Geraldine and I were talking over dinner tonight about how ours (the current 25-30 year old age group) is essentially the last generation to experience a pre-Internet childhood. If you turned 18 after ~1999, your upbringing was probably impacted, at least in part, by the rise of the web (at least in regions with high Internet penetration rates). What will we tell our children about those fanciful days before search engines, websites, and on-demand knowledge wrapped themselves into our collective psyches?
Let's explore:
- Looking up Facts in an Encyclopedia or Dictionary
At my house growing up, we had a huge encyclopedia that came with a magnifying glass in an attached cardboard drawer. You'd grab the appropriate volume and scan with the magnifying glass until you got to the right entry. Now, it's as easy as misspelling the word in a search box and hitting "enter." - Using the Phonebook
Flipping through the phonebook, trying to recall names, and wishing you had the fancy phonebook with the business white pages (we didn't get ours until the late 1980's) was the basic process for any informational or commercial query that couldn't be solved without outside help. - The Dewey Decimal System & Library Card Files
Those huge bookcases filled with information cards dictated the structure of knowledge access. Between them and the librarians, there was no subject you couldn't research. - Unresolvable News & Pop Culture Queries
Who was that actor in Back to the Future that played Biff? If you didn't know his name, you'd have to wait until you could get your hands on a copy of a movie dictionary or an original VHS tape. Arguments about what year the British invaded the Falklands could go on for weeks, until access to source material could be found. - The Modem Connection Noise
Not really pre-Internet, but certainly something you never hear anymore - that long, ugly warbling is practically nostalgia to those of us who regularly fired up our 2800 baud dialers. - Unknown Values of Collectibles
Prior to eBay, anyone in the business of buying and selling goods with a solid dose of charm and charisma could make a veritable fortune buying low and selling high. Today, we just look to the web for a reliable price. - The Office Mailroom
Large and small offices alike once received an enormously greater quantity of business-relevant mail. I recall my Mom's small marketing business constantly had invoices and checks, legal documents and business communiques coming in and going out. Today, we barely get anything but junk mail, catalogs, and physical goods in the mail. - No Asynchronous Contact (except Answering Machines)
No email, no IM, no text messages and until last year, no Twitter. Communication happened in real time between people, or it took place over telephone and radio waves. The postcard and handwritten letter served as the predeccesor to even these technological leaps. - Charting Maps & Directions
Clear the dining room table, pull out the maps, and let's figure out the best route to Boise. Imagine all the wrong turns, poorly designed routes, and lost motorists - not that early versions of MapQuest didn't cause their own problems :) - Buying Airline Tickets in Person
I recall standing in line in downtown Seattle, waiting to get into the United Airlines sales office to buy plane tickets, or even driving down to the airport with my Mom to get them before a flight. - Newspaper Classifieds
Before the web, job hunting, scalping, and private sales were, by and large, conducted through the local papers' classified ads. Today, this loss of revenue (largely from sites like Craigslist, Backpages, and Kijiji) is dampening newspapers' ability to operate profitably offline. - Watching/Listening to the News for Weather, Traffic, & News
Do you remember when news, weather, and traffic weren't available on demand? Nowadays, I pull them up on my mobile device almost daily, but before 1996 or so, your only option was to turn on the news and wait until they announced it over the airwaves. I remember sitting in the car as a young boy, watching my Dad flip the stations from one to the next, hoping that someone would have a traffic report. - Inaccessibility of Adult Content and Knowledge
Like it or not, this age group may be one of the final generations to learn about the birds & bees from our parents (or that tough kid on the playground in 7th grade - that no one believes at first).
As much as we complain about the search engines and even the web as a whole, they've brought an incredible tool to all of our lives. Our job as search marketers is to make more information more accessible. It's quite remarkable, really :-)
Queue Rand's old man voice:
Back in my day, we had to walk to something called the library. It was uphill both ways, and since we didn't have global warming, we had to trudge through the driving snow. But the librarians... Oh, those wonderful librarians with their button down shirts and sweater sets and eyeglasses. They didn't always have the right answer, but they sure were a lot friendlier than that damned pocket Google you kids like so much!
