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Neito posted:I don't remember the 90s being a relatively calm political period, it was just mostly turned inward. You might be right. I didn't really start following politics until around 9/11, so I missed most of the politics of the '90s.
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May 17, 2024 20:46
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Enron, worldcom and The original .com bubble burst
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May 17, 2024 20:53
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:You might be right. I didn't really start following politics until around 9/11, so I missed most of the politics of the '90s. A lot of it was just that kids didn't really have to care about politics. My parents (mom, specifically) were very big on keeping up with the news and we watched the news every night, so I was always vaguely aware of things. I will say that there was more of an effort to pretend that there was... maybe not agreement or a middle ground, but a chance at consensus was possible.
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May 17, 2024 20:57
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Neito posted:Maybe it's a sign of my age, but I don't remember the 90s being a relatively calm political period, it was just mostly turned inward. Yeah, there was political harmony in the 80s, but the Savings & Loan scandal was what did it in. Riding a wave of public disgust that the senators from both sides that benefited from the scandals in the 80s got off with a slap on the wrist, the Gang of Seven were elected in 1990 and cultivated the obstructevist attitude that has dominated congress since. Though considering the voting records of the seven, today they'd be considered blue dogs. Macdeo Lurjtux has a new favorite as of 21:04 on May 17, 2024 |
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May 17, 2024 21:02
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For consideration, I'll throw in 'When Google became the biggest/default search engine'.
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May 17, 2024 21:16
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Neito posted:I mean, the OG was just white and grey. yeah but this ignores how ubiquitous design trends like Frutiger Aero/Eco/Metro were basically through the mid to late 2000s, stuff like the Bleeding Cowboys/“Express” aesthetic, and so on. Even looking at Apple and their design influence, outside of the first two or three years before the iPod became a massive global hit, the vast majority of iPods were colorful. The Mac OS X UI was full of blue jelly bubbles and glossy 3D elements until like 2010. Microsoft went even deeper on it, with the Windows XP and Vista UIs and everything having to do with Xbox being notably bubbly and bloopy and colorful. Look at any Sony Walkman product from the 2000s and you’ll see those same influences.
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May 17, 2024 21:18
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Neito posted:A lot of it was just that kids didn't really have to care about politics. My parents (mom, specifically) were very big on keeping up with the news and we watched the news every night, so I was always vaguely aware of things. general mills had a year 2000 election themed ad campaign, which ironically enough was rigged  The idea was that the donkey wanted his face on money, the elephant wanted coins to be bigger because they were too small for elephants to hold, and the mascot wanted money to be made of chocolate. They had both online votes and mail in votes, but partway through they took the online poll down. Probably because the kids were voting for the elephant money overwhelmingly, and the forum attached to the cocoa puffs site was talking about how not being able to hold coins was a real problem the elephant wanted to solve and the other guys were just on ego trips (The idea that the animal mascots represented actual political parties outside the constructed general mills election reality and that votes could be based on that seemed to fly entirely over the kids heads.) The commercial announcing Sonny won specified that it was based on mail-in votes, and didn't give the total, and they rolled out their chocolate promotion as planned. Tunicate has a new favorite as of 21:32 on May 17, 2024 |
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May 17, 2024 21:25
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I know the 90s lived on for a few years after the clock changed, but Woodstock 99, y2k bug not really being a bug, seem somewhat symbolic of the end of the 90s for more than just because they happened "at/near the end".
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May 17, 2024 23:40
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wesleywillis posted:I know the 90s lived on for a few years after the clock changed, but Woodstock 99, y2k bug not really being a bug, seem somewhat symbolic of the end of the 90s for more than just because they happened "at/near the end". To be fair, Y2K was absolutely a huge deal that had a ton of potential to gently caress over a lot of things, and was only such a wet fart due to prodigious effort by a lot of coders.
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May 17, 2024 23:42
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What? So it was a thing that could have actually happened? For real?
