In December 1995 as a sophomore in college, I got into a dispute with a friend as to whether Katharine Hepburn was alive or not (I said she was). Since I had a phase of writing to celebrities for autographs in high school, when I went home for Christmas I found my book with various celebrities' addresses (no need for that today) to find contact information for Ms. Hepburn. Essentially, I wrote to her to ask if she was living (without such tacky phrasing of course). I received something back from an agent/publicist a few weeks later that she indeed was living. I still have the letter.

I actually caused a “policy change” in the town where I lived. When I moved to a rural community to start a new job in 1995, I was the first person in the town to have a “cellular” phone, and the exchange for my phone number was in the town my parents lived. Whenever I would get groceries or food and needed to write a check, they always wanted you to write your phone number on the check. One time, at the local grocery store, I presented them a check, and they wouldn’t accept because my phone number was not on the check. I showed them that it was, and they asked me if I lived in the community, and I told them yes. And they asked, how can you live in the local community and not have a number in the local exchange? That is when I showed them my cellular phone, and they just stared at it. They would ask, how do you hang it up, and how far can you be away from the phone base, etc. People were actually freaked out seeing a cellular phone. SO much so, they passed a local ordinance at the next city council meeting that in order to write a check, the phone number must be the same exchange as the town listed on the check. So, I actually had to get a landline (it was a party line) just so I could write checks within the community.

As someone in my mid 30s, I've always found that I had more in common with someone in their 60s than someone just 10-15 years younger than I am.

In about 1990 my uncle worked in an office. When it was someone’s lunch break in the office they’d get a folder out of the filing cabinet which had all the funny pictures inside. If there was a picture they liked then they’d use the fax machine to send the picture to all the other offices. My uncle and his coworkers were pioneers of memes.

I like this, it's like an old man sitting around the fire telling the kids about the "good old days" through rose tinted glasses, except the old man is a millenial who isn't even 40, the fire is the internet, and the "good old days" is the time in which The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air was still being taped

As someone born in 97, I and many people my age have such a weird relationship with 90s culture. We were the awkward transition phase where the VCR and iPhone co-existed. When the internet was still seen as only a supplement to the then current forms of entertainment. Iconic remnants of 90s culture, like brick and mortar rental stores, were still very much relevant to us but quickly grew obsolete and didn't proceed with us into adulthood or even our teenage years. By highschool, many of us had ultimately developed this awkward nostalgia for these 90s remnants in spite of not being fully incorporated with the time period.

Your comment about how older generations couldn’t fact check things really struck a cord with me. I definitely see this with my dad. When I’m unsure about something I immediately google it but for my dad that never seems to even cross his mind as an option. He’s always shocked at how quickly I can find something out and I’m always confused at how he can not know something and not immediately try and look up the answer

the 90s were magic and none can convince me otherwise. I was a teen but being a teen in the 90s was pretty perfect. Technology grew up with me.

I think the 90s generation is in a profoundly privileged position of actually being adept at technology in both ends of the spectrum - not fumbling with “those dang gadgets” like our parents, and neither being completely bamboozled with the sensory overload today. No other generation can claim to have lived and not only survived, but thrived, in both worlds.

Hey JJ, I'm the guy who ran into you on Thursday evening. I'm very grateful that you were willing to talk as long as you did. Talking about your channel and videos was a super fascinating privilege. You must be a pro at these encounters at this point -- even I, someone who had semi-thought of what I would want to say if I ever encountered you, was braindead and didn't know what to say, but you are versed and empathetic enough with your fans to lead the conversation and ask questions yourself. Even though I'm sure it was a routine encounter for you, it absolutely made my week and will be a moment I won't forget! Hit me up if you ever need half off at a JOEY or LOCAL next time. 😂

I was born in '87 and this is literally my whole childhood right here. From, "Word Munchers" to "Mario Run", the only thing he forgot was "Oregon Trail".

I was born in 92 and I agree with everything about memories of the 90s being a dividing line between generations. Of course I obviously was not an adult during these years but I still feel like I can understand and recall the differences in daily life, although to a lesser extent.

In 2001, I was still carrying a pager so that I could respond to issues with my company's database. This was a "cool" pager because it had four little lines of text that could show you little "news drops". There'd be the four most recent news stories to choose from usually with just a "---News Update---" shown on the line. Every once in a while, there'd be a big news story, and one of the news drops would show "**Breaking News**" instead. You always knew that was a big one. One Tuesday morning, I woke up and saw all four lines showed "**Breaking News**". That's odd, I thought. Turned out, it was September 11th, 2001. That's literally how I found out before turning on my television.

While I am a decade younger than you, I was growing up in a post-Soviet country and I can totally relate to everything you mentioned. We had computer literacy classes at school as late as the early 2010s. I remember using a payphone at school to call my grandma. I remember how kinds would share pirated DVDs (the only means to access any digital product in Eastern Europe up until the mid-2000s) and spread rumours about video games that only a couple of us could actually play. I never used computer to do any of my school assignments though, besides the ones for the computer literacy class. I remember pagers and fax machines, I remember taking off our landline phone while chatting online so nobody would be able to call my apartment and cut off the Internet. It is so strange how we got to live through similar experiences in different centuries

Growing up in the 90s, just watching tech evolve has been really interesting. We grew alongside it. So when I look at something like a Switch I remember everything that came before it to the NES and Gameboy.