So... What stories will you tell your kids about the time before the web?
p.s. Yes, you can file this post straight in the noise over signal file, but hopefully you'll get a laugh before you do. Besides, I'm technically out of town, enjoying a romantic Monday night with my fiancee, so I shouldn't even be blogging (clearly I'm addicted).
My first online gaming experience went something like this...
*** Dialing 001 855 1227 at international rate ***
Click. Squeeeeeeeeeel!!!
*** Connected ***
You are in a room. There is a door to the north.
> Open door
I do not understand. Please try again.
> Go north
I do not understand. Please try again.
> unlock door
I do not understand. Please try again.
> arrrrgggghhhhh! Stupid game!
I do not unders.....
*** you have been disconnected ***
*** duration: 20 sec - charge: £18.50 ***
Excellent!
Good old times :)
If you guys liked that, you all should find this incredibly amusing.
hah... the modem squeel! That was genius. Absolute genius!
its kool
lolz
iddy biddy is the amount of the worlds population that has internet. there will be many more generations who have zero clue what you are talking about.
Choosing between green font or amber font in high school typing class.
Carmen San Diego...
Prodigy...
Calling every shoe store in the phone book to see if they had the new Air Jordans...
Going outside...
Talking to people face to face...
I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to mention that!
Don't forget Reebok Pumps!
Pong...
Asteroids...
Space Invaders...
Pacman...
Back in my day, we bought our porn in the back room of the video store and carried it home in a brown paper bag... AND WE LIKED IT! ;)
Great post, Rand. I'm constantly fascinated by how quickly we've taken the internet for granted.
I was just thinking about the days when p0rn was difficult to get (if you were under 18) and usually purchased publicly. Now its often free, definately plentiful and you can get it whenever you want and often when you don't (check your in box).
The first digital porn I saw was on a 5.25" floppy and had this chick.
Back in my day a couple of guys would make a road trip to the big city for porn and liquor and it came with a projector so you could watch it on a sheet tacked to the wall. There were no video stores, because there wasn't any VHS.
And the thing is, I'm not really all that old. That's what I keep telling myself anyway.
This is a great way to start the day. Fond memories indeed.I remember being in grade school and playing Oregon Trail on a little Apple IIe at school.
I remember writing papers in high school and actually having to photocopy the articles from the reference books at the library because you couldn’t take them home.
I remember getting a pager so I could be cool and get voicemail.
I remember when you had to watch the news or listen to the radio to know what was going on.
I remember when a newspaper meant something.
And best of all I remember when I could Spell and had nice Handwriting.
Ahhhhhh Oregon Trail :)
I loved hunting, it was too much fun. That and getting supplies and watching your group members drop like flies from disease and starvation
Good times.....
Remember how satisfying it was when you shot a squirrel? Sure, it was a measly 2 lbs of meat, but the fact that you bagged the fast little bugger was a real feat.
Do any non-Americans know what this means? I sure don't.
Loser.
Back in 19th-century America, a bunch of people decided to move to the West coast, because they liked to surf and heard that you could get good sushi. As kids, we honored those pioneers by playing cheesy video games where we tried to make them all get cholera and die.
Or dysentery.
or scurvy :-( poor settlers, they never had a chance when I played..
Pete, you're the George Carlin of usability.
Is that a good thing? :) Speaking of before the internet, whatever happened to George Carlin?
Cheers Rebecca! Yes...very satisfying indeed :)
I would play oregon trail and not do the trial...just hunt. I would shoot those green buffalo like there was no tomorrow.
Omg...remember doom? That was an amazing game...had to sneak it cuz my mom thought it was too violent :)
What is it, make Ian feel old week?
First a thread on the HR forum asking what your first computer was, only to find out that I was the second oldest user, just behind the guy who programmed computers using paper data punch-cards.
