Think today’s first world problems are bad? Try living in the 90s.
Those were the days….. When watching a movie meant borrowing a tape from the video shop and remembering to rewind it before it was returned. When there was a enough time to make a cup of tea while the internet ‘dialed’.
When discmans didn’t always come with anti-skip protection and when meeting up with a friend meant picking a time AND STICKING TO IT.
Kind of makes today’s first world problems seem… even more trivial.
First word problems of the 90s
What was your 90s first world problem?
 on http://www.mamamia.com.au){kind=link}
Comments
111 Comments so far
My early 90′s FWP…. I love going to the gym but people are still wearing g-string leotards! Me, I’m in my itsy-bitsy matching bike-short and tank-top ensemble and I’m not sure if I look cooler or daggier than the g-string leotard wearers… it’s on my mind every Step class.
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maybe it’s my computer but.. I dont know how to look at the gallery photos without clicking on each one and opening a different tab for each photo. help?
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Waiting by the radio for your favourite song to play. Everytime a song would finish you would have your fingers on the record & play buttons ready to go…. And then the announcer always talked Over half of the intro of the song
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I swear they did that on purpose
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I worked in a shoe shop part time during high school and when we got eftpos we used to have to wait till someone got off the phone before using it. It used to take ages to dial through and oldies were always woried about you seeing their pin. Fast foward to now and Im sure they are the same when using “that tap and go” eftpos thingy…oh wait..I am one of those oldies!!
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Watching to make sure big brother doesn’t hear dial up connection and angrily disconnect the internet…. he does.
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i remember all the necessary accessories for the disk man, like the tape cassette connector that allowed you to plug into car tape player, and then trying to balance the disk man on the seat to use. I spent a month driving around the us southwest like this in 1998 with I think 4 CDs for choice!!
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Ha! I still use one of those in my 1999 Mitsubishi magna so I can listen to my iPod. Works a treat!
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I want to play a new game on my brother’s Commodore 64 but we have to write the programme into the machine first.
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You’re showing your age! I remember that – it would be more 80s than 90s I think
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Yep, I think you’re right. Must’ve been about ’87. Close!
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haha this is so funny, because almost everything applies to me.
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That was painful; that same Dawson guy’s face over and over in almost all of them. Whoever put this together is annoying! And lazy. I gather it wasn’t Mamamia as we don’t say “mom” or pay with quarters.
But it did make me look for JTT! Apparently he’s been doing a whole lot of not much… but may be in a Home Improvement reunion show… washed up
http://mobile.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity/gallery-e6frfmr0-1226137816848?page=2
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hahaha I am not sure what is more funny – the sentences or seeing Dawson’s crying face over and over again
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It’s the late 90’s and I’m on the train. My mobile phone rings – I cringe – because it’s an analogue, and everyone else has just switched to digital. The phone is as big as my size 7.5 shoe. The numbers light up in red. It has an antenna. And I have to answer it, so everyone sees me. And judges.
The video’s I rent all say Be Kind, Rewind!. I want a VHS copy, but the only available is Beta.
I’d do my Denise Austin aerobics video and do 10mins on my thigh-master too. In my hyper colour T-Shirt.
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Denise Austin is still around, grinning away madly. Saw a yoga DVD of hers.
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Being old enough to understand these problems (and the humour in these memes) but young enough to have never had to properly deal with them! Perfect !
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Oh and anyone else think that JTT looks a little bit like Justin Bieber? I was looking at the cover pic thinking it was him until I realise it was JTT!
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Thanks for this post! I was born in 84 (hence the name) so I grew up in the 90s!
Here are some 90’s first world problems that I can think of:
- Bringing a floppy disc to school to save information for a school assignment but finding it broken in my bag (or even worse, saving the information FIRST and then finding the floppy disc is broken and unusable)!
- Going on Year 7 camp and Mum forgetting to tape Melrose Place on Tuesday night (Does anyone remember: Tuesday night is a bitch! Pretty sure this show was definitely NOT targeted at my age group but loved it anyway)!
