The internet hasn't changed that much, only the scale of it. You could "watch videos downloaded off the internet" for a long time, but now we can access a massive library of 1080p video with zero buffer time. People don't appreciate how amazing YouTube really is.
> massive library of 1080p video with zero buffer time.
Yes but can you sit there and wait for several hours before accessing a grainy 240p clip of a whale being blown up, and then thinking it was the best thing ever for three days? Kids these days....
Which means now we can be barred from owning (downloading) the videos. And be subject to algorithmic feeds and whatever dark UI patterns value extract our data most efficiently. :D Rentseeking++
1968: waiting for new latest-technology vinyl records to come out from pop stars who were setting "records" for the number of millions sold per hit release
1978: copied selected vinyl to cassettes for portability
1988: copied selected CDs to cassettes next
1998: designed RIAA circuit for digitizing vinyl collection
2008: never did digitize much
2018: people are listening to vinyl all over again
I was in high school in the late nineties and I was looking forward to some nostalgia but this is hard to watch. I had kinda blocked from my memory that most people felt they needed a computer but didn’t know why. The internet was so new, it wasn’t essential yet. We still used the phone book as a primary source. Most people’s internet was through America Online and you stayed in their walled garden. They still bought computers out of fear of getting left behind. I did a lot of free IT work for friend’s parents in those days.
> The internet was so new, it wasn’t essential yet.
The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then, by another 12yo. And the Internet was essential, critically so, by 1995. It was the WWW that was new, about 2 years old.
The first web browser that integrated text and graphic (Mosaic) was two years old but it was Netscape that really kicked things off with the general public.
Netscape was only a few months old at this point.
Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.
> The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then...
This is more of a side note response.
I often see a huge disconnect between those who lived during a period in question and those who read about history. I imagine that this transitory stage in computing was before your time.
More often than not, it's fascinating to see how... off, the readers of history are versus those who lived through the period. This, sometimes, becomes painfully clear when it is actual history for one generation but only a recent memory for another older generation.
I think the implied statement was: the internet was so new, it wasn't essential to the general public yet.
It very much was not essential to the general public and it wasn't until the www made it easily accessible for commerce that it became essential to the general public. But you are absolutely correct that the internet itself wasn't new.
This video exemplifies why Steve Jobs absolutely nailed it when he came back to Apple and simplified the product lineup and started selling out of Apple stores. These customers are confused with all of the available options and different processors and peripherals. Jobs simplified it to one device for consumers, the iMac, making it very easy for consumers to understand.
I also think part because he wasn’t thinking “computer” , he was thinking “appliance” , with the skeuomorphic interface to match. I would love to see more of that instead of the flat designs we see now.
I agree aesthetically, but watching my daughter trying to learn interfaces with skeuomorphic design has been illuminating. Trying to explain to her that the save button is a blue rectangle with some gray stuff on the bottom for some reason (she has no idea what a “floppy disk” is) or the symbol for an inbox being a physical inbox, or contacts as a Rolodex or address book is starting completely from scratch. All of these things make intrinsic sense to me, because I learned those concepts when those physical objects existed in a meaningful form, but to her they’re completely meaningless. A desk calendar for a calendar interface would be just as opaque. So perhaps we need to reconsider what is or is not used for inspiration. An app that shows a drawing pad and tools is immediacy intuitive even to her, but when the corollaries are gone, where then do we go for the same effect?
Skeuomorphic designs made sense when people didn’t understand how things worked in the context of computers. Try asking a teenager what a Rolodex is or how to operate a tape deck now. :)
I really love watching 90s footage from malls, shoppingcenters or just some people walking in the city, it is somehow calming. If anyone knows some good youtubevideos like this from germany instead of the US please let me know.
I agree about calming and I feel we were all much calmer overall in daily life. For this video I can see myself being in such stores, looking at all the computers, listening to adults talk as these people were, and it’s such a calmer environment. I worry about my kids as they seem too excited always. I know I wasn’t like them.
It was just more relaxed somehow. One part of it I think was that you just had to wait for things, not everything was available instantly, it teaches you patience.
Not the nice in-store video, but a page from an Allkauf Supermarket ad in 1995, with some of the computers on sale. No Amigas, though: https://youtu.be/z9Rb0L-xK8w?t=27
This is a 4:3 video. Why stretch it into 16:9 ? That's a throwback to the early 2000s when everyone was buying 16:9 TVs to watch stretched 4:3 sources. Drives me crazy, really.
I had a very similar job at a retail store called PC Club in Santa Ana, CA from 1995-1997. It was my first job, started when I was 14. I had a blue PC Club polo shirt and a pretty rad pony tail.
I was also a purely technical “sales” guy, just like the guy in the video. Could talk specs all day and repeat anecdotes about the differences between different vendors’ components. Had the worst sales numbers in the company because I only sold people the minimum of what they needed and did not understand the concept of revenue or profit margins. My adult colleagues were sometimes making 10X more than I was in commissions.
It was fun being in a small computer store during the era when the 486DX was hot stuff, SIMM RAM was transitioning to DIMM RAM. The Pentium was coming on the scene. Burning MP3s to CDs was popular. We played music at the store all day via a demo PC that was running WinAmp. Our tech support guys in the back were real techies. US Robotics 14.4 modems were cutting edge.
