MATTSPLAINED [] MSP131 [] The 90s: Smells Like Digital Spirit
MSP says a fond farewell to Jeff Sandhu by celebrating the decade that shaped him. Mobile phones, PCs, the Web 1.0 and a sea of plaid, acid washed jeans and boho-chic.
Photo by Unsplash. Glitching by Kulturpop.
Hosts: Matt Armitage & Jeff Sandhu
Produced: Jeff Sandhu for BFM89.9
TRANSCRIPT
A couple of weeks ago we were talking about the 80s and MSP’s Matt Armitage came to the conclusion that the 80s has overstayed its cultural welcome and should go away and leave us all alone. What will fill the gap? Does that mean we’re all set for a 90s revival?
[you want to ad lib something about it being your last episode?]
Do we need another revival?
I don’t think we do.
One of the conclusions we reached on that previous show was pretty much to that effect.
Hopefully by throwing all the Gen X and Gen Y contaminated stuff out of the window, it will leave the Gen A and Bs space to create something that doesn’t reference Star Wars as its starting point.
So, no, I don’t think we’ll see a full-on 90s revival.
We’ve seen a mini-spike over the last couple of years in terms of TV revivals.
Friends has been one of the most streamed shows of the past couple of years.
We’ve seen shows like the short-lived Roseanne reboot, Will & Grace, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, 90210. New Jumanji movies.
Plenty of music.
The 90s is alive and well.
So, what’s it doing here, today?
Well, as I think we mentioned on that 80s show…
The 90s for me was a kind of proto-digital decade.
It laid the framework for the digital world we’re enjoying twenty years later.
Yet, when we look back at the 90s the two things people kind of pick out are Grunge - Nirvana - obviously and Friends.
So, as it’s your last appearance on the show, I thought we’d do your defining decade, the 90s.
For those of you who are wondering, Jeff is relocating to one of Kulturpop’s retirement communities where he can keep fit with some light, hands-on cobalt mining classes during the day and use the clear mountain air to clear his Black Lung at night.
So, the 90s is a bit of a going away present to him.
Jeff, what did the 90s mean to you?
[we can probably ad lib back and forth on this for a couple of minutes]
I’ll ask you favourite music, TV, gadgets, clothes etc.
[Back to Matt]
I think one of the weird things is that we don’t have a firm grasp of what the 90s was, beyond those stereotypes we discussed.
When you picture the 60s you have the kind of groovy, James Bond, mini skirts, Beatles and paisley image.
With a backdrop of civil rights, protests and hippies.
The 70s is long hair and flares. Economic decline and strikes.
The 80s was that material greed decade. Fall of the Berlin Wall. Triumph of capitalism and bright, shiny pop culture.
all of those are unrealistic encapsulations, of course.
Do any of the subsequent generations have those defining characteristics?
I think so. We have to look a little bit harder.
The Noughties was Web 2.0, social media and the smartphone.
The Aughts - the worst name for a decade ever conceived - was the first real app for that, always-on decade. Where streaming displaced downloads.
But the 90s is a lot harder to pin down, I think, apart from that it looked like Clare Danes and Jared Leto in My So Called life.
The early part was that 80s extension plus Nirvana and wearing skirts with pants.
Then the second half was the mobile phone, Internet, Millennium Bug half which was much more closely linked to the Noughties.
You mentioned on the 80s episode that the 90s was much more important to you than the 80s…
Yeah. Absolutely. I was 18 in 1990. And in the UK there was an explosion of music and club culture.
Which coincided with me heading off to university and missing most of it.
That was also when I met my first Malaysians and made the fateful decisions that would eventually bring me to this country.
But I made a rally. I was in London for the whole Britpop explosion.
And it was a really exciting time. Or it felt like it. Maybe everyone feels that about their early to mid 20s when they’ve left home and they’re figuring out who and what they’ll be.
One of the things I mentioned in the 80s episode was that you made all your plans with people on landlines, ahead of time.
So this was kind of that first swing of impromptu meet-ups.
You’d get a call or text on the tube or bus home from someone saying fancy a drink or a bite to eat in half an hour.
And you’d be off. So, there was a lot of that dynamic energy going around.
What was your first phone?
It was an Orbitel 902. Probably in 1994 or 95.
You know the weird thing - I didn’t even need to think twice to recall the model number.
The phone everyone wanted at that time was the Motorola Star Tac with its really cool flip.
And the phones then - you’d get 8-12 hours battery time and then you’d have to charge them for 8 hours.
After the Orbitel I had a couple of Orange branded phones and from then on it was mostly Ericssons.