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May 17, 2024 23:45
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wesleywillis posted:What? So it was a thing that could have actually happened? For real? Absolutely. Not some of the weirder, more out-there predictions like Microwaves detonating and poo poo, but it absolutely could've affected significant parts of society if we didn't dig deep and fix it. So much of the world (especially then) runs on code that some guy farted out in 1978 in between rails of coke and cans of tab. For perspective, my 1 TB hard drive would've cost, in constant 1975 dollars using 1975 storage for unit dollar, $100,000,000,000. Shaving two bytes off every date was actual, factual cash in the pocket in that era. (This was also exacerbated by COBOL storing numbers as digits rather than as a binary number that represents a digit, for... COBOL reasons. So "02" was stored as a 0 and a 2 on disk, in memory, and on punch card, rather than how you think of a computer storing a number now, which would be the binary representation, 00000010, all in one byte). Most consumer stuff was immune from the get-go, barring minor cosmetic issues (like the file manager showing 2000-1-1 as "Jan 1 :0" due to how it figured out the date to display), but a lot of institutional stuff was vulnerable (you see shadows of this in the modern era, where a 105 year old gets told to report to kindergarten and things like that) and it could've caused problems (the canonical example is a financial institution trying to figure out how to handle a transaction that ends before it begins and things such-as) with undefined behavior that wasn't known at the time. Neito has a new favorite as of 00:24 on May 18, 2024 |
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May 17, 2024 23:47
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A ton of old dudes made serious bank and signed fat consulting contracts getting pulled out of/postponing retirement to update 60s-70s era code in the leadup to Y2K
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May 18, 2024 00:21
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trilobite terror posted:A ton of old dudes made serious bank and signed fat consulting contracts getting pulled out of/postponing retirement to update 60s-70s era code in the leadup to Y2K dudes rock
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May 18, 2024 00:47
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Neito posted:A lot of it was just that kids didn't really have to care about politics. My parents (mom, specifically) were very big on keeping up with the news and we watched the news every night, so I was always vaguely aware of things. It was the "End of History".
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May 18, 2024 03:16
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Phanatic posted:“Pearl clutching” itself vastly predates the 90s, and while I’m sure there’s a lot of 90s slang that I’ve forgotten or which never rose to sufficient prominence to show up in a sitcom, I have never, ever heard someone use “Clutch the pearls!” as an expression. "Clutch the pearls!" was one of the regular punch lines in the Men on Film segments on In Living Color.
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May 18, 2024 03:27
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trilobite terror posted:A ton of old dudes made serious bank and signed fat consulting contracts getting pulled out of/postponing retirement to update 60s-70s era code in the leadup to Y2K Yeah my first job was at a software company that apparently made a name for themselves upgrading old IBM stuff for Y2K. (I started in 2007 so I don't have first-hand knowledge of exactly what they were doing about it.) It's probably impossible to truly know, on a global scale, just how bad it would've been if nobody did anything to fix it. But I don't doubt that plenty of individual programmers collectively found enough individual instances of lazy code that it could've gotten really bad. I can think of a lot of situations where you'd want to be able to simply check "if this date is greater than that date". At the very least a whole bunch of systems probably would've stopped being able to process transactions, if not necessarily blowing up a bunch of existing stuff. Changing a bunch of mainframe databases and programs to increase the size of a data field (or add another field) can absolutely be a huge effort, especially back then, and so it's the kind of thing that simply doesn't get done unless you can convince the higher-ups that their money depends on it. Sir Lemming has a new favorite as of 14:33 on May 18, 2024 |
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May 18, 2024 03:54
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It's the phenomenon where a lot of preparation for horrible storms is "worthless" because "almost nobody died", when the reason almost nobody dies is due to those very efforts.
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May 18, 2024 04:22
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Milo and POTUS posted:It's the phenomenon where a lot of preparation for horrible storms is "worthless" because "almost nobody died", when the reason almost nobody dies is due to those very efforts. See also; COVID vaccines.
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May 18, 2024 04:36
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I remember the hysteria around Y2K being completely wild. It seemed like everyone who had a theory, no matter how out there, was given equal representation in people's heads. My dad thought that the family computer would literally self-destruct because it would think the date was 1900 instead of 2000 and computers didn't exist back then! This paradox would overload the computer or something, so he put the computer outside in case it exploded when the new year rolled around.
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May 18, 2024 05:31
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The internet’s complete overhaul post-bubble ruined basically everything. Even from 1995-2000, dot com companies were a novelty or a modest pivot from existing companies. Oh boy, I can buy dog food on the internet. The companies that survived eventually mostly became massive assholes dominating their sectors and the internet has become pervasive in every minute aspect of modern human existence. This has pivoted our attention, our capacity to pay attention, and created a massive competitive market to capture that attention for purely marketing/political ends using technology and methodologies that the vast majority of people are powerless to even perceive, much less resist. These aren’t necessarily new concepts, but the internet has made them vastly more effective, Duran Duran was already griping in 1993, and that was just TV. We spend way too much time thinking way too much about entirely that wrong things. You from the 90s would have nothing to discuss or in common with the you of today and you’d swiftly receive a talk to the hand.
