Online cat food cupcake recipes predicted in 1995
August 14, 2012 9:34 PM   Subscribe

Fifth graders in 1995 predict that we will all be on the internet in the future in this PSA from a Montana elementary school.
posted by Isadorady (46 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
Maybe the one year of perfect overlap between Goa and Chicago.
posted by migurski at 9:51 PM on August 14, 2012 [7 favorites]


SOCKS: The First Cat. Could not find cupcake recipe though.
posted by unliteral at 9:58 PM on August 14, 2012


RE: cat food cupcakes -- They weren't predicted, they actually already existed on the internet in 1995. That's what the girl is saying - she found them on a cat website, which they briefly show.
posted by Miko at 10:02 PM on August 14, 2012 [8 favorites]


Looks like they had a better computer lab than the art department at my university in'95. They were probably better at using Photoshop 2.0 than any of us were too...
posted by blaneyphoto at 10:03 PM on August 14, 2012


Copyright 1995. Determined to eat cat food cupcakes or not, that cat must be long dead. That's kind of a downer.
posted by Sys Rq at 10:04 PM on August 14, 2012 [11 favorites]


After many years of being on the internet, I am trying to get off the internet.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 10:09 PM on August 14, 2012 [4 favorites]


Well, by the time I'm in college, the Internet will be our way to talk to friends, and then isolate yourself by playing a farmer, or a mafia guy.
posted by benzenedream at 10:10 PM on August 14, 2012 [1 favorite]


By the time I'm in college, the internet will be the way to download that Eiffel 86 song everyone's talking about!
posted by Navelgazer at 10:11 PM on August 14, 2012 [2 favorites]


In 1995, the only person I knew who was online was my friend's weird dad who collected Pepsi cans.

Now, 1998? First time I used dogpile.
posted by peacrow at 10:19 PM on August 14, 2012 [2 favorites]


They were wrong about cats on the Internet.
posted by PHINC at 10:20 PM on August 14, 2012


I wonder if a 5th grader could predict what we will have after the WWW

I was on the internet in 87 I think.
posted by Ad hominem at 10:22 PM on August 14, 2012 [1 favorite]


When I'm in college, everyone will love old things that no one cares about right now, like zombie movies and Chuck Norris. And kids who profess their love for kitsch things like My Little Pony and the Power Rangers would be well-regarded as connoisseurs of fine culture, instead of total dorks who need to be stuffed into lockers. The internet will bring us there. You'll all see...
posted by Apocryphon at 10:25 PM on August 14, 2012 [5 favorites]


Wait... people in Montana had heard of the internet... in 1995???
posted by hippybear at 10:40 PM on August 14, 2012


Feline Information Page

WHAT?

I like how "in less than an hour" I'd be able to do all that stuff they mention. Indeed, they were correct.
posted by King Bee at 11:07 PM on August 14, 2012


When I was a kid, I visited Jupiter without no durn "internet"! We had a thing called a "telescope"! And it's all we had to eat! And we loved it!!
posted by not_on_display at 11:50 PM on August 14, 2012 [2 favorites]


Heh...one of those kids is my coworker, who is now a kickass reporter in Helena. She is getting quite a kick out of seeing this resurrected.
posted by davidmsc at 12:43 AM on August 15, 2012 [8 favorites]


They were wrong about cats on the Internet.

Oh, if I could flash animate, the Prometheus trailer I would create based around this idea.

1995: Before TubGirl.
posted by Mezentian at 1:00 AM on August 15, 2012


Man.

I want to go back in time and show these the kids my MeFi Curiousity Landing thread experience.
Because, that was the most fun. And not only did we see it all live, he got photos from MARS.
LIVE STREAMING!

I am also wondering where are these kids now, and if we can recreate this video.
posted by Mezentian at 1:03 AM on August 15, 2012


Backing track sounds like dubnobasswithmyheadman-era Underworld. Awesome!
posted by jet_manifesto at 1:15 AM on August 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


I started working at an ISP in Australia in Feb 1995. At the time there were about 20000 ISP customers (mainly via compuserves gateway) and about the same academic users with shell accounts.
Yet whenever a thread about olden days Internet pops up it seems like everybody in it was one of those few.
posted by bystander at 2:28 AM on August 15, 2012


I'm sorry, but the internet surely cannot replace the vast information found on my Encarta '95 CD-ROM.
posted by littlesq at 2:56 AM on August 15, 2012 [15 favorites]


Compuserve's gateway? Academic users with shell accounts?
It wasn't the dark ages.

