One of the perks of growing up is getting a pass on lecturing the youth. Just look at the '90s kids. Every breath they take and every move they make, they'll be reminiscing about the good old days.However, it doesn't mean we have to hate on the fellas. Let's approach this as an anthropological study, why don't we? For example, if we were to fire up the Today's Kids Will Never Know tweets, we'd immediately get a whole depository of things that perfectly define those who were born in the past millenia. Like, the WordArt Gallery or some floppy disks. Don't know what I'm talking about? Continue scrolling and check it out for yourself.
#21
The internet used to be expensive and far from every vehicle had a GPS (those cost some serious mega-bucks back in the day). So if you needed directions to get to somewhere from your home, you’d look the info up online, then print the directions out.
It was a modern way of getting a physical copy of a detailed map with directions. Of course, nowadays, all we have to do is turn on a map app on our phones. Though some of us still prefer using huge maps that unfold to be larger than us.
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131points
#22
Personal mobile phones weren’t a thing back then (unless you were in the military or were an extremely successful businessman). So when we needed to call a friend, we’d dial their stationary phone. And who’d usually pick up the receiver than your pal’s parents?
When you’re a kid, it’s terrifying speaking to an adult because you start thinking all sorts of weird thoughts. Am I wasting their time? Am I going to get my friend into trouble for a larger telephone bill?
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130points
#23
Here's something that might just blow your mind: Netflix used to be a DVD-by-mail company! What's more, it still is for a staggering 2.7 million US subscribers.
"The familiar red envelopes have been arriving in customers' mailboxes since 1998 and helped earn the company a healthy $212 million profit last year," writes CNN. Truly unbelievable.
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127points
#24
Using iPods to find specific songs was a bit of a hassle because there was no CTRL+F-style search function. Imagine what a pain in the neck it was if you had a music collection composed of thousands of songs!
Some of us [cough, cough] still use iPods to this very day, disdain Spotify, and think that taking more than a few seconds to find the song that you want is no big deal. But that’s just an opinion.
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126points
#25
Floppy disks! Diskettes! Floppies! Oh boy, do we miss those! Some early computer games, demos, and shareware came on these babies and we’d go swapping them with all of our pals. We didn’t need the internet to have a truly communal experience when playing video games.
Some of us might also still have a huge number of floppy disks back at home and miss having a floppy drive installed on our PC.
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117points
#26
Internet piracy used to be different in the past. Some people relied on peer-to-peer file-sharing clients like LimeWire to get access to files, including songs. However, downloading songs like this took a long time and was quite a hassle.
And no mention of piracy should go without reminding you of the "Piracy, It's a Crime" ads that we still love to watch every once in a while.
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106points
#27
Nearly all video game stores had one or two consoles hooked up to TVs near the ceiling. It was a blast trying the demo games out. Especially if you didn’t have that particular console at home. After all, they were expensive as heck! As were the games themselves. And not every parent was up to buying their kids whatever awesome/violent/gory game they had their hearts set on.
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97points
#28
Chonky game cartridges may be a thing of the past, but there are plenty of retro gamers out there who specifically collect them.
But the problem with cartridges is that dust gets inside them over time. So if your game stopped working, it was time to take it out of your console and blow all the dust out.
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95points
#31
Lots of people feel nostalgic when they think back to the times when they used their very first chat rooms. From Yahoo Messenger to Hotmail chat rooms and others, there were plenty to choose from and they offered some people their first taste of what it was like communicating with people on the internet.
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81points
#32
The GameBoy Advance SP was awesome! It was like the GameBoy Color and the GameBoy Advance had a kid together and it was mega-cool. It was similar to a flip phone in the sense that you could close the screen.
But the other cool thing was that you could slightly tilt the screen back which made it easier to play when you were lying in bed. Unfortunately, what most longtime GameBoy Advance SP owners had in common was that the back of the screen would get lots and lots of scratches with use.
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80points
