Late 90s you're into the internet era. Early 90s, basically no internet.
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.
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.
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].
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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.
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.
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.
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/
It may have been an exercise in futility in 2022, but it taught me many things about the http protocol (and it was fun)
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.
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.
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.
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-bi...
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.
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.
i.e. everyone can relate to George drivingmand thinking of the perfect comeback to a mean spirited comment.
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...