How did people in the 90's viewed technology? Was it really exciting or instead something they got used to.
It was super exciting as technological progress was amazing.There was a new innovation around every corner and computing power was doubling every year.This excitement basically continued all the way to the very early 2000's.
>>108349713Fast progress that empowered the user
>>108349713>beige techsome of them were white when they were new
It wasn't as in your face as nowadays. You could live a good life with just a radio and a land line phone at home.New technologies were exciting but not necessary.
It was actually pretty easy for my dad. He was an early adopter type of guy. Even if he didn't really understand why or how to use it, he'd get all the new stuff. We were the first ones on our street to get a fancy new IBM Macintosh computer with a COLOR SCREEN and a MOUSE and - gasp - even a CD-ROM drive to play Myst with its huuuuuuge 240x240 FMV sequences. Our previous computer was an Apple IIc, which was also pretty revolutionary when he bought it. And he really had no idea how to use this stuff, he was just really into new tech. Thankfully I was 5-15 in the 90s and my brain was extremely plastic so I learned how to use all of it and now here I am in 2026 on a Laotian truffle hunting website.
>>108349713>How did people in the 90's viewed technology?Porch of geese moment.
>>108349713it was exponentially getting better, in the truest sense of the wordit was amazingtech plateaued sometime before 2010
>>108350918This.
>>108349713exciting to me but most people would look at the internet or mobile data or whatever and just shrug and say they had no use for it, I was showing people email on mobiles in 1994 and people were like why the fuck do I want email on my phone....
Only exciting for tech enthusiasts aka nerds all of which were male.
Literally the same as now. Anyone saying otherwise is under the age of 35.
>>108349713bothwe got used to how your computer would be slow as shit in four years
expensivetime consuminghobbyniche
>>108351714would you like a refund?
>>108349713I thought it was exciting.But anyone who was into tech was called a nerd and bullied or even beaten up for it.I find it very ironic that kids today get bullied for not having the latest iPhone.Oh how the tables have turned.
>>108349713>beige techI remember working on it required a blood sacrifice. I have scarred many knuckles while trying to change an ide jumper without removing the 40 wire ide cables. Those edges were pretty sharp.
>>108350906not much was actually white, though many things were barely beige to the point where it was nearly white when new
>>108349713>when your trash website is dying this fast and costing you millions of dollars in legal fees because people keep trying to sue you>just spam the entire website with bot engagement threads to mislead advertisers into thinking this site still has traffic
>>108350906Yeah beige was very much a professional/office color.Consumer tech was colorful.There was some German psychological study that claimed workers were more at ease when devices were beige.Pretty sure it was pseudoscience bullshit but the German government insisted all electronic devices in government offices had to be beige.And manufacturers didn't want to make different colors for different countries so they just made everything that might get sold to the German government one day beige.
>>108351785it was the 'molex' power connectors that did it for me, many a time stuggling to pull them out and having my hand slam back into whatever pointy objects once it finally lets go
>>108351801The site feels better to browse now. I thread I wanted to read in the morning might still be active when I get home from work on boards that used to be way too active.
>>108351373I'm 41 and you're full of shit. Tech has plateaud for at least a decade now. In the 90's things progressed rapidly.
>>108349713it was prohibitively expensive and non-essential until around 2010-present
>>108351733Just like guns
I was also a kid, but I think it was exciting to many people.The jump from 2d to 3d games was unbelievable to me. Some already played 3d games earlier but when I saw Mario 64 I was blown away, as if I saw real life magic.Everything was also much more "innocent", there was some controversy about violent games but you had no subscriptions, no data farming, much less surveilance, tech caused no political division yet. You just paid once and enjoyed your hobby.
>>108352430i remember thinking it was never getting better than the 6th genturns out i was right, just not in the way i was thinking at the time
>>108349713That's what tech looked like. It was practical and durable, and no one cared about the case at all. It ran my dungeon keeper 2, Omicron the nomad soul, 500 game collection cd rom etc. Frosted transparent plastic for kids, and looked fun but then had some fun sucked out of them by Apple.>>108350918Yeah we moved from a beige landline to a black bulky cordless handset at some point. >>108352430Newgrounds games, seemingly endless. And a N64 then later a PS2. Gaming with friends and same age family members being super normal.
beige computers and shit are like greek marble statues: a ruins from more civilized age
>>108349713You can watch old shows with computer segments in it and interviews with the public or search news articles about it. Generally, it was exiting because the pace of change was fast as it was still immature. The main thing that changed was when the internet access got ubiquitous and they had to start using tech everywhere in life like work.
