft, Apple, and other vendors of desktop operating systems such as NeXT and Be invested in refining the desktop computing experience. I personally believe that the Windows 95 interface is the most usable and most well-designed Windows user interface, with further refinements made in Windows 98 and 2000. For many years I would use Classic Mode in newer versions of Windows such as XP and 7; I wish Windows 10 had a classic mode. And while I love Mac OS X's Aqua interface, I love the Platinum theme that was developed for Copland and was introduced in Mac OS 8. While there was still an effort in the first half of the 2000s to continue refining the desktop user experience (e.g., Aqua, GNOME 2 [which is personally my favorite Linux desktop], KDE 3), once mobile computing and Web 2.0 technology took off a little over a decade ago, I feel that emphasis has shifted away from refining the desktop experience. Moreover, there has been an emphasis on trying to make the desktop computer experience more mobile-like, leading to products such as Windows 8 and GNOME 3 that, in my opinion, are worse than their predecessors. Even Windows 10 still has mobile-like influences such as its penchant for large title bars and ribbons that take up a lot of vertical space (ever since Windows XP's Luna theme, Microsoft has had an obsession with using a lot of vertical space for bars). In my opinion, Mac OS X peaked in the Snow Leopard era, and while I still prefer Mac OS X to Windows 10, I feel that certain parts of the Mac experience have downgraded over the past decade (some pain points include the transition from iPhoto to Photos.app as well as the differences in font rendering in macOS Mojave that affect users who don't have 4K or higher resolution displays). I'm also very concerned about the implications of Marzipan on future versions of Mac OS X, but I guess we'll find out very soon when WWDC 2019 takes place. I would like to see more investments being made in desktop computing. Despite some pundits prematurely proclaiming that desktop computing is dying, the fact is many people rely on desktops and laptops to do their work, and tablets and smartphones cannot replace all tasks that we use our desktops for. I still believe that the personal computing revolution is far from over; there is still a lot of room for improvement, refinement, and innovation.
- jon-wood 7y agoThe thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web application (such as they were) didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML. In many ways the way we do it now is far superior, and there’s a swathe of things you simply couldn’t do in a web browser back then, but at least it was simple. Outside of tech? Life was not simple. These days I can arrange more or less anything with a few taps on the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket, with an internet connection that would have put anything but a large institution to shame in the 90s. Want to listen to some obscure 70s album? In the 90s that’s weeks of scouring record stores. Order some food? First I have to rummage around for the menu, then call them up and place the order, and finally hope they can find your place because if not your food’s arriving cold after they get back to the restaurant and call you for directions. Watch a recently released film? You’ll have to drive into town and hope the video store has it in stock. Go to a wedding in a town you don’t know? Lots of planning, and hope you don’t get lost along the way. I sometimes joke that I couldn’t make it to the end of my road without GPS now.
- return1 7y ago> didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML Actually this hasn't changed, you can still work the exact same way with a LAMP stack. The perceptions have changed, for some reason needless complexity has become the norm.
- rgrieselhuber 7y agoThe 80s were even better
- api 7y agoI don't think the 90s were any simpler, but I do miss some things. Popular music was IMHO objectively better even in a pure composition sense and was much more interesting. I also miss 90s cyberculture. There was a more genuine ethos of inventing and exploring and people would never have tolerated today's lockdown and surveillance stuff. I'm amazed at how the mobile revolution boiled that frog.
- Parcle 7y ago> IMHO objectively I don't think that's legal, my guy.
- sys_64738 7y agoFor the first part of the 90s we still had Commodore. Now they’ve been airbrushed from history by those left.
- caymanjim 7y agoNo one has airbrushed Commodore from history. The company went away. Many of us learned on the C64 and moved on. You make it sound like there's some conspiracy against them.
- thought_alarm 7y agoIn 1995 I was making $6.75/hour as a line cook, and my combined rent, utilities, phone, and cable TV was $180/month, renting a large old house downtown with 6 other friends. Dial-up Unix shell/internet access was free through the university. I picked up an original 128k Mac and Mac Plus with 40 MB SCSI HD at a local thrift shop for $40, both of which I still own. A CD cost $25, a pack of cigarettes was $5, and pitchers of beer were $8. Ten short years later I would be walking around with an always-connected Blackberry in my pocket wondering how I ever survived without Google Maps, push email, and IM.
