The 1990s: Grunge, Patriot Missiles, and Reality TV

The 1990s started with the world finally exhaling and ended with everyone bracing for the computers to crash.

The Soviet Union unravelled for good in 1991. Four decades of nuclear dread, gone in months. It felt like history had wrapped itself up. Someone actually wrote a book arguing exactly that. History didn't get the memo.

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The Gulf War came fast and looked strange on television. Night-vision green and smart bombs. It was a war you could watch live on CNN like it was sports. It showcased the might of the last Superpower standing.

Then Rodney King. Then the LA riots. The country that had just watched itself win the Cold War turned its gaze on itself. It didn't look so hot anymore.

Grunge hit. Hard. Nirvana turned flannel and distortion into the sound of the decade, and Kurt Cobain became the reluctant face of a generation that didn't especially want one. Hip-hop went from the margins to the mainstream and then split down the middle — Tupac and Biggie, two coasts, two feuds, both men dead before the decade was out. Seinfeld made a hit show out of nothing happening. MTV put strangers in a house and called it real. Irony became a personality.

Underneath all of it, the wires were changing. Dial-up modems screeched their way into living rooms. AOL mailed everyone in America a free floppy disk, then a free CD, then another, like it was trying to double the size of landfills overnight.

"You've got mail" became a sound people recognized instantly, the same way an earlier generation knew a dial tone. The internet went from something the military built to something a kid used to talk to strangers after dinner.

Analog hadn't left yet. Digital had just shown up and pulled up a chair. A very stiff one, that was clunky, but showed promise.

Nobody was fully in one world or the other yet. You still rewound your VHS tapes. At the start of the decade you had a landline. By the end you might have a cell phone, too, but it probably flipped open and had a dangly antenna.

In the 1990s the U.S. impeached a president over an affair and watched on TV it like it was a season finale. The world had grieved a princess together, live, all at once, in a way that hadn't quite been possible before. Columbine became a name everyone knew, too.

When the decade counted down everyone held their breath and waited to see if the computers would even turn back on.

- Matt Garvin