What was England like in late 1998/early 1999?

[breaksinthedayforyou]

Interested to know.

I am a late 90s baby and can't believe that was now over 25 years ago

One of my earliest memories is going into Woolworths in Poplar. I was in a buggy and remember feeling cold

It randomly occurred to me that 1998, my birth year, is going to sound ancient to my own grandchildren/great grandchildren. Much like my great grandmother shocking my mum years ago by being born 'in the 1800s' 😃

The text speak was because there was no predictive text - you used to have to repeat numbers several times to type out a word using the number keys. I think there was also a limit to the length of the message. Plus if they were 30p each you used to try to get everything into one message.

I know I could afford to move to a bigger house , education was good in schools , the NHS seemed OK and safe

We could afford to put the heating on and feed ourselves

Well, maybe you didn’t care much about hair and makeup but me and my friends did. However, we did work then. Top Shop or Hyper Hyper was our mecca for clothes, makeup, accessories. And Camden Market.

One used to go to Vidal Sassoon or whoever it was who did hair colour and cuts for cheap prices if she couldn’t afford salon prices.

I definitely liked nice makeup, Shu Uemura and Nars eyeshadows and eyeliners were faves and I watched one friend put on a dark red (or dark cherry) colour Chanel polish. Some of us did wear face and body glitter or little glitter stars and hearts.

@Slipknotted I was at Mansfield '98-01. DD is at Catz 🙂

It's was ok. I'd have been in my teens during that time.

There seemed to be a lot of hope and optimism, but that might be just because I was young.

Things were more spontaneous because we had great shops, cinemas, nightclubs, but no internet, social media and instant photos of everything.

Teen life was hanging out with friends, renting videos, going swimming, getting pissed in the park, sleepovers, walking round for hours in the freezing cold chatting, town on Saturdays, girly magazines, lip gloss, dodgy hair dyes, dodgy make up.

There was a lot of sexism, and I mean a lot.

I remember a colleague telling me in 1998 about this new thing called Google, which he was contemplating buying shares in.

How I laughed to myself thinking of all the money he'd be naively throwing away ...

Ah, the era of the 'dot com bubble', @Squiblet

DH was certainly hands on with DS born early 1998. He had to be, I was out working day and night rewriting computer systems to cope with the millennium bug. (he also worked full time during the day). This was also the case for many of my female friends and colleagues who worked in IT and who had children.

On another note, I remember a friend looking up Keith Chegwin on the internet (Alta Vista) and getting 36 hits.

I had a PC at this time. You had to go to specific sites. I remember browsing I think the NASA website with gorgeous photos.
But it was hard to find things.
Windows seemed easier to use back then. I can remember creating posters quite easily using clip art. Probably pretty basic looking though.
No one expected you to have Internet access though.
But these years have been my favourite just because the national mood was so hopeful.
When labour was first elected they made a totally new policy announcement every day for the first few weeks. I can remember rushing home from work to see what was happening next.
In many ways life was still the same though. I worked hard at a job, took the bus to work every day, went out with friends in the evening. The day to day stuff does not change as much as we think it will.

@BestIsWest it was about this time my DH was diagnosed with a genetic disease. He was told hardly anything. I looked it up on the internet and got zero hits.

I certainly remember the first time I saw the very early Google screen on a much more tech-savvy friend's computer (why would you change over from AskJeeves?!) They also had a screensaver of the 3 Budweiser frogs that croaked 'Bud' 'WEIZ' 'er'. Tik tok was some application on the non-apple version of an iPod, I am guessing it can't be the same one, but who knows.

I remember wine deals (Majestic, possibly), good pub gigs on many nights, and playing pool. Sainsburys reward points on about the scale of 250 on certain products so buying 2 such items in one shop meant being sure of getting £5 off next time. Being rather starstruck with boyfriends/intended dates who were driving Peugeot 206s.

Facebook launched before that. I was a FB member in 2006.