- Not having enough money to make a call on the school pay phone
- Using the one desktop computer in the Year 8/Year 9 building and being worried that the teacher would figure out that rather than doing research for my history assignment I am on mIRC asking boys their a/s/l (anyone else use this program?)
- In High School I listened to rock music (Pearl Jam, Smashing Pumpkins, Foo Fighters, Chilli Peppers, Green Day and Offspring). I made it clear to my ‘teenybopper’ friends that my taste in music was far better than those who listened to Spice Girls, Backstreet Boys, 5ive and most of all, HANSON! To get back at me for insulting their taste in music in Year 8, some friends took my pencilcase and my school folder and wrote ALL OVER IT in whiteout “I love Isaac Hanson.” Apparently they thought he was the ugliest member of Hanson and so thus even Hanson fans would think it was strange. I spent the rest of the year telling everyone that NO I don’t like Hanson and NO I don’t want Isaac to be my future husband!!
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Loved loved loved mIRC. Spent more hours on there than I ever care to admit to…..
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I grew up in the 90s too (born 85) and am suddenly feeling old that people are starting to reminisce about them!
Haha, and I totally get you with rock vs pop bands. I was into rock too. I realized during my entire teen years I only listened to male vocal leads! Hahaha, my music taste has broadened a lot since!
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Me too! At least 1 or 2 a night for most of high school! Yes, a/s/l is a flashback!
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I have been waiting for this all week.
Bought a new dinner set – the plates are too big for the dishwasher!!
(cue floods of tears)
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That happened to me too, but my mum pointed out you can usually raised the height of the top shelf so the plates will fit on the lower shelf… have a look!
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Oh WOWOW. Problem fixelated.
thank you to you and your mum!!
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think you posted on the wrong post – this is not best and worst
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I know, I was thinking First World Problems, and I totally jumped the gun. But I am still VERY happy that my dishes now fit into my dishwasher!
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I remember using my 28.8 dial up modem to chat with some stranger on a bulletin board as there was no internet. I had to tell everyone not to pick up the phone to dial out as it would cut out my internet connection. And I remember my teacher telling us that one day the hard drive in our computer would be 1 gigabyte, but why would you need all that storage space? And the screen on the laptop only showed text in orange and it was really hard to play solitaire as you couldn’t work out what suit the cards were. Yes, those were the days!!!
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Literally camping the tape recorder/radio for a whole weekend to finally catch that song I really want on tape, with no talking, and having small heart attacks everytime I realise 2 seconds too late that THIS IS THE SONG!!! Missed the intro that I like so much :/
I really really want a CD player. Stupid tapes keep getting eaten and are so hard to detangle from the little reading pin thingy.Happy everytime I realise the tape still sounds almost normal even when it looks all messsed up though.
Waiting for friends. Waiting waiting waiting and then giving up, after 30 mns, they’re probably not coming, if I hadn’t left home 5 mns early I would have gotten their phone call , they had to go shopping with their mother .
I have a crush, just gave him my phone number, I’m not leaving the house for the next 3 years, there’s no way I can miss that phone call.
Step father and I don’t agree on the definition of a word: ok, I’ll go get the dictionary.
I know less than my doctor does about autism and there’s no way I can learn anything about it unless I go speak to/start corresponding by paper letters with a top notch researcher in the US. I don’t miss it at the time but god am I grateful this isn’t the case anymore.
I’m bored. It’s the weekend and everybody’s busy and I’m listening to music in my bedroom and re-reading a book I’ve read thousands of times before and there’s strictly nothing else I can do to kill this boredom short of going out for a walk by myself with a walkman, but if i do i’ll look like i’m looking for a boy so i just stay there.
Watching the news with my parents. If there’s nothing they want to watch that night, we might be able to watch a boring movie, so we just sit there and wait expectantly, they don’t buy TV programs, so it’s really a gamble.
If I want to buy anything, I have to take a bus for an hour to the city, walk for hours in the heat, never find exactly what i’m looking for and buy something approaching instead, then take the bus back , and look at my purchase with disappointment. Thank god for ebay.
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gotta love ebay the only place you can buy someone elses crud and pay even extra in postage for that honour
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Yes, you have to look at the numbers before you click on the little “buy now” button.
