Christmas Day.
1998.
You’re splayed out on the floor of your family room, surrounded by a sea of crumpled
wrapping paper and a fleet of toys and games.
Your older sister’s stationed at the bathroom mirror, testing out a new eyeshadow.
It’s blue.
You can hear the tinny, muffled voices of Beastie Boys emanating from the headphones
of your older brother’s new Sony Walkman.
You’ve eaten six Christmas cookies and it’s not even 10 a.m.
Life is good.
Just then, a team of federal agents sporting dark suits and even darker sunglasses bursts
through the front door and makes a beeline right toward you.
You’re confused.
You’re only 9 years old … what could they possibly want with you?
But they don’t want you.
They want … your Furby.
“Sorry, kiddo, this is a matter of national security,” one G-man says as he pries the
furry animatronic from your hands.
And with that, the agents disappear as quickly as they came.
OK, fine, the government didn’t go around seizing kids’ Furbys on Christmas or any
other day.
But it did buy into the possibility that the beloved bird-like toy could pose a threat
to national security.
Hi, I’m Justin Dodd, certified ’90s kid and former Furby dad.
The last decade of the second millennium gave us a lot: the rise of the World Wide Web,
the fall of the USSR, multiple rom-coms starring Julia Roberts.
I mean, that smile really can light up a room—no misconception there.
With such seismic shifts in technology and culture came a fair number of misconceptions,
from the idea that Furbys could function as spies to the myth that OJ Simpson got acquitted
all because of some ill-fitting gloves.
Let’s get into them.
In 1997, designers David Hampton and Caleb Chung conceived of a Tamagotchi-type toy that
you could pet.
They imbued this ambiguous creature with the power of (limited) speech and called it a
Furby—a variation on their working title, Furball.
The invention soon got sold to Tiger Electronics, which itself soon got sold to Hasbro.
By the 1998 holiday season, Furby was the hottest toy on the market.
But the finer workings of this technological wonder were lost on the casual consumer, and
rumors exaggerated its capabilities.
The simplest misunderstanding was that Furby could record conversations, which it literally
couldn’t.
In January 1999, the National Security Agency went so far as to ban the toy from its Maryland
headquarters.
According to NSA’s memo, or “Furby Alert,” as the media dubbed it, “Personally owned
photographic, video and audio recording equipment are prohibited items.
This includes toys, such as Furbys, with built-in recorders that repeat the audio with synthesized
sound to mimic the original signal.”
The fear was that Furbys would pick up classified intel on the premises and start spewing it
out willy-nilly whenever NSA employees took them off site.
Tiger Electronics president Roger Shiffman did his best to set the record straight, saying
that “Although Furby is a clever toy, it does not record or mimic voices.
The NSA did not do their homework.
Furby is not a spy!”
Furby worries weren’t confined to the NSA.
Some health care professionals thought Furbys could mess with medical equipment, and the
FAA banned them during takeoff and landing just in case they could somehow screw up plane
instruments.
And not all the misconceptions were tech-based.
Another prevalent claim was that Furby fur came from dogs and cats.
Folks, the fur was acrylic.
As one company spokesperson joked, “Yep, a lot of acrylics were killed in the name
of Furbys.”
On June 15, 1995, in the middle of a Los Angeles courtroom, O.J.
Simpson tried on a pair of leather gloves, one of which was bloodstained.
They were kind of small.
And in the words of Simpson’s defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, if it doesn’t fit, you
must acquit—which is exactly what the jury did in early October.
Some 150 million people tuned in to watch the former football star be declared not guilty
of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.
But the verdict was never just about the gloves—nor was the statement “If it doesn’t fit,
you must acquit.”
Sure, it seemed strange that Simpson would stab anyone to death wearing a pair of gloves
that he could hardly wriggle his fingers into.
So did a number of other details about the case.
Actually, the whole process to collect and secure evidence was kind of a mess—photos
were unlabeled, multiple items got tossed in the same bag, and police draped one of
Nicole Brown Simpson’s own blankets over her body, potentially comprising any evidence
that might have been collected, since her husband presumably could have used the blanket
previously.
As the Crime Museum pointed out, “ … sloppy maneuvering at the scene caused more bloody
shoe prints to be left behind by LAPD than by the perpetrator.”
A cross-contamination nightmare from start to finish—and a golden opportunity for the
defense to poke holes in the prosecution’s case.
Cochran even went so far as to float the notion that blood and other evidence had been planted.
As Cochran explained, the ill-fitting gloves were a metaphor of sorts for all the other
ways in which the prosecution’s theories just didn’t add up.
