The 90s were before The Age of Connectivity, so when we didn't know something, we had to look it up in an encyclopedia.
If we wanted to talk to our friends in Texas when we lived in New York City, we had to write them an actual letter with a stamp in an envelope.
We had to make plans before we went anywhere, and look up directions before we went. All this on the fly planning and mapping is very new.
What else did we do in the 90s that we don't do know? Well, we've compiled a list below.
Read on and enjoy a nice tall glass of nostalgia on us.
1. Memorize phone numbers
Today's phone users definitely know much fewer phone numbers than we did in the 90s. In the 90s, if you were in a remote location and needed to get in touch with someone, you had to use a pay phone to call.
Which you couldn't do if you didn't have whoever you needed to get in touch with's number in your brain.
[anad]
Raise your hand if you still know your elementary school best friend's number by heart but don't have even a remote clue what your current roommate's home area code is.
2. Use pay phones
faylenechung #remember these? Saw one on my way to work today. Had to stop gor a photo. #phone #payphones #payphone
Having quarters on you for emergency phone calls used to be much more essential than it is now. And, like we said above, you needed to have someone's phone number in your brain to call them.
Or you needed to have an actual, physical address book organized alphabetically in which you took a pen and wrote down someone's name and phone number. To call them with a pay phone, you had to flip to that page, look it up, then dial.
If you didn't have any quarters, you could call collect and just hope the person on the other end of the line wanted to talk to you badly enough to pay for it.
Here's a kind of sobering thought: today's children will never know the origin of the phrase, "The phone's off the hook." Since, you know, today's phones don't have hooks at all.
3. Remember birthdays
For those of us with terrible memories when it comes to dates, we're rescued almost daily from the social media powerhouse of Facebook, who pleasantly reminds us on our sidebar when it's someone's birthday.
Before Facebook, people had address books where they organized everyone's names, addresses, and birthdays.
4. Look up directions before we went somewhere
Today, we have Google Maps, Waze, Hopstop, Embark, and dozens of other apps that kindly show us exactly where we are and exactly where we need to be.
In the 90s, we used maps of a different kind.
[anad2]
Maps that weren't electronic but were rather printed on paper and had no means of showing us ourselves as a moving blue dot.
So we had to actually know where we were going to start on that map, and where we wanted to end up, prior to leaving for wherever we were going.
5. Rewind videos
blockbustervideolove Did you visit your local Blockbuster Video closing sale?? Extremely sad time to see this franchise crumble #blockbustervideo #blockbuster
Remember Blockbuster? Of course you do.
Many of our favorite weekend afternoons were spent perusing the stacks of that exciting video store, renting the same movies over and over again.
They'd print "Be Kind, Rewind" on the labels of VHS tapes because, well, you know, that's what you were supposed to do. What was the rudest thing you could do when you were bringing back movies?
That's right. Not rewind. So many of us know what it was like to sit there rewinding a VHS because of the good-for-nothing rude person who'd rented it last.
It wasn't even like a, "Oh, just press rewind, and hahaha, it's over now," situation either. You had to sit there for at least 10-15 minutes watching the movie play backward.
,6. Make plans and stick to them
All the spontaneity of today's weekends is largely due to cell phones. You can text someone and say, "Hey, I don't know what I'm up to later, but I'll hit you up if I'm free."
You couldn't do that in the 90s, because cell phones weren't really commonplace until the 2000s.
[anad]
So when you made plans with someone, you had to agree to meet somewhere at a time, and then just go there at that time. There were no, "Sorry, running late!" texts. No, "Actually I can't make it so sorry!" Texts.
None of the waiting until the last minute to hit someone up because you couldn't find anything better. In the 90s, people had to actually make plans and follow through on them.
7. Use dial-up
eris_ember #tbt nine or ten years old with our sweet new computer. Judging by the look on my face @daleywelsh took this photo. @leigh_welsh in the background ignoring us as she should be. #90stechnology
Remember when you used to share one desktop computer with your whole family and you had to wait for the dial-up internet for ten minutes or so before you could log onto your computer to play The Sims?
Yeah, we do too. That was a real test of our adolescent patience, wasn't it?
8. Send letters
It used to be extremely expensive to communicate via telephone with someone in a different country. So expensive, in fact, that it was a ludicrous idea to even suggest it.
With Facebook, Viber, What's App, and Skype, communicating with anyone, anywhere on the globe with an internet connection is instantaneous.
[anad2]
Before all these portals of communication were forged, however, we wrote letters to our friends in other nations, or just across the country. We had pen pals. We documented our lives and thoughts in ways that made it possible to go back and revisit them years later.
Letter writing was also great because it was mostly uninterrupted. You could say whatever you wanted without the other person just waiting for their turn to talk. If they were reading your letter, they had to read what you were saying without interjecting.
9. Make mix-tapes
Today's playlists are really just the mix-tapes of yesteryear, but who doesn't remember rewinding a blank tape to the part where you could record your own voice introducing the mixtape you were about to make?
Or how about listening to the radio for hours on end, waiting for your favorite song so you could record it?
Today, all our favorite songs are at our fingertips. Their lyrics are much less mystifying, because we can just look them up. In the 90s, we had fierce debates over the lyrics to songs, with no real means to discovering who was right at the end of the debate.
Check out 9 Quintessential Signs You Grew Up in NYC During the 90s.
[via Instagram]