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' 😃

Disabled access at the time waS properly shit though. INCLUSION was a new thing and places thought they were being great I'd kids who used walkers could attend a mainstream school. Disabled toilet provision was incredibly patchy.

You must have been moving in very advanced circles! My husband worked in IT so I knew the internet existed and I knew in principle about emails but we didn't have internet access at home until 2000, when we splashed out on a modem and a dial-up connection to go with our huge desktop PC. As others have mentioned, you couldn't make or received calls on your landline while you were on the internet, so that and the fact that we were paying by the minute meant to begin with we spent very little time online. It must have been the early 00s before we paid a flat rate for unlimited internet access and started to spend far longer online. I had the impression at the time we were fairly typical, and possibly even a bit ahead of the curve when it came to having a home internet connection, but maybe that's because we were older (I was born in the early 60s).

Also Stine buildings were being cleaned. Before all stone buildings were blackish covered by decades of soot and air pollution. It looked dour and grey. A new process was invented in the eighties to clean stone buildings. It must have come down I'm price by this year because lots of buildings were being cleaned and suddenly we could see beautiful stone buildings again.

Not advanced at all, most people used the internet by the late 90s. It was the mid 90s when internet was more niche, not the late 90s.

I was living on Poplar High Street in late 98/early 99, OP - maybe I passed you in your buggy! 😁

Agree there was no minimum wage. In real terms the lowest wages were less than today. No working tax credit for childless people.
It was a better time because of the hope. But remember a lot of MN come from well off families with good jobs.

Really? https://www.statista.com/statistics/289201/household-internet-connection-in-the-uk/

I'm casting my mind back to that time and the majority of people we knew did not have the internet at home. As mentioned by many on this thread, some jobs involved using the internet, many didn't. Smartphones hadn't been invented.

Yes - most people we knew had a modem in 1998, and we were very average people!

We had a desktop PC. A laptop in those days was much more expensive, upwards of £1000.

I just googled it. In 200 28× of the population were using the Internet. By 2004 it was over 60%.
As I said 1998 was a time of transition with some people using the Internet lots, and others never using it.

Sp most people did not use the Internet in 1998. The majority did not.

tv and music was the best. Spiceworld had just came out, Steps were super cool and s club 7 had their own amazing tv show. Saturdays spent walking round hmv. Live and kicking/rugrats/raccoons was a great saturday am tv line up. Watching gladiators, generation game in the evening. I had a "lovely" fake purple leather jacket and felt like the bomb haha

I didnt have internet but some tv shows had webpages and they would explain over the end credits how to type "www." 🤣🤣

Loads of nostalgia on here.

I was 16 in 98, at a catholic secondary. Things that happened then that don't happen now -

• kids with SEN would have to hide it and manage or be kicked out of school, no special support other than basic dyslexia help
• if you got pregnant or in trouble with police you'd be expelled from school (a friend hid her pregnancy so she could sit her GCSEs)
• no discussion about consent, if you had sex you were a slag, if you got drunk and something happened it was your fault
• hard to get info about things - eg I had to go to a family planning clinic in my school uniform, was given morning after pill without the anti-sickness part that usually came with it, I think to teach me a lesson so I spent a day at school nauseous
• there was an obsession with baywatch and looking like pamela anderson, or if not then kate moss - not healthy role models
• eating disorders and self harm were common but not talked about
• TV and mag culture was all about heavy drinking, drugs, sleeping around
• there was one internet connection on one PC which was shared with the phone so you couldn't use the internet if someone was on the phone and vice versa

plus point was that tuition fees were still fairly minimal (£3k a year when I went to uni)

I bought a dial-up modem and got on the internet in 1998, all by myself. Everyone assumed it was DH that set it up! But I put them right, My PC had a huge monitor and everything was beige. Alta Vista was my search engine.

I’m 59.

It was the most optimistic happy time of my life. And l think the country? New Labour swept to power on this tide of optimism and hope that l’ve never known since or before. The country felt radiant and happy. Everywhere.

Just feet like the world was at your feet.

Just like now really😔I can’t believe how much has changed in that time. This is a horrible place now.

My secondary school had 2 computer rooms, with 15 computers in each. That was the entirity of the schools computer provision. We had one term of IT lessons a year in Yr7-9.

I was in my late 20s. I had just finished my Masters degree and started my first job in my new profession.

I met my now DH at the end of 1998.

I'd bought a little house on my own a few years earlier. There was a total eclipse of the sun in the summer of 1999 and I remember climbing out of the spare room window so I could sit on the flat roof and watch it.

I remember that eclipse - went to a local hill to watch it. I borrowed a handheld portable TV with a 2 inch LED screen to take with me, in case it clouded over.

I was at school. We were all worried that Blair was going to turn it into a comp.

I think a good analogy would be with apps; you might expect a much older person to not be au fait with using apps now (but then again they might be but just relying on a stereotype here), but young people are immersed in them. Similarly, in the late 90s young people used the internet all the time but it was a mystery world for others, especially older people.

On the other hand there were older people who were forced into use of the internet through their jobs so my Grandad was very familiar with it right from the beginning, for example, which doesn't happen these days with TikTok, for example.

Early twenties in 1998, brought my first house for £30K, drove a Vauxhall Nova that I brought off my Mum, had a cassette deck in it, and the mix-tapes I used to make used to fill the glove compartment. Loved that car which I christened Nolene, she took me miles, many weekends away at the coast. I spent a lot of time going to concerts / festivals and also going to pubs/clubs with my now husband and our friends, happy times though I'm sure there were some low times too, we got through them. My home town where I still live, now has no nightclubs, the cinema is often empty and you can see where budget cuts have been made locally which is sad. Now I'm a mum to a 19yr old and I often think I had better late teenage years than she has had with regards to simply having fun, though she has had more opportunities in other ways. And she often is amazed that I was born in the 1970's, had 3 TV channels and no mobile phone when I was a teenager. 😀

I was 46 in 1998. Even so, I really liked European trance music. I still play L'amour Toujours by Gigi D'Agostino (I have about 6 mixes, the Max Riven is my fave - has anyone heard his Moonlight Shadow?) I am a very prim old lady these days, I don't get stoned or (God forbid!) loved up!!! But I only have to put that type of music on and I'm dancing! I play it LOUD.

My first memory of the internet was as an IT Advisory Teacher in 1988. We had TTNS (The Times Network System) and managed to connect one of our secondary schools with a secondary school in France, who I think must have been using Minitel.
We had internet at home from the early part of the decade, but it was very slow dial-up until we got cable with NTL by the late 1990s. We were both working in IT, DH since 1972.

Oh, there was more personal responsibility back then too!

Being a ‘victim’ wasn’t a career path / people’s proudest achievement, as it seems to be these days.

I was pregnant and then had DD.

I worked from home for a US company, writing software so I had a couple of computers and broadband. Much like now except now the broadband is fibre to property rather than early copper and one of 'my' computers is a VM on a machine in Las Vegas.