Once serving as the world’s largest email service, Hotmail has now recently been converted to Microsoft Outlook.
Remember how huge Hotmail was when we were growing up? All my friends used Hotmail as their email addresses when email services such as Yahoo! were barely forming. Launched in 1996 when Internet was taking baby steps, Hotmail was one of the first free webmail services. Having email was pretty cool those days, and Hotmail was the fast path to that.
Now that Hotmail is gone, another piece of the late ’90s/early ’00s has faded away. This has definitely gotten me nostalgic. Sure, the late ’00s and early 2010s are exciting. They’re full of technological innovations and a wild mix of popular trends that never fail to surprise people. After spending most of my childhood living in the late ’90s, early ’00s, I’ve grown quite fond of that era when life was simpler.
For one thing, toys were actually physical (I know, it’s hard to imagine). I remember spending hours after school playing with my stuffed animals and Barbies and building miniature towns with my enormous jar of LEGOs. I remember the first time I got a Pokéball. That was my most prized toy, and I nearly cried when I broke the tail of the Pikachu figurine that was stored in it. The kids these days are really missing the glory of the ’90s toys: Furbys, Beanie Babies, hula hoops. Last year, my high school physics tutor brought his 5-year-old son over to our house once, and the boy’s idea of a “toy” was “Fruit Ninja.” He had never played with LEGOs or toy cars. There is something inherently fun about playing with physical toys and being able to feel that you own something (even if they were just Beanie Babies).
TV shows bloomed in the late ’90s/early ’00s. Disney Channel was magical and served as probably the only legitimate reason to get up early on Saturday. Shows like “That’s So Raven,” “Lizzie McGuire” and “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody” were shows that tackled real problems, and a lot of us could relate to them. They didn’t have all the glitter and glamour that many of the current Disney shows have. They were original. Now, Disney has run out of good ideas (seriously, “Fish Hooks”?). Many of the TV shows use redundant plot lines, aren’t realistic enough and involve too much singing and dancing.
And then there was the new love of the wonders of computers and the Internet. I recalled the first time my family bought a personal computer — a huge, clunky gray machine with a fuzzy screen. Software games were my best friends (Kudos to Mario, who taught me how to type), and the websites seemed very creative, with colorful backgrounds and simple buttons compared to the complexity of today’s websites. Even though Internet was a pain in the butt (I could boil myself some tea and grab a snack while waiting for the page to load) and some company called AOL kept flooding our mail box with CDs offering 1,000 hours of free internet, the web wasn’t as huge of a deal in life back then. Certainly no one had Internet addiction disorder.
Overall, the feel to the late ’90s and the early ’00s was relaxed and upbeat. The economy was great, the new wave of technology offered many exciting advances, and the music was cheesy. My Los Angeles Lakers were on a championship roll and life was way simpler without the dominance of technology.
Enough of the bittersweet nostalgia. There are still some lingering effects of’90s popular culture today. The website launched in 1996 to promote _Space Jam_, the comedic sports film staring Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes characters, is still up and running in true ’90s fashion. “Arthur” still airs on PBS, and Ring Pops are still on store shelves. All is not lost quite yet.