> * no streaming videos RealPlayer, Macromedia Flash & Shockwave were quite popular (and horrible) > * no ebooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebook#1980s_an

> * no streaming videos RealPlayer, Macromedia Flash & Shockwave were quite popular (and horrible) > * no ebooks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebook#1980s_and_1990s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebook#1980s_and_1990s > * advertisers hated social media The social media user base was tiny and primarily full of antisocial nerds. > * email cost money No, it didn't. > * Amazon just sold books By 1999, Amazon was selling other stuff too. > * cloud computing wasn't anywhere near mature It depends on how you define "mature," I suppose. VPSs, dedicated hardware rentals, and managed services were quite common. > * cell phones were only on TV Having been in high school from ~1996 to 1999, I can say that a good portion of the girls had cell phones. > * identity theft wasn't a thing Identity theft has been a thing since the beginning of the human race. > * Subscription-based "walled gardens" like AOL were popular Almost everyone in the tech community widely mocked AOL. It was "popular" among a small subset of computer users. And to be fair, this was before good search engines. Services like Yahoo! and AOL made it possible to find content easily. > * server side programming was done in C And PERL, and Fortran, and Shell, and .NET language like C#.