London on New Year’s Eve 1999 felt staged for history. The Millennium Dome opened that night, part exhibition, part promise, beamed across the BBC as proof that Britain had arrived at the future on time. Crowds pressed along the Thames. Fireworks! The London Eye (The Millennium Wheel!) was not yet open to the public, but it was lit and turning. Some voices in the pub mumbled about the Millennium Bug, but trains ran, lights stayed on, and the city worked. London felt organised, optimistic, and a little unreal.

To go back to a time when the world was all Chrome&Candy, click here.

Tomorrow morning, you could grab a coffee in the 1998 American import, Starbucks, and chuckle if you saw a weirdo there with his laptop. Maybe you’d pick up a Furby on the way home or Robbie Williams’s She’s the One on CD. Maybe grab a cassette for your Ford Fiesta. Later, stretched out in a Poäng chair: reruns of Friends. Or a film recorded off ITV, one of the VHSs stacked by the TV, labelled in biro. Video games were still played on the PlayStation, with the upgraded machine promised next year. You’d been getting pretty good at Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater in the meantime.

For Christmas, someone had bought you The Matrix on DVD. Unfortunately, you didn’t yet own a DVD player. Luckily you had just sorted out your dial-up and in off-peak hours, you could search what felt like an endless Internet. Y2K! What a world!