A typical day in the early ’90s

This is what a typical day in the early ’90s looked like, before the advent of the internet. I am not sure whether I need to explain what many of the things I’m going to mention are. Forgive me if I’m being redundant.

All Hit Radio

To start my day I had an alarm clock radio. It was essentially a radio that would turn on to your preferred station at the time you programmed it. I guess they still sell those. Normally, I would program it to go off at 6:00 a.m. because it was the time the station would start broadcasting. There was no streaming service, let alone personalized playlists. The first thing they played was the Brazilian national anthem. The first hour in the programming was Baroque music—which I loved.

Another brick in the wall

I would then take a bus and go to school. We had textbooks for our classes. For school work though, I would need to go to the library. There, I would consult physical books. I always preferred to read an article at an encyclopedia—think printed Wikipedia. In rare cases, you could find a book specialized in the topic you needed to research. What the teacher would want us to do, probably, was to read them, make notes, and write in our own words what we understood about it. But most of the time I would simply copy the relevant sections from the books. Did we invent the copy and paste, before there was Google search? Even this act of copying by hand helped me in learning. And the teachers were OK with it.

Under pressure

Then I would go to work. I was a teenager and an office boy in a bank branch. That meant that I would be transporting documents and even money all day long. Do we still have that job? Today everything is signed digitally, money is transferred electronically. Back then, we had a lot of paperwork. Documents were physical. Meetings had to be in person. We needed to be there for things to happen. I guess, not anymore.

Homesick

It’s funny. Once I left my home in the morning, my parents wouldn’t hear about me until I came back in the evening. No text messages, no e-mails, no calls during the day. I can’t remember for sure if there was more apprehension about our whereabouts. But I feel that we would greet our loved ones with more enthusiasm when they returned home back then.

Definitely, those were other times. I feel a bit nostalgic thinking about a typical day in the early ’90s. The world is changing quickly, and it doesn’t stop for anyone. But once in a while, it’s worth pausing to remember how we got here.