Anyone that was born in the 1980s and lived there childhood the 1990s was blessed in my eyes.. I was born in 1981 and enjoyed so so many awesome things as a child- I Feel Blessed.. Very interesting video ✊🏼

I'm about the same age and one big change that the Internet has brought about is that it's made other countries less "distant." I had relatives in Australia and a phone call from them was a big thing. I remember my grandpa being very impressed by the fact that with the Internet, you could just talk to a person on the other side of the world. By a similar token, I remember movies would be released at significantly different times around the world. A film would be released in the US, then in the UK we'd have to wait months for it to come out. Then it would be several months more before it came out on video. I think it was The Phantom Menace that ended those practices, with the threat of online piracy.

I think one of my most missed gaming memories from 90’s/early 00’s was getting the PlayStation Mags and getting the new demo discs. It’s such an odd thing to think of now that was how we actually tried games before being able to look up trailers and gameplay now. Also the music on those discs were so good!

Being a Canadian myself, this is the strongest Canadian accent I’ve ever heard. Good lord.

it's wild to me how my experience with computers in education ended up so vastly different to yours, only 5 years later. still, i remember the novelty of computers as well as the computer rooms, and eventually using the school library to access the internet and print out assignments. but i also remember using an "Alphabeta" typing gadget in the 4th grade, and only a select few of us were allowed to take them home because of our advanced skill in typing. i remember how magical Microsoft Paint was at that time, and I remember how insane it was to finally get my own computer in maybe sophomore year of high school. wild. thanks for this JJ, a pleasure as always :)

I also grew up in the 90s. I've heard our generation described as the last generation of modern people who had an analog childhood. It's true. Those of us who had an analog childhood and a digital young adulthood have a unique appreciation of the powers and privileges of technology, but mixed with a healthy dose of apprehension/distrust at its potentials. Those who grew up purely in a digital age don't have any apprehensions about technology, which can be very dangerous.

I'm about a decade younger than JJ, but two other changes I vividly remember: 1) It used to be stressful (at least as a kid/teen) to meet a friend somewhere public at a predetermined time. If you hadn't been to that place before, you had to get somebody to give you detailed directions which you would need write down, often pretty vague compared to what we get now from google maps (e.g. turn left after the hill), or you needed to bring along one of those huge fold-out city maps to navigate with. Then you show up at the park or whatever and just wait and hope that you are in the right spot, because there was no way of contacting the other person until you found each other. 2) This is kinda small, but always having a flashlight in your pocket makes a big difference. Outside at night, away from street lamps, you just couldn't see at all. Even inside, if you didn't want to turn on a light which might bother someone else, you were relying on memory and caution to get from place to place without bumping into furniture or stepping on the cat or whatever

Growing up in the early 2000's was a really interesting time; I didn't live anyway particularly urban, so I was dealing with the remnants left over a dying culture. We still had one solitary family computer - nobody I knew really thoroughly understood the internet until a good few years into primary school, and we still had one of those computer rooms with the terrible, slow computers. Nobody I knew typed their work, and if you wanted something printed, you usually had to go to the local library. As a very young child, VHS's were still a thing I actually had to use, and it's weird going from VHS's to DVDs to Bluray to digital in just a decade and a half or so. Nobody had a mobile phone until highschool, either - not that they weren't readily available, it just wasn't seen as something kids even wanted or had any use for. I remember there being a particularly large amount of judgement around that kind of tech being given to children, too - with people scoffing that they wouldn't have any use for a phone, anyway. I remember my sister getting an iPod and being blown away by the whole concept of one - and thinking that I was living in a full Back To The Future era when I got an iPod shuffle on my 10th birthday (and promptly loading it up with youtube2mp3 copies of all the music I knew). That's the weird thing about the 00's as a decade overall really - one defined by the awkward growing pains between the 90's and the 10's - though perhaps to some extent that's true about all decades.

One concept as a Gen X that I cannot wrap my head around is ownership versus subscription. Sure, in the late 20th Century, you bought a CD for $13, but you owned that CD. I still have CDs that I bought in the 1980s, and they still play music just as well. If pay $10/month to Apple Music, that's $120/year. Yes, you get a huge catalogue of music, but the minute that Apple Music stops existing, or that you stop paying them, you have absolutely nothing to show for that money. Even if you paid for 10 years, which is $1,200, the day you stop paying, you have no songs to play ever. Worse, if Apple changes its catalogue or drops Apple Music the way it just dropped the iPod, you lose access to those songs. Now they are trying to make that model for software, where you just pay and pay for access, and once you stop paying, you have nothing to show for your money. Don't get me started on DLCs, where they sell you incomplete software and then expect you to pay and pay for more components.

Fellow 90s teen. I'm incredibly grateful that I remember functioning in an analogue world. There are lots of obvious and profound advantages wrought by the internet and digital technology... but they have also resulted in a fundamental culture shift that has some acute disadvantages. One of the biggies is the increasing lack of time investment: we are now conditioned to brevity and fast turnaround, sound bytes, headlines and crystalised information - particularly in media. Our 90s selves may have had to spend $15 on a CD containing only 10 songs... but we sat down and listened to the whole thing from start to finish, time after time. We read the liner notes and song lyrics. We contemplated the album artwork. We physically interacted with the music - opening the case, removing the disc and inserting it into the player, pressing the clicky play button. We experienced the album - not just listen to it. Entertainment was deliberate and engaging instead of merely a perpetual distraction. We distracted our bored selves with thought and imagination, rather than with news feeds, endless images, banal social media content and binge streaming. Arrghhh, so much change to discuss...!!!