And now this. Just in time for Valentines day. You guys have me seriously considering Viagra, just in case... ;)
I remember getting programs in magazines. No, not disks in magazines, actual printed code in the pages of a magazine that one had to type carefully into your computer character by character. Then save on a tape drive. Good times.
I remember reading Every. Freaking. Post. on Usenet. It took all day, but I did it just to see if I could. Now, with 60k+ newsgroups it's an impossible feat.
I remember looking at photos made as 256 color gifs and thinking that was pretty cool. I remember Amiga HAM mode with a glorious 4096 colors at once!
I suspect that people like me have a better understanding of how hardware affects computing than today's users. Deciding to get 1 gig or 2 or RAM is not the same as deciding if you can afford 7k instead of the default 4k. I think eventually most people will be hardware and even OS agnostic - as long as your web and office tools work well, who cares what's running them? This is a huge change from my generation.
Another change is that people just getting onto the Internet today are having a completely different experience than people just getting on the Internet 10 or 15 years ago. I remember when AOL got a huge black eye when they allowed tens of thousands of people onto the web all at once, with none of them aware that the web was a very different animal than the cozy confines of AOL. Shortly afterward, having an email ending in @aol.com was enough to get you flamed in most places.
Today, my kids just use it, and are stunned to find out that the Internet isn't accessible in the car (I have wireless in my house and several laptops).
I think much of the Web 2.0 and beyond stuff is coming from the new generation of people who take the web for granted and expect far more of it than us older folks, who still think it's kind of cool we can avoid going to the library if we want to.
Dad, what's a library? {sigh}
Ian
I definately remember getting programs in magazines... old basic and ML (machine language) on the c64. That was the king of computers, you could go to a grocery store's magazine aisle and find 3 or 4 computer magazine and they were all c64 related ones :)
We got the C64 when I was in the 5th grade ('85ish). We had a tape drive and you could get programs/games on cartridges. We upgraded to the floppy a year or so later, and that was unbelievable. My dad also got a modem and we would call local BBS's (anyone remember those?) at 300 baud.
I had an Amiga through jr and sr. highschool and didnt get into the PC world until college. And it was about 94 when I made that one decision that has lead me down the darkests of paths... I signed up for a compuserve account.
But yeah I remember the good ol days of pre-computers and internet... playing with G.I. Joes, Star Wars figures, Transformers and Go-Bots and the 2600... crap that was a computer.
I just remembered one of my favorites: the internet has completely killed tip-of-the-tongue phenomena. Remember when you'd think something like "Who was that guy in that movie with that girl from that show?", none of your friends could remember, and you'd spend a sleepless night trying to wrench it from the dusty corners of your brain?
Now, you just go on Google, IMDB, or Wikipedia, and 5 minutes later think "oh, yeah, that's the guy". Kind of sucks all the fun out of it.
Edit: Remember back when Rand made this exact point in #4 - Unresolvable News & Pop Culture Queries? Apparently, I didn't.
"Memories......like the corners of my mind....misty water-colored memories...of the way we were" :)
I remember the first time someone used a smiley face in my IM box.... I thought the girl was a real snot and I finally snapped and yelled "AND WHAT IS THAT THING YOU KEEP ADDING AT THE END OF THE SENTENCE!!!!"
Needless to say I felt like a complete idiot when she explained it was a smile.....
I personally don't see the need for the "p.s." in this post. Who cares if the post is a bit noisy? We offer so much value on our site that we shouldn't have to identify a "noisy" post or apologize for its existence.
I think it's precisely because of that high level of expectation of more serious value that posts like this need a p.s. - as much as I'm thrilled that folks enojyed this post, it's probably not going to help anyone with their Internet Marketing campaigns and I always feel bad when I don't post something each night that does.
Absolutely disagree with you there Rand, all work and no play makes Lindop a dull boy... and nobody wants a dull SEO.
