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90s nostalgia

Pop Culture

People born before 1990 are sharing their now-useless but 100 percent nostalgic skills

For instance, recording songs on tape from the radio while yelling at the DJ to shut up during the intro.

From holding the phone on your shoulder to folding a map to knowing what "cornflower" and "goldenrod" are, here are pre-Y2K skills at their finest.

Hey there, millennials! Welcome to the "Holy crapoly, I have real-life memories from 20 years ago!" club. It's a strangely disorienting milestone to reach when you find yourself starting sentences with "When I was young…" or "Back in my day…" isn't it?

Your Gen X elders have been here for a while, but even we have moments of incredulously calculating how the heck we've arrived at this place. Time is a tricky little jokester, isn't he?

To highlight how much has changed for middle-aged folks since we were young, a user on Reddit asked people born before 1990 what useless skills they possess that nobody has a need for anymore. It's both a hilarious trip down memory lane and a time capsule of life pre-Y2K. (Do kids these days even know what Y2K was? Gracious.)

If you're down for some good-old-days nostalgia, check out people's responses:

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A beautiful vintage rotary phone.

The rotary phone was ubiquitous until the late ‘80s when they were replaced by push-button telephones. Then, at the turn of the millennium, those were rendered obsolete by smartphones. So anyone born in the late 1990s may have never encountered a rotary phone, even though they were in everyone’s houses for decades.

It’s been years since most people dialed a rotary phone, but that familiar mechanical swish sound that happens when dialing a number is still etched in everyone’s memory.

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A cassette tape from the '80s or early '90s.

The parts of our brains responsible for processing senses are also used for storing emotional memories. That’s why when we smell, hear or see things from the past we get that irresistible, bittersweet feeling of nostalgia.

A new video posted by @Rerunthe80s on TikTok is giving everyone who grew up in the ’80s and early ’90s the feels.

Gen X and older millennials, I’m looking at you.

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YouTube

The phone headset that wanted to change the world

What was even happening in the '90s? I'm not sure we know. Somehow everything was beige but people wore all the colors of the rainbow at the same time. Everything seemed to be in some sort of geometrical shape or pattern. Overlapping triangles, random trapezoids. It was madness I tell you, madness. But nothing encompasses the chaos of the '90s like this unearthed and unintentionally hilarious advertisement for a headset to connect to your phone.


The idea seems to be to stop consumers from holding their phones between their shoulder and head. For some reason avoiding a crick in your neck was very important. How long were those phone calls? Boy would people from the '90s be shocked if they were dropped into 2022 where people avoid phone calls at all costs. The ad isn't completely useless in our current place in the space-time continuum. It's certainly good for a much-needed raised eyebrow chuckle. You can always count on 1993 being weird, no matter how far in the future we go.