- switch007 7y ago180/6.75 = 26.6 hours I wonder how many hours are required in 2019?
- corodra 7y agoOnly thing I really miss, memorizing phone numbers and just somehow always knowing where all my friends were no matter what. We could always find each other in town because we just... knew. Now if I go with friends to a store, I have to text them to find out where they are. And I miss having such a good memory on something practical, at the time, as phone numbers. You had everyone’s number in your head, pizza, most of their work numbers, etc.
- onnnon 7y agoYes. Simplicity, getting piercings, tribal tattoos, singing about saving the planet and forming bands. https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew?t=23 https://youtu.be/U4hShMEk1Ew?t=23
- gaze 7y agoIt seems rare to me that software is carefully engineered and thought out in advance anymore. There's a "move fast and break things" and "worse is better" attitude where designing things carefully is largely seen as a waste of time. Why bother when there's a hundred "good enough" solutions that you can glue together and hardware is so powerful you figure that it won't matter. What I'm saying is that there's an emergent complexity from bolting together a ton of things together in ways that work "well enough." Things that are working well out of the scope in which they were originally engineered... or things that just carry a ton of baggage with them. This creates complexity.
- GuB-42 7y agoNo. And I was a teenager in the 90s, peak nostalgia, but the answer is still no. The 90s weren't that simpler, we just had different problems. In fact, I have a bit of trouble finding things that really were simpler from a personal perspective. The one thing I can think of is security. We didn't have security checks everywhere, kids could do plenty of "dangerous" things, we didn't see pedophiles everywhere etc... And I kind of miss it. But it may just be the result of living in a safer society: human lives are becoming incredibly valuable, resulting in over-protection. Other than that, think about how simpler internet made things. Want to buy something unusual: buy it online with a few clicks. Access to knowledge is almost limitless. I don't miss going to the bookstore at the other side of the town, noticing that the book I wanted isn't available, take an order, and come back 2 weeks later to pick it up. All these forgotten details were really annoying thinking back. Another example: cars. Cars used to be mechanically simpler, which was great for the DIY types. But modern cars are so much more reliable. Smoking cars on the curb were a much more common sight back them. So maybe cars were simpler to repair, but not having to repair make life much simpler. Now about computers. Sure computers were simpler under the hood. Understanding a CPU and assembly was comparatively easy back then. But nowadays, we have abstraction layers that make computers more accessible at every level. We just shifted a few layers up. Truth is, even oldschool computers hid a lot of complexity regarding the electronics inside it that we, as kids, didn't realize and older people did.
- Scoundreller 7y agoThe cars are more complicated, but if you drive something common, you can always find a video for the common failure modes. The manufacturers have sure done what they can to eliminate any empty spaces though.
- andrewstuart 7y agoI miss not worrying about the earth dying.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoIf it helps any, the earth is probably not dying. There have been mass extinctions, climate change, etc before. After we cut our own throat as a species, Mother Nature will deal herself a new hand and continue her game of solitaire without us.
- andrewstuart 7y agoI have no doubt it's not the end of life on earth - the earth will recover and life will continue for another 3 or 4 billion years, probably. I'm more concerned about the short term - i.e. what will happen to us and our children and future generations.
- DoreenMichele 7y agoI'm sorry this weighs on you. FWIW: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838229#19843507 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19838229#19843507
- dingaling 7y ago> I miss not worrying about the earth dying. Acid rain, hole in the ozone layer, Chernobyl radiation legacy, global deforestation, overfishing, air pollution; we had plenty of environmental worries in the 90s
- gshdg 7y agoIt’s so weird to me that more than half the answers here focus primarily on computing and programming. I mean, this is a tech-oriented community, but surely our experiences of the 90s and of the present day weren’t limited to tech.
