Tell me about your pre-2005 experiences

[FalseReality]

Born in 2000.
First memory is being in my dad's room and then crying when he came in because I thought he shouted at me so he beat me. Don't remember the beating but next I remember saying he promised not to hit me and making him promise not to again. My guess is it's 2002/3 because I recall it as my first memory.
I remember my mum leaving the house when my sister was about to be born in 2003. I didn't know at the time that was what was happening.
I met a kid in Reception (first year of primary school) with my name in 2003/4. I recall having jokes about having the same name but I don't remember ever talking to them again and I know for sure they weren't there the next year. Never met anyone my age with my name again (I think 2 other ages though).
I rememberf in this guy kept turning around in assembly and telling me to be quiet, I wasn't talking so I decided to tap my two fists horizontally, thinking of building I think. Then when we were back in class the teacher brought it up saying that I didn't stop talking and instead did the fist thing. Then she gave the whole class but me a sticker. I thought it was wrong but I didn't say anything. For some reason I thought it was possible I had been speaking and I didn't know. Guess I've always been a doubtful avoidant.

 

[AMC_Squared]

I had to come back to this thread because I had a recollection of life in the mid 2000's again. Back in 2004, I recollect myself coming back from Blockbuster to watch Polar Express with my family and we went to an Oxxo to get some snacks for the movie. I remember that my parents bought this Powerpuff Girls Cereal that I can still remember how it tasted to this day. The only other sweets I am able to remember the taste of but have not been able to find that taste again would be Hubba Bubba Ouch! Gum that we got from that convenience store. Everything tasted better in the 2000's, but then again they used excessive amount of sugar on sweets too.

 

[Tintin]

I was also born in 2001 but I still remember stuff we used to do in my old preschool. I vaguely remember them teaching us how to use Microsoft 3D Movie Maker on the boxy desktop computers and I remember that I had an autistic friend named Oscar that I used to hang out with in that class.

Boxy desktop computers. I have great memories of these...

 

[Tintin]

Dude, i can't, i was 3 years old in 2005, can you be more flexible and give me the opportunity to talk about the pre 2010's at least

Tell me!!!
I love the whole space of time between 2000-2010

 

[Tintin]

I had to come back to this thread because I had a recollection of life in the mid 2000's again. Back in 2004, I recollect myself coming back from Blockbuster to watch Polar Express with my family and we went to an Oxxo to get some snacks for the movie. I remember that my parents bought this Powerpuff Girls Cereal that I can still remember how it tasted to this day. The only other sweets I am able to remember the taste of but have not been able to find that taste again would be Hubba Bubba Ouch! Gum that we got from that convenience store. Everything tasted better in the 2000's, but then again they used excessive amount of sugar on sweets too.

That's nice, I see you have really vivid memories of that time.

 

[Tintin]

Born in 2000.
First memory is being in my dad's room and then crying when he came in because I thought he shouted at me so he beat me. Don't remember the beating but next I remember saying he promised not to hit me and making him promise not to again. My guess is it's 2002/3 because I recall it as my first memory.
I remember my mum leaving the house when my sister was about to be born in 2003. I didn't know at the time that was what was happening.
I met a kid in Reception (first year of primary school) with my name in 2003/4. I recall having jokes about having the same name but I don't remember ever talking to them again and I know for sure they weren't there the next year. Never met anyone my age with my name again (I think 2 other ages though).
I rememberf in this guy kept turning around in assembly and telling me to be quiet, I wasn't talking so I decided to tap my two fists horizontally, thinking of building I think. Then when we were back in class the teacher brought it up saying that I didn't stop talking and instead did the fist thing. Then she gave the whole class but me a sticker. I thought it was wrong but I didn't say anything. For some reason I thought it was possible I had been speaking and I didn't know. Guess I've always been a doubtful avoidant.

