The 90s Nostalgia Thread

Holy crap! I remember that stuff! YTV used to use segments from that film in between shows to pad out time. I had no idea where those things came from. I thought they had them made just for the channel. The segment with the bird and fish separated by the barrier is one of the more memorable ones. Is there a segment with a duck shaped like a lifesaver walking through a series of rooms?

These were done as demos for Thinking Machines, Cray and other "supercomputer" firms. Google "The Mind's Eye" 1990 and "Beyond the Mind's Eye".

Whether it was high schools or college, these vids were played by computer companies trying to show how awesome they were.

All went bankrupt within 10-15 years.

Silicon Graphics hung on until around 2009.

But they were sure pretty.

That Mind's Eye Wikipedia page leads to the page on Short Circutz, AKA the segments YTV ran between their programs in the 90s. Mind's Eye and Beyond the Mind's Eye are there, along with a third, Imaginaria. The Duck segment in particular should be very familiar to anyone who watched YTV in the 90s. So thank you for bringing this up, because I had no idea where these segments came from originally.

Edited by WillKeaton on Dec 15th 2021 at 4:35:33 AM

I mostly remember the Short Circutz ones

Hey, remember Nick Arcade? Remember the "Video Zone" segments where the kids walked "inside" the video game, but in reality they just did a bunch of stuff in front of a green screen and they had no idea what was going on? I was just thinking that, with modern technology, we could have a much more immersive experience, where the kids wear VR goggles so they could actually see the "game," and they could interact with physical objects that, through VR, could be whatever they needed to be. It would be great.

I'd rather see that applied to Knightmare.

Ah 2019, in one year, The '90s will be thirty years ago 90's kids!

Edited by TairaMai on Jan 2nd 2019 at 2:29:10 AM

I was watching some videos talking about early 90s consoles, like the CD-i, the Atari Jaguar and the 3DO. I recall the 3DO most vividly from a show called It's Alive! that aired on YTV. Whenever they had sweepstakes contests the prize was always a 3DO. In their gameshow segment, which was basically an early version of Uh Oh!, the prize was always a 3DO. And on the topic of It's Alive!, it's the strangest show I've ever seen. Not because of content or anything, but because it had an hour and a half run time. Name any other show that was an hour and a half long. I remember when I watched it they put Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons right in the middle of It's Alive! Apparently in later seasons the run time was cut down to an hour, then a half hour.

Edited by WillKeaton on Jan 16th 2019 at 7:37:54 AM

Oh god one of the kids at school had a CD-i, and I remember being about 5 and playing the notorious Zelda game Faces of Evil on it. Seemed fine to a 5 year old back then... but seeing those cut scenes as an adult... crikey!

I love a lot of computer-related things from the 90's. Edutainment games, old website designs, even graphic design in general.

Back in those days, it's like people were so excited about all this new technology that was becoming available, and they designed such fun and outlandish things to test it out. Nowadays, the majority of designs (at least in graphic and website design, video games are definitely getting better, though I still miss the charm of the old computer games) are becoming minimalistic and simpler to use. I just hope that someday we'll get back to the "fun and outlandish" trend.

Edited by DrNoPuma on Feb 14th 2020 at 7:07:08 AM

Agree on that on making it fun and aesthetically pleasing. Though, that depends on which part of the 90s you're from. Is it the "Save By The Bell" aesthetic, grunge, of the Y2k chrome blobs?

As much as I like today's graphics, we're getting to the point that processors will exceed the heat of a star in an effort to run the "photo-realistic" games of the future.

Look at Minecraft: it could have been made in the 90's (okay, the late 90's).

It's not just hipsters, it's people who just want a fun game and don't care if it has that block-y "virtual realty" 90's look.

So we're talking 90s PC Games? Now that was the stuff that dominated my teen years. Jazz Jackrabbit, Duke Nukem (not just 3D, I loved the first two as well), Traffic Department 2192, Full Throttle, and of course, all the first person shooters (Wolfenstein 3d, Doom, Redneck Rampage, Dark Forces, Heretic, even Tek War, it was fun to explore at least).

A long lost song, so me at least. I found it with a google search.

Enjoy!

Ah LazyGameReviews - so much 90's goodness in their videos.