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Hi MM team,
I’ve reinstalled firefox (14.0.1) and flash player but still cant get the galleries to work. Can you advise whether there is a setting I can change to fix it? have cleared caches etc too.
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It would be good if you could credit your sources.
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Very funny! I used to like Dawson but looking at him in these photos is quite off putting!
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The short lived Telstra voicemail account pre-mobile phones….in the summer of 94 my friends and I spent most days leaving messages for each other from pay phones around town!! Felt like when characters on US tv used to dial remotely to pick up their answering machine messages!!
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Melrose Place peeps!! Where’s my melrose clip (hair comb) and my scrunchie and I recently found a photo of a friend and me in ’92 in my “pad” at Neutral Bay with a green dial phone in the background..gah!
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And said photo was in a photo album
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1996. We had a ‘bag phone’.
Was the size go a house brick and portable but you could really only use it in your car without looking like a tool.
It was in a black leather bag, heavy and calls were very expensive.
Then onto the Nokia (3110 or something??) it was big and I thought I was shit hot because I changed covers on it when I felt like a colour change.
I remember feeling really important about my ring tone as well.
What a knob
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Knocking the lid off your Impulse and breaking it when you were trying to do a diving leap across your bed to press “play and record” at the same time on your tape player whilst recording favourite song off the radio.
Spewin.
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When you needed to research a project on Encarta in the school library but there was only 1 computer and it was _always_ booked out weeks in advance.
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Love_the_underscores! My husband still uses them when he saves projects. I always tease him and he goes off his nut but it’s so 90′s!
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Awwww, Encarta
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Most of the people I work with use _them_ all the time too! Weirdos…
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It’s mainly for grouping documents into projects, etc. Not between every word though!
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At the library. Need to do an assignment on China.
Someone has the ‘C’ Encyclopedia Britannica.
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Hehehe good one. Choosing the topic on your assignments by what encyclopaedia was left. Only M-N … Oh guess it’s another nazi assignment then!!
And writing out the whole chapter from the encyclopaedia word for word because we weren’t allowed to photocopy it!!
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I don’t get the one about the sweat-shirt tied around the waist, and falling down.
??
Can someone please explain?
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Used to be cool to tie your shirt around your waist but if you didn’t tie it tight enough or the sleeves were too thick, it often fell down so you were constantly having to fix it. I used that trend as a way to hide my arse.
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Thanks for that, beans.
I still tie my sweatshirt around my waist if I can’t be bothered carrying it.
Am I now uncool?
Come to think of it, I haven’t seen anyone else around who’s doing the same.
Where did the 90s go!
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oh? people don’t do that anymore? Shoot! I still use it as a way to make my ass look bigger under fitting shirts
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That looks like a superhero cape for his bum =)
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And here’s Joey’s doll from the ’90s complete with shirt around the waist haha
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Going out underage was easy, no photo ID.
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I cant remember the 90s. Guess I must have been there.
Cheers
http://mum-abulous.com/
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No cordless phones ! When I would get phone calls from a boy I had to sit at the kitchen table to talk to him with the whole family listening from the landline on the wall.
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Hehe! We were talking about this the other day at work! How lucky teenagers of today are, most of them have mobile phones! No ribbing from the family post call for them!
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Children used to misbehave just out of cord and arms reach when you got on the phone. Would have been hard for small business owners working from home.
I got a cordless mid 90s and walked in on the kids playing up whilst on the phone. THe looks on their faces was priceless.
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I used to climb out the kitchen window and sit outside. I couldnt count the number of times I was in trouble for cutting the cord by closing the window on it.
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Crap I’d totally forgotten?! I hated the whole ‘I can’t use the Internet because your on the phone’…
God that feels like so long ago though!
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Reminds me, i actually use to have a home phone! Haven’t had one of them for years!
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Or having a sibling disconnect the Internet because it was their go
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And one more, because I am really feeling nostalgic now…
I am at the Big Day Out and I REALLY want to see this cool, but relatively little known band called Nirvana, but my idiot friend said she would meet me at the beer tent and she hasn’t shown up. I guess I’ll just have to wait…
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That was an awesome day.
