The clothes. The vibe. The hair. The music everyone was listening to.

Help me imagine say, what spending a week in 1995 would be like as opposed to today. What I could expect to see, hear, etc. What was on the stereos? Playing in city night clubs? Bars? What would the people have looked like?

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I had been in graduate school in Hawaii for several years at this point and 1995 was the first year when I really, really felt like I was actually in a different decade from the 80s.  All the big hair and 1980s fashions were finally starting to disappear.  Non-academicians and non-geeks were discovering the internet.  Due to the recession, there were still a lot of 1980s cars on the road, though, so the 80s vibe wasn't entirely dead yet.  Also, radio stations were still playing 80s music.  Well, that would continue into the next century, actually...

It was a pretty eventful year, too.  Lots and lots of major news stories.  (Wait, didn't somebody start a topic about this recently?)

The two biggest news events in the US were obviously the Oklahoma City Bombing and the OJ Simpson trial.  I STILL remember that jingle that CNN always played when they were covering the trial.

On the technology front, the bigest thing that stands out in my mind is Alta Vista, the first USEFUL search engine.  Until Alta Vista came along, the Internet wasn't really useful as an information source.  Basically, it was just a parallel world to everying you found in real life.  If you shopped at a physical bricks and mortar store "X", then you might happen to know that they had an online presence at "X".com or "X".net, but there was no way some other random person in the world would discover it.  You learned about websites from physical paper books, paper magazines, paper newspapers (company "Y" would run a print ad with "Visit us at Y.com"), email, links from other websites, or actual in-the-flesh human beings.

If you wanted to find information there were paper books, magazines, newspaper articles, that told you which website to go to.  Sometimes you'd have to find an online forum or some Usenet newsgroup and ask around.

That all changed with Alta Vista.

Eventually, Alta Vista was overtaken by Google in terms of popularity.  However, I've always felt that Alta Vista was superior to Google in terms of search functionality.

The other big tech news from 1995 was the release of Windows 95.  Frankly, that was a bit of a yawn for me.  I hardly ever used Win95; I heard it was very buggy and crashed all the time.  At that time, I was mostly using UNIX, VMS and Windows NT.  Windows 95 seemed like a big step backwards.

On the political front, the country seemed to be moving to the right.  The Republicans took control of Congress for the first time since the 1950s.  Right-winger Newt Gingrich was the brash new Speaker of the House and he was very confrontational, loud and polarizing.  This also seemed to be a turning point for the media.  Up until this point, the media had almost universally been very harsh on Bill Clinton, I think in part because of the generational divide.  The media titans were mostly from the GI Generation or Silent Generation and at this point the Baby Boomers were still thought of as the young immature kids, instead of the out-of-touch geezers as they are currently perceived.  Now that another Boomer was the face of the Republicans, it became more of a left/right divide rather than a young/old divide.  FOX sided with the Republicans while outlets like CBS and PBS tended to side with the Democrats.

Anyway, the whole thing culminated in a big government shutdown at the end of the year, one of the longest up until that time, I believe.  Although nobody outside knew it at the time, it was during this shutdown that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinski began their affair...

More thoughts later.

I have to think 1995 was in many ways the most “90s” year of the 90s in the US

Mortal Kombat the movie

Jumaji

Toy Story

Height of Power Rangers craze; Power Rangers movie

Sega and Nintendo were equal in overall sales. SNES sold 2.7 million, Sega with the combined sales of the Genesis, 32x and Saturn sold 2.7 million in 1995 also

PlayStation had just arrived (in Sept 1995)

Indian in the Cupboard

Tupac getting bigger and bigger

Selena’s death in March 1995

Clinton emerging as a respected President after Oklahoma City in April 1995, government shutdown in November 1995 blamed on Republicans

Floral blouses for teen girls and young women

Peak of Friends around this time

I feel like 1995 was the 90s year

I was in my junior year in college in 1995. I was already dating Carlos. He took a trip to California that summer to visit his sister. He sister cleaned out her closet and he returned with 4 garbage bags full of clothes-NICE, business-like clothes. He let me have first dibs which was great because that fall I was student teaching and didn't have the wardrobe and didn't have the $$$ to buy the wardrobe. The only thing I had to buy was shoes (I think I bought 2 or three nice pairs).



Cat

By far the favorite year of my life. If I had to pick one year that perfectly defines the 90s, it's '95

I went to both an Oasis and Beastie Boys concert.  8)