The 1990s weren’t that long ago, but they can feel like an entirely different civilization to people who grew up with smartphones, streaming, and social media.
It was a decade when finding directions meant unfolding a paper map, answering the phone without knowing who was calling, and waiting all week to watch your favorite TV show. Music came on CDs or cassette tapes, internet access tied up the family phone line, and disappearing for hours on a bike ride didn’t require sharing your location with anyone.
For Gen Z, many of these everyday experiences sound almost too strange to be real. In fact, a 2023 GWI study found that many younger adults view media from past decades as both nostalgic and surreal—a reminder of just how dramatically everyday life has changed in only a few decades.
Here are 17 things people really did in the 1990s that many Gen Zers have trouble believing actually happened.
Dial-Up Internet
It took a chorus of electronic beeps and screeches from a dial-up modem to establish a connection to the internet. The operation, which occupied the home phone line, provided speeds that were fractions of what is now offered by broadband.
Statistics show that internet connections in the 1990s were typically around 56 kilobits per second (Kbps), so a 4-megabyte song file could take approximately 10 minutes to download.
For Gen Z, who are accustomed to speeds thousands of times faster, waiting minutes for a single page to load is completely impractical.
The Card Catalog
Before digital search engines, finding a book from a library involved a hand search of a card catalog. This magnificent machine stored tens of thousands of index cards, neatly organized by author, title, and subject.
You would locate your card for the book of interest, write down its Dewey Decimal number, and then search through the library shelves to retrieve it. The transition from this method began in the late 1990s, but it had been the primary means of information acquisition for generations.
Burning a CD
Creating a music playlist was a dedicated, labor-intensive process. You purchased blank Compact Discs (CD-Rs) and employed a computer’s CD burner drive to “burn” a compilation
That entailed carefully selecting MP3 files and employing programs like Nero or Roxio to record them onto the disc. The process could be long, and a mere mistake, or “buffer underrun,” would render the entire disc useless, something of an anachronism in the drag-and-drop convenience of modern streaming playlists.
Answering Machines with Tapes
Before voicemail became an ordinary network feature on cell phones, families had to settle for standalone answering machines. They played back messages on microcassette tape.
You pressed a button manually to hear messages, listened to them in the order they were left, and rewound or fast-forwarded the tape by hand. Because space was limited on the tape, you often had to delete messages in order to make room for new ones.
Disposable Cameras
Having memories without being able to view them on a screen was the situation with disposable cameras. You purchased a plastic one-use-only camera preloaded with a roll of film, typically providing 24 or 27 shots.
You took the entire camera to a photo outlet to develop it, something that could take a few days. The thrill of shock at seeing what your photos actually look like is an out-of-this-world experience in the age of instant digital satisfaction.
Floppy Disks
Saving digital files required a physical medium called a floppy disk. The standard size of the ’90s, the 3.5-inch disk, held only 1.44 megabytes of data. For perspective, a single high-resolution photo taken on smartphones today can exceed 5 megabytes.
Students and professionals would have to stack enough disks to save a single school project or work presentation, which made it a fragile and inefficient method of storing data by today’s standards.
Cords on Landline Phones
The majority of home communications were a landline phone, typically literally tethered to a wall by a spiral cord. This limited your movement to a few feet, and therefore, people stretched the cord around doorways and around the corner to have a bit of privacy.
Long-distance calls cost by the minute, too, so costly long talks with out-of-state relatives and friends were a cost to consider.
Pagers (Beepers)
Prior to the widespread use of cellular phones, pagers, also known as “beepers,” were the devices used to send vital, one-way messages. A person would call in your pager number and leave their number.
Your pager would beep or buzz, displaying the number to call back from the nearest payphone or landline. SMS messaging, which emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, rendered these devices obsolete to the masses shortly thereafter.
Movie Night on VHS
The Video Home System (VHS) was the standard for home movie watching. It was on these cumbersome plastic cassettes, which contained magnetic tape with video and audio data.