Alas, my father was too cheap to get anything faster than a 486 DX 33 until '97, when I built a new Pentium 166. Ah Zip disks and having to go to school for a CD burner as they were upwards of $500....

Then I was able to build a Pentium ][ 400 with it's own CD burner.

Edited by TairaMai on Jun 22nd 2020 at 12:53:40 AM

My first love: the Enlight corp. Enlight EN-7237 Mid Tower Case w/300w PS.

It was a forgiving case in some ways, in others it was a harsh mistress.

The company no longer does business in the US as we have moved on from the beige boxes.

Alas.

I miss those cases, they were bland but fun to work in.

Not trying to bring the mood down, but one of the big events of the 1990's that I remember was the Mt. Otay plane crash that happened in 1991. Then of course Garth Brooks was popular during the 90's as was Shania Twain and then you had Furby as well. All in all, the 90's were a exciting time for me as I was born in 1988.

Edited by pikafan on Oct 30th 2020 at 8:45:33 AM

As someone born in The '70s, The '90s were a time when I was in college.

Babylon 5, Star Trek and the internet was being born - it was a new age and with the end of the Cold War it was the end of history.

Edited by TairaMai on Mar 26th 2022 at 4:58:51 AM

And we all know how that last part turned out. . .

This might be silly, but who remembers being confused why they called them "floppy disks"? (In the US, then, it was always a K - we hardly use the K anymore, e.g., geometry and spines. Sort of like theatre or grey.)

The floppy disks I grew up with were even less floppy than the once-ubiquitous 3"1/2 ones.

That said, we didn't call them floppies in French.

Edited by Medinoc on Jun 12th 2021 at 11:42:40 AM

I don't, that's because I was a kidlet when the first 5.25 inch (Five and a Quarter) disks came out for home use.

Then the 3.5 inch (Three and a half) hit mainstream use in The '90s. Those were solid hunks of plastic.

The Zip drive, the "Floptical" and the LS-120 all were born in this decade...and didn't survive the 2000's.

Floppy disk carrying cases - THE fashion accessory for any computer geek/nerd/hacker. Mine was blue.

I grew up with a british computer that used 3" disks (which we simply called disquettes) and had an external 5"1/4 drive connected (which in our house went by several names including grandes disquettes, disquettes cinq [pouces] un quart, disquettes souples and disques souples, i.e. floppy disks).

It should be noted that in comparison to 3" disks, 3"1/2 disks could be called floppy if you were stretching it. That's because 3" disks used thicker, harder plastic.

Floppy stopped being a term in popular jargon when Zip disks and CD-Roms took off. "Flopticals" never really caught on. The LS-120 was called "LS-120" by the dozens of users who bought it.

Jazz, Zip, LS-120 and the other riff-raff (Floptical, Shark, WORM) tried to gain ground. The CD-ROM (and later CD-RW) killed them all except ZIP. Then USB wiped the floor with all of them in the next decade. But in computer magazines you'd see ads for Iomega's Zip and Jazz drives. Plus all the other attempts at storage.

This was the era that the "floppy disk" icon became the save icon in popular culture as more people started to use computers.

Starting in the mid-90's, you'd see computers on the desks at businesses rather than in the back.

Inkjet printers hit in the early to mid 90's. I remember what a game changer that was. Before, you had to be a college student who snuck in that nice anime or Star Trek pic into the print queue (even then you risked getting a finger wagged at you wasting paper).

Even the first inkjets - loud as a dot matrix printer, could shake a folding table - made pictures that were good enough that they gave laser printers a run for their money in the small business market.

Scanners took some time to gain ground - most were large. Even when the price came down to the point a person could buy one, they were still separate devices.

Digital cameras came into their own during the mid-90's. Chunky, clunky and expensive, it was still fun to take pictures (At 640x480 or if you were really rich, 800x600!) and load them into your computer.

Edited by TairaMai on Jul 8th 2021 at 1:33:29 PM

I remember those early HP inkjets. The school I went to in 9th grade got one like a week or two before the school year ended, and I was very impressed with it, but also bummed because I'd been stuck with an ImageWriter II all that year (I was positively addicted to MacDraw Pro, even though it ran like crap on a Mac Classic).