Fun Friday
It’s hard to imagine what life was like before the Internet, isn’t it? I’ve been using it for more than half of my life, but today’s generation of kids grew up with it. Those are the kids that don’t even know the difference between life before and after the Internet came along, but I’m sure you can remember the differences, like…
- Balancing your checkbook required waiting for your statement to come from the bank because there was no online banking access
- Along the same lines, if you wanted money to be transfered from your checking to your savings account or visa-versa, you had to physically walk into the bank to do it instead of quickly logging into your online account…
- You actually knew all of your friends in “real-life.” There weren’t “virtual” friends or people you call friends but have never met
- To communicate with friends and family who lived far away, you hand-wrote letters and mailed them through the Post Office
- Google and Yahoo didn’t exist which meant researching was done with the help of books
- You received the weather forecast on TV, from the newspaper, or even over the phone…
- Planning a vacation meant going to see a travel agent to have them arrange the flight, tours and hotel stays
- You called 411 or used a phone book to look-up telephone numbers
- Finding out who won a sporting event that you missed meant waiting for the next day’s newspaper to arrive at your doorstep
- There was no way to track a package that was being delivered to you via UPS or FedEx, you simply had to be patient
- When you had something you wanted to sell, you ran an ad in the newspaper and hoped someone in the area would be interested because there was no eBay or Craigslist
- Finding out the show-times for movies at the local theater meant calling their pre-recorded message and listening through the whole thing to hear what movies were playing and at what time, or just showing up at the theater and seeing what was playing
- To get human interaction, you went to physically visit your friends instead of chatting in forums or leaving messages on message boards
- Keeping an account of what was going on in your life meant writing it out on paper with a pen or pencil instead of keeping an online blog or journal
- Watching a home-video or sharing it with friends meant you needed a VCR, there was no YouTube or other video sharing services
- Buying music required going to a physical store and purchasing a cassette tape or a CD and playing it in your Walkman or Boom-box, there was no iTunes
- Talking to multiple friends at the same time required that you be in the same room, this was what life was like before instant messaging…
- No one had heard of the terms “Identity Theft” or “Phishing”
- The only way to pay bills was to mail them or maybe pay using a check over the phone because online bill-pay wasn’t an option…
- Finding a book at the library meant searching through the little cards in the card catalogue and not using an online system
After looking through this list, it really makes me thankful at how far we’ve come! I can’t imagine needing to wait for a newspaper to arrive to get the news or needing to walk into a Travel Agent’s office to plan a trip. Even worse is the thought of physically mailing all of my communication between friends and family, we really are spoiled with email, aren’t we?
This beginning part of this Chris Pirillo video is kinda humorous and fits in well to today’s topic, so take a look:
Sadly, I don’t remember life without internet (yes, I am that young). Haha! But this post reminded me of a 24 (the TV show) spoof. It was something like “what if 24 happened in 1994″.
Life without internet was boring. Climbin’ on trees, playing with other kids. Quite awful
I hope that is sarcasm! Jeez, if not, it must show my age
Life before the net was so damn good, nothing the net can “do” would ever come close, guys. Yes, it IS sad that some don’t remember, or were too young to have known. If I could go back to the 1980s, I would in a heartbeat. If you wanna make fun of that, do your worst 
I really wouldn’t want to go back to the eighties. I like life as it is now!
What I do miss of the things mentioned in the article, is flipping through the cards in a library. I really liked that
This is indeed an excellent video by Chris Pirillo. There has been a lot of controversy over the validity of Wikipedia’s information. I think it ’s an unfair statement. As Pirillo said, “there is no such thing a total truth”. “Truth changes over time”.
We are the ones who discover our own truth through critical research and critical thinking. We can than say, “we are close to the truth” Britannica is an excellent source of information, but by all means, it’s not the only information resource, no matter what the elitists may say.
I’m 61 years old, and I can surely remember those good ole times when the Internet was nonexistent. They were good and sweet like a Hawaiian pineapple. Would I want to go back? Yes and no. As everything in life, there is no total black or total whiteness—different shades of gray are part of life too. Living in an Internet world has a lot of goodies too. Like reading this blog and sending this comment to all of you guys. To me that’s great and can only be done with the Internet in real time.