You rewound the tape to the beginning after watching it, a courtesy known as “Be Kind, Rewind,” one that was typically enforced by video rental stores. The video quality would degrade with each viewing, and tapes were at risk of being “eaten” by the VCR player.
Road Atlases
Navigating a road trip required a paper road atlas, a giant book of maps. A passenger might double as the co-pilot, flipping through pages to map out the route and read out future turns.
There was no real-time traffic reporting or automatic rerouting; changing an exit meant pulling off at the side, locating your position on the map, and calculating a new route manually. T
his is in contrast to the turn-by-turn vocal instructions of GPS apps nowadays.
TV Guide Magazine
Choosing what to watch on television involved scanning the weekly paper called TV Guide. The magazine featured a grid listing of every program airing on every channel for the entire week.
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You would scan the listings, perhaps marking something you wanted to watch. There were no on-demand options; if you missed something when it aired, you missed it forever unless reruns were scheduled.
Encarta Encyclopedia on CD-ROM
Microsoft’s Encarta was a computer encyclopedia distributed on a CD-ROM. It was a cutting-edge learning tool for its time, offering articles, photographs, and even short video clips on a fantastic range of topics.
But its content wasn’t dynamic and only updated with the release of a new annual volume. This static, stand-alone source is a galaxy away from the constantly updated, linked information available on sites.
Payphones
In-building and transit station public payphones, as well as street corner payphones, were commonplace. They were a lifeline, necessary for making calls outside the home. It cost a calling card or a pocketful of coins to call with one.
The near-universal use of cellular telephones, with over 98% of adult Americans now owning one, has led to the removal of almost all public payphones.
Writing and Mailing Checks
Writing out a check, putting it in an addressed stamped envelope, and mailing it through the mail service was how payments or transfers of funds were made to an individual in the past.
It may take several days for the payment to be received and processed. The multi-day paper process seems quaintly inefficient to Gen Z, who are used to instant peer-to-peer payment systems like Venmo and Zelle.
The Dewey Decimal System
Navigating the non-fiction part of a library demanded an understanding of the Dewey Decimal System. This was a numerical code that assigned a number to every subject area, from philosophy (the 100s) to history and geography (the 900s).
You would use the card catalog to find out what number a book was and then search the shelves for that specific code. Although still used by many libraries, it is no longer the primary method by which most people find information.
The Walkman
The Sony Walkman and such portable cassette players were the first portable, personal music machines. You could play cassette tapes or the radio through headphones while on the move.
But you only had space in your pocket to carry a couple of tapes, and the players required a continuous chain of AA batteries. That’s a far cry from the smartphones we have now that contain or stream millions of songs.
The AOL Startup Disc
Around the mid- to late ’90s, America Online (AOL) blanket-covered the country with free startup discs. The CDs, and sometimes floppy discs, were mailed to homes and inserted into magazines, offering a limited number of free internet minutes.
This aggressive marketing tactic brought millions of Americans face-to-face with the web. The need to possess a physical disc just to get software installed, simply to be online, boggles the mind of a generation that downloads programs wirelessly in seconds.
Key Takeaways
The Pace of Technology: The rapid advancement of technology has created a tangible gulf between generations, rendering formerly indispensable items entirely alien to younger generations.
Convenience and Immediacy: Much of the ’90s practice was accompanied by waiting, physical media, and manual labor, the antithesis of the instant digital convenience to which Gen Z is accustomed. Sociologist Dr. Lelia Gowland, who specializes in studying generation trends, says, “Gen Z’s world is based on a foundation of seamless digital integration. For them, the friction and patience required by ’90s technology aren’t just inconvenient; they’re conceptually alien.”
Physical vs. Digital: The 1990s were a time of transition, when people relied on physical devices like tapes, discs, and paper maps to store and access information, a far cry from the cloud-based world of today.
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