13 things you’ll only understand if you lived through the ’90s
13 things you’ll only understand if you lived through the ’90s
Daniel BukszpanSat, March 7, 2026 at 2:57 PM UTC
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As If
It’s 2026, and the 1994 death of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain is now roughly as distant in time as the John F. Kennedy assassination was when In Utero first hit the airwaves. In other words, it’s not merely that three decades have passed—we might as well be discussing a different universe entirely.
If you truly want to grasp the profound cultural shift between the 1990s and today, you only need to compare the defining moments and everyday realities of that era with our current landscape. Unless you lived through it, it’s genuinely challenging to convey the lived experience of the 90s to someone in 2026. However, you can bet your Collective Soul compact disc that we’re going to try our best to bridge that gap.
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1. AOL Adding New Art
In the 1990s, AOL was the only internet service of note that was accessible to regular Joes. It promised you the world at your fingertips, but the truth is it took forever just to start up, and much of that time was spent seething with hatred as the software said it was “adding new art.” This process took ages and could not be stopped, no matter how many times you frantically hit “Cancel.”
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2. Awkward Silences
Awkward silences still exist, but as of 2007, we can endure them by playing on our iPhones until the moment passes. In the 1990s, if you were trapped in a room with someone you didn’t like and neither one of you could leave, you just had to sit there and tolerate it until some outside circumstance interrupted the proceedings, like an earthquake.
Image Credit: Coasterlover1994 / Wikimedia Commons.
3. Blockbuster
Renting videos at Blockbuster was a way of life in the 1990s, as people piled in every Friday night to rent the latest Pauly Shore VHS. All that technology was rendered obsolete decades ago. Still, nothing can replace the thrill of spending 90 minutes in the store trying to find something watchable after all the good titles had been rented out ahead of you.
Image Credit: Amazon.com.
4. CD Carousels
Most of us listen to music on streaming services. If you’re feeling indecisive about what you want to hear, services like Spotify will allow you to put all the recorded works of countless artists on perpetual shuffle play. If you enjoyed that experience in the 1990s, the most technology could offer was the CD carousel tray, which held five discs and could shuffle them indiscriminately. This may be a nostalgia article, but today’s technology is way better.
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5. CD Wallets
If you wanted to take your voluminous music collection on the road in the 1990s, the good news was that there was a simple solution – the CD wallet. This media conveyance had pockets into which you would slide discs for safe storage and slide them out to impress your friends with the many hip titles. Unfortunately, the CD wallet coincided with a period in which many bands didn’t put their name, tracklist, or album title on their discs, so you sometimes weren’t sure which disc was which.
Image Credit: IMDB.
6. Crying at ‘Titanic’
Don’t even pretend that when you saw “Titanic” in the theater in 1997, it didn’t upset you as you watched the doomed love story of Kate Winslet’s Rose and Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jack. Deny it all you want. We don’t believe you. We think you went back to see it a second time, alone, bearing a roll of toilet paper so you could keep yourself clean during three hours of hysterical and anonymous weeping.
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7. ‘The Joy of Painting’
The late painter Bob Ross is still a beloved figure, and episodes of his instructional television show, “The Joy of Painting,” are readily available on YouTube, so it’s not like no one today knows who he was. And that’s precisely the issue. When you accidentally stumbled upon his show for the first time in the 1990s, it took many viewings before you realized it wasn’t a joke. Fun fact: Ross was an Air Force veteran, and being stationed in Alaska made him like to paint snow-capped mountains.
Image Credit: Rn.brito / Wikipedia.
8. Lollapalooza
The Lollapalooza festival was initially envisioned as a one-time-only farewell tour for Jane’s Addiction with many other alternative bands. It became a recurring festival, and for young concertgoers at the time, it was a rite of passage. The festival was parodied on “The Simpsons,” and that episode, titled “Homerpalooza,” is one of the best episodes in the show’s history.
Image Credit: SerhiiBobyk/istockphoto.
9. Moviefone
In the 1990s, if you wanted to go to the movies, you had to call Moviefone to get the name of the theater playing the desired movie and the showtime. It was a valuable service in the pre-internet age, to be sure, but the whole thing involved listening to some dude with an extremely grating voice bark theater names and movie running times at you until you could mercifully hang up.
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10. Music Listening Stations
In the 1990s, many record stores did their customers a solid by offering listening stations where they could hear new music and decide whether or not to buy it. This was usually limited to major new releases, but occasionally, you could find something you’d never heard of before, and it would be a real gem that you might never have heard otherwise.
Image Credit: CNN / YouTube.
11. The OJ Simpson Bronco Chase
If you want to feel really old, ask your teenager if he or she knows why OJ Simpson (who died on April 10) was being chased in his Bronco on the freeway in 1994. When your kid stares blankly at you like you’re crazy, explain that authorities wanted OJ Simpson on suspicion of being involved in the murder of his ex-wife. When the blank stare doesn’t go away, say that OJ Simpson used to be a football player. If there’s still no response, drop the subject entirely and watch “The Naked Gun.”
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12. Really Unpleasant Alarm Clocks
The smartphone has made it possible for anyone to wake up at the desired time of day to the sound of their favorite ringtone or music. It’s a pleasant way to wake up, but if you really want to be awakened effectively, you need the type of old-school digital alarm clock that was ubiquitous in the 1990s. Most of them had only one alarm, and it was absolutely jarring and woke you up in the most unpleasant way possible. It did, however, always wake you up 100% of the time, if offensively.
Image Credit: Depositphotos.com.
13. The Sound of a Connecting Dial-Up Modem
As bad/effective as the alarm clock sound was during the Clinton years, it could not possibly compete with the most horrible sound in human history, the sound of a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. Some have joked that it sounded like robots screaming, and they ain’t kidding. The next time you’re woken up at 3:00 in the morning by a car alarm going off outside your bedroom window, just be glad it doesn’t sound like this.
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Source: “AOL Entertainment”
