What were the 90s like?
For awhile, they were like having all the money in the world to do anything, and everyone was rich. There were no more competitors, only “Partners collaborating to improve the lives of our customers” and to create the appearance of choice you’d just spawn a dozen other companies which were still you - all operating under different names. You could spend millions on products that never sold but taught you how to make even better products and no one cared - SPEND MORE was the solution to everything. No one slept, and ‘you must wear pants in the office’ wasn’t a rule yet.
The internet went from dialup to IDSN (Idiotic Damned Slow Nuisance) and then to T1 frame relays, and desktop publishing happened - typefaces stopped being $799 a typeface and all of a sudden you could get 100 typefaces on a single CD. LaserPrinters went from being the size of cars to sitting on your desk and not only worked with every computer at the same time, some of them were less than $1,000. Suddenly you could print anything you could draw, as big as you wanted, in colors that are illegal now because they were irradiated and literally GLOWED. I think that might actually be my crotch in the background of that image with the mark 1 DisplayMaker.
Even the games were mind blowing, and they just kept getting better and better so fast it was like they would never stop becoming more and more mind blowing.
Even 2000 was incredible.
The decade was unbelievable. Fun, fast, and we couldn’t flush money down R&D holes fast enough.
Then the IRS ‘fixed’ the ‘product swap’ and ‘we give you thing or you give us thing = we earned money’ problems in the tax code that we’d been exploiting to get away with … well .. basically making the high speed internet and the ‘everyone has their own computer now’ world we live in.
You didn’t think something like the desktop publishing revolution and the global internet happened without breaking some eggs, did you?
@TheGamerPainter
If you count platforms, I probably have thirty or forty. Some I save just to test new releases on older platforms. My fav right now though is my MacBook Pro and my old PowerMac - a thunked 64bit upgrade of the machine that basically were the original XBoxes.
I still have a DreamCast for Soul Caliber and an Intel 80286 with an EGA monitor that still plays Doom like it was brand new.