Posts like this create a stronger sense of moz community, and gives us a place to be stupid - this means that the educational posts stay that way, and don't go off the rails (too much!) One post like this can keep your other posts clean for a month or two.
Also, I log in a few times a day as a respite from crunching keywords and fighting (in a friendly way of course) with marketers and web designers - so psychologically I would say this does help with my internet marketing campaign indirectly.
So as long as you are posting high quality serious posts, then don't feel bad about posts like this that make the mozzers smile :)
This is one of the reasons I keep coming back here. You all are great people will amazing talent and the ability to not take yourselves too seriously. :-)
I wouldn't call this post "noise" at all.
I remember the rise of the fax machine. Some enterprising businesses would accept faxes for you and hold them for as much as $3 per page.
And then the rise of the pager. $50 for the pager and $6 per month for service. We all looked like dealers.
Cell phones were something that were attached inside the car for a long time. And they were all analog. The old school cell phones were the size of a phone book.
My aunt's boyfriend showed me an early BBS over what I doubt was even a 14.4 connection. It all seemed rather pointless back then.
Oh and CBs! All the cool kids had them with the 6 foot antenae shooting off the top of their cars!
A very early memory of mine regarding mobile phones is from about 1990 when my dad bought a brick. I used to like talking on it but it was too heavy for six-year-old me and I often had to cut my conversations with my mother short because I couldn't hold it up anymore, even with two hands.
CBs! CQ seekyou :)
I'm only 25 man, I shouldn't be talking like this! grrr
What about digital cameras? Every time I take a picture of a little kid, he or she comes bounding up to me and says "Can I see it?" When we went to Korea when I was five, we came back with a bazillion rolls of film that had to be developed, and you couldn't just delete the "omg I look ugly" or the "what the heck, this one's all fuzzy" ones.
Are you calling me a little kid?
Oh right, I should have amended that statement to say "Every time I take a picture of a little kid or Jane..."
Which reminds me of slide projectors and the slide shows of family members visiting far off and exotoc Tulsa.
And that reminds me of chalkboards with chalk and slate... before the whiteboard revolution. And overhead projectors with the Vis-a-vis pens that were constantly confused with Sharpies. Ghost images of two-year-old math equasions in the background.
Ah, life before PowerPoint!
Or even Excel. I remember my grandparents updating their general ledger on paper.
Of course, another major change is the way that people judge anyone taking photographs of little kids.
I think that one point which you have missed is the massive increase in dissemination of misinformation.
The advent of social media has, to a massive extent, accentuated this issue. At SESLondon last year Chris Sherman posed the question, 'How do Yahoo! Answers remove the idiot factor', the reply to which was that authoritative users would aid algorithmic idiot filtering.
When I asked Jeff Revoy, then VP of Search and Social media, now VP of EU Search, Local and Social Media, at Yahoo!, "Is the problem with a community which contains a huge number of idiots being self regulating, rather than implicitly algorithmically regulated, not precisely that it is idiots who are doing the moderating? Over time will popular myths not become represented as fact - especially given that popular opinion, particularly that of those with the time to spare moderating on line communities, is often flawed?" the answer was unsatisfactory.
The answer remains unsatisfactory. Popular myths are becoming fact in a shared pool of knowledge which used to be governed by the accuracy of academic publishers, but is now controlled by the popular and the appealing.
There are a myriad of benefits of unhindered publishing, but dumbing down of knowledge management is one aspect is dragging down the social milieu.
Sorry, that was a bit of a rant.
Life is perception. At least now we are getting honest about the lies we buy into. ;)
Snopes will save us all!
Snopes and Wikipedia are two of the best examples of sites which are presented as bastions of truth and respected as accurate by the community but which are often wildly inaccurate or subjective.
The collective knowledge should be reflected in the Zeitgeist , the Zeitgeist should not dictate the collective knowledge.
I remember my Commadore Vic20 and Moon Patrol! https://my.stratos.net/~hewston95/RTM17/moonpatrol-vic.gif
Also my sanyo 8088 with its shiney green monochrome screen, dual 5 in floppies and no hard drive. Good old MsDos 2.11!
