Norton UK Blog
90's Back to School Digital trends
The new school year in the 90’s meant packing an oversized bag full of folders and textbooks, gadgets and other junk. It’s remarkable how much things have changed since then, here’s our recap of five trends that were a cornerstone of our school lives and how they’ve totally changed.
Day planners were an essential. How else would you know when you had football practice or who’s house you were going to play SNES at on Wednesday? It also gave us an opportunity to express our creative sides through stickers.
Kids these days however have Facebook events and Google Calendar. Which is fine, but you can’t put a glitter foil hologram sticker of Jim Carrey on your Facebook page.
Did you know anyone with a pager? They were the cutting edge of cool tech at school and enabled you to call a number and leave a message which would be typed out and sent to the person’s pager in a similar way to texting would later be done.
Text messages inevitably replaced pagers in schools but since then that has been replaced by instant messaging via WhatsApp, Line, Viber, Facebook Messenger, WeChat or any one of dozens of other free IM services.
Remember having to carry around CDs and cassettes? Kids today will never know the pain of deciding which five CDs to fit into a travel case because they can store millions of songs on their phone and have access to pretty much anything they could dream of via streaming services.
Tamagotchi appeared one autumn and disappeared by the following spring, but in the period they were cool absolutely everyone had one.
They were the cutting edge of pocket technology and even though they didn’t really seem to do much they were a hint of what the future would hold. Today however kids are more likely to have a couple of hundred Pokemon Go friends in their pocket.
Graphing calculators were massive hulks that weighed your bag down and looking back probably only ever got used five times in four years of high school. You’ll be relieved to hear that nothing has changed between the 90’s and now in this respect, kids still lug around massive calculators they never seem to use.
Students do rely an awful lot more on their laptops and mobile phones than they did twenty years ago though, if you want to protect your family’s digital lives on all their devices, Norton Security Premium is a great place to start:
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