JJ, I love your content. I'm in my 70's so I can strangely relate to your cultural translations, while finding others incomprehensible. I didn't have a computer/word processor until I was a professor in a community college. I never saw a gaming magazine, but I got hooked on the omnipresent card game before moving on to RR Tycoon ,etc. Adjusting to rapid social and tech change has always been an issue, but has become exceptionally rapid in the recent past! Keep up the excellent content.

I turned 20 in 1990 and I’m the same age as the members of the band Nirvana! I remember a lot about pop culture in the 90’s . The first half of the 90’s was a great time for music and fashion and rave culture. I had that exact phone on the cover of klostermans book!

Never had a computer class going through school, and didn’t know a single person with a cell phone until I was damn near 21. As a drug dealer in the late ‘90s, I can’t stress the importance of the pay phone enough… I like to think that it would be glorious to go back to pagers and pay phones, but deep down, I know I’d lose my mind. Also, I had that very same Nintendo Power issue at one point in my life… Even though I was an EGM guy through and through.

My 90s memory: My nuclear family was watching Seinfeld when the phone rang. My father picked the handset up off the ringer and immediately dropped it back, ending the call to the confusion of the person on the other line. When my mom got frustrated with him, he responded: "everyone should know that you don't call during the hour Seinfeld and Frasier are on."

Nostalgia x 1000. Although the 90s were a boom time in the US, my understanding is that Canada suffered some brutal economic times during that decade. Ultimately, Canada did emerge from the 90s a stronger nation than it entered them though. Would be an interesting video.

I was born in ‘94 and can remember as early as late ‘95. Those memories are so soothing. Things truly were different back then, and I hurt for people who didn’t experience it. There’s such a huge disconnect between these newer generations and the rest of us.

I'm about a decade older than JJ, but pretty much everything in the video was highly relatable. It brought back many nostalgic memories that I had to hit pause to remenisce about.

I feel like the transition between "90s" and today can really be linked to the smart phone. A lot of what this video talks about is pretty relatable to a person who only hit their teenage years in the 2000s. There was a little bit more proliferation of the internet and cell phones, I suppose, but the difference in how my family operated between 2006 and 2012 is mind blowing in retrospect.

I remember in the late 90s, my boyfriend’s mom being really into, “the internet”. It used to tie up their phone so I often couldn’t get through. I remember her recommending it so highly by saying, “you can look up a recipe and it only takes a few minutes for the page to load (or whatever the lingo was then) and then you can print it”. And I remember saying something about how cookbooks were FULL of recipes. She also said something about chatting on, “America Online”, and I thought, “I don’t wanna talk to strangers”. Hahaha. The best thing about being a Luddite and a late-adopter, though, is that by the time I caved and got my own computer it was a sweet, fast little Mac and I got to skip all the growing pains that the internet had had. Ditto for CDs, I eschewed them as new-flanged, kept playing my tapes and then boom! Got an iPod and was living. I mean my Walkman never skipped and neither did my iPod but I cannot say that about anyone’s Discman.

It's different to see how geography and, honestly, probably social class influenced a lot of these experiences. I'm a bit older than J.J., and was born in 1980 in Manhattan. In 1983, we got a computer. We had Quantum Link (the AOL predecessor) over a 300 baud modem at home in 1987. In 1989, I was using BBSes and proto-Internet (Telnet and Tymnet, which became Sprintnet). By 1988, most of my elementary classmates' homes had their own computers as well.

So awesome that you chose Dookie as the quintessential example of a 90s CD. Because that, in fact, was the 1st CD I ever purchased and owned

As a 2000's kid, a lot of this stuff does ring to my memories. I can recall video stores, having to wait until you got home to use the Internet or the phone, all that stuff. What does interest me is how different it was back then in terms of information. The fact that you guys just had no easy way of looking things up like we do nowadays is kind of strange to think about. Even at my youngest age I never had to wait more than a few hours before I could Google something. I remember bothering my dad while he was working and being told by him to just Google it. So to think that you guys had to rely on libraries and magazines and things like that just feels very odd and it makes me wonder how you guys coped with that sort of uncertainty. Just because these days we take that sort of knowledge for granted.

Another part of growing up in the 90s is the whole "flipping through the channels" thing on TV. Nowadays you're more likely to just choose a show or movie on some streaming service but back then you'd often times end up watching something that you had no intention of ever watching because happened to come across it when flipping through the many cable TV channels. It also meant you'd often end up only catching part of a movie half-way through and then not seeing the ending because you got bored during the commercials and turned it to another channel. Additionally it more more likely that if you were watching something on TV the whole family was as well. Now we seem to each be watching our own things on our own devices/TVs.

A recent topic that I’ve been noticing is from the people born in the late 90’s. Specifically 96-99. I was born in 97, and I think it is a peculiar generation to live in. It is almost as if we were born in a liminal, transitional period that is part 90s, part 2000s. I don’t necessarily remember the 90s, but I do still have personality traits and memories of technologies from that period. For example, I just recently became more comfortable buying products online. I always preferred going to a store to see the product before buying it. Which in today’s standards may seem time consuming. Similarly, I just became comfortable with buying digital versions of video games. I think this is partly because I was used to picking up physical copies of games in my childhood. My generation is also expected to know the ins and outs of technology, specifically computers. I am not very comfortable with computers even today. I always grew up with a household computer and regular visits to computer labs in school. However, I feel that computers still did not hold as much importance in the early 2000s as they do today. And in recent years, I feel as though computers are entering a useless stage again because smart phones can accomplish everything a big clunky computer can. My generation has evolved almost simultaneously with modern tech, specifically that of modern internet and smart phones. Anyways, the generation of 96-99 have began to name themselves the “cuspers.” Basically being on the cusp of 2 generations. Having one foot in both generations, those specific years are a very unique time to think about. I very much remember dial up internet as much as I do high speed internet, and I think that alone says a lot about what makes my generation so unique. I think it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on this.