More than the annoying modem noise, the dot matrix printers! Printing banners on connected paper and taking off the preforated sides.
And typing papers on a typewriter. Oh the days.
Thanks Rand, I officially feel old. Pretty hard for a 25 year old.
Oh man! I remember having an old dot matrix. Sad thing is here at my job we still use them as report printers, :-(
Dot Matrix printers! That's hysterical.
I remember reading the features - 12 characters per second - Holy Crap! How do they do that! Are you telliing me this printer can print an entire page of text in under three minutes? Wow!
I would add: no one to talk to about your unusual hobby.
That's one of the things that the web opened up for me - a whole realm of people who had the same interests I did.
My first experience with making my own travel arrangements was using EasySabre (thorugh CompuServe I think). You had to know the text commands to perform the lookups, but it was nice to finally be able to do travel arrangements yourself. Travelocity was a much appreciated improvement on the experience.
hehe ... it begs the question as to what was your hobby if you felt you couldn't talk to people about it?
As I grew up Aldo and DOS programs were still widely in use, but I have to admit that computers existed before I was born. Que Fred's old man voice: "Back in my day, there were no..."
"First Comments!"
;)
Wow, this post makes me feel so old. I remember our first computer - I was in sixth grade - and we were the first family I knew to have one. The word processing program was called "Wordstar", and for some strange reason the forward to the Wordstar handbook was written by Isaac Asimov. (I think he was heralding a new age of technology). Although I love Isaac, Wordstar sucked.
My high school didn't get computers until my senior year, and I remember one teacher taking us into the computer lab and having us enter in all these DOS commands that would supposedly lead us into some sort of program. At the end of the class, only about 2% of the kids had actually done it correctly. The rest of us thought computers were stupid and unusable.
It took me about 10 years (and marrying a bona fide computer geek) to overcome my early disappointing experiences with computers. In contrast, my kids (ages 4 & 7) routinely ask me to Google for information and buy stuff on eBay. They send emails to their grandparents and play computer games with ease.
Someone mentioned upthread that the internet means that misinformation spreads faster and easier - but frankly, published info has been no better. When you read about how giant sources of info (Oxford English Dictionary, World Book Encyclopedia) had to make literally thousands of corrections each time they came out with a new edition, you'll quickly realize that today's model - where mistakes can be correct in nanoseconds, and thousands of sources can be accessed rather than just one or two - is a huge improvement. I wouldn't trade it for the old way at all.
I don't know how people graduated from university before the internet. Walk to the library to find out how you spell that in French? Are you kidding?
Pre-internet, cats knew how to spell. Rick Astley was just a singer. What a strange world that must have been.
Gah, my stupid brother Rickrolls me like once every three months. IT'S NOT FUNNY, JOHN.
great post Rand, it brings back memories.
I'm just jumping on the pile about libaries and information. Not only traditional information.. but cultural information is now accessible. 2 nights ago my wife and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis on television and she asked if he was still married to his 13 year old second cousin bride - the marriage that destroyed is career. A quick Google search and we found out they were married for 13 years, had 2 children, now divorced, and she is a real estate agent.However, Richard Manley's comment about misinformation is well worth noting because it's much more difficult to determine what's a trusted fact and what's not. Experience on the net and education I think help us not be fooled too much, but I do worry the 'the kids' accept things to quickly without questioning in this age of instant information.
TIREY.TV's TOP 5 LIST OF PRE-INTERNET EXPERIENCES I'M GLAD ARE GONE:
5. Going to the libary to look up out of town phone numbers. Hey, directory assistance cost money!
4. Hearing loving Mom warn us a billion times about not making long distance calls to friends, we should write letters instead. (my sis's never seemed to get that message??)