It was exciting. My dad bought a Hewllet-Packard with windows 95 and I had so much fun exploring all the pre-loaded games (those 3D mazes, dinosaur-themed, space-themed, human-body-themed), playing the ski jump game. Then we got AOL and again, a whole bunch of content to explore, my first chatrooms. I was a big Marvel fan and they had a lot of original content up on AOL, web comics and flash games. Sometimes I'd have to leave a web comic loading for an hour before I could read it, but it was exciting.I had a 386 and was so jealous of my friend who had a 486, even though realistically I couldn't tell the difference.
>>108349713You'll get a lot of conflicting answers here, so I'll tell you from a normie's perspective growing up in a poor area. Tech was treated as nerd shit that no normal person would care about, until people had any access whatsoever to it then they went 'oh that's what that does' and maybe thought it was interesting but otherwise carried on with their lives. Home computers were very rare among poors in the 90s, but it wasn't like they wanted them but couldn't afford them. They just weren't really familiar with them and didn't know or care what they could do. The biggest change was game consoles. Starting with PS1, game console awareness become pretty widespread and among kids and even adults it made them much more interested in nerd shit. Happened to me too. Most households had a Playstation before they had a computer. This was the first time normies started to get excited about anything to do with tech. Then cellphones came around which changed everything. Most poors generally talk shit on anything new until it becomes accessible to them, then they can't get enough of it. So it was with cellphones, they were a stupid waste of time and anyone using them was like a zombie staring at their screen, but everyone came around eventually. And again some years later when it came to smart phones. General culture wasn't actually too far removed from this as far as I could tell. Maybe in the US things were different, but elsewhere in the Anglosphere the attitude was similar to what it is with AI now - some people were pretty interested and got right into it, most people thought it was dumb and overblown and couldn't imagine that it would change that much. The answers you are getting here are mostly from people who are interested in technology, and presumably grew up in an environment where others were interested in technology. You would absolutely never ever ever in a million years touch a vagina if you said you were interested in technology where I was.
>>108352526>Home computers were very rare among poors in the 90sOnly really up until 98/99 because at that point you could get a free computer by getting a dial up sub for 2 years. All the poors I knew had them at that point. But lets also not forget technology was moving fast through the 90s and buying a cheap or getting a few 3-4 year old machine was also on the table for poor people.
>>108351983The progress is in the AI advancements, which seem retarded now but history will remember it as a monumental change. It's true that consumer tech seems to have almost gone flat, like go PS1-PS2-PS3 and the difference is absolutely mind blowing each time. Go PS3-PS4-PS5 and there is functionally NO difference in fact the user experience got worse. The most popular game on PS5 is THE EXACT SAME GAME as the most popular game on PS3. This kind of thing would have been unconscionable across 3 of the earlier gens of consoles because the capabilities were a completely different world each time. As for shit like COD and whatever the games are not massively different even if they are at least sequels rather than the exact same game 2 generations later.
>>108352546>But lets also not forget technology was moving fast through the 90s and buying a cheap or getting a few 3-4 year old machine was also on the table for poor people.This is exactly what I'm talking about, it was possible but very rare that they actually did it. At least where I was it was considered somewhere on a spectrum of stupid nerd shit that only a complete retard would be interested in, business stuff for rich people, or educational things that might be useful for schools. Because most poors are unconscionably stupid and completely lack the ability to conceive of life outside their tiny pea sized brains, it was usually the nerd thing. But games appealed to poors almost immediately once they became 3D and relatively affordable.
My keyboard just turned 38!>>108352447Too right. A lot of soul died off with the jump to widescreen/flatscreen/HD. I'd happily limit my vidya library to titles that can run on Windows 98, which mostly go up to about 2004-2005.>>10835246200s transparent plastic looked kino tho.
>>108349713Seeing this as a kid filled me with dread since none of the games worked on it and I still have a fear of navigating Apple computers to this day.
>>108352570imagine the vegans of today trying to justify all that excessive purely aesthetic plastic
>>108352553Not him but the jump from PS2/Xbox to PS3 was mostly impressive because of the resolution. Even then, that only applies to a select few PS3 games; a lot of them are shitty ports capped at 720p that look like ass and have shit frame rates. That's partly why you had the same games re-released for the subsequent generations - "this time you can actually run it!"6th gen had similar issues, but it was an exception rather than a rule.
>>108352570The low mouse pointer speed, round mouse shape, single mouse button, mushy keyboard keys, low display height, and monochrome GUI combined made for a UX that bothered me way more than it should have.
>>108352553>The progress is in the AI advancements, which seem retarded now but history will remember it as a monumental change.It seems retarded now, because we're fucking around with slop memes, while corporations are developing LLMs that can shit out literally any kind of TV show / movie / vidya / porn that you can think of, working with governments to push through laws in the name of muh childrinz, that ensure they retain full control over their models with minimal competition.
