No matter how competent one is with technology, there will always be a time when the rage hits. Maybe a compressed file was still too large to upload before an important deadline, maybe you got the spinning “wheel of death,” or maybe you just can’t take one more pop-up or notification noise without losing it after a long week.
In the ’90s, it was so much worse. Computers would completely freeze and crash constantly without warning, and most people had no experience using them. If one person was online, anyone in the family who tried to use the phone would hear weird noises if they picked it up. Computers could fail entirely, wiping out everything because it was so hard to back anything up with only the limited space of floppy discs. Running “Final Fantasy VII” on Windows 95 was both irritating and addictive, leading normally happy families to have epic fights with each other.
For many people, the ’90s were a horrible time for technology.
Somehow, my family managed to download these videos off AOL without the computer crashing, spontaneously lighting on fire, or being thrown out a window:
That Lenovo ad is possibly the first example of a company using something that looks like a viral video to sell its product. I didn’t even remember that it was a commercial originally — all I remember is a tiny version of that playing on QuickTime.
I remember this being a thing around the same time that me and my brothers figured out that you could record your own WAV files, and then go into the settings and change the noises Windows 95 played for various actions.
We changed the noise for the mouse clicking on something to 11-year-old me saying “CLICK” in a high-pitched voice.
My parents were saints for not doing this to the computer when we pulled that prank:
I think the fact that people dressed up in suits to go to the office back then makes this video even more hysterically funny. It’s the same mentality as Krusty the Clown saying that “the pie gag’s only funny when the sap’s got dignity.”
This video truly goes off the deep end, with hilarious results.
To me, the “potato quality” of these videos just adds to the humor– they’ve been passed around the internet for decades, and the limitations of what technology could support over that time has left them with very low-quality resolution.
Watching these is a great way to decompress because there’s not just humor involved– there’s also gratitude that at least whatever problem the person watching this in the mid-2020s is having, they’re not dealing with Windows 95 crashing.
Oddly enough, the ’80s had more mellow attitudes towards computers– probably because the use of computers was limited to people with a niche interest in them. They weren’t yet being thrust upon people who weren’t ready to embrace that change in technology. Rather than rage and destruction, there was a fascination with new developments and possibilities: