The 90s were a pretty interesting time to be alive. The Cold War came to a peaceful
end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Underground music in the form of grunge rock and hip-hop
replaced the more heavily-produced sounds of the 80s. And for a generation of kids that
grew up alongside the emergence of personal technology, a new world of exploration unfolded
in the form of desktop computers and the World Wide Web. Computers provided 90s kids a veritable
Swiss army knife of tools to play with, and the Internet unlocked the door to communicating
and spreading these tools far and wide.
Let's revisit a few of the essential software tools of '90s kids.
To truly understand what the Internet was like in the 90s, you had to have lived through
it. For the uninitiated, you connected to the Internet through a telephone line, and
at 56Kbps, downloading anything larger than a basic webpage or image was painfully slow.
And if ANYTHING interrupted that connection, say a parent trying to make a business call
or an older sibling trying to call a friend, say goodbye to your download. That made our
first tool an absolute essential.
GetRight was a download manager, developed originally by Michael Burford under his company
"Headlight Software". While trying to download a game demo, Burford grew increasingly frustrated
as the demo would get halfway done, and then disconnect. He thought, "If I could just be
putting these pieces together, I would have had the whole file, and wouldn't be starting
from scratch again!" He set to work immediately to solve his problem, which resulted in GetRight.
The defining feature was that it would allow you to pause and resume your downloads, either
by choice, or if your connection was suddenly interrupted. This meant that if you started
downloading an MP3 or Real Media file from a website, and someone broke your connection,
it was a simple matter of telling GetRight to resume the download once you were connected
again. This turned what was once a catastrophic loss of time into nothing more than a minor
inconvenience.
Ultimately, the idea of a download manager was such a good idea that the idea was simply
copied into every major browser.
As we surfed around the world wide web, looking at all the different web pages, many kids
thought to themselves, "Why can't I have my own website?" As it turned out, we could,
thanks to websites like Geocities, Angelfire, and others. But in order to get all your HTMLs
and J-P-Gs on your free web host, you needed a program to transfer the files, and one of
the most popular, for a time, was CuteFTP.
Built originally by Russian developer Alex Kunadze around 1996, and distributed, and
eventually acquired by GlobalSCAPE, Cute FTP was one of the first truly easy-to-use FTP
applications that had a graphical user interface. 90s kids quickly built an underground network
of personal web logs, as well as websites to host MP3 music files, Real Player South
Park episodes, Nintendo ROMS, and warez tools to crack all of their essential software,
including, ironically, CuteFTP.
Eventually, CuteFTP would fall out of favor for other FTP software, ultimately with open-source
FileZilla becoming one of the most popular and widely-used.
When you're dealing with a 56k dial-up modem, shaving off a few kilobytes here and there
wasn't just useful, it was essential. The idea of compressing a file or set of files
through algorithms that reduce redundancy in files had been around since at least the
late-70s, and was made popular on PCs through the introduction of PKZIP in 1989. However
90s kids had graduated from the complexity of the command line and demanded something
more...buttony. Enter Winzip.
Released in January 1991 by Nico Mak Computing for the OS/2 platform as PMZIP, the company
would quickly rename to Winzip and eventually pivot to the rapidly growing Windows platform.
Winzip would eventually become one of the most widely-used, and cracked, applications
by enterprising 90s kids. Combined with the GetRight download manager, downloading files
compressed by Winzip became...if not exactly enjoyable, at least tolerable.
Eventually, Winzip began to fall out of favor to other compression applications like Winrar,
and eventually the ability to handle zip-compressed files was integrated directly into Windows,
Mac OS, and Linux. But for a few years, Winzip was an absolutely indispensable tool.
Communicating with friends has always been a vital part of any teenager's life. The 70s
had the phone, the 80s had the mall, but what did 90s kids do to chat and hang out? The
answer came in 1996, with three simple letters: I C Q.
Introduced by Israeli company Mirabilis in 1996, ICQ's adoption was incredibly rapid,
tapping into a massive pent-up demand for an ability to communicate online. ICQ wasn't
the first application to bring real-time chat to the Internet - IRC had been in existence
for some time by then - but it brought it in a way that was incredibly accessible, simply
having users register an account and providing them with a UIN, sort of a "telephone number"
for ICQ. Mix in a colorful flower logo and cute sound notification, and Mirabilis had
a recipe for instant success. By 2001, over 100 million users were on the network.
Over time, ICQ would trade back and forth in popularity with AOL Instant Messenger (who
eventually purchased ICQ outright), but ultimately the rise of mobile phones with text messaging,
Skype on PCs, and eventually services like Facebook and Apple's FaceTime, would completely
wipe ICQ off the map. By 2013 the userbase had fallen to around 11 million users, and
was acquired in 2010 by a Russian Internet company. It was a pretty ignominious end for
such a popular app, but for a time, it was truly a beloved app.
Thanks for watching the essential software tools of '90s kids, a Smartyflix production
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