The functionality didn’t change too much. It wasn’t really the thing we looked for back then.
No cameras. No mobile Web
The biggest innovation was Snake on the Nokia 6110 in 1997.
Were you an early Mac User?
Macs were kind of in that parallel universe.
I had a flatmate with a Mac and it looked really weird and difficult to use.
At work we used a stock control system that I’m assuming was based on DOS.
It was vey much Microsoft’s world.
I had to take out a loan to buy my first PC.
It was generic…
The brands were too expensive?
Not exactly - apart from Mac.
The brands were less ubiquitous.
Web hosting companies were the start ups of their day and they were often hyper local.
I think I’ve mentioned on the show before, I went with a dial up service run by an expat Malaysian in the UK called Vampire Internet.
And my email address was matt@vampire.co.uk.
Finally, we have proof, He denies it almost every week, but now we know for certain that Matt is a vampire. When we come back, tech that made the 90s great.
BREAK
We’re back in the 90s today. A place it seems Matt never really left.
I’ve been in Malaysia since the 90s.
My entire experience of the 21st Century has been a Malaysian one.
Before the break I mentioned that the 90s is a little bit hard to define.
So I did pretty much what I would have done then and turned to slacker writer extraordinaire Douglas Coupland.
The man who pretty much defined Generation X in his novel of the same name.
And it’s weird because he said pretty much the same thing as me - that the 90s seemed a little bit blank.
Not in that nothing happened but that it was a story waiting to be written, a story that would be very different from the generations that came before.
And his memories of it are similar to mine - albeit from perspectives thousands of km apart - in that we both felt that it was a decade of hope.
In terms of idealism?
Not really. We were still seeing the old capitalist structure enriching the many rather than the few.
Computers and mobile phones were becoming cheap and affordable.
So there was a sense of the democratization of technology.
Email meant you could be in touch with colleagues all over the country and the world.
There was this feeling of potential, the idea of bringing people together.
And the Internet?
Was this incredibly slow thing that loaded up webpages created by the color blind with no idea about readable fonts.
It’s no wonder the early portals and eCommerce sites failed.
It would take you half an hour just to download, line by line, a100kb JPEG.
The idea of buying online in the mid-90s?
You could drive your car to the store, shop, stand in line to pay and drive home in the time it took a site to load.
Not to mention the cost - in dial up days you paid for your Internet by the minute.
Which is why, when Amazon started, it did not look like the world-conquering, sure thing it is today.
It’s hard to imagine going online being expensive today...
I’m sure you remember your own adventures in dial up...
Jeff responds
[Back to Matt]
Going back to E-commerce...
Those sites were places you went to if you lived somewhere that didn’t have bookshops or whatever it was you were looking for online.
What about the tech itself? What were some of the most notable moments from the 90s?
Well, we’ve mentioned the Internet, affordable home computing, mobile phones.
I’m going to kick off with music as I’m a music guy.
This was the first portable digital music decade.
CDs had already been around for a while
And the first Sony Discman was actually launched in 1984.
But by the 90s the technology was good enough that they weren’t just portable, they were mobile.
The early models skipped as you walked.
As the decade progressed they went from something you took out of a suitcase and put on a table top, to something you could play while walking to something you could wear while jogging.
Of course, a CD is pretty substantial, so no matter how much you slimmed and trimmed the player, it was never going to be as tiny as a Walkman.
Until...
I’m really going to miss you setting these up for me.
If you survive... I mean, feel like coming back from the retirement camp... we’re going to have to bring you back as a guest,
Yeah, so the music industry came up with an idea for digital compact music.
Digital Compact Cassette?
Is not the one I was going to mention.
That was a Philips led system, that didn’t really take off.
I was going to mentioned another Sony led system - Mini Disc,
Which were basically just mini CDs.
But what was really cool about them was that you could record onto them.
And then we went solid state?
We’ll skip the CD-R because there’s no time and I’ll come back to it in the future.
Yes. So this is where the digital revolution started.
The first MP3 players. The true forerunners of the iPod debuted in 1997, the Korean made Eiger FPMan M10 and M20 with a maximum of 64MB of flash memory.
Which was enough for about an album’s worth of songs.
Which had to be painstakingly transferred via parallel port.
Which is where we started to see music downloading.
It’s hard to imagine now how much conversation there was about file sharing in the late 90s and early 2000s.
Now - not that I’m advocating it - you can torrent a movie and be streaming it within a few seconds.
Back then, it might take you all night to illegally transfer a single Britney track.
Britney?
Just because Oops I Did It Again and good old Limp Bizkit became synonymous with P2P file sharing through sites like Napster.
