In the early 90s, we didn’t have Starbucks and
Pearl Jam was still known as Mookie Blaylock. Huh? We didn’t use the Internet for everything (yet), and AOL was king. Google wasn’t even invented until 1998 (though didn’t officially become a verb until 2006); instead, we had Ask Jeeves, Alta Vista, Netscape, Lycos, Earthlink, MindSpring, or Yahoo (among others) to search the mysterious, new World Wide Web.
We also saw the birth of email, or Email, or e-mail, or E-mail; yes, it took a while until we settled on a universally accepted spelling for the abbreviation for electronic mail. AOL Instant Messenger was the first chat-like service to exist in the mainstream and it was life-changing. We could chat friends and make plans to go to happy hour after work right from our work computers without ever picking up the phone. We loved it.