Where I studied there was only one other kid with my name. And the only other guy with around the same age as me with the same name aswell. We lived in the same neighbourhood so we would always play football together with ther friends.
Those first years in school, I made a nice friend, we are still best friends to this day

 

[Tintin]

It's not something that can be put into words, really. People were pretty normal. Lived normal lives, ate normal food. Media was passive

the air was different even. The sun felt different, shit was more innocent. Morals existed

idk, if you weren't there, you won't get it

I have the same feeling when I think about 2007-2012. This last 10 years were full of confusing things, media and people.
It seems as if everything was much more simple back then when I was a kid. Also the moral values my parents luckily got me to learn are apparently dead by now. World changed so much with the digital evolution and social media, I guess.

 

[Tintin]

I was born in 1984. I turned 21 in 2005. I think this story about when I was in high school best relates the difference between pre-2005 and now. I remember going to my friend's house and his mom answered the door. She said he had gone to walk to the store, a good 20-30 minute walk from where I was living. So I went to catch up to him, I saw him maybe half a kilometre ahead of me. I sang out, but he couldn't hear me. We were almost to the store by the time I caught up with him. That whole type of situation was typical and is practically impossible nowadays. Don't get me wrong, I miss situations like I'm describing here where you just have to find people and catch up to them or whatever. Just imagine life today if you weren't in constant contact with all your friends and family. No sending a quick text. You could only talk to someone if your were with them or if you were both at home and could answer the phone or talk on something like MSN or email.

Another good one: I remember leaving school to get lunch at a gas station, and we had no idea the September 11th attacks happened until we got back to school nearly an hour later. Our lunch time started at I think 11:15 or 11:30, and the first attack did not happen until after 10:00 local time, so we had no idea what was going on until almost two hours after the first tower was hit. Just the speed of information in general was a lot slower, so it took maybe a half hour or more for word of what happened to get to our local news stations, and then when it did reach the local media and the little local TV station started playing the now infamous footage on an endless loop, we were out on a walking trail eating gas station hotdogs with no way to communicate with anyone who wasn't in the immediate vicinity. If that were today, I bet we would have know a plane flew into the World Trade Centre within 10 minutes.

Wow that communication difference is really something when we stop to think about it, right?
Because I remember that in 2010, for example, I was 9 years old and there was still this lack of communication, things weren't that fast as they are now with the cellphones. I think this ultra fast era makes us miss the important part of the connections: that they can cease. and we have to enjoy them.

Things got really fast these last years, it gets me overwhelmed at times...

 

[Tintin]

The year is 1999. My dad brings home a big ass, clunky yellowish box with a screen in it. He plugs a different shaped yellowish box with no screen into it. He hits a button. A black screen with 'Windows 95' was displayed for a bit before a blue background with grey boxes all over it popped into place. Another button and and there's a large whirring and the grinding of gears as a slot on the screenless box opens. My dad drops a CD into it. Button. Whirring and gears. He clicks some stuff with a wired contraption. Then he plugs in what looks to be an arcade joystick with buttons on it. Next thing I know, I'm using that stick to fly an F-16 fighter jet and blow other fighter jets out of the sky. I blow up. I'm dead. The dude from Alien goes "GAME OVER MAN, GAME OVER" in terrible audio quality.

1 year later...
I get on the computer. My dad walks over to a device and plugs it into the computer. He clicks some stuff. LOUD BEEPING. BEEPING OF ALL KINDS. IT FEELS LIKE IT GOES ON FOREVER. MY 6 YEAR OLD EARS HURT. Then my dad tells me, "This is the internet." He then proceeds to show me how to use email through a service called 'Yahoo!'.

THAT MUST HAVE BEEN AWESOME
I love the idea that your generation saw everything happening right in front of your eyes. There is a big difference between seeing THIS happening and seeing snapchat and facebook. Something in the ''old'' innovations is so charming, we lost touch of it nowadays where everything is so fast and connected.