What was Napster?
Napster was another one of those college dorm brainchild things.
It was created by two Sean’s - Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker.
It was a peer to peer file sharing network that was optimized for sharing music files.
If you’re familiar with torrents then you get it. It was a decentralized network and you actually downloaded your files direct from the sharer’s hard-drive.
Obviously, the music industry hated Napster. Just as the TV and film industries would grow to hate file sharing networks as broadband speeds increased,
And they eventually litigated it out of existence.
Not that you endorse file sharing...
No. Artists deserve to get paid. Including me.
What was notable for me was that Napster was launched in 1999.
Around the same time that Microsoft and Yahoo launched their Messenger products.
Don’t forget that these were the days before Google was everywhere, the company only started in 98.
It’s hard to believe that the Internet once existed without Googling.
I was still Asking Jeeves at that point.
There had been other chat tools before - IRC most notably.
But Yahoo and MSN gave away free email accounts.
So their chat services had that mass cross platform audience.
Along with those, Napster was a proto social media service because you could chat with the people you were sharing content to and from.
So it had those ideas of community baked in.
It was the forerunner for the noughts social media services like MySpace and Bebo and ultimately Facebook.
Let’s stick with physical media for a minute...
Way ahead of you.
Nintendo’s Game Boy.
There have been better handhelds. but probably none as iconic.
It was actually launched in 89 but I’m including it here because it was an archetypal 90s sight.
It was’t smartphones you saw on pubic transport, it was the Gameboy.
And there lots of classic titles but the only one you actually needed was Tetris.
A game I’m still playing today. Physically, today. I played an app clone while typing these notes.
The 90s were great for all sorts of consoles. The original PlayStation and the game changing Wipeout with its techno soundtrack and tie in CD compilation.
The rise of the FPS shooter in the forms of Wolfenstein and the classic Doom.
Idkfa. That’s all I need to say.
One of my all-time favorite games, Carmageddon which had no other purpose than wanton carnage an running a car into zombies and cows, a genre that Grand Theft Auto would later come to define.
We’ve talked about phones, what about the smart?
It was the 90s. So you had your PDA.
Probably a PalmPilot. That had really good handwriting recognition software twenty years ago.
Do you hear me Apple? Only introducing it with IOS 14 this year.
You could store your contacts, notes, reminders and work on basic spreadsheets and text documents.
Apple had the Newton in the 90s which was a failed tablet that was actually pretty good.
Nokia had the super swank communicator series.
And the training tablet the Tamagotchi. One of the most insidious social experiments in history.
Social experiment?
A generation of teens woke up on Xmas morning 1996 and stared death in the face in the form of a little key ring sized machine with a tiny screen display in a little creature.
That screen was life.
They spent weeks and months nurturing an egg and the creature it became.
Feeding it. Stroking it. Parenting it.
And ultimately failing. and watching this little digital creature die.
I wonder if any of those teens went on to have children.
I think tamagotchi may be the reason I don’t have kids.
I tried and failed. They all died, Time after time.
Now we complain that friends are distracted with their phones.
In the 90s it was with Tamagotchis they were desperately trying to keep alive.
I know there’s a lot more you want to cover but I really have to leave. I have no idea what to pack for the mines.
Whatever is fine. They’ll all be rags in days.
because of the, erm, amount of fun you’ll be having.
I don’t want to make this a two episode thing - so let’s just outline a few of the outstanding scientific achievements of the 90s.
We still think of cloning as something new and cutting edge, but the first cloned animal, DOlly the Sheep was created in 1996.
We’re still discussing the ethics of cloning nearly 25 years later.
The first gene therapy treatment took place in 1990.
Similarly, the Human Genome project was launched in 1990 and the project was declared completed 14 years later in 2004.
Space?
Well, TNG started broadcasting in 197 and wrapped up in 1994.
There were a whole bunch of other ST spin-offs like Deep Space Nine.
The Pathfinder rover landed on Mars in 1996.
In 2020, we’re seriously, or semi-seriously, talking about colonizing the planet.
The X Files told us that the truth was out there.
And Twin Peaks made us realize that we wouldn’t understand it if we found it.
The Hubble Telescope in 1990/
Probably the biggest of them all, the International Space Station became operational in 1996.
What have you forgotten?
DVDs! Movies as they were intended to be seen.
Do you see what a treasure chest of beauties the 90s was?
It’s no wonder Douglas Coupland calls it the Good Decade!
Episode Sources:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/91603cc1-f159-4c89-9462-443a078945ca
https://www.history.com/news/1990s-the-good-decade