Today’s kids will never know… It may sound cliché. Unless, of course, you lived through the ’90s. Telephones were attached to the wall, the internet screeched at us like an angry aunt, we mastered the art of rewinding a VHS tape before returning it to the store, and our Tamagotchis sometimes got more attention than our actual pets.
It was a time of slow living and carefree fun. Riding bikes, running through sprinklers, and waiting for the next episode of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air were all the order of the day. Instant gratification wasn’t a thing. We painstakingly developed film to finally see what photographs we’d taken (sometimes none) and we listened for hours until our favorite songs came on the radio.
Many a millennial’s favorite decade may be long gone but the memories live on in the form of nostalgic memes. Bored Panda has put together a few of the best from an Instagram account called 90snostalgiagirl86_. It has more than 258,000 followers and is a wall of posts that might have you feeling like the 90s never left.
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Today’s kids will never know the struggle (or joy) of looking up facts using physical books, home encyclopedias, or browsing the school library. They have Google, Wikipedia and fun fact listicles carefully curated by Bored Panda.
They’ll probably never experience dial-up internet, VHS tapes, cassette tapes, landline phones, and having to wait an entire week to watch a new show episode on “appointment”.
It goes without saying that you won’t find them looking through the TV guide in a magazine or newspaper, to double-check what day and time a movie or show will air. Nor will they painstakingly page through a massive telephone directory of alphabetical surnames to find someone’s number or address.
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Kids of today will never know what it’s like to have a pen pal. To hand-write letters in perfect cursive, place them in an envelope with the correct postage stamp, and set off to the nearest post office to send them on their merry way.
They sadly might not experience the joy of receiving matching stationery sets as a birthday or Christmas gift. And they probably won’t pass folded notes around in class, hoping not to be caught before their friend reads what they’re itching to say…
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Kids of today communicate via texts, social networking, instant messaging, online gaming, and get lost in virtual worlds (like Minecraft).
Kids of the 90s got lost in the real world. We explored the neighborhood on our bicycles, walked to visit our friends, roller-skated to the park, and used paper maps to find our way around. Screen time wasn’t even a thing for us…
We had hide-and-seek, hopscotch, puzzles and board games. We built treehouses, scraped our knees, and had hours of fun with nothing but our imaginations and a few pebbles we’d found in the garden.
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“90s kids had the golden age of toys: Tamagotchis, Beanie Babies, and action figures. Board games like Monopoly and Uno were family games. The simplicity of toys brought time to spend with family,” reads a column in The Sun.
“By the 2000s, toys had gone high-tech. Kids moved from Tamagotchis to virtual pets and from Game Boys to gaming online games like the PubG and Free Fire. Even physical toys often came with digital add-ons,” it adds.
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Kids of today will never know the love and effort that went into making a mix tape for your crush. It often meant first getting a blank cassette tape, then either carefully timing tracks on a 60- or 90-minute tape using a dual-deck stereo player, or recording straight off the radio. That, of course, meant waiting for certain songs to come on. Or calling in to request them…
We made sure to cut out the DJ talking, and we carefully curated our songs so that they told the perfect love story.
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“Unfortunately, sending someone a link to a playlist just doesn’t have the same charm as giving them a physical mixtape with a cute label on it. And while you can easily play your playlist with high-quality audio while driving, there is still that nostalgic feeling of flipping through a cassette case while trying to focus on the road,” writes Milo Denison, the host of The 80s and 90s Uncensored podcast.
“Despite the benefits of modern technology, those of us who remember the old days will always miss that sense of nostalgia that goes along with the days of making mixtapes,” the mix tape expert adds.
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