Hearing your memories of the 90s reminded me so much of my own. I was born just one month after you, so all of your experiences regarding school and technology (or lack thereof) were very similar to my own. Also, coincidentally, I moved to Japan the same year you did (2009).

I'm basically exactly JJ's age, and I recall all these things as well. My family got a computer far earlier than his, as my mother used it for work, but I didn't get a video game system until I was nearly 14 (it was an N64), as my father thought they were very déclassé and children would be better off engaging with physical things with their hands. As such, I ended up playing with things like building sets, and Warhammer, rather than video games for far longer. My family also thought that mobile phones were needlessly showy and wasteful far into the late 1990s. I recall when a friend's mother arrived to pick him up, and called the house from a block away from her car, my parents were incredibly put-off by what seemed a hugely snobbish gesture. "What, she can't just ring the doorbell?!"

As someone who grew up in the 2010s, the thing about typing still rings true. Typing was always quite difficult, and we took typing classes in the computer lab every Wednesday.

I love this!! I was a teen in the 90s and thought it was the last good decade 🤣. I need to get this book, not only because it sounds great but because I had that exact phone. The same exact phone. It was cool as hell. It lit up when the phone rang. I always turned the ringer off and turned the lights off at night just to see if any of my friends would call, the lights still lit up. So cool.

This is the very 1* time I’m learning of your channel and I am already in LOVE!! This was an excellent video!! Your style, presentation and energy are absolutely amazing!! Instant subscriber

I’m surprised you didn’t mention answering machines. Despite only being an infant in the 90s, I still learned how to “take a message” (even tho everyone basically had an answering machine at that point). I do vividly remember how basically every pay phone disappeared as I was growing up.

It’s so weird to me seeing a bunch of 90’s residue still present in the early 2000s. I can relate to some of these things, but then other parts of it seem very unfamiliar or outdated. Old MP3 players really embody this. You didn’t need to buy physical disks or anything, but you still needed a specialty device to listen to your songs.

I feel like people from our generation (born in mid 80s) have probably experienced one of the fastest constantly changing lives when it comes to technology and way of life.

as a 2006 kid, this is so interesting to me omg. my parents were older when they had me so they were kids in the 70s and my older siblings were kids in the 90s/early 2000s. i grew up not only hearing about most of everything you discussed today but experiencing most of it in some strange, left over way. my dad always had a copy of the yellowpages in his office, my mom would take me with her to the library when she had to fax things, i watched almost every childhood movie on a vhs, and we all shared one computer for most of my early childhood. i remember seeing my first iphone when i was probably 3 or 4 and it was completely foreign to me seeing as my parents used either our home phone or a flip phone. it’s also worth noting that because my parents had substantial memories of the 70s and 80s, they would (and still do) tell me stories of how hard it was to do x, y, or z without a computer, so i’ve always had a fairly good grasp on what life before 21st century tech was like. this was such a cool video, jj!! i love this kind of generational society stuff!!

I'm especially intrigued by how phone culture has changed, I think you could make an entire video about this. Just the fact that you didn't know who was calling had all sorts of ramifications. You kind of had to answer, as there was no way of telling who was calling and how important it was. When I was a kid (born 1978) most people did not have phones that could store numbers, you had to hand-dial the entire number every time, so misdialing and getting 'wrong number' calls was much more common. Calls were metered and cost a certain amount per every 8 minutes or so. My family had an 8-minute hourglass next to the phone, so that you would't run over to 8:05 or so and accidentally pay for the next unit. When an aunt of mine called us, she always let the phone ring once to give us a heads up before she dialed again, so that we could decide if we wanted to pick up or not. She only wanted to speak if she could use the full 8 minutes for the call, everything less than that was a waste of money to her. :)

I fondly recall being one of the first families to get WiFi in my area, my family was one of those "computer people". It was so new, when I went to school the next day and asked my librarian (also the computer room teacher, an older fellow) if the school would ever get such a system, he called me a liar and said such a thing was impossible. lol. It was just so different during those transitional periods. (EDIT: I should note this was in the early 00s, but the sentiment of the time and the length of the transition into the modern digital world stretched all the way to the '10s, arguably)

Seeing this from your perspective is really interesting and nostalgic. Born 1/25/64 I can fondly look back on being a kid in the 70's. I think many of us tend to be I guess entertained with the culture and way of life of the previous decade or generation of your childhood like I wish I could have experienced the 60's which I don't really remember. I do very vaguely remember the first moon landing but that's about it. Great video. Subscribed!

