OK, so yes, we here at BuzzFeed have written about a half million articles about how great it was to grow up in the '90s. But, as wonderful of an era as it was when you compare it to today, you can't help but think, How did we live like that? It feels like prehistoric times!!!
And recently, Reddit user u/bassistmuzikman posed that question to the AskReddit community when they asked: "What inconvenience from the '90s no longer exists today?"
Well, lots of people who lived through the 1990s chimed in and reminisced about things that were so common back then but would be major inconveniences today. Here are some of the top-voted and best comments:
1. "Calling your friend's house and having to talk to their parents."
2. "Missing an episode of your favorite TV show and not being able to see the episode until it became a rerun."
3. "Having to rush back to the TV after the commercials had ended."
4. "My mom would often call me frantically because she got stuck in traffic or something and wouldn't be home in time to put in the VHS tape to tape my dad's show (he always worked nights). Our VCR technically had a timer function, but it was a total crap shoot as to whether it would actually work or not, so we'd always do it manually."
5. "Rewinding a VHS tape to rewatch a movie from the beginning."
6. "Trying to plan your own route with a map."
7. "Having to wait for RealPlayer to buffer just so you can watch a pixelated 30-second clip."
8. "Waiting for your mom to hang up the phone so you could use the internet."
9. "Blowing in the cartridge to get the game to work."
10. "Having no idea if any of your pictures actually looked OK. Nothing was more heartbreaking than realizing that great shot you thought you got was actually a close-up of your thumb."
11. "Trying to find a pay phone when someone pages you."
12. "As someone whose dad had a store in the 1990s, the '90s credit card machines. You used to have to put the credit card on this manual machine that would take an imprint of their number. If it was over a $100 you had to call a number and get the card authorized. You then took those slips of paper to the bank and deposited them along with all your cash and checks."
13. "Long-distance phone calls."
14. "Getting lost driving places and having to call someone who knows the area better so you can rattle off streets and landmarks."
15. "Setting up a meeting point and time to meet someone and having no idea of their whereabouts other than faithfully waiting till their arrival."
16. "Having to go get a newspaper to figure out what times a movie you wanted to see was playing."
17. "Having to go to an internet cafe to check your emails."
18. "Waiting for your enormous computer to load — on a good day it would take minutes for stuff to be booted up."
19. "Discman constantly skipping when you would try to jog with it."
20. "Knowing a song's title. Used to record off the radio via tapes, but they didn't always announce song titles when they played them so I would only learn their titles and who sang them years later thanks to Google. These days, song identification apps makes it all 200x easier."
21. "Getting a wrong number call from a fax machine."
22. "Having to leave the house if you wanted to rent a movie."
23. "Watching the TV Guide Channel as it scrolled through the whole list of channels and getting distracted just before it got to the channel you wanted to see. Then waiting for it to repeat every three minutes."
24. "When faced with a random question, like, 'Who invented bedsprings?' and not having any real way to look it up unless you were at the library or right next to an encyclopedia."
And lastly...
25. "Scrambled Porn!"
You can read the full thread of responses on Reddit.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.