11 Things You Recognize If You Lived Through the ’90s

This week I watched De Zevensprong with my daughters, a series that kept me awake at night, so thrilling. It was still painfully scary, but old-fashioned. It was simply a document of the time that my daughters watched with wonder. From the string from the mailbox to the chalkboard and the phone in the hallway where you were calling with a Bakelite receiver on a curly cord. That cord was always tangled, of course. After the tour through the seventies, I thought about what was ‘typically eighties’ and ‘enormously nineties’ and this nice list came out of it.

Deleting SMS messages

That you could only save a few SMS messages. Only twenty. If you wanted to receive new messages, you had to start deleting.

Dialing in for the internet

That you had to ask if you could go on ‘the’ internet. That you then dialed in and heard all sorts of beeps before the gates to the wide web were opened.

You received the fax

That you called someone and the fax was still on. That hurt your ears. But anyway, that fax. Did you know that the fax number is still on a lot of people's business cards? While there isn't a soul left who actually faxes, of course. When I still worked for Marie Claire, we had one. A fax machine. The thick layer of dust was occasionally wiped off when a fax came in from Paris. With points for improvement. Because the French are hopelessly conservative (or old-fashioned) and were the only ones still sending faxes.

Light cigarettes

That was your good intention. That instead of regular cigarettes, you would smoke light cigarettes. Back then you thought it was good for you, just like getting a tan. You thought that would really help. You didn't know much about skin cancer and wrinkles.

The CD tower

Do you remember? Those that stood like trophies in your room? And that you always immediately inspected when you first visited your new boyfriend's house? And that you had to dust? And where ultimately all your CDs were in front of instead of neatly inside?

Bodypump

We all did it: body pumping. And then to Anastacia. It doesn't get more nineties than that. And with a teacher who really wanted you to count down loudly. And you never did.

Discman

Well, that was something, you know. A Discman on your pants. But then you couldn't move too much, because then it would skip.

Film rolls

Can you imagine only being able to take thirty photos on a vacation? That you would then spend a few days tanning and looking for nice spots to photograph. And that by the end of the vacation you only had two photos left.

Teletext

And page 101. That was like the Nu.nl of back then. Or your RTL push notification from back then. Your view of the world. Teletext. It's still there. But let's enjoy it for a little longer, because if there's something on the verge of disappearing, it's that. By the way, I also thought it was super cool that you could put half of your screen on Teletext and the other half on TV image. The technology was something else.

The answering machine

And that when you liked someone, you always imagined how you would sound together as an answering machine.

Receiver off the hook

You did that when you didn't want to be disturbed. Some things did have their advantages.