“Like the defining moment in this trial, the day [co-prosecutor Christopher Darden]
asked Mr. Simpson to try on those gloves and the gloves didn’t fit, remember these words:
If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.”
Now a little known fact, the idea was actually suggested to Cochran by a colleague, Gerald
F. Uellmen, who wrote that while the glove wasn’t a “home run from an evidentiary
standpoint” it gave them a theme for closing arguments, pointing out that the standard
of beyond a reasonable doubt could be paraphrased as ‘If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit.’
As Uelmen broke it down in his book, If It Doesn’t Fit: Lessons from a Life in the
Law, the prosecution faced a challenge: “ … there are lots of places where the evidence doesn’t
fit the picture they want the jury to see.”
The glove itself might not have been as important as leaving the jury with some kind of earworm.
According to Cochran, at one point the team toyed with “If it doesn’t make sense,
you must find for the defense.”
The catchy couplet they landed on became a mantra that Cochran intoned multiple times
during his closing argument in late September.
By the end, it couldn’t have been clearer to jurors that if they had any doubts about
Simpson’s guilt, they were legally required to find him innocent.
Which, of course, they did.
Don’t get me wrong: The glove was definitely a factor in the decision.
But jury members weren’t swayed by that alone.
As juror Lionel Cryer told reporters at the time, “It was garbage in, garbage out.
… We felt there were a lot of opportunities for either contamination of evidence, samples
being mixed or stored together.”
As I always say: If it’s garbage in, garbage out, that might equate to reasonable doubt.
In the spirit of conserving digital storage space, developers set a lot of early software
to use dates with two-digit years, rather than the full four.
1975 was just 75, 1989 was 89, and so on.
As the ’90s progressed, people began to wonder what would happen in the year 2000.
Any program that involved calendar dates would surely interpret the year as 1900, leading
to, well, problems.
And people weren’t just worried that this so-called “Y2K bug” would cause a major
administrative headache—incorrect records and stuff like that.
They were wary of just about any machine or system that functioned with the help of computer
chips.
Could there be plane crashes, power grid failures, medical equipment malfunctions?
A full-fledged apocalypse?
It wasn’t clear exactly how the glitch might manifest.
Though that didn’t stop enterprising individuals from hawking Y2K survival kits and guides.
But companies and government entities had been working hard to update systems in order
to preempt disaster.
In 1999, the U.S. Department of Commerce estimated that the price tag for this endeavor for the
U.S. alone between 1995 and 2001 would hit $100 billion.
Plenty of economists felt that was too low.
So it all seemed pretty silly when January 2000 came and went more or less without incident.
OK, there were some incidents.
The U.S. Naval Observatory website proclaimed the date to be January 1, 19100—for like
an hour.
A Danish newborn baby was briefly 100 years old in hospital records.
A New York video store charged a guy more than $91,000 for a century-overdue VHS rental
of The General’s Daughter.
He obviously wasn’t expected to pay the fine.
The errors might seem negligible to the point of being funny.
But they do help prove that the Y2K bug wasn’t a totally baseless generator of societal panic.
And tech experts generally agree that there would’ve been way more issues if so much
effort hadn’t been put into preventing them—effort that most people weren’t aware of and/or
didn’t understand.
As technology forecaster Paul Saffo told TIME, “The Y2K crisis didn’t happen precisely
because people started preparing for it over a decade in advance.
And the general public who was busy stocking up on supplies and stuff just didn’t have
a sense that the programmers were on the job.”
Spend enough time on social media and you’ll eventually scroll past a picture of, say,
Dunkaroos, or Pogs, or a stack of Disney VHS tapes in clamshell cases, or any other product
that was popular in the ’90s.
With it is some variation of this caption: “Only ’90s kids will remember.”
I could talk about what the ubiquity of those posts says about our collective obsession
with nostalgia culture.
Or our desperation for community in an increasingly lonely digital world.
Or just our potentially troubling fixation on defining personal identity by way of labels.
But you can ponder those happy topics on your own time.
I’m here to talk about the term ’90s kid.
Some people consider anyone born between 1990 and 1999 to fit the bill.
To others, a true ’90s kid is someone whose formative childhood years fell during that
decade.
Since there’s no formal definition, neither can really be called right or wrong.
But using ’90s kid as a straight-up synonym for Millennial is not really accurate.
Anybody born between 1981 and 1996 is officially a Millennial, and plenty of those people do
see themselves as ’90s kids.
If 1981 is your birth year, you definitely spent many of your formative years in the
decade, but someone born in 1978 could say the same, and they’re a member of Gen X.
