Alt Text: an image of Agent Smith from The Matrix with the following text superimposed, “1999 was described as being the peak of human civilization in ‘The Matrix’ and I laughed because that obviously wouldn’t age well and then the next 25 years happened and I realized that yeah maybe the machines had a point.”
There absolutely was autotune back then. Cher’s Believe was the song that kickstarted the plugin’s popularity and that song came out in 1998. Autotune itself came out the year before.