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Things in History which SEEM far away but really are not.

Music videos used to be a big fucking deal back in the late 90s-early 2000s. TRL was a very popular thing. It was a tv show on MTV that showed videos and have famous musicians come on the show to promote their shit. Crowds of people would stand outside just so they could be on camera. It was on 5 days a week.

Crazy Taxi was a game where you drove around picking people up in a really small area and dropping them off. That was it. That was all you could do in the game. You couldn't shoot people, you couldn't go bowling, you couldn't race other cars, there wasn't any story or missions or any other sorts of side activities. People played that shit for hours on end back in 1999.

People still bought encyclopedias in the late 90s-early 2000s. That was a thing a lot of people had and thought was useful.

9/11 was just 16 years ago.

YouTube was created back in 2005 and wasn't immediately popular. People didn't have their own shows, you couldn't find every single song imaginable and it wasn't an avenue where you could get famous and make money off of.

MySpace was a huge popular thing less than 10 years ago. It's where we all were before facebook.
 
Strangelove77 said:
Music videos used to be a big fucking deal back in the late 90s-early 2000s. TRL was a very popular thing. It was a tv show on MTV that showed videos and have famous musicians come on the show to promote their shit. Crowds of people would stand outside just so they could be on camera. It was on 5 days a week.

Crazy Taxi was a game where you drove around picking people up in a really small area and dropping them off. That was it. That was all you could do in the game. You couldn't shoot people, you couldn't go bowling, you couldn't race other cars, there wasn't any story or missions or any other sorts of side activities. People played that shit for hours on end back in 1999.

People still bought encyclopedias in the late 90s-early 2000s. That was a thing a lot of people had and thought was useful.

9/11 was just 16 years ago.

YouTube was created back in 2005 and wasn't immediately popular. People didn't have their own shows, you couldn't find every single song imaginable and it wasn't an avenue where you could get famous and make money off of.

MySpace was a huge popular thing less than 10 years ago. It's where we all were before facebook.
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Most of your stuff sounds like it would only surprise a 15 year old, lol. Or am I too old...?
 
super-famicom said:
Dial up internet is something I bet many members of GAF have never experienced, but it was just (less than?) around 30 years ago.
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LOL my parents lived in a rural area where all they could get was dial-up internet, and that was only 2 years ago.
 
July 1 is Canada's 150th birthday.

September is my 30th.

I'm roughly 1/5 as old as my entire country. My dad is over 1/3, and my grandparents are a few years shy of 2/3.
 
The oldest person alive today (117 apparently) would have witnessed the birth of film pretty much. That's crazy.
 
One that's been on my mind of late due to British politics:
The Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1998, came into force in 1999. Yet the thought of Irish terrorism as an actual thing that took people's lives and was a regular occurrence seems utterly alien to me, being born in 1995.
 
It seems marital rape was not considered a crime in England until 1991. Lots of Soviet countries criminalised marital rape before that time, lots of countries have yet to criminalise it, and many countries have only recently criminalised it in the last decade. And even when criminalised, it is hardly punished adequately. The first conviction in South Africa was in 2012, for example, even though it has been criminalised since 1993. So an awful lot of people are probably the children of legally sanctioned rape.

Kind of a sad and serious example, sorry. Lighthearted things are nice but there are problems with society which need fixing. And it's tough to fix things without talking about them first.
 
Felt this way a number of years ago in school when realizing Einstein died in 1955 instead of being a relic of the 1800's or prior.

Another of the "younger than they sound" names that recently threw me for a loop was Henry Heimlich of the Heimlich maneuver, who died last year.
 
Tatsumaki Senpuukyaku! said:
Along the lines of the Civil War being relatively recent - here is someone who witnessed Lincoln's assassination being interviewed on a game show in 1956
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Related to the video - It was not long ago cigarette companies sponsored lots of shows. Doctors used to advertise their health benefits. They would advertise winning a puppy with camel points. They used cartoon characters to appeal to children only 20 years ago. Everywhere used to smell like smoke!
 
just a few hundred years ago 95% of the global population lived in poverty. the typical swede in the 1700's would have lived on a farm all his life, eating oatmeal for breakfast lunch and dinner every day. i'd rather be a pre-agriculture nomad than live like that.
 