If you showed up between 1997 and 1999, on the other hand, you’re a Gen Zer.
But you can still claim the ’90s kid title on the grounds that you were born that decade.
Plus, it’s not like all the cultural touchstones of the ’90s vanished on January 1, 2000.
Dunkaroos weren’t discontinued in the U.S. until 2012.
(And, I’m happy to report, they’ve since been brought back.)
In other words, you elder Gen Zers have roughly as much right to call yourself a ’90s kid
as someone who was born in ’95 or ’96.
Just don’t do it on Facebook, or elder Millennials will probably start arguing with you in the
comments.
Who am I kidding?
You don’t use Facebook.
In March 1999, then–Vice President Al Gore appeared on CNN’s Late Edition to talk about
his presidential aspirations.
When host Wolf Blitzer asked why Democrats should back Gore for the nomination over former
New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, this was part of his answer:
“During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating
the Internet.”
Largely thanks to a WIRED article that spotlighted that portion of the interview, politicians
and pundits started roasting Gore for the claim that he “invented the internet.”
What he probably should’ve said was something like “I helped secure important government
funding for the internet at a key point in its development.”
Which he did—by sponsoring the 1991 High-Performance Computing and Communications Act.
Some of the cool $600 million that the act granted to high-performance computing went
to the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.
Its developers—including future Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen—ended up making
Mosaic, the first popular web browser to feature inline images.
So if Al Gore didn’t invent the internet, who did?
Thomas Edison?
Iron Man’s dad?
A Furby?
None of the above.
It wasn’t really any one person.
Back in the 1960s, the U.S. Department of Defense developed the Advanced Research Projects
Agency Network, or ARPANET.
Considered a precursor of today’s internet, ARPANET used phone lines to connect physically
distant computers within the Pentagon’s research network.
That said, Vinton Cerf—who worked on ARPANET—and his collaborator Robert Kahn are sometimes
cited as the fathers of the internet we know and love.
In the 1970s, they devised two new processes that worked together to package and transmit
data: Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol—often abbreviated as TCP/IP.
The protocols didn’t rely on phone lines or require computers to be the same brand
or even on the same network in order to swap information.
It was a whole new mode of communication for the world’s computers.
For what it’s worth, Cerf and Kahn aren’t salty about Gore taking credit for making
the internet a thing.
They actually supported his claim.
In the wake of the controversy, the pair released a statement detailing his role as an early
internet champion dating back to the 1970s, saying:
“Al Gore was the first political leader to recognize the importance of the Internet
and to promote and support its development.
… The Vice President deserves credit … for his long-term and consistent articulation
of the potential value of the Internet to American citizens and industry and, indeed,
to the rest of the world.”
Gore might have been guilty, in one interview, of inflating his role in the birth of the
internet.
But his contributions were important enough to earn him a place in the Internet Hall of
Fame.
He, Cerf, and Kahn were all part of the very first induction class in 2012.
Also on the list that year was Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented
the World Wide Web in 1989.
Not long after that, he developed HTML, the markup language used to create web pages—and
make your Myspace look really rad.
Bonus misconception: World Wide Web isn’t a cute, catchy synonym for internet.
I mean, it is cute and catchy—but it’s part of a larger whole.
Basically, the internet is a massive global network where information gets shared between
computers.
The World Wide Web is one place you can go to access that information.
In other words, the World Wide Web comprises websites full of content that gets transmitted
across the internet.
It’s not unlike how a Walmart houses Lunchables that traveled across many a highway in a delivery
truck.
…Ok it’s a little unlike that.
Maybe Sir Tim could invent a way to teleport Lunchables across the internet next.
I’m getting off topic.
Next misconception!
Finally, here’s some vindication for all the people who’ve spent the last 30 years
or so boasting about how easy it is to tell Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen apart.
The break-out stars of Full House and countless twin-tastic tween movies aren’t identical
twins at all.
They’re fraternal—or dizygotic—meaning they came from two separate eggs.
In other words, they only share half their genome, and should only really look as similar
as any other two close-in-age siblings.
Apparently they’re slightly different heights.
They don’t have the same dominant hand, either: Ashley is right-handed, and Mary-Kate
is left-handed.
I, personally, was rocked by this revelation.
I also learned that there are Olsen truthers out there who insist that the sisters are,
in fact, identical.
They look the same to me.
I don’t know what to believe anymore.
Does it even take two?!
That’s it for this episode of Misconceptions.
If you’ve got an idea for a future installment of the series, drop it in the comments below.
Seriously, we’re running out of decades.
Thanks for watching.