1990's Culture & Events

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First Gulf War 1990-1991

Pictured: President George H. W. Bush waves above a crowd of First Marine Division desert-command-post marines on active duty in the Persian Gulf.

The First Gulf War, which included Operation Desert Storm, was a military response to Iraq’s invasion and subsequent annexation of Kuwait, a small neighboring country with the world’s fifth-largest oil reserves.

Led by the United States, Coalition forces began a massive aerial campaign on January 17, 1991, followed by a ground offensive, and liberated Kuwait from the army of Saddam Hussein.

147 Americans and an estimated 22,000 Iraqis were killed in combat.




Terrorism:1993-1998: 

Islamic terrorists launched a series of attacks on American targets throughout the nineties. In 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center hoping to collapse the buildings. Six were killed and over 1000 wounded in the parking garage explosion. In 1996, they struck American service people at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia. Twenty were killed and 372 wounded. In 1998, they struck U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania killing over 200 and wounding 5000. In October 2000, they killed seventeen sailors aboard the USS Cole. El Queda was responsible for most of the attacks. The American response was weak and the government refused to extradite Osama bin Laden. The lack of response by the American Administration helped lead to 911.




The Internet becomes available (1993): The third wave of human history began in earnest when the government unleashed the internet. 

Today, the internet is at our fingertips. For much of the 90s, it was several beeping and screeching minutes away as we waited for our dial-up connections to boot up. Once that was done, we’d surf the web with the early Netscape browser—which looks about as crude by today’s standards as a pager does next to an iPhone.

This is what it used to sound like when we waited for our computers to "connect" the internet.



Y2K:1999

In 1999, everyone was anticipating the arrival of the new millennium. January 1, 2000 was the day that our entire lives were going to be changed. The fear was that all of the computers that everyone depended on would malfunction. People also feared that our luxuries would be destroyed and that we would revert back to living like the olden days without any electricity, heat or running water. They called this the great Y2K scare. 

The scare consisted of the fear that the entire computer systems were going to fail on New Year's Eve 1999. This is because computer memory space was pricey then and memory was saved by using two digits for the date instead four. For example, a date representing 1995 would be saved as "95." Therefore, when the year changed to 2000, the disaster that was anticipated by so many was that the computers would not be able to tell if "00" meant 2000 or 1900. Some problems with the dates were already occurring before the millennium. Therefore, people assumed that all of the world's computers would fail to function. 

In other words, people saw the new millennium as the apocalypse. They feared that the end of the world was near. A family in Ohio took it to such an extreme that they bought gas-powered generators and a year's supply of dry food because they were so convinced that the end was near. There was complete chaos occurring around the world. 

When the clocks and calendars did actually change to the year 2000, computers barely had any problems. Although there were some reports of minor problems, the majority of computers did alright.



Y2K was a really big deal in 1999. Check it out. 

Silly 1990's Slang. 

Comment: What did you learn about the 1990's that you didn't know before?