Stuff from a 90's childhood your kids don't understand:

[TheGhostsOfMeAndYou]

After reading CandidFruit's amazing thread about weird stuff from a 80's childhood, it got me thinking about things from my childhood and when telling my 10 year old DD about them she didn't get at all.

I was born mid 80's so although a lot of the 80's thread rang a bell I definitely remember kore 90's stuff.

My daughter couldn't grasp children's TV only being on for a set amount of time each day and if you weren't home to watch a programme when it was aired you missed it!

I was also explaining 10p mix ups to her and it blew her mind!

Blackboards in school. The ones that rolled round were pretty cool.

Being bored stiff

Dialling the talking clock.

Calling up the cinema to listen to the times of the films… I haven’t made that up, or have I?! Looking for the same info re film showings on ceefax/teletext

Mum searching for holidays on ceefax/teletext! And by searching I mean reading screens and screens of info and noting down the details to call. No search function! Gosh we were all so patient!

80s&90s here.
Freedom and not everything was SEN,
Books were my google.
Talking and getting to know people not look online at their profiles.
The times when we just got on with life.

Internet dial up tone

My 1st car only had a cassette slot. I drove around with a portable, battery operated CD played sitting on the passenger seat to play my 'latest' CD's! They jumped and scratched if I hit a pot hole though.

I also recall some sort of adaptor which had a blank cassette at one end, which I'd put into the cassette slot in the car then a cord coming from it to something else. I can't recall what the other end went into though? Possibly the portable CD player so the sound came out of the car speakers?

A hands free system in the car. It felt very modern at the time, but only fitted the 1, specific, brick phone I had at the time with a specific phone holder. When that phone died, I had the whole set up left in that car for the next 10yrs but unusable by any other phone.

Explaining to my dc that when we went on holiday in the 90's the cabin crew would round the kids up and let us in the cockpit mid flight 🤯

Beehive bedlam on sky (that may have actually been early 2000s). Channels 1-5 and that was it. Phone boxes home phones, one pc per class at school if that. Sega mega drive, Mobiles before smart phones, vhs, cassettes, Walkmans. ask Jeeves, Encyclopaedias I go go on forever I miss those days when life was so much simpler.

Getting people to call you back on the pay phones, 1471 and 0800 reverse

The intermission at the cinema.

Lava lamps
Shout magazine

No Amazon. (Well until the v end of the 90s)

If you were at Uni or went traveling your parents had to just suck it up and wait until you called home. They couldnt track you, or text you or send you money for an uber home

Travelers cheques

Cranberries were an exotic fruit

Cars never seemed to start in the 90s if it was cold- you’d see people with their bonnets popped staring into their engines in confusion whilst shivering

But it happened so often that you learned how to do it. Dealing with the choke, parking down hill so you could bump start it, pulling all the cables off the spark plugs and squirting with WD40, possibly connecting your car to someone else's via the battery and doing it that way.

It sometimes took some doing but it was rare that I couldn't get it to start eventually.

Oh, and that socket you use to charge your phone, its original purpose was to power a cigarette lighter so you could smoke while driving......

My dad got me a pager (!). It was 60p a message.

My Addis 17 and loves it when I talk about the 90s. She's into the era now!

I was telling her about Just Seventeen magazine the other day. How we'd giggle at the problem page!

My dad got me a pager (!). It was 60p a message

Was it pagers where you had to call a number to dictate the message to a person who would type it in and send it?

I was telling my son about overhead projectors and about how someone would be picked to use the pencil to point out the lyrics of whichever hymn we sang that morning! He looked at me as if I'd grown two heads.
😂

The smoking staffroom in schools. Schools were ‘open’, as in you could walk out at any time and anyone could walk in through numerous doors. We had plenty of flashers turn up!

Using a disk with encarta to research homework.

going to meet friends in town on the bus and then, if they didn’t appear at the appointed time, just waiting.

playing on the mega drive with my brother and having to take it in turns on Sonic (no multiplayer) It wasn’t until later in the 90s that the N64 was released and MarioKart and Goldeneye revolutionised our lives.

I genuinely thing the best thing was that it was the last decade where you could truly grow up out of the glare of social media. Our friends weren’t constantly photographing us and posting stuff. We could make our mistakes and it wasn’t recorded forever, but we had the joy of all this new tech coming along at the same time.

I’m a baby if ‘81 so almost all my teens were in the 90s. The nostalgia for then is off the scale for me.

@Jifmicroliquid

It’s a shame that most schools have been closed in. I visited my old school during the school
hudays. It was totally fenced in, like a prison. When I was a teenager, we used to go up
To the tennis courts in the evening to have a knock about etc. couldn’t do that now.

Also, seeing your name, product names hadn’t even unified across Europe so Cif was Jif,

I watched Sliding Doors with my teens the other day and had to explain about 1471!

I showed mine Garbage Pail kids inspired by a thread the other day and we all agreed they were quite grim. They laughed when I told them about my poster collection (Madonna, Aha, Brussels, Prince, MJ etc) and how we used to do swaps at school. They do love and 80's /90's film and are often shocked at how unsanitised they are.

No sat nav. My daughter asked me once how we used to find our way before satnav. I actually struggled to remember. Obviously there were maps and you'd have a close scale map of your town/county, but if you drove somewhere in a different region where you'd never been before you wouldn't have a detailed road map of that area. On reflection I realised you had written directions. Eg I once drove from south London to rural Devon to stay in a B&B. They must have given us directions when we booked eg 'Take the A303 to junction 6, turn left onto Church Lane' etc. I remember even in 2004 when I moved to a new town I emailed people who were going to visit with directions on how to get to us.
Using maps and/or written directions very tricky/dangerous when driving on your own!!

Sabrina's Secrets was in the early 2000's. As was bang on the door. Early to mid 2000's. I barely remember the 90's, they were more my era growing up in the 2000's :)

My mum reminded me of the time a bus broke down on a school trip . They squeezed as many kids as possible onto the remaining one (so we were 3 to a seat) and that bus returned home, then it went back for the remaining ones

The first one was an hour late... and the school had no idea where we were until it turned up. Neither did our parents. And they weren't overall bothered, as we were with our teachers.

Mortal Kombat on Sega Megadrive. I am a decade younger than you and barely remember the 90s, but i do remember playing Mortal Kombat aged about 6.