03/30/2026
"Although I didn’t know it in the 90s, looking back now, I am so thankful that I grew up in a time before Google Maps and cell phones and tracking apps and social media. I didn’t get an email address until my senior year of college, and I didn’t get a computer until I was 28! We made do with word processors that scared the s**t out of your roommate when you went to print a paper at 2am and the thing fired away like a deafening machine gun. We had landline phones – if you were lucky you had call waiting, and if you were even luckier you had your own line (not me!). We had the radio and cassettes and later CDs. We passed notes, not texts. We took photos with film, making sure to print “doubles” at the 24-hour photomat to share with our friends.
I grew up in Silicon Valley, about a 45-minute drive from San Francisco, and a 40-minute drive from Santa Cruz. Most of our parents worked in tech or for places like Lockheed – but we’re talking prehistoric tech, when computers were still enormous and no one actually had one in their home. This was still years before the dot-coms, and even more years before Facebook and Instagram. The original Apple campus did not yet exist. That land still housed the Cali Mill and a strip mall with my family’s favorite pizza place. The second Apple campus, Apple Park, didn’t exist either. That was later built on the site where my dad worked at Hewlett-Packard."
Read more about "Me in the 90s" on Substack - francescarussell.substack.com
