#TBT: What happened in our world when the Phoenix Suns last went to the NBA Finals in 1993?

PHOENIX - It's been a long time since the Phoenix Suns secured a spot in the NBA Finals. (28 years, to be exact.)

For many fans, June 30, 2021 will be remembered as the night when the team broke their 28-year absence from the NBA Finals with a 130-103 win over the Los Angeles Clippers in Game 6 of the Western Conference finals.

Related: Chris Paul leads Suns past Clippers 130-103; team headed to NBA Finals for 1st time since 1993

Here's a look back at what happened in our world the last time the Suns were in the NBA Finals, such as news, culture, and the state of technology back then.

Major Events in 1993

Here were some of the major events that took place in 1993:

January: Bill Clinton was inaugurated for his first term as President.

February: The World Trade Center in New York was targeted in a bombing. According to the Associated Press, the attack killed six people and injured over 1,000 people.

May-September: Major flooding occurred in various Midwestern states, in an event that later came to be known as The Great Flood of 1993.

August: Ruth Bader Ginsburg was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as a Supreme Court Justice. She would go on to serve until her death in 2020.

What kind of music did we listen to back in 1993?

According to billboard.com, some of the top 20 songs on the week of July 3, 1993 include:

That's The Way Love Goes by Janet Jackson (#1)

Whoomp! (There It Is) by Tag Team (#4)

Bad Boys by Inner Circle, perhaps better known as theme song for TV program Cops (#11)

What's Up, by 4 Non Blondes (#16)

What were the top movies in 1993?

According to boxofficemojo.com, the top five movies in 1993, in terms of box office numbers, are:

1. Jurassic Park

2. The Fugitive

3. The Firm

4. Sleepless In Seattle

5. Mrs. Doubtfire

What about technology?

Some of the things we take for granted today simply didn't exist back in 1993.

The internet, for example, was still in its infancy at the time. According to Pew Research Center, CERN donated its World Wide Web technology to the public domain in 1993, and in that same year, the first web browser to become popular with the general public, Mosaic 1.0, was released.

Internet was not a big thing back in 1993. According to a document released by the Federal Communications Commission, only 90,000 Americans had internet access in early 1993.

By our standards, the internet was not fast back then. The same FCC document states that in 1994, the few consumers who had internet access at home likely had a 14 kbps or 28 kbps dial-up connection. According to download-time.com, it would take an internet user almost five minutes to download a 1MB file via a 28 kbps dialup connection.

Those who have ever used a dialup connection will likely remember a very distinct sound the modem will make before the modem is connected to the internet.

Smartphones, in a sense, did exist back then. According to history-computer.com, the IBM Simon, which was announced in 1992, is considered to be the first smartphone in the world.

"It featured 11 built-in programs, including a calendar, to-do list, calculator, address book, appointment scheduler, world time clock, electronic note pad/sketch pad, handwritten annotations and standard and predictive stylus input screen keyboards," the website wrote.

Smartphones as we know it today, with high-speed internet access and a lot of other features, did not exist back in 1993. We were still years away from that.

People could buy and use a music player in 1993, as Sony has been selling its Walkman device for years by then. To this day, people can still buy a Walkman on eBay (in used condition, of course).

MP3 players (like the iPod) were still some years away from being released.

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