Dial-up screech, the flip phone, and the last analog childhood.
A beige computer moves into the den and screams at the phone line until the world comes through. The pager clips to the belt, then the phone flips; the CD tower rises; the Game Boy rides in the backpack. The last children to be unreachable after school are outside right now.
The dial-up modem - fifteen seconds of static that was, in fact, the sound of a door opening that never closed again.
Downsizing becomes a verb; the Rust Belt keeps rusting through the boom; a federal building in Oklahoma City and a high school named Columbine enter the vocabulary.
The nineties look like an IPO from a San Jose office park and like a padlocked gate from a Youngstown mill - same boom, different ends of it.