Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember the 1990s. Many of us who do consider it the last good decade. Living was cheap. The previously ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation had seemingly abated. This was before the d0t-com crash and obviously the War on Terror that has dominated the 21st century thus far.

I have fond memories of the 486 era, which was really the early 1990s. I'm kinda surprised the PC component of this isn't mentioned here. it was also peak Borland.

It does mention Windows NT but honestly nobody really cared about that until NT 3.0/3.5 and it soon thereafter became Windows XP and laid the foundation for modern Windows.

1993 IIRC had pre-1.0 Linux. I downloaded a distribution (SLS) onto ~30 5.25" floppy drives about that time.

But I really wonder if it was that the tech was sufficiently good at that time or it's simply the tech we had when life was sufficiently good. 1993 was before the dot-com bubble started. That's true. And I guess with more computing power came a lot of the things that many people dislike now. Ads, news feeds, social media, micro-transactions, etc.

But we also have Youtube, video streaming, digital maps and navigation, search engines and a host of other things that are genuinely good.

This stuff was also fantastically expensive (in inflation-adjusted dollars). We shouldn't forget that too.

> It does mention Windows NT but honestly nobody really cared about that until NT 3.0/3.5 and it soon thereafter became Windows XP and laid the foundation for modern Windows.

Fun fact: NT 3.1 was the first version of NT, released in 1993. It was versioned like that to match Windows 3.1 which had been released the previous year.

And NT really took off with Windows 2000. Not just business people but more ordinary people were using it as a more stable alternative to Windows 95/98 (albeit lacking some compatibility, especially with games).

I think it perhaps took off with NT4 in ‘96..

Eh. I don't think so. Sure, it was used more in business contexts but it wasn't until Windows 2000 that I saw more regular people using it and recommending it.

Oh, so we’re including the unwashed masses ? Cool.. You’re right, of course..

I would take 90s lifestyle with 2008 tech. That would be nice.

>Youtube

For me, youtube is only nice because of the decades old content that people have put on it. But that is because there is no such quality content made in the world anymore, and that is partially because of the enshittification bought on by the internet.

If it was not the case, youtube won't be that big of a deal. Let me disclose here that I am not a big fan of "on-demand" content.

I'm always amazed how Youtube can be so many different things for different people ... It's true that it used to be better a few years back, but people still upload great content even it it's harder to find nowadays.

Also, music ... back in the 90ies, if you were drawn to the obscure side of music, you'd read about it, and could, at best, imagine what it was like, because your local record store didn't have it, the bigger store the next town over didn't have it, and IF anyone could order it was with a non-refundable down payment.

Nowadays, you can probably find it on YT, and that's great IMHO. I my musical horizon would be so much more limited without it.

Also I've learned a lot about guitar repair ...

Yea..

I have stayed up all night waiting for RHCP's "Otherside" to come on MTv to record it on tape..

Will kids today even understand something like that, is anyone captured by music like that these days?

I don't really have nostalgia for that, I prefer the immediacy honestly.

Nowadays people are captured by music differently, as they were captured by music differently before music could be mechanically or digitally reproduced.

I recall sitting around all afternoon to tape Layla off the radio, during a repeat countdown, after hearing it the day before for the first time. The DJ cut in during the fade out with "Indeed..." and forty years later I still can't listen to that song without hearing him at the end.

My musical discoveries exploded with the internet, I can't imagine what I would have missed without it.

> I still can't listen to that song without hearing him at the end.

Something similar with me and "Another Day In Paradise". The first time I heard it was from a cassette my friend recorded from Dubai radio accidentally prefixed with an intro by the radio host..And that intro still comes to mind whenever I hear the song..

>My musical discoveries exploded with the internet

What, MTv didn't work for you for some reason?

We didn't get MTV until the late '80s in Australia and it only ran for a few hours late at night and didn't move to a dedicated cable channel until cable really took off here in the mid '90s.

There's nothing comparable to something like progarchives.com and similar in my experience of the '80s and early '90s. You had to combine muso friends, music store recommendations and random selections, magazines, artist and genre scheduling on Rage (better than MTV here) and you still barely scratched the surface.

I was recommending the playing of Neil Schon to a guitar playing friend recently and we both observed that neither of us had even heard of Journey until well after their popularity had faded. That you could miss a massive US stadium rock act like that seems preposterous in this day and age.

For me in the 90s it was the satellite dish and VHS that opened up the world in terms of content, music channels, movies, etc, channels like Cartoon Network, MTV, Viva & Viva Zwei, and so on. And then the internet for me came in '97 or '98.

1993 was before the west entered the last stage of capitalism. It was a time when companies still competed on products rather than using monopolistic force to squeeze ever more revenue out of the same people by turning every life necessity into a subscription. Similarly, it was a time when you could mail-order a house and build it yourself. Rental prices were low because there was no regulatory capture on housing construction yet.

Where I disagree with you is video streaming. In my opinion, YouTube and the commercialisation of holiday memories (which later became Instagram influencers) were the beginning of widespread depression. Seemingly regular people sharing their exceptional life somehow forces everyone else to compare themselves to the dreams presented on YouTube and most people will come up short and then most people will feel insufficient. I believe that’s why early YouTube ads were so powerful. Your ad for exotic goods would play immediately after the viewer became painfully aware of how boring they are, when measured against the top 0.1% on a global scale.

I never understand why people want to label such eras of capitalism as “late” or the last era of capitalism. The late stage was late only to its own death. This isn’t the last stage either. Plenty more to grow. Capitalism is more akin to an indestructible and rapidly mutating organism than an ideology.

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