Luckily for me I found my way to a technical IT role when a PC Club customer hired me to help him with his local IT business. And then came full circle 14 years later to find out the hard way how important sales are when I started my first company.
My first guess is this could be Fry's store #3 in Palo Alto located on Portage Ave (closed in late 2019 [0]), but from the footage it's hard to be certain.
The shelving layout looks like the components section, which was behind the checkout area of the store. This was where you could buy discrete computer parts like motherboards, CPUs, memory, HDDs, cases, PSUs, network switches and cabling, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing, and tiny parts like capacitors and voltage regulators. Components was adjacent to the telephone and Appliances departments.
Where else in Palo Alto was there ever so much variety of inventory for sale? The Radio Shack in Downtown was tiny, and I don't recall Egghead computers in Menlo Park ever having even near that much inventory, but I was quite young at the time.
By the way, where was The Wiz located? I remember the tagline "Nobody beats the Wiz!", but it was founded in New Jersey [1] and don't recall such a store ever existing near Palo Alto (or the Bay Area). A bit tough to search for today thanks to the thorough marketing campaigns by a cyber security company sharing the same name.
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Yes but can you sit there and wait for several hours before accessing a grainy 240p clip of a whale being blown up, and then thinking it was the best thing ever for three days? Kids these days....
1978: copied selected vinyl to cassettes for portability
1988: copied selected CDs to cassettes next
1998: designed RIAA circuit for digitizing vinyl collection
2008: never did digitize much
2018: people are listening to vinyl all over again
The Internet wasn't new in 1995, by one measure 26yo by then, by another 12yo. And the Internet was essential, critically so, by 1995. It was the WWW that was new, about 2 years old.
Netscape was only a few months old at this point.
Another essential component was real IP access by the end user. Up to this point your options for home use were sandboxed "on-line" services, telnet/shell accounts, or static SLIP service for power users. It was dynamic PPP and the emergence of dial-up ISP's that made browsers like Netscape usable by the masses. This started to happen on a wide scale around 1994-1995.
RFC1661 (PPP) was not formalized until July 1994.
This is more of a side note response.
I often see a huge disconnect between those who lived during a period in question and those who read about history. I imagine that this transitory stage in computing was before your time.
More often than not, it's fascinating to see how... off, the readers of history are versus those who lived through the period. This, sometimes, becomes painfully clear when it is actual history for one generation but only a recent memory for another older generation.
It very much was not essential to the general public and it wasn't until the www made it easily accessible for commerce that it became essential to the general public. But you are absolutely correct that the internet itself wasn't new.
Connecting a Windows computer to the Internet with Winsock didn't happen until the early 90s.
Deleted Comment
Raw footage inside Sears with Atari 800 and 2600 (1982) [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32282081
* Less buying options
* No online shopping so the FOMO of a better deal is not there
* The staff actually knew what they were talking about and less salesy than they are today
This is either very ironic or Simpsons-level future prediction.
I had a very similar job at a retail store called PC Club in Santa Ana, CA from 1995-1997. It was my first job, started when I was 14. I had a blue PC Club polo shirt and a pretty rad pony tail.
I was also a purely technical “sales” guy, just like the guy in the video. Could talk specs all day and repeat anecdotes about the differences between different vendors’ components. Had the worst sales numbers in the company because I only sold people the minimum of what they needed and did not understand the concept of revenue or profit margins. My adult colleagues were sometimes making 10X more than I was in commissions.
It was fun being in a small computer store during the era when the 486DX was hot stuff, SIMM RAM was transitioning to DIMM RAM. The Pentium was coming on the scene. Burning MP3s to CDs was popular. We played music at the store all day via a demo PC that was running WinAmp. Our tech support guys in the back were real techies. US Robotics 14.4 modems were cutting edge.
Luckily for me I found my way to a technical IT role when a PC Club customer hired me to help him with his local IT business. And then came full circle 14 years later to find out the hard way how important sales are when I started my first company.
Thanks for sharing this video.
The shelving layout looks like the components section, which was behind the checkout area of the store. This was where you could buy discrete computer parts like motherboards, CPUs, memory, HDDs, cases, PSUs, network switches and cabling, oscilloscopes, soldering irons, heat shrink tubing, and tiny parts like capacitors and voltage regulators. Components was adjacent to the telephone and Appliances departments.
Where else in Palo Alto was there ever so much variety of inventory for sale? The Radio Shack in Downtown was tiny, and I don't recall Egghead computers in Menlo Park ever having even near that much inventory, but I was quite young at the time.
By the way, where was The Wiz located? I remember the tagline "Nobody beats the Wiz!", but it was founded in New Jersey [1] and don't recall such a store ever existing near Palo Alto (or the Bay Area). A bit tough to search for today thanks to the thorough marketing campaigns by a cyber security company sharing the same name.
[0] https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2019/12/27/the-era-of-fr...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wiz_(store)
I miss Fry's (¬_¬ ) - but not the shitty returns line, haha.