- CM30 7y agoYes and no. I do miss how web development/software engineering was simpler in the 90s, since it felt like it was a lot more accessible when you didn't have all these JavaScript frameworks to learn, CSS tricks to master, and programming languages to mess around with. Also felt like standards were a lot lower in general online back then, so non designers could create comparatively decent looking sites/apps and people weren't so fussy about UX design/usability in general. And I definitely enjoyed the simplicity of your typical video game back then too. No DLC, no pay to win, no microtransactions, no lootboxes, you just bought a game, and everything on the disc/cart was yours to play. Yeah game design wasn't quite as polished back then, but there were plenty of great games to enjoy none the less, and when they were good, they just worked. Additionally, I guess the world felt simpler in its optimism too. The Soviet Union had just fell, the internet was new and exciting and the War on Terror hadn't started. Everyone felt like things were getting better, and in Western countries, people's rights were arguably at their most respected. It wasn't perfect by any means, and some rights still needed to be fought for, but it felt peaceful. Still, I don't miss all of it. Today's tech is better. Science has obviously advanced and moved on. Many sporting achievements happened between the 90s and today. Thousands or even millions of great works of fiction got released, and many things considered impossible happened too. So it depends really.
- Scoundreller 7y agoProbably for the reasons you mentioned, I have a tradition of playing SimCity2000 every time I’m on a flight, and never anytime else. It’ll be the same experience, every time, and it’ll never break.
- perilunar 7y ago90s? I miss the late 70s / early 80s. The world before personal computers was better in many ways.
- zzo38computer 7y agoYes, including analog television. The new television system is stupid and is no good. Now we have many bad thing such as: the mess being made of WWW (they try to put everything in there, even though many things are better without), complicated computer design with anti-features and other stupid stuff, blu-ray movies, DMCA, USB, etc. Much of that stuff they did not have so much in the nineties. Of course, we do have good stuff now too, not only the bad stuff. Many improvements are made, but stuff is also made worse stuff too.
- iamnothere 7y agoDevelopment was more approachable for the newcomer, because there were fewer choices and tooling was less mature. Obviously professionals are better off now, but as a newbie in the 90s it was pretty amazing to develop a website on Notepad and be one of the only people you knew who had a web presence. That and all the BASIC platforms (QBASIC, Commodore, etc) allowed you to build simple text-based games at a time when text-based games weren't uncommon. It felt like with just a little bit of practice you could run with the pros; not necessarily true, but it was really encouraging. I feel pity for people entering development now. The industry must seem like this colossal, endlessly complex, ever-changing mess filled with experts who know 1000x more than you ever will. There's an overwhelming amount of information, and there's so many partially overlapping disciplines that it's easy to feel lost.
- oceanghost 7y agoYes. This is something I have given a lot of thought to. I mean, A LOT. Before about, 1996-- (I'm estimating)-- before network connectivity was the norm-- I understood how every processor in every system I dealt with worked. Two things happened in the mid to late 90s. First-- an explosion of silicon. The days of understanding how the system worked, in its entirety, were over. I had a copy of "80386 systems designers guide", and I can't remember the name- but the Michael Abrash's guide to VGA video cards and a PC Interrupts were all that were needed to master computer architecture. If you were super fancy you understood the Pentium math extensions (whose names I cannot recall), that let you do a crossbar in a few cycles, and you understood how common chips like the 16550 worked, which is an addendum to PC Interrupts if I recall. Second, and this is the key thing, technology started working AGAINST us. As complexity exploded, so did network connectivity. We had this era in which Operating Systems complexity exploded (win95), silicon complexity exploded, and connectivity exploded. The thing about connectivity is this-- that's when our computers went from isolated things to these things that are always online-- they started working against us. They could now talk to other computers, other people, and that changed computing fundamentally. Computers went from these things that were our helpmates to our masters. This is what I lament the most. I don't miss bit-banging, assembly programming (well, a little). I fudging love Ruby/Python, as opposed to C++ being considered "High Level." I love that I can buy a computer for 35$ (RPI) that is fantastic. RPi's are so cheap I employ half a dozen just to run my 3d printers (yes I have a problem). But I do so much not miss being scared of my computer. Miss being scared of the ne5work. I miss the sense of wonder at what a computer could be or do. You have to understand technology as it exists now, is beyond my wildest dreams. I watched Star Trek TNG as a child and the devices we have now, legitimately have exceeded my wildest dreams. The simplest cell phone now has as much computational power as every computer combined at the time I graduated high school. But, I do miss simplicity. So much so, I've been considering writing an NES or Sega game; I'm precisely 40 years old, and I've finally come to understand that art and constraints are intimately connected. That they press on each other, and neither is possible without each other. I have so few restraints on modern systems that I... am constrained. I miss the constraints of my earlier years that were, in fact, my freedom. I miss software that shipped and worked on the first day. I, like everyone, miss my childhood. Because the universe is an explosion of complexity-- and when we look back, we will always feel like things were simpler-- because they god damned actually were.