DiipuSurotu said:
V8OEyYg.jpg

Civil War veteran posing with a jet in 1955
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is there a source on this because the war ended over 90 years before this.

So this guy would have to be over 100 years old and likely 110ish. Which seems iffy
 
ConfirmationBiased said:
Going on 3 but yeah, this. I was born only a few months later, but the Cold War is ancient history to me. Doesn't seem like something that's even part of the world I grew up in.
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Whoops, yeah I meant 3, but it somehow feels like much longer ago, especially the Cold War. Maybe it's because I wasn't alive when the two happened (3 years after the walls fell).
 
GamerJM said:
It's weird to me that the Renaissance period ended in like 1700. That's only, like, three lifetimes ago! When I think of that stuff I think of it being hundreds and hundreds of years ago.
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That's far more than 3 lifetimes. And you're confusing the Renaissance and Enlightenment
 
Frozenprince said:
The last survivor of combat in the Civil War died in 1959.
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Watching FDR addressing civil war veterans during the Depression is one of those "history is wrinkling my brain" moments I remember most from my classes.

In general, the fact that the Civil War was "so soon" after the Revolutionary War is kind of hard to imagine; people fighting in the Civil War had parents, not just grandparents, who fought in the revolution (like Robert E Lee.)

rudger said:
Related to the video - It was not long ago cigarette companies sponsored lots of shows. Doctors used to advertise their health benefits. They would advertise winning a puppy with camel points. They used cartoon characters to appeal to children only 20 years ago. Everywhere used to smell like smoke!
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The difference in attitudes towards smoking even in my less-than-30-year lifetime is pretty crazy. I remember as a kid when you could buy cigarettes everywhere in vending machines. I imagine for a young kid growing up today the idea that you got your choice of smoking or non-smoking parts of restaurants and the like will feel alien.

eXistor said:
The oldest person alive today (117 apparently) would have witnessed the birth of film pretty much. That's crazy.
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I think about the fact that my great-grandparents went from seeing people get around in horse-drawn carriages to living to see a man land on the Moon. As much technical achievements as we've made since then, I'm not sure we'll live in a time period as paradigm-shifting as that, even if we hit the Singularity or something.
 
Mississippi became the last state that ratified the 13th amendment in 2013. They only put it on the floor to be ratified in 1999, and then it became a "clerical error" that went unnoticed for 14 years. The 13th amendment was adopted in 1864.

Also Kentucky ratified it in 1976.
 
allenpergallon said:
Felt this way a number of years ago in school when realizing Einstein died in 1955 instead of being a relic of the 1800's or prior.

Another of the "younger than they sound" names that recently threw me for a loop was Henry Heimlich of the Heimlich maneuver, who died last year.
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It sounds like you just think Germans are old.
 
NYCmetsfan said:
is there a source on this because the war ended over 90 years before this.

So this guy would have to be over 100 years old and likely 110ish. Which seems iffy
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It seems to have been debunked.

However, consider this:

Lemuel Cook, born in 1759, served under George Washington in the American Revolution, and died in 1866.

330px-Lemuel_Cook-2.jpg


Albert Woolson, born in 1850 (before Lemuel Cook died), served in the Union army in the Civil War, dying in 1956.

Albert_Woolson_%28ca._1953%29.jpg


Isn't that amazing?

Finally, the birth date of the oldest person alive, is closer in time to George Washington becoming the first president of the United States of America than it is to the present day.

1900-2017 (117 years) vs 1789-1900 (111 years)
 
Cocaloch said:
The Enlightenment didn't end in 1700, fairly generous periodizations place it as starting in late 17th century.
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Depending on the history, some historians place the end of the enlightenment with the last of the enlightenment-inspired revolutions in 1830, but generally it's 1715 to the French Revolution, unless you're arguing western the 17th-century scientific revolution gets added into it.
 
The US actually heavily taxed the wealthy and businesses until the 1980s. In our parent's lifetimes they knew a government that wasn't run by corporations and special interests.
 
It's a bit of a mindfuck for me to consider that at this point, we're as many years from World War II as people living during World War II were as many years from The Civil War. And, people living during the Civil War were about as many years from the American Revolution.

I was born in the 80s, and World War II was still very relevant. My grandparents all fought or served in World War II, and so it didn't like some distant memory.
 
