Life before internet?

[ViviTheMage]

Originally posted by: JDub02

Originally posted by: Chris
We got our news from the TV or newspaper. We called each other on the telephone. We did research at the library. Most of all, we fucked off at work by talking coffee breaks and playing solitaire instead of surfing the web

i remember those days. life was simple then. you could leave work and no one would call because cell phones didn't exist, either.

Doesn't this mean they'd just fire your ass? haha

 

[Sea Moose]

Originally posted by: spacejamz

Originally posted by: Fritzo

Originally posted by: Barack Obama

Originally posted by: eplebnista
Before the internet I read books and listened to music, both of which I still do regularly.

This. I would prefer life without the internet. Everything is dumbing down these days.

You notice this too? If something takes more than a few seconds, young'uns don't have time for it now.

I actually showed an instructional clip on Youtube to one of our interns the other day, and he said "It's 5 minutes- can't you just tell me what it's about?" These are the same people that stand in front of a microwave going "COME ON!!!! COME ON!!!!!"

Guess they don't know that frozen dinners used to take 40 minutes.

heaven forbid if they had to actually mail a letter to someone to get a response on something....i mean, actually writing something on a piece of paper, folding it up and putting into an envelope, handwriting the address on the envelope, walk out to the mailbox, wait a week or so, checking the mailbox daily, and then opening up the envelope, unfolding the letter and then reading it...

Erg snail mail is on its way out

 

[Homerboy]

when does the internet have a "blackout"

 

[darkxshade]

It would make for a nice social experiment to see what would happen to this world if the Internet gets shut down for a month.

 

[AstroManLuca]

The funny thing is that even though I didn't get regular internet access until about 1998 (when I was 14), my family has always had computers. So before the internet, I played computer games.

Don't remember how I got them in many cases... I know several came on shareware CDs bundled with my dad's Macworld magazines.

 

[rudder]

I remember life before the internet... it actually took work if you wanted to see a vagina. Now you can just go to bing.com.

 

[TwiceOver]

It was so nice back then. Actually had to call or meet up with someone to communicate. We ran a 3 line BBS out of our house when I was young. Played a lot of door games, hence my L.O.G.D. link in my sig.

 

[moshquerade]

http://www.motifake.com/demoti...-poster-1210601228.jpg

 

[nanette1985]

I remember life before the internet. We wasted time with TV instead. Before TV I think they wasted time with radio. I don't know what they wasted time with before that - probably didn't have as much time to waste because it was before penicillin was discovered so people just wasted time by dying more often.

For communication, carrier pigeons used to be more popular. I bet you can waste as much time with carrier pigeons as you can with email.

My grandmother was born in 1899, and died in 1985. I once asked her what she thought the biggest change in life and society was, since she was born before airplanes, nuclear stuff, computers, medical discoveries, etc. She said it was air conditioning. Before air conditioning, people were outside a lot. After air conditioning, everybody stayed inside.

Internet is interesting, but it isn't air conditioning.

 

[moshquerade]

Originally posted by: princess ida
I remember life before the internet. We wasted time with TV instead. Before TV I think they wasted time with radio. I don't know what they wasted time with before that - probably didn't have as much time to waste because it was before penicillin was discovered so people just wasted time by dying more often.

For communication, carrier pigeons used to be more popular. I bet you can waste as much time with carrier pigeons as you can with email.

My grandmother was born in 1899, and died in 1985. I once asked her what she thought the biggest change in life and society was, since she was born before airplanes, nuclear stuff, computers, medical discoveries, etc. She said it was air conditioning. Before air conditioning, people were outside a lot. After air conditioning, everybody stayed inside.

Internet is interesting, but it isn't air conditioning.

I love wise words from grandmothers like that. :thumbsup:

 

[meltdown75]

i got a Commodore 64 when i was 14 or something... eventually i started my own Bulletin Board System.

so even before the net, i kinda had my own net. BBSs rocked. i've been neffing ever since.

before that, and up until i got interested in girls (16/17), i was a nerd/jock/hick mix. i messed around with dirtbikes and guns and enjoyed life on a farm but when the weather was crappy, you could find me playing Sega Master System.

i'm pretty much the coolest nerd that ever lived

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: princess ida
My grandmother was born in 1899, and died in 1985. I once asked her what she thought the biggest change in life and society was, since she was born before airplanes, nuclear stuff, computers, medical discoveries, etc. She said it was air conditioning. Before air conditioning, people were outside a lot. After air conditioning, everybody stayed inside.

Internet is interesting, but it isn't air conditioning.

I love air conditioning so much.

 

[xanis]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog

Originally posted by: princess ida
My grandmother was born in 1899, and died in 1985. I once asked her what she thought the biggest change in life and society was, since she was born before airplanes, nuclear stuff, computers, medical discoveries, etc. She said it was air conditioning. Before air conditioning, people were outside a lot. After air conditioning, everybody stayed inside.

Internet is interesting, but it isn't air conditioning.

I love air conditioning so much.

I think this is something that we can all agree on.

 

[Sea Moose]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog

Originally posted by: princess ida
My grandmother was born in 1899, and died in 1985. I once asked her what she thought the biggest change in life and society was, since she was born before airplanes, nuclear stuff, computers, medical discoveries, etc. She said it was air conditioning. Before air conditioning, people were outside a lot. After air conditioning, everybody stayed inside.

