13 things only Malaysian millennials would remember from the 90’s/00’s
Did you know the famous Walkman was first sold 40 years ago today?
Yes, you read that right, 4 decades ago.
Unlike Raven who looked into the future, we decided to walk down memory lane and look back at some of the things that made the 90’s/00s amazing for us.
1. MSN Messenger
AOL also known as Away Off Line now seems a bit redundant. Since we all have internet connection on our handphones.
But giving our friend endless nudges or changing our status to get our crushes attention was surely the highlight of our day. Ahh the smiple life…
2. The Walkman
Do you remember back in the days when you used to walk around with your Walkman and earphones dangling around your ears? It was so big it couldn’t even fit your pocket.
Sad news guys, they stopped production in 2010 when they just couldn’t compete anymore with MP3 players and iPods.
3. VHS tapes
VHS tapes served us quite well, from Hollywood movies to embarrassing tadika performance homemade movies.
It was Netflix combined with Insta-story, but instead of expiring after 24 hours, these tapes haunted us for a good part of our teen years (until it finally gave out/tape player “accidentally broke”).
4. Rewinding our tapes
Be it an audio or a video cassette, rewinding was a crucial part of being able to watch or listening to anything.
And if you didn’t like a song, you couldn’t just skip-instead you had to agonisingly wait for the tape to fast forward.
5. Astro was power
Grounding in the 90’s and 00’s meant that our parents would take out the smart card from the Astro decoder.
Sometimes, they even took it away when they went out just to make sure we won’t watch TV instead of doing homework. *insert teen angst here*
6. Dial up tone of modems
If you are truly a 90’s kid, you would automatically hear that dial tone as you saw the picture below, as you waited for your computer to connect to the internet.
The ‘best’ part was, connecting to the internet would mean your home phone would get engaged when you use the internet.
Anyone had an internet dial-up tone dance?
7. Internet-less Computer games
The picture above explains it all. From Solitaire to Minesweeper to just plain Paint, a kid could spend hours on them.
Cos having a computer was already considered a privilege, getting internet was a luxury.
8. The Rotiman
Every day like clockwork, the rotiman or babu roti would honk letting us know of his arrival, and kids would rush out of their gates to buy bread and a variety of junk food.
If your taman still has this man, you should feel blessed, because they are a dying breed.
Q: What do all three of these snacks have in common?
A: They all have free gifts!
No matter how ridiculous or how flimsy the toys were, as kids, they were collectibles. Best part is, they are still being sold now.
9. The Biodata book
Like hot commodities, at the end of the year, everybody would exchange each other’s biodata book.
10. Composing your own Nokia Tunes
Being a teen, everybody wanted to stand apart from the crowd.
With your own mobile phone, everyone would try to compose their own melody (melody ke?).
11. Floppy Discs
Another obsolete item: about 80 kilobytes to a maximum 1.44megabyte floppy disc. You can’t even save your standard 3minute song right now on a floppy disc. God knows how we used to save all our homework on floppy discs once upon a time ago.
12. Music Videos on TV
Remember needing to wait for you favourite singer to release their music videos on MTV or Channel V?
VJs short for Video Jockeys, were pretty faced babes or hunky dudes who introduced our favourite popstars with their new music videos on TV.
13. The beginning of camera/flip phones
Walkmans were not the only mobile thing that was big and started evolving, hand phones too started to evolve.
The 90’s paved the way to the down sizing of handphones and the betterment of camera phones.
So what do you miss about your childhood? Let us know on Facebook!
Writer