PrismHR is celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2025. To commemorate the occasion, we will periodically share stories related to workforce trends over the past four decades. In this blog, we head back to the ’90s to see how much technological progress we have made since then.
So let’s revisit 1995—when PrismHR was operating as F.W. Davison & Co.—to see what was going on in the world then—especially in the world of technology.
Popping in on Pop Culture
Just smell that teen spirit …
The Grunge movement was in full effect in 1995, so it’s time to bust out those ripped jeans and flannel shirts—or khakis if that’s more your style.
As PrismHR’s predecessor was celebrating its 10th anniversary, the BBC was predicting that by 2025 you’d be able to have phone conversations with virtual talking heads that float around you like apparitions in your airspace. They weren’t that far off actually. There are now virtual reality headsets that allow you to chat with people’s avatars that hang out in your general vicinity. Their prediction that we would be mining asteroids was a little out there though …
What was also out there that year was Buzz Lightyear’s “To infinity and beyond.” If that quote lives rent-free in your head to this day, you can thank 1995 for it. It’s the year Toy Story debuted, which was the first full-length, entirely computer-generated film. The fifth installment in the series is due out in 2026 by the way.
A couple of months before the original film debuted, the first item on Auction Web was put up for bid starting at a modest $1. It was a battered printer that the website’s founder, Pierre Omidyar, eventually sold for a surprising $14.83 that Labor Day weekend. Not a bad return for an item that didn’t appear to have much value.
Thirty years later, Auction Web, which we now know as eBay, had a gross merchandise volume (GMV) of $19.3 billion and revenue of $2.6 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone. Sold!
That printer was much more valuable than anyone could have possibly imagined back then.
Another popular item that launched that year in the United States was the original Sony PlayStation. It would have set you back about $300 then (the equivalent of about $630 today) with the games sold separately on compact discs. Today you can find a PlayStation 1 on eBay for between $50 to $100, and the most recent version of the now-all-digital console PlayStation 5 Pro goes for about $700.
One of the best early games for the PlayStation was Shoot Out, which featured Houston Rockets guard Sam Cassell on the cover.
In the real world, the best basketball games were occurring once again in a building on the West Side of Chicago as NBA legend Michael Jordan decided to hang up his baseball cleats and return to the United Center and his basketball career with the Chicago Bulls. Jordan’s agent sent a one-page fax to the media on his behalf with his official statement on it: “I’m back.” Can you even remember when the last time was that you sent a fax?
Speaking of “back,” perhaps the first time you typed the letters www. back-to-back-to-back on a keyboard was in 1995 as the internet was just becoming a thing that anyone could access. Did you even know then that WWW stood for World Wide Web?
The internet has been around since the 1960s in some capacity and the Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) had been established in 1983 to allow different computers to “talk” to each other, But it wasn’t until 1995 that it became an easy tool for anyone to access with a computer and modem through programs like Internet Explorer, which was in an expansion pack for Windows 95, that made accessing information online much easier.
Of course, back then the top speed for modems was 28.8 kbps (kilobits per second) compared with today’s speeds for cable modems of up to 1 Gbps (gigabits per second)
Similarly, if you’re a PrismHR user, you know how much today’s platform is designed for people who have a need for speed.
1995 At-a-Glance
Item
1995 Cost
1995 Cost, Adjusted for Inflation
Current Cost
First-Class Stamp
$0.32
$0.95
$0.73
Movie Ticket (Avg.)
$4.35
$9.11
$10.78
Concert Ticket (Avg.)
$25.81*
$52.49
$136.45 (Avg./ticket, top 100 tours)
Gas Price (Avg. Per Gallon)
$1.11
$2.32
$3.12 (as of April 15, 2025)
Gateway Solo 2000 Laptop
$3,500
$7,328
$800-$1,200 (midrange)
*1996 average
Sources: U.S. Post Office, U.S. Inflation Calculator, The Numbers, Music Business Research, Statista, AAA, 247wallst.com, Electronics Hub
3 Trends From 1995 and 2025
Then: An article appeared in Newsweek in February 1995 with the headline, “The Internet? Bah!” The author called “baloney” on far-fetched ideas like online shopping, “internet journalism” and telecommuting. The person who wrote the article complained it took him 15 minutes to figure out when the Battle of Trafalgar took place. We tried it today, and it took about a second—maybe. But the struggle was real back then.
“Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms,” he wrote, adding: “While the Internet beckons brightly, seductively flashing an icon of knowledge-as-power, this nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth.”
As did that article.
For personnel information, many companies were still relying on paper records then. For instance, the Official Military Personnel File didn’t start storing electronic records until 1995.
It’s safe to say that HR was just learning about the potential for digital files, but it would take years before anything of substance would materialize.
Now: According to DataReportal, more than 5.5 billion people around the world are on the internet, which is just over two-thirds of the humans on the planet. And the average internet user spends over 6 hours a day online. As we reported in our 1985 lookback, about a third of today’s U.S. workers work from home all the time, which saves them almost an hour a day of commuting time in the process.
And when it comes to HR, companies need powerful tools to help them make better business decisions. Today, HR functionality runs through the internet, cloud storage (which entered the lexicon in 2006 but didn’t start getting much mainstream attention until the 2010s) and advanced HR tech. Organizations large and small need data and analytics from state-of-the-art software to help them make better business decisions.
Then: A research paper from 1995 discussed the pithy subject Understanding Organizational Culture as the Quality of Workplace Subjectivity. The first line of the abstract added that, “Organization culture contains psychosocial defenses against the experience of anxiety in the workplace.”
One of the big worries on people’s minds was the economy back then.
A Time magazine infographic from January of that year found that 87% of survey respondents were either “really worried” or a “little worried” about the economy. Only 11% said they were “worry-free.”
Additionally, U.S. families were only able to stash away 4.6% of their disposable income compared with, for example, 14.6% for families in Japan and 13.2% for families in Switzerland.
At the time, the concept of workplace engagement and disengagement were just catching on following a 1990 article by William Kahn that dove into engagement. “Presumably,” he wrote, “the more people draw on their selves to perform their roles within those boundaries, the more stirring are their performances and the more content they are with the fit of the costumes they don.”
Well, cosplay has been around in the United States since the 1980s, so that tracks …
Now: Today, there’s a lot of talk about the economy as well. Even in February, 53% of Americans said the economy is on the wrong track, up 10 percentage points from January.
And reports on workforce engagement are plentiful. A Gallup poll that cites data from 2001 to 2023 has shown consistent engagement numbers over the years in the United States, hovering around 30%. Globally, the percentage has been lower than that, peaking at 23%.
The good news is “best-practice organizations” find engagement levels around 70%. Ah, that’s better.
It’s good to know PrismHR’s Performance Management solution is designed to drive engagement for your clients’ employees. They can easily set and track goals, create continuous feedback loops and simplify the appraisal process.
Keeping ’em interested is what’s it’s all about for your clients’ long-term success. We all know it’s expensive to replace talent, so help your clients keep the best of the best right where they’re at.
Then: An article was published in The Tuscaloosa (Alabama) News titled “Market Place ’95 Promises to Be Amusing, Informative.” It talked about an annual event where small businesses would get together at the Chamber of Commerce of West Alabama to show off their wares and services to consumers, and the companies ranged from travel agencies to jewelers.
Jack Kubiszyn, a councilman, said at the time, “We’ve done a lot for big businesses like Mercedes. We want to do the same for small businesses.”
Truth be told, small businesses have created almost two-thirds of all new jobs in the country since 1995, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. So why wouldn’t you want to do something for them?
Now: Today, HR outsourcers have so many options when it comes to solutions designed to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) compete for talent with much larger organizations, but figuring out which companies to work with can be daunting.
The good folks in Tuscaloosa were kind of ahead of their time actually. Today, PrismHR’s customers and their clients rely on the PrismHR Marketplace to get the best integrated solutions available in areas ranging from benefits to retirement options to cybersecurity to earned-wage access and more. Our vetted partners offer the best solutions on the market to help SMBs and their employees.
In our next installment, we take you to 2005 when YouTube debuted, trucker hats were in and the Space Shuttle Discovery took off for the International Space Station.
There was something else taking off that year—HR Pyramid (now PrismHR), but we’ll get into that. Until next time, why not turn on some Pearl Jam or Veruca Salt and check out some of our recent HR tech innovations …
James Tehrani is PrismHR’s digital content marketing manager. He’s an award-winning writer based in the Chicago area.
