10 ms·

My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s (2019)

82 points by csdvrx 3y ago

ghaff 3y ago
I don't agree with everything (and it depends on when in the 90s) but I suspect that a lot of people from today dropped into the 90s would find a great deal incredibly frustrating. Late 90s you're into the internet era. Early 90s, basically no internet.
- csdvrx 3y ago
  > I suspect that a lot of people from today dropped into the 90s would find a great deal incredibly frustrating. What I find the most shocking is the difference in cultural values. This summer I was watching some reruns of a popular 1990s show. I forgot the name (could be friend or seinfeld?) but it boiled down to body shaming then gay shaming a man who's short and suffers from hair loss. Gross. It may have been ok to broadcast that back then, but I found that not comical at all and very painful to watch.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    As someone who worked for a large company from the mid-80s to the late 90s, there was a lot of casual behavior that was, perhaps not admired, but considered just part of how things were at the time. A lot of stuff happened that people wouldn't do today unless they felt they were invulnerable from being reported to HR.
  - sctb 3y ago
    If the show was Seinfeld then it brings up an interesting point: the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological. They are bad people who treat others poorly—that's the whole show. It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours!
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      > the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological I have no idea of the context: I just watched this episode and I found it shocking enough to not bother trying more episodes. > It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours! When watching, I didn't have enough context to say if it was an endorsement or not, but the body shaming and gay shaming were synchronized with a laugh track, so it's not just that it was considered to be ok for main characters to engage in such behaviors, it was intended as humor I don't find that funny, but shocking and sad.
      - andyferris 3y ago
        I've found this a really interesting (and sudden) change. It has been commented on a fair bit in popular media, the most recent I saw was in "No Hard Feelings" where the younger generation get angry at Jennifer Lawrence for gay shaming (in this instance, as a 40-year-old my first thought was that she made a reasonable comeback given how she herself was just treated, but as far as the 19-year-olds were concerned she had crossed a line!) Whether you can enjoy 90's (or earlier) content really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe.
        csdvrx 3y ago
        > really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe. I don't wish death to anyone. I try to separate the author from the art, so there are many things I can enjoy: I'm listening to Bing Crosby's White Christmas. He may have been a bad person [1], but the song is nice. If he was singing hate stuff on a happy melody, I wouldn't enjoy it. This TV series making fun of bad things is something else. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqqeb/isnt-it-funny-that-bing-crosby-and-bob-hope-were-woman-hating-bigots https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqqeb/isnt-it-funny-that-bi...
      - nsxwolf 3y ago
        Seinfeld is one of the greatest shows of all time. You’d seriously be depriving yourself by not watching it.
  - liveoneggs 3y ago
    I'm surprised you found George Costanza to be so sympathetic.
    - XorNot 3y ago
      It varies from episode to episode is the thing. Seinfeld in every way was not about continuity. i.e. everyone can relate to George drivingmand thinking of the perfect comeback to a mean spirited comment.
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      After checking the picture, it may have been him indeed. It's not about finding characters sympathetic or not. It was very inappropriate, like if 2 characters were talking around a coffee, then one suddenly flipped the table and punched the other character in the face and everybody laughed while he was spitting teeth and blood. I would find that disturbing, because it's not relatable. The show was to be about humor, and it was popular, so I thought it could be relatable, but It wasn't. I have watched and enjoyed many other popular shows (ex: Sliders, TNG, Stargate, I want to do X-files next) but I can't enjoy this "comedy" because it's not fun.
      - ghaff 3y ago
        It's a show that plays to New Yorker stereotypes and exaggerates them. I suspect you wouldn't have liked it at the time either.
  - yuppie_scum 3y ago
