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Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

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Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#41

Post by jon-wood »

The thing I miss about development in the 90s is that building a web application (such as they were) didn’t involve knowing at least two tech stacks. The backend just queried a database and then spewed out some HTML. In many ways the way we do it now is far superior, and there’s a swathe of things you simply couldn’t do in a web browser back then, but at least it was simple.

Outside of tech? Life was not simple. These days I can arrange more or less anything with a few taps on the supercomputer I carry around in my pocket, with an internet connection that would have put anything but a large institution to shame in the 90s.

Want to listen to some obscure 70s album? In the 90s that’s weeks of scouring record stores.

Order some food? First I have to rummage around for the menu, then call them up and place the order, and finally hope they can find your place because if not your food’s arriving cold after they get back to the restaurant and call you for directions.

Watch a recently released film? You’ll have to drive into town and hope the video store has it in stock.

Go to a wedding in a town you don’t know? Lots of planning, and hope you don’t get lost along the way. I sometimes joke that I couldn’t make it to the end of my road without GPS now.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#42

Post by ricardobeat »

amelius wrote: post #26

You mean when computers ran at MHz speed as opposed to GHz? It took a lot more work to get a decent user experience.

But did it? Perceived speed has remained steady, using a computer in the 80s was not that different from today, only a lot less powerful. The UI for software like Photoshop is essentially the same 30 years later. VisiCalc and Lotus 123 were not that much slower than GDocs today. And we still have a hard time beating input latency from an Apple II: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#44

Post by api »

I don't think the 90s were any simpler, but I do miss some things.

Popular music was IMHO objectively better even in a pure composition sense and was much more interesting.

I also miss 90s cyberculture. There was a more genuine ethos of inventing and exploring and people would never have tolerated today's lockdown and surveillance stuff. I'm amazed at how the mobile revolution boiled that frog.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#45

Post by NeedMoreTea »

smacktoward wrote: post #8

Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you? Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people. But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they ofte…

> except it was a little harder to get a hold of people

Hmm. Really? Few call centres or queuing systems around yet. My bank had a local number that was answered in 3 rings - often by the same person. So did the phone and electric companies, and the tax office. They might actually remember you.

I probably couldn't ping a friend if they were out with the dog, or on holiday, and definitely not in the car - few had mobiles yet, though by the end of the 90s they were getting common enough.

A lot of things were indeed simpler as we've added needless complexity to loads of things. Adding complexity layers seems to be how we solve everything. Even politics was simpler - note I don't say better.

Then again a lot of things were fairly crap - VHS recorders, CRT TV, cassettes.

Computing was much more fun - far many more platforms - SunOS, Amiga, ST, PC, Apple, BeOS, etc, and it was still feasible to know all of the thing. Now it's more likely to be a small part of a much more complex whole, too big for an individual. That speaks of maturing, but also of over-complexity.

Swings and roundabouts really.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#46

Post by coldtea »

smacktoward wrote: post #8

Let me answer your question with another question. How old are you? Because I'm in my 40s, which means I was in my 20s during the 1990s. And from my perspective, it was not a notably simpler time back then than it is today. It was not some pastoral idyll, it was just a time a lot like now, except it was a little harder to get a hold of people. But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they ofte…

>But I do notice that when I talk to people in their 20s and 30s, they often talk about the '90s as some kind of dramatically simpler time. But that's not because of anything about the '90s; it's because they were children during the '90s, and people of all ages look back on their childhood as a simpler time.

That sounds like an easy copout.

Some eras are simpler than others, others are safer than others, some are more creative than others, and so on.

History is not some amorphous soup of self-same eras...

And yes, the 90s were kind of simpler than today in several areas.

In fact, "when I was younger things were simpler" is so empirically verifiable that it's almost a tautology, for most eras, and even more so for the 1950s-2020 era. Legislation was simpler, bureaucracy was simpler, technology was simpler, choices in many areas were much more constrained, and so on...

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#48

Post by sosborn »

andrewstuart wrote: post #25

In 1981, Electric Light Orchestra wrote about remembering the good old 1980's.... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBiPY8wDT0 Here's the lyrics: Remember the good old 1980's When things were so uncomplicated I wish I could go back there again And everything could be the same https://www.google.com/search?q=lyrics+ticket+to+the+moon&oq...

It's a refrain as old as time.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#49

Post by dvtrn »

zackmorris wrote: post #38

Yes, very much (I'm 41). The running joke with my friends is that my tag line should be "I miss the 90s". Some things were much better then than today, for example: * Children and adolescents had freedom that seems to have been lost today. However, I think that a young person's virtual self extends far out into the aether compared to Gen X. * The lack of cynicism today concerns me. There are so many very.bad.things h…

The lack of cynicism today concerns me

Interesting. I’m 6 years your junior and quite vividly remember the optimism of the 90’s but I find myself equally...erm...annoyed with the volume of cynicism now and kind of wish for a more optimistic vox politic.

And that statement alone comes with all sorts of caveats and qualifiers that would end up with this post being several volumes long just to point out “I recognize the challenges of both eras; today and yesterday but I’m sticking by the argument as delivered because reasons”.

In fact I had a quite literal shower though this afternoon after a jog through my neighborhood “I wonder if it’s possible to plot out the empowerment/cynicism index across generations and what that system of measurement would look like”

It’s fun to ponder.

Until it isn’t.

That’s not a value judgement. That just an opinionated observation.

Re: Ask HN: Do you miss 90s simplicity?

#50

Post by caymanjim »

lousken wrote: post #16

News websites https://web.archive.org/web/19990128201038/http://dnes.sezna... no spying, popups, animations, autoplaying videos, clickbait thumbnails... just a simple website with information now I have to use three addons just to get back this clean look

archive.org isn't archiving the spam. Websites were far, far worse visual and interactive experiences then. Everything blinked and scrolled, popups were rampant and almost impossible to dismiss, there were no ad blockers. It was a nightmare. There weren't sophisticated ad tracking systems or geolocation databases for targeted advertising, but there was far less privacy and security.
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