I had neither, and I was whiiiiir-bing-bongggggg-onggggg-zheeeee-ing from mid-'95.
posted by Mezentian at 3:22 AM on August 15, 2012


In the future, we will track down the identity of a man gaping his anus to the camera by noting a mole on his buttock and cross referencing it to pictures posted on a anal stretching fetish newsgroup!
posted by nathancaswell at 5:09 AM on August 15, 2012 [9 favorites]


I was 15 in 1995 and I'm pretty sure I'd been online for several years at that point. My dad had compuserve and I want to say I was attempting to figure out what was up with the Internet part of it in like 91 ish.

I mean, Quake came out in 96 for Christs sake, so I don't know what people are so shocked about. By the time Quake was out I was FOR SURE totally comfortable with the www.
posted by nathancaswell at 5:15 AM on August 15, 2012


Wait... people in Montana had heard of the internet... in 1995???

I lived in Georgia, and would have been in 5th grade around '96. Our school didn't start talking about the internet until I was in middle school (I think maybe 7th grade computer class), and only then it was to download clip art from Microsoft so that we could learn how to make powerpoint presentations.* It wasn't until the following year that the internet really broke out, and then it was really only AIM and napster.

*Mine was about cows.
posted by phunniemee at 5:55 AM on August 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


You can get on the internet in less than an hour, but you can't get off the internet in less than an hour.
posted by deathpanels at 6:22 AM on August 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Netscape was founded in '94. The WWW was around. And to a lot of people it was obviously THE FUTURE.

I did a set of webpages for the Civil Engineering firm I worked for at the time. Instead of spending time writing the Visual FoxPro database I was supposed to be working on.

I was surprised to see my first Amazon order wasn't until March of '97 though.
posted by DigDoug at 6:23 AM on August 15, 2012


The most surprising thing about that video is the correct prediction about the internet on phones. When you consider how basic mobile phones were back then, and how tiny the screens were, that is a pretty big leap to make.
posted by afx237vi at 6:29 AM on August 15, 2012


1995 was my freshman year of high school. I'd had the internet for at least a year by that time and it was available in the school library. We were issued these laminated cards called "Internet driver's licenses" that could be revoked if we looked up porn or something. I kept it in my wallet for several years after high school just to remind myself how stupid high school was.
posted by TrialByMedia at 6:40 AM on August 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


I grew up in Georgia too, phunniemee, and we had the internet at home (dial-up) by 1995. My dad was also a super Mac-addict, so he was very interested in bringing all things technological into our home.

My sister and I had a grand old time visiting chatrooms and pretending we were 23 year old women (I was 12 at the time and she was 10.). Ah, Alta Vista, the early days of Yahoo, so many memories...

Oh god. It's a wonder we were never abducted.
posted by whimsicalnymph at 7:11 AM on August 15, 2012


Man. I'd love to see a "Where are they now?" follow-up on the kids in this video.
posted by duffell at 7:19 AM on August 15, 2012


My writing teacher was crazy ahead of her time. I was in her class in 1986 and 1987, and she had email at home via some early service, and used to correspond with a handful of other writers on it. Occasionally we would have some reason to email them, and we'd compose it in class and hand it to her, she'd take it home and send it, and return with the reply the next day. That was pretty cool, and certainly very advanced for her time.

I got online in 1992 at college. As part of admission packets we got a form allowing us to sign up for a unix account. We had to learn the command language, and had to go to a small, stuffy computer lab on the 3rd floor of the ancient science building, where there were banks of green-screen terminals. Email was a big boon for a broke-ass college student like me - I never had the money for long-distance phone calls, so it let me keep in touch with my friends at other schools.

The following year, we got internet on Apple IIes in two "Mac labs," and I discovered FTP, BBSes and MUDs, much to the detriment of my grades. When the graphical web came in, I was pretty down on it. I couldn't see why the internet needed pictures, for gawd's sake. Probably why I like MeFi so much.
posted by Miko at 7:33 AM on August 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


The first time I ever logged on to the Information Superhighway was in 1997 at college (a college with a hugely successful computer science department). We checked our email with a program that I think was called NCSA Tel-Net. The guy down the hall from me in the dorms had a shirt that said "Google" on it and he wore it all the time because he was trying to get a job with Google, but I don't think he did. All through the 90s, if someone mentioned the Internet, I said: "The Internet? That's just a fad." For some reason that made people angry. They didn't laugh, they got angry.

Three or four years later a bunch of those same people who laughed lost little bundles in the dot com crash.

And now I run a successful online media empire.

The last bit is false.
posted by 3200 at 7:47 AM on August 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


Wait... people in Montana had heard of the internet... in 1995???

In 94 or 95, I remember using one of the old boxy macintoshes to watch a news wire feed spew out the news of the day as it happened in a debate class in middle school in Great Falls. I was mesmerized. It wasn't commonly used in the classrooms; this was for a gifted ed class, whereas when my regular classes went to the computer lab, we spent the hour with Oregon Trail or LOGO rather than doing anything with the internet.