    Friends and Seinfeld are still two of the most popular syndicated programs in America, and generally you can find at least one episode of either or both on at any given time of day on modern basic cable in 2023 USA. Certain groups absolutely have valid reasons not to return to 90’s cultural norms but a pretty large majority would have no objection, at least initially.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      The bottom line is probably that, for better or worse, a lot of people have broader boundaries on comic offensiveness than others do. And, especially as you plumb older comedy, there's more to offend the latter category.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  > Early 90s, basically no internet. Plenty of small-i internet, if you knew where* to be. Trailblazers came out in 1985. IMPs had been around since 1969, and I think ARPANET itself had been decommissioned by 1990. * you couldn't just download whole-book scans either (HN frontpage at 45K would've taken nearly a minute to xfer on a home line), so there were already plenty of dead-tree reasons to be associated with these institutions anyway...
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Oh. I was on BBSs. I sent chat messages in the late 70s. But, no, I couldn't generally order stuff online and email most people I knew.
- hotpotamus 3y ago
  I read “The Cuckoo’s Egg” in the late 00’s as a student and found it pretty interesting that Cliff Stoll (user cliffstoll here I believe) used many of the same Unix utilities in the 80’s that I was still using. That’s at least one piece of tech that I think has aged well. I’m very nostalgic of the optimism of the 90’s, but I do also remember VHS tapes and photographic film (which I love as a medium but it’s amazingly inconvenient these days) which were clearly compromises. On the other hand, the 90’s were amazing for gaming. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were breakthroughs that have held up quite well I think.
  - ProllyInfamous 3y ago
    Mid-00's, I showed up on full scholarship to a prestigious US Private institution, ready to "make a difference." One of my first major bummers was registering for classes using a UNIX shell, a decade older than myself. Without naming the school, I always respected the friend-from-hometown who decided to attend our public state school after our first semester at "the top tier" school [hers was a better choice]. ---- I'm about to begin digitizing VHS from my early-90's childhood — it's incredible to see what ML is allowing for upscaled restorations, often direct from tape (i.e. without having to use analogue video cables)! If I could find locally a decent-condition N64, I'd buy it immediately.
- gorgoiler 3y ago
  If you were teleported back to the early 1990s then what, at that time, was the most progressive programming language available? I note that both ML and Erlang were around at the time. I have no experience with or knowledge of Lisp in production to know if it’s a serious answer or not. For me, Lisp has always been there as a timeless alternative in the same way that visiting the countryside is always an option in between feverish daily life in whichever city I live in at the moment.
  - jeremyjh 3y ago
    Perl, if you are talking about stuff widely used in industry.
    - csdvrx 3y ago
      > Perl, if you are talking about stuff widely used in industry. I love perl! Last year for Christmas the release of cosmopolitan perl inspired me to write a perl web server: https://github.com/csdvrx/PerlPleBean/ https://github.com/csdvrx/PerlPleBean/ It may have been an exercise in futility in 2022, but it taught me many things about the http protocol (and it was fun)
    - ghaff 3y ago
      Mid-90s is probably something related to the web and Perl is a good candidate.
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    Lisp was well-established in its niche by the early 90s and just about to come (finish?) crashing down in usage numbers. The second edition of Common Lisp the Language was published in 1990, and the ANSI standard was published in 1994.
  - fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
    Common Lisp is a great experience in production
  - pvg 3y ago
    The biggest difference between then and now is not really the 'progressiveness' of the languages but that the tooling is free. It's nigh-impossible for a non-free language to gain serious traction today. Another important one is some degree of cross-platform capability - also pretty much table stakes today (it helps that the platforms are significantly more homogenous) but less common (and/or pricier) back then.
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
- supportengineer 3y ago
  In 1992 the internet worked great. We connected our dorm room computers to the internet using a serial port on the back of the room’s phone (SLIP protocol). You connected with others using email and newsgroups. You could transfer files with FTP and open a remote window using X11.
  - mr_toad 3y ago
    In 1992 it was practically unavailable outside universities and research institutions. There were basically no consumer ISPs.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      I don't think, even working at a pretty large computer company, I had access to the internet in 1992. I did get access via a Unix workstation probably a few years later but not by 19992.
  - sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
    This was only accessible to a tiny minority in a small portion of the world though.
- thaumaturgy 3y ago
  I don't know. Many of today's 65-and-up demographic began to have trouble adopting new technologies starting the late 90s. Technology is frustrating now in a different way; the most frequent daily frustration might have been paper jams in printers. 56k dialup was pretty darn fast and websites didn't weigh in at 5MB per page load; if your dialup connection was having a problem, you could call a phone number and talk to an actual person about it. So, it wasn't frustrating because of its limitations. We largely weren't even aware it was very limited. Everything seemed new and every new development was exciting. Forced, frequent software updates weren't a thing, and everyone hates those now. Software often becomes less useful over time, and you can't easily opt out of that. Now, we know faster internet connections are possible, but they aren't available to many of us. When Comcast drops signal for the third time today, there's nobody I can call about it. Earlier today in a different thread I related some challenges getting Linux to boot on some new hardware, and one of the replies was, "well yeah, that's store-bought computers for ya". The stuff we had seemed pretty decent because we didn't know what we were missing; now, the stuff we have is frequently frustrating because we (some of us) remember it better. Early 90s, I would've been on eWorld, I think -- just graduating from local BBSes and getting started in international networks. I genuinely miss the community feel of eWorld. It's something I haven't really experienced on the modern internet since I stopped using IRC a decade ago. You know what eWorld didn't have? Trolls. Or ads on every single interaction. Or an interface that was suddenly, bewilderingly different one day -- for the third time in a year. I didn't feel bad using it, like I was reluctantly giving more money to a megacorporation that would use the money to find new ways to annoy and exploit me. Yeah, sure, it tied up a phone line and was kinda slow and limited in features, but we didn't know any of those things were supposed to be frustrating.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I'm not sure what part of your comment actually supports older people not being able to adopt new technologies.
csdvrx 3y ago
When discussing the teen who likes to live as in the 1940s on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38687171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38687171 I mentioned I like technology from the 1990s and before (ex: terminals, perl, CGI, sixels) Someone suggested it was because the 1990s were the "peak of technology", but a great counterpoint was provided with this link. Personally, I think technological progress offers us more optionality: you can now use CDs like in the 1990s but you can also stream. You can use terminals but you can also use GUIs. No one is forced to adopt technology they don't like. We may be unfamiliar with some old technology, but any technology can be very nice and useful if we can take the time to weight the pros and the cons. You can then mix and match: I like sixels in the terminal, but I prefer Wayland for GUIs. I discover music on streaming sites, but I prefer to buy CDs for the tactile sensation or download FLACs from supraphonline.cz because I don't have to worry I will lose access to some of my past purchases.
- masfuerte 3y ago
  > No one is forced to adopt technology they don't like. No. * None of the privately-owned car parks I know of take cash. * The UK government is moving to compulsory electronic filing for small businesses. * The managing agent used by my landlord has decided that paper contracts are no longer acceptable. I can walk everywhere. I can close my business. I can live under a hedge. But realistically, I am forced to use technology which was not designed with my interests in mind.
  - Fauntleroy 3y ago
    In addition, pretty much any new car you buy these days will spy on you by default. Along with any other Internet-connected services you use either directly or unintentionally by proxy. (...and before someone argues, "you could just buy an old, non-spying car", you'll only be able to do that for so long. And pretty much never with a new vehicle.)
  - thombles 3y ago
    Smartphones are much less optional now too. To log in to government webapps I need to use a mobile app (https://www.mygovid.gov.au/ https://www.mygovid.gov.au/) which is (naturally) only available via App Store/Play Store, which implies I need an Apple or Android and have an account open and in good standing with either Apple or Google respectively. Then there's MFA - every week on this site you'll read how using anything less than app-based MFA is reckless.
deleted 3y ago