 

[Tintin]

I remember not having access to a computer until 2002, but I remember the years 1998-2001. I hung out a lot with my sister and some neighborhood kids. I used my imagination a lot as a kid and did a lot of fun things with my sister. We liked to do random projects just for the fun of it. We would collect things, anything from Pokemon cards to rocks. We would do random dumb things, like create a "pillow factory" out of different fabrics we found for sale at the craft store. I was really obsessed with the Lion King and I remember being fascinated by the idea of the Internet, sites like Fox Kids and Neopets. I don't think it's any better than today except for I think adults did talk to each other more without a huge suspicion. I was a very shy kid so I don't know if I would have liked being much older. I think that people are a lot less judgmental in a few different ways now, grass is always greener, and in general I think that you can have deeper relationships with people now if you work on it.

Interesting, all older people I know tell me that solid relations are gone for now.
In a way, I believe that our technological development reflects on the way we deal with people and ourselves, which makes us kinda distant from other people. But I don't know how that was before, so...

I just find it interesting how things had to be developed before in a slower way, from relations to connections to things in general. And how creative you guys were and how this contact of having fun with other kids etc. still existed.

Grass is always greener, as you said haha

 

[Tintin]

I was born December 1980, so the parts of the 80s I *think* I remember are pretty late in the decade and sorta blend in with the early 90s. We were in the Midwest and didn't have a ton of money either, so I think we were kind of priced out of actually living in the 80s; it was more like living in a more run-down version of the 70s with different music on the radio (also the same music from before. And, thanks to syndication, the same tv too. I think the rapidly expanding landfill media space + being lower class in the era make up the genetics of of h-pop). IMO people in my age cohort who have these vital, unique 80s memories- the kind the Ready Player One guy can't stop stroking it over- were middle class or higher.

By the mid 90s my mom had started making real money and I was entering adolescence so that's where my nostalgia really starts. It felt like the world was opening up and that End of History neolib human project was actually working. The future felt really limitless, and the present seemed like a safe mystery- like we were all in this big, fun line for a Disney ride called The Future and were having a good time distracting ourselves checking out cable tv, weird crap on this new internet thing, music, and spectacle-based Hollywood events. At the same time everyone was really horny for conspiracy theory media and millennialism, so obviously we were also subconsciously worried about what we were going to experience when were got to the head of the line.

Then Bush won and everything felt kind of shitty all at once. Bill Clinton definitely represented the previous era and its optimism, earned or not, and removing him without selecting Gore to replace just made everyone feel like something was over. Then 9/11 finished what Bush's appointment started, shattering the West's sense of security and thereby faith in the world-colonizing human project, and sowed the seeds for where we're at today, since they're still trying to do it, but no one trusts it anymore and have broken off into increasingly closed-off tribes. Media really started shitting the bed too and felt tacky and lame. 1999's The Matrix vs 2003 Matrix Revolutions is a great contrast; the first movie was a big, bombastic experience that oozed style and craft and had this tight, effective story that propelled the viewer through a terrific experience and the sequel felt like a couple hours of really jittery, expensive video game cutscenes. The real world and the virtual media world felt like a complete mess, and the fungal growth we call the present has grown out of the center of it.

This perspective from the United States is really good to read. How things started to fall down in the imaginary of people after the attacks and reality started to kick in with its new technological ways of living. Still have some memories of watching Matrix with my dad when I was 7 (2008) for the first time, he as telling me about how the movie was a blast and everyone talked about it.
My mom used to tell me about the conspiracy theories of the new century, over here where I live people used to think that the world was going to end in 2000.

We also lived a really optimistic era in the 2000s in my country, that's probably the main reason why I think that those days were the best, the country was flying, people were happier and we could buy thinks at the market...
''Good old days'' come even for a 20year old kiddo like me.

 

[Tintin]

I was 17 when 9/11 happened so I have a pretty good grasp on what the world was like before then. Columbine was really what set off the push for mass surveillance under the premise of safety and the development of different technologies in order to facilitate that, 9/11 was what officially sealed the deal everywhere. We spent a lot more time outdoors riding our bikes and exploring our neighborhoods, going to see local bands play at seedy little venues without parents and not being IDed to buy alcohol if the right bartenders were working, we smoked cigarettes underage and indoors, we also liked going to the mall to hang out and shop(lift). Most of us didn't have a phone strapped to us 24/7 so stopping by a friend or family member's house unexpectedly was much more common. Really the biggest difference between then and now was the freedom of knowing you could do something completely stupid, maybe even incredibly dangerous, and it likely wouldn't end up on the internet somewhere.