I needed this video. I am 42 and i have been thinking about my childhood alot lately. Enjoy your life my friends because time really does go by fast the older you get

As someone born in 2007, I might be able to contribute something from the Gen Z side of this discussion. I only recently began thinking about the way our generation's media usage must feel odd for anyone older and how that will shape us in the future. I personally learned to use a phone or computer long before I learned to question my actions and focus my attention, and that applies to almost our entire age group, with some interesting consequences. For example, looking back at my time in elementary school (where most of us already had our first phones), I feel like our relationship with the internet and especially video games was always very superficial and based on quantity rather than quality. Since we could remember, we had a play store with more games than you could ever imagine, not to mention the countless (and often quite sketchy) websites with flash games. Most were not good or even functioning games, but at some point, we stopped caring what exactly we're playing as long as the lights on the screen would keep moving. I was guilty of this too and spent a lot of time playing really pointless games just to delete them afterwards. And even in school, it's common for disinterested stundents to pick up their phones and start playing literally anything, motivated more by spite for the teacher than a desire to, well, play the game. And given the way almost all of our teachers react, this relationship to their phones and media consumption might be one of the biggest differences between GenZ and the one born before, say, 1995. What I'm getting at is the way we really don't value physical goods and property anymore. You briefly touch on this about 2:00 into the video and I can absolutely confirm this "generational confusion" we have when comparing the new and old ways of using technology for entertainment. What used to be common just 20 years ago now seems completely and almost insultingly archaic, but I find it is also fascinating in its own way. And that feeling only increases the more you go back in time. When my father, a computer scientist, tells me about his experience with 80s computers like the Commodore 64 and the games he played on it, I feel a weird mixture of pride about "the new technology" / relief that "these times of inferior tech" are over ("What? Only 64KB of RAM? And no Internet at all? What was that even good for?!") but also a great admiration for the dedication that went into operating and learning these machines that weren't even sure to succeed like they ultimately did.. It honestly must've been great being that "computer kid Ryan" during the 90s because you could consciously observe and interact with the massive changes in computers and the way they influence society, gaining some important insights. The way we went from just a few home computers to massive online games and smartphones in our pockets in no more than a decade just sounds so exciting and the early internet looks like an absolutely wild ride as well, but than might just be the imagination and wishful thinking of someone who was thrown right into the internet age without learning moderation. Okay, these some of my thoughts about this topic, I'd love to write more about it if someone's actually reading this :) Thank you for the video JJ, I love how you cover such a vast range topics in your unique casual but still productive and thoughtful style, it makes me come back to your channel every Saturday. I've been watching for a long time but never commenting, so I just had to get that off my chest.

Watching these videos as a close to young adult, it’s interesting how many things from the “before times” are starting to seep there way back into this generation’s culture. In the new music scene, it’s not uncommon for kids to brag about their physical music collections and buy music related magazines and merchandise. Even in non-music scenes there seems to be a growing awareness of youth cultures lack of physicality, with more kids opting for cd movies and written assignments etc. I personally really like these changes- there’s something indescribably different about listening to an album you own and payed for as opposed to streaming. I hope we continue to go on this path towards mediating between the vast information of the internet and the simple comfort of owning a cd/magazine/whatever.

My experience with technology in the '90s was mostly at a distance. Me and my family saw computers as something only used either by people who literally needed them for their line of work, or by people with a ton of disposable income who bought them as a status symbol like a jetski or the like. We weren't poor, but we felt comfortable with what we had and didn't see the need to have big ticket items. For about four years, all the tech we had was a small TV with a VCR, and a radio/cassette player. Cable TV wasn't available in our area, a satellite dish was one of those big ticket items, and we didn't know how to connect the rabbit ear antenna on the TV (but somehow did the VCR... :\), so the only time I got to watch TV shows was occasionally at my grandmother's place. We also got by with rotary phones. We viewed cell phones, pagers, and fax machines the same way we viewed computers. For the whole '90s, I didn't own a home video game system, even a Game Boy. My mother saw toys that cost more than around $70 Canadian as pure luxuries, and she was also worried about me getting addicted to them. She was similarly wary of my spending more than a few minutes at a time in arcades. Aside from brief encounters with things like Lethal Enforcers and The Simpsons arcade games, the first video games I played were Doom II and Windows Solitaire on a laptop computer a family friend brought over one time - this was also the first time I properly interacted with a computer. After that, I would occasionally watch the neighbour kids play things like Quake and Sonic on their PC and Sega Genesis. Yes, watch. They weren't much for sharing, but the equipment felt like it was too exotic for me, so I rarely asked to play anyways. My first experience with the internet was on a lark, me and my mother passed by a print shop that advertised using the internet for a fee. It was Netscape Navigator through an ISDN connection. I think it cost a fair bit, so we only used it for a few minutes, didn't see much. But it was still an experience, it felt like the highest end thing in the world to us, like sitting down in a millionaire's house. I became an instant gamer in 1997, playing Star Fox 64 on a video rental store kiosk. I was vaguely familiar with "Nintendo"; their name, logo, and packaging came across as 'kiddy' to me compared to the games I had happened to experience before then. But having a detailed 3D spaceship perfectly match the movements I made with just my thumb, and the shadows on it realistically moving around in unison...everything that came before felt like the stone age to me. I played a Game Boy for the first time in 1999, when the neighbour kids loaned me theirs with Pokémon Red - I didn't know they had it, and didn't ask for it, but I was a fan of Pokémon via the cards (which were ubiquitous) and renting the cartoon VHSes, and I suspect they felt I shouldn't miss out on it. I finally really got to know computers and the internet around 2002, when the public library put in free high speed internet (what 'computers' the library had before then were monochrome Dynix terminals for finding books). Internet Explorer, Flash & Java games, Altavista and AOL.com, I learned it all then. The first web forum I posted on was around 2004. I also played games online for the first time then, first Unreal Tournament '99 at a local game store, then MechAssault on Xbox Live. It was also around this time that my uncle bought me a CD player - just when MP3s were coming into fashion. So generally, I wasn't engaged with '90s tech when it was the newest thing, but later when it was a lot more common.