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May 18, 2024 05:59
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AlternateAccount posted:The internet’s complete overhaul post-bubble ruined basically everything. I think I've just been Norvilled.
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May 18, 2024 06:30
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The consensus I've heard about y2k is that we don't really know. There's some countries that prepared a lot for y2k and some countries that pretty much ignored it and nothing really happened anywhere but that still doesn't mean that nothing would have happened because a lot of systems the countries that didn't prepare were based on systems from countries that did care.
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May 18, 2024 07:39
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In general when you're dealing with the possibility of catastrophic failures the best possible outcome is one where you don't know how bad it could've been.
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May 18, 2024 15:23
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The '90s obviously ended with the founding of Something Awful in November 16th, 1999.
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May 18, 2024 16:38
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^^^that heralded the beginning of the New Dark Age where we are nowNeddy Seagoon posted:See also; COVID vaccines. Moreover, I’d say measles, and in the future, polio vaccines
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May 18, 2024 18:26
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BoldFace posted:The '90s obviously ended with the founding of Something Awful in November 16th, 1999. Something Awful made us all stupid
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May 18, 2024 18:31
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Milo and POTUS posted:Something Awful made us all stupid I was already stupid, Something Awful just kept me that way
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May 18, 2024 18:32
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You could make an argument it was one of the first platforms for radicalized thinking to spread unchecked. 4chan and Reddit, spinning off of this forum either directly or indirectly, are very serious influencers in the internet and it all started here. So yeah, SA is the first Apocalyptic Trumpet.
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May 18, 2024 20:20
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SA is a Pandora's Box.
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May 18, 2024 20:29
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Look at this Pandora's huge box
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May 18, 2024 20:35
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Your poison website is making the Internet too loving stupid.
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May 18, 2024 20:36
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dialhforhero posted:You could make an argument it was one of the first platforms for radicalized thinking to spread unchecked. 4chan and Reddit, spinning off of this forum either directly or indirectly, are very serious influencers in the internet and it all started here. Is it though? There have been, and still are, a lot of broke-brained people here, but one of the major things about the Awful Forums was that it has a paid entry point, albeit a very small one, and that the mods, despite the many flaws we’ve witnessed over the last quarter century, have been very effective at keeping things relatively civil. 4chan, by comparison, is the cesspool that the media should have been referring to rather than SA.
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May 18, 2024 20:46
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It’s us, via shitposting we are become the harbingers of death, destroyer of worlds.
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May 18, 2024 20:47
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root beer posted:Is it though? There have been, and still are, a lot of broke-brained people here, but one of the major things about the Awful Forums was that it has a paid entry point, albeit a very small one, and that the mods, despite the many flaws we’ve witnessed over the last quarter century, have been very effective at keeping things relatively civil. 4chan, by comparison, is the cesspool that the media should have been referring to rather than SA. It is the progenitor no matter how you look at it. The proto, if you will.
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May 18, 2024 21:00
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The amount of people I've seen that will just nonchalantly say they used to/grew up posting on 4chan is mind boggling sometimes. I don't even tell people I post on Something Awful.
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May 18, 2024 21:01
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Unperson_47 posted:The amount of people I've seen that will just nonchalantly say they used to/grew up posting on 4chan is mind boggling sometimes. I don't even tell people I post on Something Awful. Say "4chan" aloud in a federal prison and find out how quickly you need to produce paperwork proving you're not incarcerated for a sex crime. edit: having knowledge of the Internet already makes you suspect, but most federal inmates have no idea what a "4chan" is, except that it's a thing 100% of sex offenders have in common.
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May 18, 2024 21:27
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AlternateAccount posted:You from the 90s would have nothing to discuss or in common with the you of today and you’d swiftly receive a talk to the hand. Me from the 90's would be really shocked and confused about almost every aspect of the me of today.
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May 19, 2024 00:26
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dialhforhero posted:You could make an argument it was one of the first platforms for radicalized thinking to spread unchecked. 4chan and Reddit, spinning off of this forum either directly or indirectly, are very serious influencers in the internet and it all started here. (the tweet about something something you can draw a line from lowtax banning hentai to the storming of the Capitol, or whatever it was, here)
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May 19, 2024 02:15
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Animal-Mother posted:Me from the 90's would be really shocked and confused about almost every aspect of the me of today. Our '90s selves would barely understand a lot of our lingo today - Twitter, tweets, etc. I envy them their comparatively more innocent 1990s internet.
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May 19, 2024 02:24
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It was truly a more radical - and, perhaps, even tubular - time. (the 90s also sucked but just not in this particular way)
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May 19, 2024 02:30
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