- seventhtiger 7y agoI think culture used to be more united. There were significant limitations in the channels for producing and consuming culture. Used to be, to get people to read your writing, you had to go through either the effort of printing and distribution, or you had to submit to some editorial selection and review. Then the only channel people had to consume it was to get a physical print of it. Now anyone can write anything and anyone can read it. The channels of culture have exploded to infinity. This has caused culture to be fractured. Used to be that most people watched what was on tv, read what's in the paper, and listened to what's in the radio. This formed a foundation of shared cultural experience. It's more varied and accessible compared to centuries of only oral tradition and limited printing, but compared to today, pretty much everyone experienced the same culture. Today it feels like culture has fractured. Even members of the same household might not watch, read, or listen to the same things. The physical proximity no longer guarantees any shared culture. Now if you want to enjoy culture in a group, you must either find it online, or you must be a cultural advocate for whatever your views or media are and build a community around you. Game of Thrones has been one of the most popular TV shows at all time, yet almost no one has found it just by flicking through the TV in that time slot. Game of Thrones was advocated for by superfans. Although there are certainly advantages to access any type of culture we want, it's definitely more complex. I can't just talk to someone about sports, the show last night, or the new hit song. Because even though I might live or work with someone, first I have to figure our the cultural choice they've been making.
- kthejoker2 7y agoTo be fair, the monoculture was almost exclusively white, Western, Judeo-Christian approved media. It created a giant tidal wave of conformity on which progress rose, but it drowned out a lot of other voices. Always tradeoffs.
- seventhtiger 7y agoPerhaps where you lived. I experienced this fracturing of culture in a non-white, non-western, non-Christian country. I think it is a global effect. I agree that the centralization of culture allowed the people in power to suppress diversity and control the cultural narrative. But now there is no longer a cultural narrative at all. It is too fractures to make any holistic sense.
- taf2 7y agoI’m not yet in my 40s but can postulate that the 90s was not simpler from a tech perspective let me explain. 1. Today we have google in the 90s we had mailing lists . It is much easier to use google than it is to construct a well thought out question. 2. At the start of the 90s we had very little access to mobile phones. We had no uber. Imagine landing at an airport and having to use a pay phone- or calling collect. This is much more complex and difficult then what you can do today with a smart phone. 3. Say you wanted to build a website. There was no simple answer or Ruby on Rails to make give you a right way to approach it. You had to figure it out without google. For reference lookup corba. Software engineering was definitely not simpler
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y agoUsable bicyles at reasonable price points with longer lasting parts. Nowadays it seems like almost exclusively fashion driven, with parts wearing out fast, even if they are expensive. CONSUME MORE!
- charliebrownau 7y agoYes Most of us also are missing Accountablity Truth Facts Logic in today's offended & feelings socialist infection in the West
- eykanspelgud 7y agoNo, I don't miss the 90's. I was a kid back then, and didn't have the freedoms I have now as an adult. That freedom can bring in a lot of complexity, but I'd take freedom over simplicity.
- ulisesrmzroche 7y agoI miss the Internet. Like the culture of forums, geocities, all that. It does feel like we're getting lamer. I even miss the blink tag, even though I hated it at the time.
- crx07 7y agoCan I suggest that "90s simplicity" is an oxymoron? I was alive back then, and I've always been under the impression that the nineties were extremely fast paced and increasingly complicated.