The biggest difference between now and the 1990s is in the reduction of abject poverty worldwide. Death and disability from food shortage was extremely common in many countries. A huge improvement in the 1990s over the 1980s is that I could own my own computer (I bought a Sun-2 with Solaris) instead of having everything I created owned by the institution which owned the computer I needed. Today's consumer products, though, are a mixed bag. As an example, I wish I could buy a microwave oven as good as my first one. It was larger, had a temperature probe that could be used instead of time and it used a small internal metal wheel to distribute the microwaves evenly throughout the oven instead of wasting space for the silly rotating platter.https://ourworldindata.org/extreme-poverty-in-brief
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
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