A year or so later, I was at a summer camp at Montana Tech and we were allowed to use the computer labs, which had Internet connections. The campers found out about chat rooms (not the AOL style but web pages that had a text box at the bottom and which you had to refresh to see new content and which only kept the last hundred or so lines). I remember telling multiple people that I was in Montana, and most were surprised to learn not only that we had Internet access but that we had electricity at all and didn't ride horses everywhere.

love this video, by the way. Was hoping to recognize people in it. Now, if the video of me and other second graders reading our predictions for the year 2000 which would be sealed in a time capsule in the Great Falls courthouse ever shows up online, I'll be mortified. "The New Kids on the Block will be the Old Kids on the Block," I wrote.
posted by msbrauer at 7:58 AM on August 15, 2012


I had neither, and I was whiiiiir-bing-bongggggg-onggggg-zheeeee-ing from mid-'95.

Objection!! The "bing-bongggggg-onggggg" part of the modem handshake was introduced with the v.90 56k standard, which was introduced in 1998! I rest my case.
posted by zsazsa at 8:09 AM on August 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


This PSA gets –1 for no mention of the Information Superhighway. I mean how can you "get on the internet" if you don't know where the on-ramp is?
posted by Kabanos at 8:16 AM on August 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


1995 was the magic year for the Internet. In San Francisco the early nerds working at Wired, etc called it "the Summer of Web". For me I was in Santa Fe, and I knew this Internet thing was going to be mainstream one day while sitting at Downtown Subscription having a coffee and overhearing two, maybe three conversations that all mentioned "email" or "web". In a little touristy town, of a bunch of normal folks who did nothing with computers. Except now they were doing email and looking up cat food cupcake recipes.

Another nice document about 1995 is Derek Powazek's essay Stoked. "I will never forget the first time I walked into the HotWired office."
posted by Nelson at 8:43 AM on August 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


You can get on the internet in less than an hour, but you can't get off the internet in less than an hour.
I can get off on the Internet in like 2 minutes.
posted by nathancaswell at 9:58 AM on August 15, 2012 [2 favorites]


I'm sorry, but the internet surely cannot replace the vast information found on my Encarta '95 CD-ROM.

Wikipedia's got nothing on Microsoft Dangerous Creatures.
posted by Apocryphon at 10:07 AM on August 15, 2012


Where are those children today and what are they doing? They should refilm the PSA with the exact same people.
posted by Renoroc at 10:34 AM on August 15, 2012


Wikipedia's got nothing on Microsoft Dangerous Creatures.

Which, in turn, has nothing on the Microsoft Creatures of the Necronomicon CD-ROM.
posted by acb at 10:48 AM on August 15, 2012


Hey, did any of you guys ever play the trivia maze game that came with Encarta '95? That was awesome. I loved the weird little girl who kept talking about oysters.
posted by phunniemee at 10:58 AM on August 15, 2012


Hey, did any of you guys ever play the trivia maze game that came with Encarta '95? That was awesome. I loved the weird little girl who kept talking about oysters.

I loved that game. I think I played that more than using the actual encyclopedia. Incidentally, after I posted that comment I ended up going to Youtube searching for videos of that maze game. I really want to play it again.
posted by littlesq at 1:53 PM on August 15, 2012


I really want to play it again.

I know what I'm doing when I get home.
posted by phunniemee at 1:56 PM on August 15, 2012 [1 favorite]


I would talk about how I was totally using BBSs/the internet in fifth grade (which was 1990-91), but the story is already in my profile, so instead I'm going to point out that my gosh I'm so glad the era of 1990s fashion is mostly behind us kind of. The whole look of that era was just... well suited to it being a long long time ago. There are very few photos of anyone I know from that era that don't elicit the exact same thoughts - even supermodels looked stupid.

I got a sort of warm fuzzy feeling from the screengrabs, though. It made me look up this wonderful example of pointless nostalgia. My sisters and I like to try and remember which ones we put on our own websites - there was a period when just one animated GIF explaining how your website "wasn't finished yet" was completely insufficient for communicating this information.

(I was also totally like "why bother with pictures, they just slow everything down" feeling in the early nineties, honestly. And I don't regret it, because I remember when my dad finally upgraded to a 2400 baud modem.)
posted by SMPA at 6:54 PM on August 15, 2012


One of the kids in the video, Marnee Banks, is now a reporter in Helena and did a brief follow-up today on the video, and talked with the woman who created it (semi-self link, I work for a sister station in another MT town).
posted by davidmsc at 5:51 PM on August 16, 2012 [1 favorite]


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