Internet is interesting, but it isn't air conditioning.

I love air conditioning so much.

Errr please dont talk about hvac... i stay up late to delay having to go to work tomorrow :S

 

[nakedfrog]

Originally posted by: Sea Moose

Originally posted by: nakedfrog

Originally posted by: princess ida
My grandmother was born in 1899, and died in 1985. I once asked her what she thought the biggest change in life and society was, since she was born before airplanes, nuclear stuff, computers, medical discoveries, etc. She said it was air conditioning. Before air conditioning, people were outside a lot. After air conditioning, everybody stayed inside.

Internet is interesting, but it isn't air conditioning.

I love air conditioning so much.

Errr please dont talk about hvac... i stay up late to delay having to go to work tomorrow :S

I love you, HVAC man. Don't ever leave me.

 

[Cienja]

Originally posted by: aircooled
I was rocking the dial-up BBS's in 1983 w/ a 300 baud dumb modem on my commodore 64, shortly after that we got connected to Q-Link (who would eventually change their name to AOL), non of this was "the internet" but back in the day it was cool.

Same here! I remember "chatting" with a friend "online" with my C64 and his Osborn (don't remember the model, but it was like a suitcase that opened up to a computer, etc. I had a notebook full of phone numbers of BBS's, military, etc. nothing vicious, but fun to poke around. 1983 I think it was...

 

[natto fire]

I regularly go camping for 2-4 days at a time, and don't really miss the internet while doing that. (For reference "camping" to me is going into a national forest on an old logging trail and setting up wherever I want, bathrooms, running water, etc. is not camping)
Addictions come in many forms, and being a recovering addict myself, I can sympathize with many addicts, but internet has thankfully never been one of mine.

 

[maziwanka]

it started with bbs, then AOL (chat rooms and crap) then the internet. i can't remember exactly when i started with bbs, but it was before 8th grade for me - i think 7th grade. the good ol days

 

[SonnyDaze]

I played pong on a 13" B/W television.

 

[CRXican]

Originally posted by: xeemzor
Sometimes I wish I had known a time in my life before constant internet access. I sometimes feel addicted to it. It's quite easy to be an anti-social caveman with the internet.

I hear that

 

[Patt]

Originally posted by: meltdown75
i got a Commodore 64 when i was 14 or something... eventually i started my own Bulletin Board System.

so even before the net, i kinda had my own net. BBSs rocked. i've been neffing ever since.

before that, and up until i got interested in girls (16/17), i was a nerd/jock/hick mix. i messed around with dirtbikes and guns and enjoyed life on a farm but when the weather was crappy, you could find me playing Sega Master System.

i'm pretty much the coolest nerd that ever lived

Sometimes I feel like I could lay claim to that as well ... played a ton of sports, have done a ton of hiking/climbing/backpacking/travel, yet can (and do) still geek out with video games and programming

:thumbsup: for the cool nerds.

 

[OCGuy]

We had to walk 15 miles in the snow, up-hill both ways, just to get some decent German parapalegic porn.

 

[Baked]

Internet ruined my life. Curse you Al Gore, curse you to hell!

 

[AMCRambler]

Yeah I think I read a lot more before the web. My family was relatively late to the party. We got internet when I was 14 in 1994 when my dad bought a used 386 PS2 model 55 from his friend for $400 bucks. Came with a 14400 baud external modem. We signed up for Prodigy and I used to go to chat rooms to meet girls, lol. A year or two later my brother bought his own pc and signed up for AOL. I used to borrow his account because then I could instant message with my friends. Browsing the net was kinda slow, but it didn't get really slow until broadband started becoming the norm and the websites started becoming all bloated with graphics and flash that all had to download through my slow modem.

 

[Golgatha]

Originally posted by: GodlessAstronomer
I was 10 when I first got regular access to the tubes (1995). These days I would have a very hard time going a month without web access.

My first regular access was in 1996, when I started to college. Didn't have home access until 1997 when I bought my first computer and was able to dial-up to the university's modem bank. When you got connected (bank was often at full capacity in the early evening), you were surfing along at 28.8 or 33.6 speeds. Eventually they got V.90 modems and you could connect at around 42-50kbps. In 1999, I got my first cable modem when I got married and moved out. Switched to DSL pretty quickly and was blazing a trail of glory at 1.5Mbps\384kbps. Ten years later I'm still on 6Mbps\1Mbps U-Verse DSL, although it is slightly cheaper than my older DSL connection was in 1999. Shows how much initiative AT&T has taken to bring higher broadband speeds to the masses over the last 10 years.

Kinda sad that my Internet is only 2-3x as fast for slightly less money, but my CPU has gone from a single core, single thread 233Mhz unit, to a 4 core, 8 thread 3.2Ghz monster in the same amount of time.

Before the Internet, I talked with my friends on a wired, rotary telephone and played outside quite a bit. We also had sleepovers and prank called girls from school, since caller-ID wasn't around yet. We played ATARI 2600, NES, and later Genesis and SNES games. We rode bikes and generally life was good. We also paid full MSRP for most items and rarely got a package in the mail.