For instance….
1. If you got online, it was probably through America Online (AOL).
Or you tried to navigate the web via this baby.
Google was founded about 11 months later.
There were no blogs because blog wasn’t a word.
The word “blog” is short for “weblog,” a term that has roots in the Miami Valley via Yellow Spring native Jorn Barger. It was shortened to the last four letters by a man named Peter Merholz.
2. There were no iPhones.
Actually, there were no ‘i’ anything. The iMac debuted in 1998 with iTunes and the iPod coming in three years later.
There were smartphones… sort of.
Facebook? Twitter? Forget about it.
The most famous social media network came along almost seven years after the (then-Florida) Marlins’ completed their Game 7 rally to claim the championship. Twitter came a couple of years after that.
In between, there was MySpace (let’s never speak of MySpace).
3. Reality TV was scarce.
Survivor? Yeah, that was not a thing. It debuted in spring 2000. Good luck finding a reality show on mainstream broadcast television before that.
Good luck avoiding reality TV now…
4. College conference expansion?
In the news last week for deciding not to expand, the Big 12 Conference was a year old in 1997.
It had 12 teams, surprisingly enough, while the Pac-10 had — you guessed it! — 10.
Big Ten had 11 teams, and everyone thought that was weird.
The recently expanded SEC had 12 teams while the ACC had only nine.
5. Top sports teams: The reigning Super Bowl winner was the Green Bay Packers.
The best team in the NBA was the Chicago Bulls, and the Detroit Red Wings possessed the Stanley Cup.
Meanwhile in college football, Michigan and Nebraska were both among the remaining undefeateds…
6. Music?
The most popular single* according to the Billboard Hot 100 was “Something About the Way you Look Tonight”/”Candle in the Wind” by Elton John, and you were most likely to listen to it via the radio.
Let’s just say without broadband or smartphones there was no streaming your favorite song. You couldn’t even log onto Napster to download it, either, because that service didn’t come along until 1999.
7. The highest-grossing movie was Titanic, starring a young Leonardo DiCaprio.
The rest of the top 10 included a James Bond movie (Tomorrow Never Dies) and flicks starring Will Smith (Men in Black), Harrison Ford (Air Force One), Julia Roberts (My Best Friend's Wedding), Jack Nicholson (As Good As It Gets) and Bruce Willis (The Fifth Element).
Not too shabby.
(Note: We relied heavily on Wikipedia, founded in January 2001, for this story.)
*A “single” was a cassette or CD (we only have so much time so you’ll have to figure out what that is on your own) you could buy for like $4 if you didn’t want to spend $16 for an album that was probably 75 percent filler.
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