I enjoyed the video. Im pretty nostalgic about the 90s myself. Late 90s WWF in particular will always hold a special place in my heart. Especially in 97 when i finally got my hands on the internet! Thanks for the trip down memory lane and ill keep my eyes peeled for your content. You have quite an interesting presence on camera. Keep it up bro

As a person who didn't grow up in the 1990s, I remember hearing extremely vague mentions of egg yolks in computer mice, and while I just now checked and turns out that isn't a real thing, the fact that that sounded completely plausible says a lot about the era.

Despite being born in 2001, my experiences growing up with computers were extremely similar to yours JJ. For example, we had dial up Internet that only my father used until at least 2010 or so. This is because of where Ireland started off in the early nineties and the rapid progression of our society to where it is today, another advanced Western country. Honestly I might try and make a channel and video about this myself, I feel the perspective of an Irish person in this time period is quite unique, and Ireland's story of progression is vastly different to almost every other western country.

I just discovered your channel and really enjoyed this video. I was an avid reader of Filibuster Cartoons when I was in college back in the mid to late 2000's, so its really cool to see you making videos like this now!

I was born in January 2000 and my parents and I have lived in Canada since 2003, specifically Calgary. I don't think society has changed much here, and I haven't changed much throughout my life either, except for my height.

To me, as somebody who grew up in the 2010s,the idea of not understanding what the internet is is impossible to comprehend. It's like trying to have an english word stop making sense to you as a cohesive structure, it just can't be done. All of the little tropes of the internet (even things as minor as the way scrolling works, or where the standard buttons are located) are as intuitive as language and can't be unrationalized.

This may sound weird now but... I LOVED encyclopedias! I loved randomly grabbing one off the shelf at school and finding something, anything, new to learn. I even enjoyed looking at them. Just seeing the words seamlessly line up on the spines was satisfying. I dreamed of growing up and having my own collection of encyclopedias one day. World encyclopedias filled me with feelings of joy, awe, and wonder. ESPECIALLY when they started having colors and pictures on the spines. They were beautiful. The only time I disliked them is when I got into trouble and had to "write lines." The teacher would grab a random encyclopedia from the shelf, flip to a random page, point at something, and tell me to write until she said to stop. It somehow was always something borrrring! But, I have ADHD so maybe it was just boring because it wasn't what I wanted to read about at that moment. haha Sometimes I still want to have a collection and I do think I would be happy with one. But, they are just beautiful pages and can't be updated as science progresses as such a rapid pace without buying an entirely new book. I'm sure that a lot of it would be extremely out of date after about ten to fifteen years. Then, I think to myself, "But that is history. It's interesting to look back on what we thought we knew and how far we've come." After all, I do have some newspapers from 1938-1940. There's an article where they talk about how Mars will be the closest it's been in 'x' amount of time and that there will be three astronomers on three different points on the globe to view it. They were said to be specialists and claimed that Mars changed from brown to green throughout the year which suggested the planet had seasons. They claimed that this proved, without a shadow of a doubt, there was vegetation on Mars. We know now that that is inaccurate, but at the time, they were so sure it was true. We have come so far as a species but we still have so far to go. I always wonder what we are so sure of today that future generations will find is completely false. It keeps me hopeful and forever interested in the world. Oh, and I miss when Animal Planet and Discovery Channel didn't have just reality shows but educational shows. No drama, no following humans around as they make saddles or whatever tf. And I know it's 2000s but, Xanga. I miss Xanga. That's a story for another day. It's late and I've typed more here than I have in my journal in months. haha Feels like a Xanga post. Late night, on the computer when I should be sleeping. Ah, the nostalgia...

I was born 3 years later than this fellow and I can relate. I am nostalgic for those times. These days you are expected to be available 24/7. If you turn off your phone for a day, people get worried. Back then you could take a day to yourself and people would just assume you were away from the phone/unavailable at the time. Also the Macs that were pictured are eMacs, not iMacs.

I actually loved the tiny pre-smartphone/computer segment of my life when I was still in elementary school and early middle school. Walking around with no smartphone at all and using all of the dedicated devices that are now just integrated was kind of magical. I also long to a past when everything official didn't happen through online platforms or booking systems and people couldn't physically reach you all the time with so much mail.

As someone born in 2001, I certainly had remnants of the 90's present in my childhood, but I'm grateful to a certain degree that I didn't have access to "smart" technology until early highschool. It makes me more appreciative of what I have now. It was awesome to hear about your experiences growing up, and as usual, I'm always impressed at the depth of discussion you manage to create with your videos.

I always question my lens towards the 90s as being too rose-coloured, but it's sobering to hear others sharing my exact same sentiments. Also reading "The Nineties" by Chuck Klosterman solidified the warm fuzzies towards that decade as being more than just "everything was better as a kid". Really enjoyed this video, and reading through the comments! There's deep value in keeping those nostalgic feelings alive - I truly believe they help ground us as we trend towards more chaos and detachment in our lives.

Awesome video. I'm a fan of Chuck's. I love how he recognizes how all the minor details of change all add up to the whole no matter how random it is. He's pretty rare in that sense.

As someone who was born in 1982, I can verify that this video totally checks out. I avoided owning my own cell phone until around 2003; it just seemed so pretentious to me, owning a cell phone seemed like something Zack Morris would do. I still resent the expectation that I must own a cell phone and keep it with me at all hours of the day.

