Clip Art is dead. Long live Clip Art. Microsoft has announced the discontinuation of the basic image library we all peppered school presentations and work PowerPoints with.
Instead, the company will now integrate images in its Office suite with its Bing search engine, allowing users to pull pictures from the internet that exist under a Creative Commons license.
I, for one, am going to miss the so-called “screen beans”, the basic stickmen figures (lightbulb over the head, feet kicked in the air), that I incongruously added to GCSE coursework on Kenya’s tourism infrastructure.
Like Carrie at the end of every Sex and the City episode, the end of Clip Art got me to thinking: what other things from 1990s tech and internet will we miss?
Game Boy
OK, so a Wii reckons it can keep you fit. GuitarHero allows you to pretend to be a rockstar. Whatever. I have many happy memories of a Game Boy keeping me company on long, boring car journeys, eschewing my mother’s attempts to strike up a game of I, spy. (“I spy something beginning with G. MY GAME BOY.”)
Born a few months before me in 1989, Nintendo’s handheld device was wonderful in its simplicity. The original PlayStation remains the defining console of my youth, but the Game Boy was the perfect gateway drug.
It introduced me to Zelda and Donkey Kong, and for that I will be forever grateful.
The Color and Light successor models were handsome little numbers, but nothing matched the charm of the original design. So well done this guy, for keeping the dream alive at an airport this week.
Cassettes
The 80s thinks it owns cassettes, but cassettes were still an important part of every music lover’s life throughout the 90s, and the romanticism attached to vinyl also applies to the humble cassette tape.
There was something quite rewarding in the effort it took to sit for hours listening to the radio, attempting to make a mixtape of tracks filched from the airwaves.
Mind, there was also something incredibly frustrating about DJs always talking over the ending of songs. Or, in the case of Tim Westwood, adding gun sounds and broken glass effects right in the middle. But getting it just perfect was satisfying.
The first bonafide piece of music I ever bought was Rosie Gaines’ Closer than Close on tape (still a classic). I also recall buying Clock’s cover of You Sexy Thing, from Woolworths, and being pissed that it came in a shitty cardboard sleeve and not a proper plastic hinged case.
And just like artwork makes a vinyl sleeve special, the squeak of the case opening and the ka-thunk as a new cassette went into the machine was terribly exciting. Never mind the unruly tape which came unwound, cassettes were far better than CDs.
Tamagotchis
Kids grow up too fast these days. I’m constantly amazed at my friends’ tweens and teens. I look back at photos of myself at 13, and what I thought was a good outfit consisted of a tennis dress combined with a fleece and jelly shoes. My friends’ kids at 13 give Cara Delevingne a run for her money.
Not only that, but they do not know of an age pre-internet or social media, and are shaped by all of the benefits and downsides this entails. Added to this, kids seem to be sexualised earlier and earlier. Especially by Mail Online.
I long for a simpler time, a time when kids played outside in the street; when kids played with Tamagotchis. Brought to the market by Bandai in 1996, Tamagotchis were small, egg-shaped devices on a keychain, which housed a digital pet.
Tamagotchis themselves (a portmanteau of egg and watch in Japanese) were little alien creatures that players were responsible for raising. You had to care for the pet: feed it and play with it at regular intervals, and look after it when it was sick.
And best of all, unlike Farmville and the like, there was no means of pushing your love for your Tamagotchi on your uninterested friends. In late 2013, they returned. Praise be.
Overhead projectors
Long before PowerPoint and flat-screen TVs monopolised presentations and business meetings, the overhead projector ruled boardrooms and classrooms across the land.
There was something about a projector that felt very scientific to me. Sliding sheets on and off, you could easily pretend to be a radiologist surveying x-rays (just me?).
There were many things I loved about overhead projectors. Writing on the acetate sheets was a joy, and somehow always seemed to make handwriting neater. Especially great was when a teacher wasn’t looking, and you could quickly scrawl a cock and balls in the corner.
Not only this, but the industrial hum sent a weary schoolgirl to sleep like a dream, and after they’d been on for longer than 10 minutes, they heated a room as well as any fire could. And who couldn’t love the beauty of dust dancing in the projector light? Even if it was 90% dead skin cells.
MSN Messenger
When Microsoft finally killed off MSN Messenger in 2013 (are Microsoft heartless or what?), there was understandable mourning. Flowers were hurled, noses blown in unison, church bells rang. Auden would have written a poem about it had he been alive.
The most popular messenger service around for a long time – known affectionately if inaccurately just as MSN, and later rebranded as Windows Messenger – the ICA (instant chat application) was responsible for the cementing of teen friendships, workplace affairs and pop culture sharing.
Just sneaking into the list, as it launched in 1999, and boomed throughout the 00s, the messenger introduced us to the power of emoticons and emoji.
It also, however, introduced us to the irritant of wistful statuses, and people Who All Caps Every Sentence. Or worse, ~ tYpE lIkE tHiS ~. For some reason, MSN messenger was shut down in China a full 18 months after everywhere else, and for that, I will be forever envious.
Let us know which 90s gadgets, internet culture and tech innovations you miss in the comments below.
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