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shae 3y ago
Soon you will be able to carry a lifetime's worth of music in your pocket!
- deleted 3y ago
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- two_in_one 3y ago
  1TB micro sd is < $100. this is more then one can listen to and still remember something from each track. And you can easily fit 10 of them in small pocket..
  - bitwize 3y ago
    I found it hilarious how, in the movie Johnny Mnemonic, set in 2021, he had to use a brain implant to smuggle 320 GiB of data -- a feat which, in actual 2021, could be done by swallowing an SD card in a toy balloon.
    - two_in_one 3y ago
      people don't realize it. but small high capacity memory changes a lot. now even small robot cam remember it's whole 'life' in low resolution. and this makes possible to create, say, powerful assistants. when you can ask questions like "what did she say about dinner?", or "where are my keys?", "who was standing in line with me?". assistant can simply scroll through the raw memory to find the answers.
- analog31 3y ago
  As a double bassist, I'm lucky to fit a lifetime's worth of music in my car.
aaron695 3y ago
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andyferris 3y ago
> Finance: change comes slowly to consumer finance indeed compared to Wall Street, but we can note since the ’90s the (half-assed) shift to chip cards and faster payments, cheaper remittances & free checking. And outside of North America, the change isn't even half-assed.
- bboygravity 3y ago
  It's astonishing how badly US banks get to treat and milk their customers to an outsider (compared to say EU-banks). The amount of bribes and regulatory capture needed to maintain that... I can only imagine.
- deleted 3y ago
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- anigbrowl 3y ago
  I had free checking in the 1990s and no ATM fees, on a very ordinary income.
Fr0styMatt88 3y ago
Does anyone know of a similar list like this but for medicine? This is awesome.
dang 3y ago
Related: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865 - Feb 2020 (197 comments)
causality0 3y ago
But are you happier than you were then? Lately I've been struck by how the better things get the less I seem to enjoy them. Like I used to just look at a screen. Now I examine it for dead pixels and light bleed and motion ghosting and color evenness and signs of OLED burn-in. I watch old movies and TV shows and am struck by how powerful people seem to be when they don't need to look at a phone a hundred times a day. Like the desire for constant improvement has left us unable to tolerate a lower level of stimulation. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s it was ok to constantly want more because there constantly was more. Every year was a noticeable improvement. Where's it getting better now? I use my smartphone for the exact same things I was using it for ten years ago, except now it has fewer buttons and I can't replace the battery. I can't help but feel like it would've been far better for me if I hadn't been conditioned to expect unending improvement.
roland35 3y ago
Unfortunately the cost of housing and the cost of education has increased so much since then it has really put a damper on the rest of those innovations! But things absolutely just work so much better now! The only thing I miss is portable gaming, but now the we have the steam deck and switch!
- Terr_ 3y ago
  I like to think of it as the difference between the cost of objects versus labor. We've managed to make lots of things cheaper (largely by reducing the labor in their creation) but there's plenty of other stuff to soak up a budget in terms of rent, daycare, etc. (And healthcare too, but that's... well, full of uniquely broken stuff.) Charts like this encapsulate it well: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...
jksk61 3y ago
it seems to try too hard on proving things have improved by white lying a bit. Some examples: * Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased, and more rivers are safe to fish in - yeah except that are only statistics related to USA, not to mention the Detroit area water pollution thing that it is still going on. Or all the PFAS related drama happening recently. * LASIK surgery has gone from an expensive questionable novelty to a cheap, routine, safe cosmetic surgery - yeah, almost cheap, safe sure, but none of the people I met actually says they'll do it again (sample N=5), for various reasons. Some: they did have to take glasses again after a few years, colors were less vivid, eyes were less hydrated. * Food, it is nice that fast food aren't shitty anymore, but there are still plenty of contaminations happening (not only in USA but all-over the world). Moreover, the food is becoming worse because of the lack of microsubstances (and soil degradation) as well as the increase in CO2. Agriculture output is damped by climate change.
prettywoman 3y ago
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82 points by csdvrx 3y ago

I don't agree with everything (and it depends on when in the 90s) but I suspect that a lot of people from today dropped into the 90s would find a great deal incredibly frustrating. Late 90s you're into the internet era. Early 90s, basically no internet.

csdvrx 3y ago
> I suspect that a lot of people from today dropped into the 90s would find a great deal incredibly frustrating. What I find the most shocking is the difference in cultural values. This summer I was watching some reruns of a popular 1990s show. I forgot the name (could be friend or seinfeld?) but it boiled down to body shaming then gay shaming a man who's short and suffers from hair loss. Gross. It may have been ok to broadcast that back then, but I found that not comical at all and very painful to watch.
- ghaff 3y ago
  As someone who worked for a large company from the mid-80s to the late 90s, there was a lot of casual behavior that was, perhaps not admired, but considered just part of how things were at the time. A lot of stuff happened that people wouldn't do today unless they felt they were invulnerable from being reported to HR.
- sctb 3y ago
  If the show was Seinfeld then it brings up an interesting point: the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological. They are bad people who treat others poorly—that's the whole show. It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours!
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    > the context of the show is that all of the characters are socially pathological I have no idea of the context: I just watched this episode and I found it shocking enough to not bother trying more episodes. > It would be fascinating if today's viewers might see it as an endorsement of those behaviours! When watching, I didn't have enough context to say if it was an endorsement or not, but the body shaming and gay shaming were synchronized with a laugh track, so it's not just that it was considered to be ok for main characters to engage in such behaviors, it was intended as humor I don't find that funny, but shocking and sad.
    - andyferris 3y ago
      I've found this a really interesting (and sudden) change. It has been commented on a fair bit in popular media, the most recent I saw was in "No Hard Feelings" where the younger generation get angry at Jennifer Lawrence for gay shaming (in this instance, as a 40-year-old my first thought was that she made a reasonable comeback given how she herself was just treated, but as far as the 19-year-olds were concerned she had crossed a line!) Whether you can enjoy 90's (or earlier) content really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe.
      - csdvrx 3y ago
        > really depends if you can view it in the context that produced it; if you go all "death of the author" it's just going to seem cringe. I don't wish death to anyone. I try to separate the author from the art, so there are many things I can enjoy: I'm listening to Bing Crosby's White Christmas. He may have been a bad person [1], but the song is nice. If he was singing hate stuff on a happy melody, I wouldn't enjoy it. This TV series making fun of bad things is something else. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqqeb/isnt-it-funny-that-bing-crosby-and-bob-hope-were-woman-hating-bigots https://www.vice.com/en/article/mbqqeb/isnt-it-funny-that-bi...
    - nsxwolf 3y ago
      Seinfeld is one of the greatest shows of all time. You’d seriously be depriving yourself by not watching it.
- liveoneggs 3y ago
  I'm surprised you found George Costanza to be so sympathetic.
  - XorNot 3y ago
    It varies from episode to episode is the thing. Seinfeld in every way was not about continuity. i.e. everyone can relate to George drivingmand thinking of the perfect comeback to a mean spirited comment.
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    After checking the picture, it may have been him indeed. It's not about finding characters sympathetic or not. It was very inappropriate, like if 2 characters were talking around a coffee, then one suddenly flipped the table and punched the other character in the face and everybody laughed while he was spitting teeth and blood. I would find that disturbing, because it's not relatable. The show was to be about humor, and it was popular, so I thought it could be relatable, but It wasn't. I have watched and enjoyed many other popular shows (ex: Sliders, TNG, Stargate, I want to do X-files next) but I can't enjoy this "comedy" because it's not fun.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      It's a show that plays to New Yorker stereotypes and exaggerates them. I suspect you wouldn't have liked it at the time either.
- yuppie_scum 3y ago
  Friends and Seinfeld are still two of the most popular syndicated programs in America, and generally you can find at least one episode of either or both on at any given time of day on modern basic cable in 2023 USA. Certain groups absolutely have valid reasons not to return to 90’s cultural norms but a pretty large majority would have no objection, at least initially.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    The bottom line is probably that, for better or worse, a lot of people have broader boundaries on comic offensiveness than others do. And, especially as you plumb older comedy, there's more to offend the latter category.
082349872349872 3y ago
> Early 90s, basically no internet. Plenty of small-i internet, if you knew where* to be. Trailblazers came out in 1985. IMPs had been around since 1969, and I think ARPANET itself had been decommissioned by 1990. * you couldn't just download whole-book scans either (HN frontpage at 45K would've taken nearly a minute to xfer on a home line), so there were already plenty of dead-tree reasons to be associated with these institutions anyway...
- ghaff 3y ago
  Oh. I was on BBSs. I sent chat messages in the late 70s. But, no, I couldn't generally order stuff online and email most people I knew.
hotpotamus 3y ago