Fuchsdh said:
Depending on the history, some historians place the end of the enlightenment with the last of the enlightenment-inspired revolutions in 1830, but generally it's 1715 to the French Revolution, unless you're arguing western the 17th-century scientific revolution gets added into it.
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Some people like to push back the starting date to get Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, and Spinoza along with the empiricists.
 
Popstar said:
Potatoes, tomatoes, chili peppers and many other crops originated in the Americas and took some time to catch on elsewhere in the world.

This means that all non-Native American dishes using them are no older than their eventual adoption elsewhere in the world. ie: Irish, Italian, Indian, etc.
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Yeah, it's kind of weird how much culture people assume as time-honored was really a result of the Columbian exchange.

Also, the fact that within 200 years Native American tribes in the American west went from never having seen or heard of a horse to relying on it entirely as the foundation of their way of life is pretty crazy.

The Albatross said:
It's a bit of a mindfuck for me to consider that at this point, we're as many years from World War II as people living during World War II were as many years from The Civil War. And, people living during the Civil War were about as many years from the American Revolution.

I was born in the 80s, and World War II was still very relevant. My grandparents all fought or served in World War II, and so it didn't like some distant memory.
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I think it's just as soon as the living memory of something dies out, it vanishes pretty quickly from consciousness. Which is why I understand where a lot of Holocaust survivors are afraid the same thing will easily happen again as soon as people who directly remember the atrocities disappear.

Mostly I just wish I'd spent more time talking with my elders when I was a kid. So much history lost because people don't write everything down.
 
SG-17 said:
Behaviorally and a anatomically modern humans have been walking the Earth for the last 350,000+ years. The current iteration of civilization started only about 8,000 years ago. At most.
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It is thought to have started at last 9,500 years ago.
 
I remember when I first started driving in highschool, I thought I lived in the most futuristic time ever, because I could look up a route on my computer at home, print it out, and have a customized map of my trip with me!

That seems like forever ago, because it's so hard to imagine living without GPS... right in our phone no less, not even a dedicated GPS unit...

Hell, I got my first cell phone in high school, game boy green and black screen

And to think in a just a short while, I'll be able to tell my car where I want to go, and it'll understand me and just take me there by itself... what the hell is happening lol
 
My great-grandmother, who passed away a couple of years ago, was born in 1913. She was born just 3 years after Portugal became a Republic, and a few months before the start of World War I. She was 13 when the Estado Novo-dictatorship started. She was 61 by the time it ended. My older brother was born 11 years after that, in 1985. When he was born, there was still a USSR. I was born in 1992, and there was no longer a USSR. My great-grandmother lived to see us both finish college.
 
The Exploder said:
friendster
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That's a good point. I recently started getting these "ten year anniversary of your friendship with ___" reminders from Facebook, which made me realize that's how long it's basically been since Facebook opened up to high schoolers. Now that everyone basically has a Facebook even if they don't use it for much, imagining the world of pre-social media must be strange for some people. MySpace feels older than dirt.

Hell, using web forums like NeoGAF is archaic to an increasing number of young people with social media platforms these days.
 
I was still using dial up when steam came out... you would update over night and offline mode was super important.

Only upgraded to a shitty "high speed" like maybe within a year after half life 2.
 
Cocaloch said:
?
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For example, take Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Maybe the historical work most responsible for the dichotomy I mentioned. While his knowledge was vast and his use of primary sources excellent his analysis of the events was simplistic to say the least. Rome in her height was a pagan "republic" while when it fell was a christian empire. View that through the lense of the Enlightenment and the solution to him was quite simple. The logical, martial and disciplined Old Rome versus the decadent and superstitious New Rome. And the "Byzantine" empire was nothing but a prolonged death.

It's a tempting interpretation but one no recent discovery either historical, sociological or archaeological supports.
 
Fuchsdh said:
I think it's just as soon as the living memory of something dies out, it vanishes pretty quickly from consciousness. Which is why I understand where a lot of Holocaust survivors are afraid the same thing will easily happen again as soon as people who directly remember the atrocities disappear.

Mostly I just wish I'd spent more time talking with my elders when I was a kid. So much history lost because people don't write everything down.
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Yeah this. I've been talking to my grandparents about thier experience during WWII. I should really document it...
 
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