Born in the early 2000’s, I feel like I came at just the right time to just barely see 90’s culture phased out and see modern technology rise up. I distinctly remember renting out movies and video games at our local blockbuster as a very young kid, only to get home and prod my parents to let me mess with their new smartphone that just came out. Beginning middle school, of the kids who had phones half of them had a sleek new iPhones while the other half were still using flip phones. They way different generations describe the paradigm shift of the 21st century is funny to me because I grew up during that transition

My family bought an encyclopedia when I was young -- maybe 10 years old. I was able to look up a lot of things there, to see if it was true. I remember using the encyclopedia to prove that the hole in the ozone was real, for example.

Very cool to watch this as someone born in 2000! All of these things remind me of my earliest years. I too remember dial up, fax machines, and the elusive “computer room”, but those things largely phased out of my life in middle school when I became connected to wider society beyond the small community where I grew up. Thanks for the trip JJ!

I love this. I was born in 1993 so I really don't remember the 90s fully/'at all. I love hearing about your prespective as someone who was there to see it begin to be accepted and understood.

All these things you're describing just sound like my experience of growing up in South Africa in the mid to late 00s. Growing up in a developing country plus a poor family made sure I was at least a decade behind everyone else, lol.

I come from a fairly small town in Argentina, so even in 2004/05 cellphones weren't so common, so I got to live some of the 90s phone culture despite being born in 2001. I clearly remember my mom going to a payphone near my house whenever she needed to call someone, because we didn't have a phone at home.

YES! I was born in 1979. So I was an analogue kid, a burgeoning digital young adult, and a fully digital grown up. I owned vinyl, cassettes, cds, and digital. I have gone from Atari/nes to PSX to PC to handheld PC. I experienced VR in its infancy and in its current form.

It's crazy how everything you described resonated with me so well, as I'm roughly your age. It doesn't seem like "old stuff" but wow looking at it now, I feel rather old lol. I really enjoy your videos, thank you for all your hard work 👍

As someone born in 95 but in the poorest state of the US, Mississippi, I'm really surprised how similar our initial years were. I'd say Mississippi caught up all at once in 2011 and for us lower class kids it was a major culture shock. We didn't go from flip phones to smart phones, but home phones to smart phones.

J.J., you and I are the same age, only you're older than me by a few months. I was born in October 1984, started high school in 1999, et cetera. The first computer I ever used was in the 1st grade; it was an old fashioned monochrome IBM that was meant for teaching spelling and typing. By 2nd grade, we had color computer monitors for playing Number Munchers, Odell Lake, and the ever popular Oregon Trail. As for the internet, that was basically an expensive and breakthrough novelty that took off around the time I was in my pre-teens. My aunt and uncle were well-off and really big into new tech, so they let me use early dial-up internet at their house in circa 1995, back when AOL charged by the hour, and it took like 10-15 minutes to load a website. As for PC games, I first played Wolfenstein 3D at a friend's house in 1994 and immediately got hooked, then got obsessed with DOOM and DOOM II when the latter eventually came out.

I live in iran and im 18 Most of what you said was relatable for me because when Westerners had wireless internet. We had dial ups so i was kinda living in 90s when it was 2008

I am doing research in history class about 1990s so this was a BIG help thanks 😊

The 90s in the US had the same technological advancements as India and other developing nations in 2000-2005/6. But its amazing how smart phones and the internet made all nations catch up from 2008-now. a person living in rural African town with interent access can watch KZfaq videos and tv shows about the American lifestyle. i remeimber in 2004 and 5 my family used to take me to an internet cafe with dial up internet while American households already had colorful macs in everyones rooms

Born in '83. I remember when CDs became a thing and we were totally blown away by this new technology. My family got a computer (it was HUGE) in '94. I used it to play Where in the World is Carmen San Diego and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. Going to the video rental store was just... amazing. Impossible to get kids nowadays to understand the excitement it was. And when dad would cave and buy a box of Junior Mints, too? Man, that was the best.

I relate so much it almost brings a tear to my eye.

back when i was a kid, going to the video rental place was just the best thing ever, scrolling through Netflix is just not the same.

Your story about the computer room, writing assignments by hand, and getting a home computer in high-school made me remember going to the computer lab in elementary school. I also remember my senior year of high school all the students got an iPad from the school. It's also interesting to me in college seeing the increase of students regularly bringing laptops to class and professors asking students to download software for class. It's reached the point where professors can ask people to bring their laptops to class and expect everyone to be able to. Although I have also noticed an increase in this after covid.

Although I don't have much conscious memory of the 90s, being born near the end of 97', I feel that having two older sisters and such still exposed me to a lot of pre-2000s life. Still listened to stuff on casette, still watched 90s Disney on VHS, watched them play Super Nintendo at a neighbor's house - I still think the starkest difference between my childhood and now is that we actually had a really nice house for our economic status. Besides getting lucky with a nice location and pretty good sized yard, my dad and other family members did the bulk of work building the house. Now I am looking at the housing market with absolute dread. Not only will it be an astronomically higher cost, I am uncertain if I'll even be able to live in my state because of how many people are moving in.

This video inspired me to learn how to type correctly for the first time. I'm getting better, so thank you JJ!

Hey J.J., as someone born in 1997 in Germany I can confidently say: pretty much all the schools I ever went to never really got rid of their early 2000’s (maybe even late 90’s) tech like painstakingly slow computers with microsoft xp or older and those infamous projectors on which you write on see-through slides with special eraseable pens only and that is then projected onto a wall.

