1. In Episode 1, "The One Where Monica Gets a Roommate," we meet all the Friends for the first time — and Rachel talks to her dad on Monica's massive cordless phone.
2. In Episode 3, "The One With the Thumb," Phoebe discovers that her bank mistakenly credited her with $500 — because she reads her monthly statement that came in the mail.
3. After she tells her bank about the mistake, they credit her another $500. And send her a football phone.
4. Chandler has started smoking again, which he freely does in Central Perk.
5. He does it less freely at work, but still manages.
6. In Episode 4, "The One With George Stephanopoulos," during a sleepover with Phoebe, Monica is thrilled that they get George Stephanopoulos' pizza delivered to them by accident...
... but since Phoebe and Rachel are not Clinton White House obsessives, they have no idea who George Stephanopoulos is.
7. In Episode 6, "The One With the Butt," Joey celebrates getting a part as Al Pacino's butt double in a movie by invoking Pacino's performance in And Justice for All.
(Here's the scene he invokes, for the millions who don't remember And Justice for All, or have never heard of it.)
8. During Episode 7, "The One With the Blackout," Chandler is stuck in an ATM vestibule with Jill Goodacre. And all of those deposit slips and envelopes!
9. Jill Goodacre's cellphone (Friends' first) works during the blackout.
10. In Episode 8, "The One Where Nana Dies Twice," Joey watches a Giants-Cowboys game on a portable TV at the funeral.
11. In Episode 9, "The One Where Underdog Gets Away," the first Friends Thanksgiving episode, Joey is disinvited from his family celebration because he models for a "VD" awareness campaign, and they think he's diseased.
12. Rachel doesn't have enough money to fly to Vail to go skiing with her family — shoop, shoop — until the friends pitch in to help her. She waves her paper ticket around triumphantly.
13. Today, Ross would be kicked out of the scientific community for adopting an exotic animal as a pet. In 1994: meet Marcel!
14. Monica throws a New Year's Eve party, and Janice, Chandler's date, brings this camera.
15. And she needs Ross to take a picture of her and Chandler together.
16. This is what they're watching to count down to 1995.
(Bonus fact unrelated to this post: Episode 11, "The One With Mrs. Bing," opens with Phoebe and Monica crossing the street — and Joey's poster is pasted onto the building behind them!)
17. Phoebe and Monica go to a newsstand, because Phoebe wants to check the previous day's Daily News — "to see if my horoscope was right."
18. Chandler's mom, the famous romance novelist, goes on Jay Leno's Tonight Show.
19. Mrs. Bing uses a restaurant payphone to call her hotel to get her messages.
20. One equipped with a stack of phonebooks.
21. In Episode 12, "The One With the Dozen Lasagnas," the gang bursts out into an impromptu version of the theme song from the original Odd Couple TV show.
(Which would be canonical to statistically zero twentysomethings now. But it's funny that Matthew Perry went on to star in the rebooted version.)