Ahh yes. I remember the days in University of spending hours in the library and then hauling a dozen reference books home to write that term paper. You would only spend 10 minutes on email because people couldn’t send you cutesy pictures through PINE. And browsing the text-based BBS’s in Lynx. Then of course, you would head outside and climb a tree because there was nothing else to do, as noted by unset.
Lemme tell ya – there has been many a day when I’ve been tempted to go Amish and throw out every piece of electronic gadgetry that I own.
Also we didn’t have the 200-300 channels on TV. Satellite dishes were the size of a VW Bug (Beetle). Cell phones that weren’t hardwired into your car were huge and very expensive.
LOL. I remember selling the old Motorola bagphones that were nearly $1000 and airtime cost upwards of $1.00 per minute.
#9 is kinda stretching it. ESPN was around well before the internet.
#12 isn’t totally true. I remember looking through the paper to check for movie listings before the internet was around.
Ugh, and I remember using Encyclopedia’s to do research for school. Such awful times. I’m so glad that only lasted up until I was in around 2nd or 3rd grade, though
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Ahh the good old days! Man, sometimes you don’t realize how much life has changed (gee I’m starting to get old). I do remember all that, but it’s further away in my memory than I thought.
I remember we only had 3 TV channels. Showing video was a happening and happened only once a year at most. We played large tapes or LPs. We would have fun with marbles, sand, setting things on fire
We played with miniature cars, lego. I’ve been outside most of the time in those days.. until I got a computer. Sad really. Just like kiltboy I sometimes think about going amish. I wonder if the ones who don’t know life without the internet ever think about that..
Every once in a while you’ll still see the satellite dishes that are the size of a VW bug which is kinda humorous.
A Motorola bagphone was the first phone I ever remember my parents owning, and we thought it was so cool! How funny it is to think about carrying around a bag just for a phone these days…
Going “Amish” for a few days might be good for all of us! While it’s nice to think about how far we’ve come and how much easier technology has made some things, in other ways it was nice to not have the distraction of the Internet or cell phones.
I remember form the days back in Hawthorne people would mount those giant things on their roofs. I also remember back in those days to we have CompuServe and other BBS. Didn’t really do much with the Internet until we came out here in 1993 and then 56K modem was considered fast.
With 54 years in my background, I certainly remember my 34 years before the Internet’s birth !
There’s no heaven on Earth, right ? That includes the Web ! The best IMO is the worldwide communication it allows, comes next access to a planetary library, and third Web services.
The worst is, as always, the alternative to the best, but that’s more specific of life as a whole. What would rather call my attention is that, if democracy remains the best system, it also remains the best tool to brainwash, and that freedom goes much further than the simple right to oppose oneself : it calls upon our will to stay critic of global mass fashions as well. Not sure the younger ones are not at risk of loosing their identity in a universal pea soup…
Otherwise, Hemingway did write his novels with paper and a pencil, and who is (remains) able to extract a square root without a calculator ?
The risk is in developing the intelligence of the user, and the brain laziness it may lead to.
I see what you’re saying here, that sometimes we don’t use our brains as much as we should/could because of the technology that’s around us like calculators. However, on the other hand, think about how much information we have access to and how much we’re able to learn because of technology. I believe for myself at least, that my brain is full of more knowledge today because of browsing the Internet and sites like Wikipedia, National Geographic, and even Google Maps, than it would be if technology didn’t exist. Of course there’s also software that we have access to that broadens our knowledge as well. We may use our brains less for some things, but we use them more for other things, so it all balances out.
Plus we can deal with more complicated things due to technology, and develop faster. I too get what you’re saying, but I’m not sure yet if it’s a bad development. It will have been if all that technology will once disappear, because we’d have to start from scratch again, more or less
duuuuude payphones were the BOMB!!!!!
and they are still much needed. everyone doesn’t have a cell phone. and the calls don’t need to be 50 cents, they ned to be a nickle because the average person who needs to use a payphone doesn’t have fifty cents to begin with.
Remember when being “out” was truely being out!? It’s sad that we are reachable at every second of the day.
To me, life before the Internet was true Freedom. Sadly, it’s gone forever.