It is interesting how for some countries certain technologies would come later. For example for the post-Soviet states video game consoles have come later than they did in the West. I remember how different kinds of NES knock-offs and Sega Mega Drives aka Genesis were popular among kids as far as the early 2000’s. Another thing that is fascinating is how sometimes missing out on certain technologies would be advantageous in adapting of newer ones. For example it is true that some countries like China and Russia did not have the e-mail culture similar what you can see in the west and people there have started using chatting and social media apps for tasks such as work earlier than some did in the west.

I'm a bit older than you; born in 1980, graduated from high school in 1998, went to college from 1998-2002. But many of our experiences line up for sure. Another wrinkle in my story is that I grew up in a low-income home, but in a relatively affluent area, so even by the mid 90s, a fair number of my friends had computers at home, but we did not. But still, back then there was, as you say, very much an idea that computers were a novelty entertainment device, and not something literally everyone would have to have someday. I also remember a curious gap in my awareness of personal computers. I remember in elementary school (mid to late 80s) people were very excited about them, and my school had a computer room with a bunch of Apple IIe computers that we sometimes visited to play very simple text based educational games. Then by the end of the 80s/early 90s it felt like interest in them waned a bit for a few years; they had been a fun novelty but people couldn't see how they'd be useful for everyday life so most people just ignored them other than people who had to use them for work or whatever. It wasn't until 1993 or so that there seemed to be a resurgence in interest in them among everyday people, that I attribute mainly to the rise of the "internet", although back then, the internet wasn't what it is now. I still remember friends who had CompuServe and had to pay for the "internet", which was really just access to CompuServe's chat rooms and bulletin boards, and you had to pay by the hour. The world wide web, and ISPs like AOL that charged a flat rate per month to access it is what really changed things, but this wasn't in the consciousness of normal people until like 1996 or 1997. When I went to college in 1998, my school was very big on technology and loudly touted their "connected campus", which had T1 connections in all the dorm rooms and large computer labs equipped with both iMacs and HP computers in every dorm and academic building. I didn't even own a computer though. I actually brought my electric typewriter to school, thinking that'd be fine. It was not, lol. Pretty much all my professors expected papers to be done on a computer, some even wanted assignments to be turned in as a file on a floppy disk rather than a printed out paper. I quickly found that using the computer labs for this was hit or miss. They were locked after a certain hour, often they were full, or the printers were down. Then I found out that you could take out an extra loan for a PC as a necessary educational expense, so I did that and bought my first PC, an HP Pavilion model that had like 56 MB of RAM and a 10 GB hard drive.

I was born in 1985 and I really enjoyed this video. I have so many of the same memories and experiences (nintendo power, mario teaches typing, computer rooms, etc) and its really interesting thinking about how even 20 year olds today have NO idea what any of that was like and how it truly was a major transition. Thanks for this video.

I remember the '90s. It was fun to be a musician in Chicago in the '90s.

This was really interesting to watch as someone born in 2005. I hope one day I'll be able to tell kids about responding to texts on my digital wristwatch or asking a little Amazon-made disc for the weather or wearing surgical masks for a year straight. Another great video, J. J.

It'd be really cool to do a version of this video for the 2000s compared to the 2020s. One of the things that stick out the most to me was the emphasis on teaching us beginning Grade 3 (2003 or 2004) how to write in cursive because as my teacher always said, "you'll need it in high school". Turns out I did not need to use it in high school lol

Love this video, one of my favourites

this was super interesting! i was born in the early 2000s so of course have no memory of the 90s, and learning about the 90s fascinates me because it’s a very glorified cultural window that i *just* missed. (although growing up poor meant i shared some experiences with 90s kids in terms of the technology i interacted with etc - when i had a PS1 i thought it was a snazzy new device, only when i grew up did i find out it was released 10+ years before i had one 💀 but still loved it!)

As an, I assume, somewhat younger viewer of your channel, it really hit me hard when you said you became a legal adult in 2002 as that was the year I was born. To think that someone whose content I now watch and enjoy so greatly was just coming into their own when I first started existing is quite mind blowing.

Might you do a video on the 2000's? It's barely ever talked about as an era of its own but it generated an almost unbelievable amount of popular culture and is tied to some pretty iconic people and events. And for a lot of people 10-20 years younger than you it was obv a hugely important time.

While I was in my late 20s or early 30s during this era and was quite comfortable with computers beginning with the old 8-bit computers from the early 1980s, my discovery of the internet came as a surprise when I realized that I could launch the Netscape browser while connected to AOL (which used their own software to both dial-up and manage the users content) and connect to a whole spectrum of websites that weren't available on the AOL content management program. It was like discovering a whole new sublevel of internet that nobody talked about. To this day I still miss the learning aspect of the old 8-bit computers. Having to learn how to make the computer do the thing you wanted it to do, learn the computer language that made things happen and implementing a provable action from the computer was a very pride filled success. Nowadays, the programs and apps do all the work for you.

As someone who was only born in 2006. I find the 1990s very interesting to look at. As the 2000s were an evolution of the 1990s, everything about the 90s feels very different but somewhat familiar at the same time. And coming from a very rural area of the UK, some things I was used to came from the 90s anyway. For example, in the early 2010s, my primary school still had computing lessons on computers that I want to say came from around the late 90s or early 2000s. (I can't remember the operating system but I think it was Windows 98)