Most of the answers here come from americans. Being in South America, I believe that the most iconic thing is how all of you guys point the 9/11 as the biggest event that settled the world and the ocident as it is now in terms of security and political views.
As of my childhood days, I spent most of the time inside playing videogames, but also went out with some cousins and friends to play football. Smartphones weren't really a thing so that's what we used to do to have fun back then, riding our bikes, playing football, running after each other, hide and seek... simple things.

I think the ''simple'' lost itself now, politically considering the 9/11 as a turning point as you mentioned, and socially when we talk about the development of technology.

 

[grap]

There was a book series called Uncle John's Bathroom Reader. They were filled with, like, random facts about everything from insects to movie stars. The idea was that you put it in your bathroom because there's nothing to do while you're pooping or taking a bath, I think. My dad liked them, so they were always laying around. Sometimes there was stuff about sex in them which was always pretty exciting.

I got a flip phone when I was probably 14 or 15. Texting was awesome when you could remember life without it. It was also a lot harder, and you paid by the message so mom would always get mad if I did it too much. You also got charged if someone else texted you, so I had to tell all my friends "don't text me."

I was too young on September 11 to remember feeling free from surveillance, or geopolitical anxiety, or whatever. But I can remember how adults were acting and it makes a lot more sense to me as an adult in the pandemic.

Obviously people would kick you off the internet when they wanted to use the phone during the dialup years. I can't imagine who they were calling, though? AOL chat rooms for teenagers had mods, and it was probably basically discord, but I remember it being like the wild west.

Email or MySpace messages were the ways I talked to people I had a crush on. That was also really fun, because it made more sense to send longer messages. I doubt they were more thoughtful, but they were longer.

The John Kerry/George Bush election was fun. There were a lot of really silly Flash videos circulating and everyone was wondering how it was possible for regular people to make digital video.

 

[handoferis]

Oh, a bunch of stuff:

I remember going into an airport in the 90s, all the way up to the gate with my grandpa, and watching the planes take off while he waited for his flight.

I remember getting my first PC and eventually getting the internet solely because I'd read all of Encarta and wanted more.

iPods becoming a thing was also pretty wild as well, going from having maybe one cassette or CD with you at a time to all of your music was insane.

 

[YourOtherLeft]

Pre 2005 I was in elementary school. I'd go about my day and then I'd go home and pop Battlefront II in my fat PS2 and play till the wee hours in the morning. Life was good.

 

[jaedaen]

I think we all have these feelings about our younger years, unless they were horribly traumatic or something. It's a kind of magic, a feeling of saudade for a time that is now dead and will never come again. I'm sure you younger travelers have the same feelings about the 00s as I do about the 80s, only the context is different. I was in my 20s in the 00s, and so by that time, a certain cynicism overtakes you, so I didn't see it in the same way you did, most likely.

For me, in the 80s and 90s, it was about adventure and freedom. I remember playing without any supervision inside bent open sewer gates. I remember wandering the neighborhood with friends, stopping by the local Circle K to see if my Street Fighter 2 high score was still on the arcade machine there. I remember playing my buddy's homebrew tabletop RPG, back when doing things like this was not at all cool and generally anathema to non-nerds. I remember getting mad at a friend's sleepover and storming off to walk home, many blocks away, in the dead of night.

I remember being so afraid when we think we got our first virus in the late 80s/early 90s, pacing around the computer room in anxiety. I remember downloading an antivirus on a BBS to fix it and having it be a joke program and being irritated, a 100k file back in those days might take 30 minutes to download.