I read “The Cuckoo’s Egg” in the late 00’s as a student and found it pretty interesting that Cliff Stoll (user cliffstoll here I believe) used many of the same Unix utilities in the 80’s that I was still using. That’s at least one piece of tech that I think has aged well. I’m very nostalgic of the optimism of the 90’s, but I do also remember VHS tapes and photographic film (which I love as a medium but it’s amazingly inconvenient these days) which were clearly compromises. On the other hand, the 90’s were amazing for gaming. The PlayStation and Nintendo 64 were breakthroughs that have held up quite well I think.
- ProllyInfamous 3y ago
  Mid-00's, I showed up on full scholarship to a prestigious US Private institution, ready to "make a difference." One of my first major bummers was registering for classes using a UNIX shell, a decade older than myself. Without naming the school, I always respected the friend-from-hometown who decided to attend our public state school after our first semester at "the top tier" school [hers was a better choice]. ---- I'm about to begin digitizing VHS from my early-90's childhood — it's incredible to see what ML is allowing for upscaled restorations, often direct from tape (i.e. without having to use analogue video cables)! If I could find locally a decent-condition N64, I'd buy it immediately.
gorgoiler 3y ago
If you were teleported back to the early 1990s then what, at that time, was the most progressive programming language available? I note that both ML and Erlang were around at the time. I have no experience with or knowledge of Lisp in production to know if it’s a serious answer or not. For me, Lisp has always been there as a timeless alternative in the same way that visiting the countryside is always an option in between feverish daily life in whichever city I live in at the moment.
- jeremyjh 3y ago
  Perl, if you are talking about stuff widely used in industry.
  - csdvrx 3y ago
    > Perl, if you are talking about stuff widely used in industry. I love perl! Last year for Christmas the release of cosmopolitan perl inspired me to write a perl web server: https://github.com/csdvrx/PerlPleBean/ https://github.com/csdvrx/PerlPleBean/ It may have been an exercise in futility in 2022, but it taught me many things about the http protocol (and it was fun)
  - ghaff 3y ago
    Mid-90s is probably something related to the web and Perl is a good candidate.
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Lisp was well-established in its niche by the early 90s and just about to come (finish?) crashing down in usage numbers. The second edition of Common Lisp the Language was published in 1990, and the ANSI standard was published in 1994.
- fiddlerwoaroof 3y ago
  Common Lisp is a great experience in production
- pvg 3y ago
  The biggest difference between then and now is not really the 'progressiveness' of the languages but that the tooling is free. It's nigh-impossible for a non-free language to gain serious traction today. Another important one is some degree of cross-platform capability - also pretty much table stakes today (it helps that the platforms are significantly more homogenous) but less common (and/or pricier) back then.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
supportengineer 3y ago
In 1992 the internet worked great. We connected our dorm room computers to the internet using a serial port on the back of the room’s phone (SLIP protocol). You connected with others using email and newsgroups. You could transfer files with FTP and open a remote window using X11.
- mr_toad 3y ago
  In 1992 it was practically unavailable outside universities and research institutions. There were basically no consumer ISPs.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    I don't think, even working at a pretty large computer company, I had access to the internet in 1992. I did get access via a Unix workstation probably a few years later but not by 19992.
- sjfjsjdjwvwvc 3y ago
  This was only accessible to a tiny minority in a small portion of the world though.
thaumaturgy 3y ago
I don't know. Many of today's 65-and-up demographic began to have trouble adopting new technologies starting the late 90s. Technology is frustrating now in a different way; the most frequent daily frustration might have been paper jams in printers. 56k dialup was pretty darn fast and websites didn't weigh in at 5MB per page load; if your dialup connection was having a problem, you could call a phone number and talk to an actual person about it. So, it wasn't frustrating because of its limitations. We largely weren't even aware it was very limited. Everything seemed new and every new development was exciting. Forced, frequent software updates weren't a thing, and everyone hates those now. Software often becomes less useful over time, and you can't easily opt out of that. Now, we know faster internet connections are possible, but they aren't available to many of us. When Comcast drops signal for the third time today, there's nobody I can call about it. Earlier today in a different thread I related some challenges getting Linux to boot on some new hardware, and one of the replies was, "well yeah, that's store-bought computers for ya". The stuff we had seemed pretty decent because we didn't know what we were missing; now, the stuff we have is frequently frustrating because we (some of us) remember it better. Early 90s, I would've been on eWorld, I think -- just graduating from local BBSes and getting started in international networks. I genuinely miss the community feel of eWorld. It's something I haven't really experienced on the modern internet since I stopped using IRC a decade ago. You know what eWorld didn't have? Trolls. Or ads on every single interaction. Or an interface that was suddenly, bewilderingly different one day -- for the third time in a year. I didn't feel bad using it, like I was reluctantly giving more money to a megacorporation that would use the money to find new ways to annoy and exploit me. Yeah, sure, it tied up a phone line and was kinda slow and limited in features, but we didn't know any of those things were supposed to be frustrating.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I'm not sure what part of your comment actually supports older people not being able to adopt new technologies.