But to your general point still stands. 😆

in 1998 not everyone had a mobile. my friends started getting them in 1998 and
through 1999. by 2000 most people had them but not everyone.

Hope he was ok.

What an amazing time to be alive! Life felt so carefree and easy. There was no permanent attachment to a mobile phone and being connected to everything all of the time. We went out and had fun and the future felt hopeful. How life changes in a few decades...

I was about 11, it wasnt all a laugh for us as my mum was on 'the dole' - i remember going with her on foot to the job centre to look at the jobs available, hand written on little cards pinned to a board! Our tv was black and white because the license was cheaper, and you hsd to tune it in and out of channels with a dial! Walkmans were fancy, with casettes!

It was very positive when blair got in and we felt the effects of that, we had a car and a computer by the year 2000

I worked in a dept of a big insurance company, with multiple branches. We had a computer system to look up info but it was static, you couldn't update it. So we would look up info we needed and print off the relevant page to create a paper file. If we sent a letter to a client we had to put a copy in the file otherwise there was no record of it being sent. Letters were in a template but no copy and paste so you just had to type the content. Our post in and post out trays were exactly that. Post went twice a day and incoming was distributed by a lad with a trolley. People walked around the office to retrieve files etc. If you needed to ask a colleague a question you walked over to them. It was much nicer and more interactive than offices today. Everyone knew everyone's face.

Ohhh i forgot the big breakfast - so fun! Got you going for the day, like a party!

I was 12 in 1998. We were all so excited about the future, we thought the new millennium was going to be all space age and exciting. Lots of the fashion was very metallic and "futuristic" looking. I remembe music videos being set in space or in a high tech world.

We were all super into magazines - J17, Smash Hits and Top of the Pops were all popular and we used to swap the magazines at break time. We were also all totally obsessed with Beanie Babies - those things we're supposed to be our pensions and buy us a house when we were older! The first website I ever went on when we got a computer and the internet in 1998 was the Beanie Baby website. You couldn't use the internet if someone was on the phone and you only had a certain number of internet minutes.

TV was an event - we'd watch Buffy every Wednesday (Thursday?) and talk about it at school the next day, if you missed it and your mum wouldn't tape it, you were screwed and your mates had to fill you in. I think Dawson's Creek started in 1999 on channel 4 and my best friend and I were obsessed and used to ring eachother on the landline after every episode to discuss it in depth until our mums kicked us off the phone.

Amazing! I was at university. Simple pleasures. Optimistic vibe is a distinct memory. Some great music, going to festivals, feeling like all the paths in the world were open to me. A really precious time in my life.

You could pay for something in a shop using a cheque! Sometimes even in a supermarket a whole line of people would wait for someone to write out a cheque to pay, and for the whole thing to then be processed and they did something with a cheque guarantee card, plus signing. And maybe the person would even also take the time to fill out the little stub in their chequebook! 🤣🤣🤣

And I sound a million years old now, but you know what? We all stood in the queue and no-one said a word, we just waited politely.

@ThornToes I remember those little cards! Back in ‘86 in my year out, I went to the jobcentre to find myself a job, and got a job at the jobcentre. 😂 I used to type out some of those cards, and sort through the ones that came through on the central printer. This was 1980s though.

Of course, in those days you'd have a full complement of staffed tills in the supermarket instead of most of them being replaced by self-service!

Pre-scanning era is when I remember really long supermarket queues - everything having to be rung up on the till (ETA: obviously not in the 90s).

I had a 3 year old second marriage, an 8 month old- was back at work (no long maternity leaves then) lived in Crouch End and was a great fresh vibe around - especially in London

I was 15 in 1999 and I remember having so much fun and also much more freedom as a child than I think my children will ever experience.
I had a paper puns which have me more than enough money to go underage drinking at the weekends, shopping in town on a Saturday and for fags.
Everything was so cheap. The high street was great, loved the fashion although was a rocker. I saw loads of gigs, would get the train into London and mooch around Camden, stumble home in the morning early hours of the morning after going to a rock club.
So much fun and definitely a very optimistic time.