I remember waiting until my parents went to bed, sneaking past their bedroom in to the computer room, and covering the modem with a pillow. Those modems were LOUD when you dialed a BBS. I remember watching my first porn picture on a BBS, titled 'American girl peeing standing up'. You didn't get a thumbnail or anything back then, you had to trust the title. Sometimes the uploader would troll you by mistitling it and would upload a tractor pic or something, and you'd be irritated, lose your wood, and just head back to bed. Back in those days, as you downloaded a picture, you would start to see it line by line, one at a time. "Here comes a nipple!", you'd think, and you'd get excited. I remember reading a lot more erotic stories than pictures, those were much quicker to access.

Videos were absolutely out of the question when it came to computer porn, as they were far too large to even consider. A friend of a friend did have a coveted VHS porn tape though, Rainwoman III. Hairy bush was the thing back then. We would watch it and masturbate together but put up couch cushion walls out of necessity, as we didn't really want to be in the same room together doing it, but there was no other way. Eventually, his mom found it, and dramatically backed over it with her car.

I think I saw my first avi file on windows 95, Weezer's 'Buddy Holly' music video. It blew my mind at the time. I remember having a collection of wav sound effects as well and listening to them, thinking how cool it was that you could do such a thing.

I remember my first proto MMO, The Sierra Network, or TSN (later called Imagination, I think) around 10 years old. There were a ton of different minigames, and the big RPG Shadow Of Yserbius. I remember knowing nothing and having others guide me through even the basics to eventually being that person, leading parties through convoluted quests in twisty mazes. I remember people that were, in retrospect, obviously pedophiles trying to get me to send them nude pictures of myself (through snail mail, lol). Something always felt a little weird, so I never went through with it. Feels gross just thinking about that.

I remember a time when I was very young that I would go with my grandma to the airport, right up to the gate, just so I could watch the planes take off. Pre 2001 was a completely different world, a far more innocent one. A similar break happened to previous generations when Kennedy was shot, I think, and the bar keeps moving along, away from innocence.

That's all I can remember at the moment. It feels like a 1000 years ago.

 

[Miku Simpson]

My pre 2005 experiences:
2004
>the wiggles were a big thing for me
>probably starting to grow teeth
>I was 2 years old,so i was probably in high school at that point idk
2003
>Probably learning to walk, talk, the usual
>Mashed food was a delicacy of those my age
>Began my world tour as a famous thespian
2002
>I was birthed and stuff
>a lot of poopin
2001 and before
>Travelling the cosmos promoting my new book "The Act of Law" where in an alternate world people get summed (like in jury duty) to perform in movies, so everyone gets a chance to perform in one of the hundreds of sequels to Fast and Furious. I was very busy in my prenatal years, now days I just live off the royalties

 

[Punp]

I've been thinking about this a lot. My experiences of growing up are set in the 90s in the UK.

Entertainment

I remember spending a lot of time bored. We had to "make our own fun" which often meant lying upside-down on the couch channel surfing or wandering around the house. At some point the family had a super old windows PC which had solitaire and paint - no internet connection or other games.

I remember asking my parents to buy me toys when we went for the weekly shop and spending ages in the toy aisle picking them out. I remember having a toy from an Alien spin-off with big plastic wings and a second mouth that ejected pneumatically by squeezing the head. There were big revolutions in gaming at the time. You'd walk up and down the toy aisle hoping for something new and cool that you could champion in the playground. There was a boy's section and a girl's section - the girl's section was usually bright pink and pastels, and the boys were reds, blacks and exciting neon colours. Hand-held digimon games that ran on watch batteries were one of those toys, but I remember begging and begging for a gameboy and it being one of my most cherished items. Imagine: a piece of delicate, expensive, digital technology that was your very own that could fit in your pocket containing all your adventures. The N64 was a massive dive into new gaming, with Super Mario 64 being on of the first games I'd experienced where you could move in all directions. We used to be able to play those games on demo consoles at tech shops like Curry's, which mostly sold white goods like washing machines. Telephones were rudimentary and nowhere near the gleaming iphones. Sometimes my dad let me play with his phone which was not as exciting as you'd imagine - you could use a simple editor to make basic pixelart or simpler-than-midi tunes. Imagine the interface for that and then realise that the screen was maybe 25 pixels tall and 40 pixels wide and black and white.