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Nooooooooo!
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Oh lord :/
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It was absolutely brilliant!
Seeing Nirvana is definitely on my best things ever
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Yep, I always count it as a highlight in life too!
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I’m trying to write the last essay of my degree and some a$$hole has CUT OUT (yes, with scissors!) the uni’s only copy of the journal article that would have magnificently answered the question.
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And I camped out at the Special Reserve section to get it!
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And after all that time looking through the paper volumes of monthly abstracts from the last 5 years …..
(or was that the 80s)
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Had to run and have a shower during the Ally McBeal ad-break, because we were only allowed to watch it if we went to bed STRAIGHT after. Haha. Too long in the shower? Too bad! (Good way to save water!)
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And I mention this only because in the 90s, AD BREAKS WERE SHORT
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Hey I thought the ’90s were quite advanced – then again I’m from the ’70s….and these were my first world problems:
- Ugh – can’t fit into my jeans despite heaving with a coathanger. (They were 100% cotton back then – no lycra in the mix)
- My favourite Fleetwood Mac vinyl record has a scratch – right in the middle of ‘Go Your Own Way!’
- Countdown is on at the same time as Channel 9 news! And dad wants to watch the news! (most homes only had one TV you see….)
- I’ve got my period! And mum makes me wear these massive bulky pads that I put in my undies with an elastic contraption called a ‘belt’! Mum says tampons are only for ‘those type of girls…’
- I helped mum carry the groceries to the car and the brownn paper bag split and spilt our stuff all over the carpark…(no plastic bags back then…and no trolleys to transport your groceries to the car)
Yep, the ’70s wer pretty first world crap!
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I m from a bit before that, had the only phone in the street and had neighbours coming in to use it, had to be quiet while they phoned. Had to book to ring outside the area: “yes next friday at five”
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Thats rumors isn’t it. I was 10 when that came out and my parents and their friends were obsessed with it. They flogged it without mercy. I still know it along with hot August night and love it. Alright both of them.
I remember the introduction of stretch jeans. I got a pair straight away as a teenager and they were so much more comfy than the old non stretch ones.
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Yes, the album was ‘Rumors’ – and my mum and dad were Hot August Night fanatics too! They disturbed the whole neigbourhood playing it at parties on their ‘quadrophonic’ sound system – woo hoo the height of technology in 1974!
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Taped my favourite movie and tried to cut out the ads, but kept hitting record too late and missing the first half of each scene after the ad break….
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Gold.
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“I really like this jacket, but it doesn’t come with shoulder pads…”
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not a FWP of the 90s – texts were free!
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i really have to pee, but FRIENDS is on and i dont want to miss a second!
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I am trying to make an awesome mix tape and the Top 40 DJ keeps talking over the beginning and end of my fave songs.
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I swear this problem defined my life for about 2 years … All I wanted was to have a good tape to play on the school bus!
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Missed an episode of Home and Away and have no way of ever seeing it again!
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Being in year 7 and Mum not being able to afford Doc’s. So she bought me some cheap black boots and I put strips of white out around the edges and coloured them in with yellow texta! Boy did I get made fun of, lol!
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That made my morning.
I’m sure Red Rocket and Little Lad will find all those problems as foreign as I found the Vietnam war protests!
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Lol, anyone remember that horrible noise when you use to save stuff to a floppy disc?
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Settle down, we had mobile phones in the 90′s, I got my first one in 1992.
It wasn’t that backward! Although there was no internet at all in the early 90′s.
A real problem were interest rates being in the range of 15 to 18%
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Whilst the interest rates were that high, the proportion of income to mortgage repayments was significantly less than it has been for the last 8 years.
And very few people had mobile phones – it wasn’t a way to ensure that you could tell your coffee date you were running late!
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Dee, I dunno about the proportion of repayments v income, I remember being barely able to eat when they were at their peak.
You are right about the phones though, It was unusual to have one back then. But public phones were much more common than they are now. If someone was in transit there was no way of contacting them.
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We musn’t forget the price of property back when the interest rates were so high. I remember having a $40k mortgage on a house that is only 7kilometres from the Adelaide CBD.
