Reminiscing About Tech in the 90's! 💻

It was the best of times. It was the bestest of times. Let's walk back to that magical time.

Hi everybody - do you remember what tech was like in the 1990’s? Cameron Balahan certainly does, and we take a trip down memory lane in this fun chat:

You can also watch/listen on: 📺 YouTube, 🎙️ Spotify, and 🍎 Apple Podcasts.

Cameron is the perfect person to talk to about this topic! In the mid-1990’s, he created one of the best sites for tech enthusiasts. He created winshareware.com, a site where you could go and get the latest details on things you can download and run on your Windows machine! 🔥

This site, along with a handful of others such as Windrivers, Neowin, and madonion, made up my morning routine of tech sites I would visit for the latest Windows news and what beta graphics drivers I could install (on my sweet Hercules-branded nVidia GeForce 256 graphics card) to eek out a few extra points on Futuremark’s 3DMark benchmark.

Below is an example of one of the benchmarks that I would run after every driver install:

This chat is a trip down memory lane for those of us who started off with the internet in the 1990s.

We talk about classic shareware (or nagware?) apps like WinZip and WinRar. We talk about OpenGL and DirectX and how that influenced whether you played Unreal Tournament or Quake. We talk about the Windows registry, connecting to the internet via dial-up, hunting for drivers, AOL CDs, classic video games like Math Blaster, and a whole lot more.

Content Creation in the 1990’s

Not only was the tech from the era pretty transformational, creating content was as well. Creating a HTML page and uploading it for others to see was the frontier of what was possible. It was cutting edge! If you didn’t have a paid FTP server (hello, mediatemple!), you used a free one like what you got from GeoCities.

Discovery of your web page was a whole different thing as well. Remember, this was a time before Google. This was a time when you manually went to various search engines and submitted your newly created page for indexing:

You had to make sure you had your meta tags (including the now-ignored keywords field) all squared away, and then…people found your site!

There wasn’t a whole lot of algorithm smarts back then. People found your site by searching for the appropriate keywords, or they found you because another site linked to you via the handshake “I’ll link to you if you link to me” agreements. Webrings and their related cousins were one of the best ways to find like-minded content. Those were simple (and fun!) times.

What was your fondest 90’s tech memory?

I am almost certain that most of you reading this got your start in tech in the 90’s as well. What was your most memorable tech moment? I’d love to hear about it or, even better, see a screenshot of it. Head over to the forums and post your response in this thread.

Till Next Time!

Cheers,
Kirupa 😅