csdvrx 3y ago

When discussing the teen who likes to live as in the 1940s on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38687171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38687171 I mentioned I like technology from the 1990s and before (ex: terminals, perl, CGI, sixels) Someone suggested it was because the 1990s were the "peak of technology", but a great counterpoint was provided with this link. Personally, I think technological progress offers us more optionality: you can now use CDs like in the 1990s but you can also stream. You can use terminals but you can also use GUIs. No one is forced to adopt technology they don't like. We may be unfamiliar with some old technology, but any technology can be very nice and useful if we can take the time to weight the pros and the cons. You can then mix and match: I like sixels in the terminal, but I prefer Wayland for GUIs. I discover music on streaming sites, but I prefer to buy CDs for the tactile sensation or download FLACs from supraphonline.cz because I don't have to worry I will lose access to some of my past purchases.

masfuerte 3y ago
> No one is forced to adopt technology they don't like. No. * None of the privately-owned car parks I know of take cash. * The UK government is moving to compulsory electronic filing for small businesses. * The managing agent used by my landlord has decided that paper contracts are no longer acceptable. I can walk everywhere. I can close my business. I can live under a hedge. But realistically, I am forced to use technology which was not designed with my interests in mind.
- Fauntleroy 3y ago
  In addition, pretty much any new car you buy these days will spy on you by default. Along with any other Internet-connected services you use either directly or unintentionally by proxy. (...and before someone argues, "you could just buy an old, non-spying car", you'll only be able to do that for so long. And pretty much never with a new vehicle.)
- thombles 3y ago
  Smartphones are much less optional now too. To log in to government webapps I need to use a mobile app (https://www.mygovid.gov.au/ https://www.mygovid.gov.au/) which is (naturally) only available via App Store/Play Store, which implies I need an Apple or Android and have an account open and in good standing with either Apple or Google respectively. Then there's MFA - every week on this site you'll read how using anything less than app-based MFA is reckless.

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shae 3y ago

Soon you will be able to carry a lifetime's worth of music in your pocket!

