Well, “the future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES.
You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical.
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† Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.
- Few people had computers. It was not reasonable to meet someone and expect that they know how to operate, say, a word processor. All of my homework was done by hand, including essays and long-form writing. All research was done in libraries amongst musty shelves and microfilm viewers.
- Even amongst the few families with computers that I knew about, I was definitely the first to get a CD-ROM drive. Storing mass amounts of data on a disc was brand spanking new. The default storage media for data was 1.44MB 3.5" floppies.
- We had VCRs. Most people did at that point, but they were still expensive beasts, much more so than the $50 DVD players we can purchase today.
- Walkmen were still huge. Mixtapes were still huge.
- Cell phones? What a bigshot you are!
- Game consoles were very popular and not at all rare. It was the SNES vs. the Genesis at that point I think.
- The internet "existed" - but was not at all in a state that we are familiar with today. More people used closed networks like CompuServe and AOL than the open web as we use it today. Even then, it was not at all reasonable to expect someone to have an email address at all. People had sort of heard of this "internet" thing but most people still didn't even know what it really was.
My dad had a Compaq laptop and an Ericsson cellphone in -93, and I got my first cellphone in -96 (I was 22). I've had broadband internet (not dial-up) since -97. Scandinavia was quite ahead of the curve when it came to cellphone adoption and internet stuff.
Well, I live in the UK, so maybe things were different? I was under the impression we were pretty backward round here, though. I was 18 in 1995, so I (think I) remember it fairly well.
It's true that my dad was always a bit of an early adopter. We had a VCR in 1983, and a CD player in 1986, and a home computer in 1982 - now all that WAS unusual.
But that was then. By 1995, all par for the course. Almost everybody I knew had a VCR, pretty much everybody had a CD player, and basically everybody had a computer (and it was always a PC - very different from even 2-3 years previously). I wasn't even the only person I knew to have a computer small enough to fit in my pocket (and I think my Psion was old hat by 1995 anyway).
Mobile phones weren't terribly common in 1995, but nor were they particularly rare, and people were certainly familiar with the notion. (I vaguely remember mobile phones being used in the early series of the X-Files, and that this was noted in the press at the time.) By late 1998 (if I remember correctly?) pretty much everybody had one, so even if 1995 is too early for mobile phones to truly count as common technology it is not a stretch to class them as being common "around that sort of time".
I stand by my statement: you have to start further back than 1995, if 2011 is to seem like science fiction! Even if you're going to call me on my privileged upbringing (I blame the parents...), and perhaps suggest that this was not the case for the majority of the population (you tell me...), the technologies were common enough and well-known enough, that there's not enough difference between 2011 and 1995 to count!
Go back ten more years, maybe.
(But then, maybe not. Perhaps if I had been 18 in 1985, today would seem like a smooth transition? Hard to say. But I'll stand by my statements, from my perspective, which I'm afraid is the only one I've got ;)
Very few people I knew in 1995 had a computer. We got our first one Christmas 1998 and a 56k modem in January 2000. Everyone had a VCR, we were pretty much the exception so that doesn’t really count. But the mobile phones of 1995 really are a far cry from the mobile phones of 2011. It’s ridiculous to even compare. The concept of calling everywhere might have been possible in 1995, the concept of using a smartphone? Our family, by the way, got their first mobile phone in 2001. A cheap Nokia 3410 that could do nothing.
I was seven in 1995 so I don’t remember all that much but we had no computer†, no VCR and certainly no mobile phones. My dad got a car phone for his company car around that time. I think we also just got our first cordless phone around the time (the batteries were constantly empty and it never worked quite right) and we bought our first CD player two years earlier. I sometimes played Tetris on my aunt’s Game Boy and Super Mario Kart as well as SimCity on a friend’s SNES.
You seem like a terribly early adopter, even of technologies that in the end went nowhere. I would be surprised if you experience were in any way typical.
—
† Not just at home but also at work: My dad is a construction engineer responsible for all water supply projects in a small to mid sized engineering firm and didn’t routinely use a computer for his work in 1995. I always thought that was kind of funny considering he did learn how to program (rudimentary, mostly for structural analysis) at college in the late 70s and early 80s.