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Forgot to say, the phone weighed about ten kg. Had to carry around a handbag thing with a battery in it. I’ve often wondered about people getting back injuries with those damn things.
I was a radio technician back then, and on friday afternoons we would use the test equipment to listen in to phone conversations between guys and girls and their plans for the weekend. was a bit of a laugh when it would become clear that the guy was talking to his mistress and they were planning a clandestine meeting.
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Yes, the internet was available in Australia in the 90s! Internet access was first available in Australia at universities via AARNet in 1989 and the first commercial dial-up ISPs appeared in capital cities soon after. By the mid-90s most of Australia had the ability to access the internet via dial-up. And many of us did so regularly.
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I would disagree with most of Australia in mid 90′s. Late 90′s yes but not mid. We got ours in 1999 and that was pretty early.
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And I didn’t use the Internet until I was at university and that was in 1998. Had to look up encyclopedias and reference books to do assignments at school.
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We had the Internet at home out in Broken Hill in 1996! Very advanced
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Um, well, you can disagree all you like, it won’t make your assertion correct. It simply means you’re too young to know differently. I worked in the computer industry at the time and I can assure you it’s the truth. However, you could research it for yourself to verify.
The fact that most of Australia had the ABILITY to utilise dial-up internet connections doesn’t mean that most of Australia did. However, a great many of us were utilising dial-up modems (very rudimentary with a speeds of 56Kb or 128Kb if you were lucky) to access the early internet (it looked nothing like it does today). I personally have had an internet connection since the early 90s. And when I returned ‘home’ to the very isolated rural town I grew up in in NWQ in the mid 90s I took a laptop and modem with me to show my primary school aged niece and nephew how great this wonderful new thing called the world-wide-web was. I asked them to give me a topic to look up and my nephew, being a typical boy and being amused by bodily functions, blurted out ‘snot’. So, we searched for ‘snot’ and up came a recipe for fake snot.
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Yeah the guy I was seeing when I was 20/21 had a computer and was on the net, that was 95.
And my engineer friends at uni were all on the net (such as it was) in 93, in a tiny little computer room at our college.
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I had an email address in 1994 at Sydney Uni and a dial-up modem at home a year later. Mind you, I remember getting the first non-unix email programme – zmail:) – and no, I was NOT studying anything remotely engineering or science-based:)
Oh and Netscape at the begining had two buttons that would be useless now ‘what’s new’ and ‘what’s cool’…oh and we printed the jokes people sent by email because we didn’t want to lose them…and got to share them with friends.
Chatting with friends at other unis meant using ‘talk’ or ‘ntalk’ and if you were lucky, you had ‘ytalk’ which let up to SIX people chat at once!
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Definitely had dial up internet in 1995. Email was happening, though not everyone had an address. And in the mid to late 90s, ICQ was the preferred form of instant messaging!
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My folks must have been pretty advanced because we got our internet in 94 or 95 (in Brisbane). I remember the massive modem we brought home – and we logged in through windows 3.1… on a dos run menu system!
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We got ours in 1996 and lots of my friends had it.
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I remember internet access coming in at my workplace around 1997 and we had to queue at the office with the only computer with access to it to do work related searches. Can you imagine that? Work with no facebook or Mamamia? We were so productive in those days!!!
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- My brand new Doc Boots look too new
– I pressed pause whilst recording a show to cleverly cut out the ads and i forgot to press record again
– Guns n’ Roses have released two albums on the same day and I only have the money for one
– Someone I don’t want to speak to keeps phoning the house making my internet drop out
– This high cut G-string leotard is chaffing me through my lycra bike shorts but everybody else is wearing them to aerobics
Ahhhhh, the 90′s…
-
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Yep, that leotard/bike short combo – nothing quick about going to the toilet either.
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I remember being so thrilled when my ’8-up’ docs finally looked worn in, felt so much cooler hehe
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I’ve been eyeing off Docs and thinking about how long it’ll take to wear them in. And how much they’ll cost.
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These are great!
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I wonder what first world problems for previous decades would be…..
The last pic is most poignant.
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I love that.
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