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two_in_one 3y ago
1TB micro sd is < $100. this is more then one can listen to and still remember something from each track. And you can easily fit 10 of them in small pocket..
- bitwize 3y ago
  I found it hilarious how, in the movie Johnny Mnemonic, set in 2021, he had to use a brain implant to smuggle 320 GiB of data -- a feat which, in actual 2021, could be done by swallowing an SD card in a toy balloon.
  - two_in_one 3y ago
    people don't realize it. but small high capacity memory changes a lot. now even small robot cam remember it's whole 'life' in low resolution. and this makes possible to create, say, powerful assistants. when you can ask questions like "what did she say about dinner?", or "where are my keys?", "who was standing in line with me?". assistant can simply scroll through the raw memory to find the answers.
analog31 3y ago
As a double bassist, I'm lucky to fit a lifetime's worth of music in my car.

aaron695 3y ago

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andyferris 3y ago

> Finance: change comes slowly to consumer finance indeed compared to Wall Street, but we can note since the ’90s the (half-assed) shift to chip cards and faster payments, cheaper remittances & free checking. And outside of North America, the change isn't even half-assed.

bboygravity 3y ago
It's astonishing how badly US banks get to treat and milk their customers to an outsider (compared to say EU-banks). The amount of bribes and regulatory capture needed to maintain that... I can only imagine.
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anigbrowl 3y ago
I had free checking in the 1990s and no ATM fees, on a very ordinary income.

Fr0styMatt88 3y ago

Does anyone know of a similar list like this but for medicine? This is awesome.

dang 3y ago

Related: My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22441865 - Feb 2020 (197 comments)

causality0 3y ago

But are you happier than you were then? Lately I've been struck by how the better things get the less I seem to enjoy them. Like I used to just look at a screen. Now I examine it for dead pixels and light bleed and motion ghosting and color evenness and signs of OLED burn-in. I watch old movies and TV shows and am struck by how powerful people seem to be when they don't need to look at a phone a hundred times a day. Like the desire for constant improvement has left us unable to tolerate a lower level of stimulation. Growing up in the 90s and 2000s it was ok to constantly want more because there constantly was more. Every year was a noticeable improvement. Where's it getting better now? I use my smartphone for the exact same things I was using it for ten years ago, except now it has fewer buttons and I can't replace the battery. I can't help but feel like it would've been far better for me if I hadn't been conditioned to expect unending improvement.

roland35 3y ago

Unfortunately the cost of housing and the cost of education has increased so much since then it has really put a damper on the rest of those innovations! But things absolutely just work so much better now! The only thing I miss is portable gaming, but now the we have the steam deck and switch!

Terr_ 3y ago
I like to think of it as the difference between the cost of objects versus labor. We've managed to make lots of things cheaper (largely by reducing the labor in their creation) but there's plenty of other stuff to soak up a budget in terms of rent, daycare, etc. (And healthcare too, but that's... well, full of uniquely broken stuff.) Charts like this encapsulate it well: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/chart-of-the-day-or-century-8...

jksk61 3y ago

it seems to try too hard on proving things have improved by white lying a bit. Some examples: * Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased, and more rivers are safe to fish in - yeah except that are only statistics related to USA, not to mention the Detroit area water pollution thing that it is still going on. Or all the PFAS related drama happening recently. * LASIK surgery has gone from an expensive questionable novelty to a cheap, routine, safe cosmetic surgery - yeah, almost cheap, safe sure, but none of the people I met actually says they'll do it again (sample N=5), for various reasons. Some: they did have to take glasses again after a few years, colors were less vivid, eyes were less hydrated. * Food, it is nice that fast food aren't shitty anymore, but there are still plenty of contaminations happening (not only in USA but all-over the world). Moreover, the food is becoming worse because of the lack of microsubstances (and soil degradation) as well as the increase in CO2. Agriculture output is damped by climate change.

prettywoman 3y ago

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