What the World Looked Like 20 Years Ago

It was an age of pagers, Caesar haircuts, and dial-up modems

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Two decades feels like a long time. To someone who was in their 20s during 1995, it’s eons—but not for the threadbare reasons people of any aging generation offer when wallowing in nostalgia.

Think about the people who saw the world change from the ‘60s to the ‘80s. In two decades, there were brick phones for rich people and everyone owned a microwave. Not really impressive.

But the ‘90s to the twenty-teens? It's staggering. We’re rebuilding people with stem cells, testing self-driving cars, and everyone is walking around with a computer in their pocket that’s about a thousand times more powerful than what NASA used on missions to the moon.

(What seems amazing today that will be hilariously outdated in twenty years? It's hard to say, but probably The Arrival of Lab-Grown Penises.)

What was life like in the mid-‘90s? It wasn’t that long ago, but it was so much stranger than you remember.

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Dial-up Modems and Giant Monitors
Those of us of a certain age will recognize this sound all too well. It’s the noise-vomit that signaled you’d established a successful connection to the World Wide Web. But that’s just the beginning of what was involved in discovering the Internet for the first time when Bill Clinton was president.

Find somebody in their 40s and he’ll tell you tales of ubiquitous AOL “Thousand Hours Free” CDs and 15-inch CRT screens that overtook your desktop.

‘95 was the breakthrough year that the old 14.4 k modem gave way to the turbo-charged 28.8 k modem. It was like trading up from roller-skates to, uh, roller blades.

Image from Shutterstock

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55 MPH
Next time you’re flyin’ down the highway, pay attention to all the 65, 70 and (in Texas, of course) 85 mph signs that blur by.

Now, set the wayback machine for two decades ago and make them all top out at 55.

That’s right, 55 miles per hour was the maximum legal speed you could travel on any U.S. highway. Thank you, Sammy Hagar.

RELATED: 5 Amazing Road Trips You Need to Take This Summer

Image from Thinkstock

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The DVD Debut
Before streaming video, there were these stores scattered far and wide wherein you rented movies on what were known as Digital Versatile Disks (not Video, as some might insist).

Prior to DVDs, however, there were these clunky plastic rectangles known as video cassettes—basically giant tapes for video instead of music.

RELATED: What to Expect in 2015 (According To Old Science Fiction Movies)

Image from Thinkstock

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No Soup For You!
Broadcast television in the ‘90s was basically Netflix today. Friends, Saved by the Bell, Twin Peaks, X-Files .

The most popular ‘90s comedy, Seinfeld, was the quintessential source for pop-culture quips. It was like Twitter if there was only one account, and everybody followed it, and we all retweeted our favorite lines the next day. That was the entirety of the social conversation.

In 1995, the Soup Nazi made his debut, and with it, a catchphrase applicable to so many of life’s disappointments.

Image from usatoday.com

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The George Foreman Grill
Technically, it’s the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine, and it speaks to a time when, dietarily, we thought eating fat was the reason why you got fat.

That notion was proven false as legions of office workers inhaled pallets of Snackwells cookies with no slimming effect, so we shifted blame to carbs. (It’s always been about too many calories!)

(If you really want to drop some pounds, check out The Anarchy Workout. One guy lost 18 pounds of fat in just 6 weeks!)

If nothing else, the Foreman Grill became a dorm-room mainstay for everyone who likes their Hot Pockets done with the panache of a pannini.

Image from ProductReview.com

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Video Games Based on Movies Based on Video Games
In what might be the ultimate example of recursive promotional digression, ‘95 was the year where a Street Fighter video game was released based on the Street Fighter movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, which was itself based on the earlier, original Street Fighter video game.

Image from moviespictures.org

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Stuffed Crust Pizza
In 2015, we’re barely shocked when we hear about a pizza with hot dogs in the crust. We know it’s excessive, but really, is it all that surprising?

We were (comparatively) so innocent in 1995. That’s when Pizza Hut unveiled the Stuffed Crust: pizza featuring not just cheese and crust, but cheese as crust . Commercials called it a “revolution,” and it really felt like it at the time.

(If you're going to eat that much cheese, you're going to need these Two Exercises That Help You Lose Your Spare Tire.)

Image from usatoday.com

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The Caesar Cut
No, no, it wasn’t a bowl cut. It was a hairstyle with retro (as in B.C.) timelessness, and a remarkably fresh update on the comb-over.

It was the comb-forward, because covering your male pattern baldness from side to side makes you look like Dick Vitale. Covering it from front to back makes you look like George Clooney.

Image from WireImage

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Pagers. No, Seriously, Pagers!
Today, we have the Apple Watch. But in 1995, mobile phones hadn’t yet improved far beyond the brick or bag phone just yet. They were getting smaller, but still had antennas about the size of patio umbrellas.

If you wanted someone to reach you on the go, they had to call your pager (see Urban Dictionary: beeper). You’d see a little number on the LCD screen, know who was calling you, find one of the many pay phones that used to litter the landscape the way Starbucks do today, and call them back.

For a moment, some people carried both pagers and cell phones. Those people were dealt with in ways we can’t discuss here.

Image from Shutterstock

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