The lego was much cooler back then too - it was simpler, with awesome dioramas on the front, with basic themes that you could adjust to whatever situation you wanted. I played games with my sibling and we'd make huge convoys of toys that would go from one room and visit another.

Education

I hated every minute of school. The primary school classes were maybe 20-25 kids, which in England has grown larger. There was a diverse mix of races - mostly Muslim Pakistani, British white, British/Carribean black, and Sikh. Race didn't seem like a thing that bothered us as kids, but as we got older we started being wary of it and tried to over-police ourselves against saying anything even potentially racist like talking about skin colour. In secondary school race became weaponised by minorities and Ali-G's "is it cos I'm black?" was heavily based on race relations at the time.

We got taught a lot of things that have never again been relevant in my life. Most of chemistry was a waste and I've never had to work out electron bonds or how to synthesise chemicals. We didn't even cover the lymph system in Biology which I've now come to understand is really important for basic human anatomy. Secondary school felt like advanced babysitting where kids could tear at each other for fun. There were a few incidents of knife crime that I can remember, but nothing where anyone got hurt. I have never been exposed to more human savagery and depravity than being at a secondary school.

Pornography

We didn't get the internet until I was almost sixteen, which meant access to pornography came in the form of the porn fairies who would leave torn porn magazines in bushes at parks. Sometimes you'd get lucky and be able to glimpse the page three of the SUN newspaper where there were topless women, or someone would bring a deck of adult playing cards to school. Pornography was a precious resource. If you wanted to see moving images you'd have to stay up until 1am with the TV turned down low and hope that there was some "art" film that glipsed boob for all of three seconds. Relying on your imagination and memory was important.

Food

Culturally we ate less meat becaused it was expensive and we often had a lot of leftovers which would last us through the week. My mother would prepare large meals that would feed the whole family on a very low budget - usually something like lasagne or pasta or a layered potato dish. We would buy vegetables from a vegetable shop at the local park.

Going to McDonalds was a "special treat" and it was widely accepted that all kids love mcDonalds and would eat it all the time if they could. There wasn't such a drive for healthy eating back then, and you would get awesome toys in the happy meals - including lego which I was suitably excited for. Back then there was a "girl's toy" and a "boy's toy" - I can't imagine that lasted long after the 2010s. Back then McDonalds were allowed to advertise directly to children and they took full advantage of that (Ronald McDonald is your friend!).


View: https://youtu.be/OWf3Tpdqh8M?t=213


(Also see the starting of the video to see how a e s t h e t i c old McDonalds layouts used to be. I'm coining the term burgerwave right now.)


World issues

There was no pressure of an imminent end of the world. Climate change was being played off as a hippie theory and not the looming reality it is today. We consumed plastic without a second thought about it, drinking from single-use, dense plastic bottles - but you had to be sure you didn't litter and threw your rubbish away in a bin so it could be magicked away somewhere invisible. We didn't have recycling for a long time. In the 90s the big thing was about how we had to plant more trees, and I participated in a few tree plantings. The rules were simple then too - more trees = everything fine. The world was very naieve to the damage being done by industry and personal consumption.

War seemed like something that happened far away in imaginary lands which sometimes came up as blurry footage on the evening news. It didn't feel like something that could just appear on your doorstep tomorrow, but that changed after September the 11th.




I hope that was helpful for you. Feel free to ask questions if you like.

 

[Punp]

I forgot to add - if you had to find something out you had to ask an adult, look it up in the dictionary, ask a teacher (who often didn't know or care), or ask your friends. There was no internet to consult.

Learning things about the games you owned involved calling a helpline, buying a guide, or playground rumour. I still remember the day I got a mew from a kid I barely knew at school. In hindsight he'd clearly cheated it, but at the time I was sure he'd been to Japan and brought it back with him.

 

[RIG]

i remember going to bjs (that store that's fucking massive and has everything jumbo.) idk what year but jak and daxter just came out and my grandma bought it for me.

i also remember the day grand turismo 4 released in 2004. my grandpa went and got it at release (he's a big racing game fan)