3. Needing AAA membership for 'trip-tick' maps
2. Driving to or calling multiple stores to find the lowest prices
1. Watching Encyclopedia Britannica commercials!
-----------------Okay, I do confess... I miss Pen Pals! We traded them for Internet Pervs and Nigerian 419 scammers.
For #4, we had Katz and Halliwell. When I was in film school (pre-web), every student and every prof had dogeared copies of both.
For #9, you had to be a member of AAA. You could call them up and order a TripTik, which would include a map with the recommended route highlighted on it. Someone with a marker actually drew those lines onto maps.
I'm actually not from a pre-internet generation. But I remember that a long, long time ago (6 years) I first heard about the internet. And my dad explained everything to me about what it was. We had to dial up with a phone line, but I remember that we only used it for a couple of times just to see what that internet thing was. Actually, after 10 minutes we would stop because we just didn't know what to do online. But I found it fascinating that you could have your own website available for everyone to visit from everywhere around the world. And so I started building a website. The funny thing was that I had build a website and had only been to the web for about 2 times in my whole life. And I couldn't upload it yet because there was no such thing as free webhosting those days (hey, I was 12 years old, I couldn't afford paid hosting). So that was a bit dissapointing.
But it all ended up very well, I remember the times that my father used to say that you can't earn money with the internet :)
The argument about the Falklands should have gone on for a long time because the British didn't invade the Falklands, the Argentinians did. The British defended the Falklands.
I am ashamed that I missed that.
I really should have noticed.
EDIT: Jane edited out note about multiple comments added by accident, as she's cleared up said comments :)
Am I the only one who still experiences the sweet thrill of anticipation everytime I hear a dial up modem sound (while watching wargames rerun)? Most people experience it as a terrible noise, but it was such a big deal in my life as a kid to be able to hook that thing up to a network that I'm still keen on it.
Agreed precisely. Love that noise.
Ha,
Great post Rand. I remember loading computer games from tapes. How on earth did that work?.. Well, on the whole, it didn't. Having said that the anticipation created from actually not knowing whether or not they would load is something I miss to this very day. "Please, please, please load... its loade..... its crashed".... Great days.
T
I loved the sound of tape games loading.
I am making that sound now, much to the chagrin of my colleague.
I still remember that sound, from my TRS-80. My favorite game took something like 3 minutes to load from tape. Ah, sweet music...
Swapping electronic information on floppy disks? Duncan and I wrote a book like that last century some time.
How did we cope?
The business mail one is a huge one though - it's hard to remember how dependent we were on snail mail.
What did you do with all those floppy disks Will?
I stuck them to the wall following a pattern ..made a tree kinda shape out of it.
Once floppies...stuck to the wall.
I've heard that some of my friends developed a "frisbee" kinda game with floppys. :D
I think they went to the great disk drive in the sky.
Anyone still remember 8" floppy disks, the predecessor to 5-1/4"?
What's funny is that you can get a 1GB flash drive for about $20 (or free at a tradeshow), but a 360KB 5-1/4" drive will cost you $50-100+ these days (if you can find one).
No.
Now you're showing your age.
;)
Since I had the benefit of public schooling (read--the bottom of the totem pole for electronics donations) in my programming class I used PDP-10s that emulated PDP-8s and allowed us to code in BASIC. Wikipedia's image byline for those is great, "A PDP-8 on display at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C..." Before that though, was middle school and YES! the 8" (or 9") floppies. Admittedly it was only one machine and I don't think it really worked but I clearly remember the process for loading the disk: drop it in vertically and pray.
Personally I miss the reams and reams of dot matrix printer paper the most and all the fun games that could be had with their tear-away edges.
If only floppy disks were a memory from the past... I had a client give me copy for his website on a floppy last week. Took several days to find someone with a floppy drive in their computer so I could access it :)
I used to handcode ugly pages on geocities. Which took me on a high more than the shots I had at the pub.
Drawing up ugly pages on geocities...
Plugging it with the stupid counters...
You know the fun part was when I used to spend all week long to design a "webpage" and when I "displayed" it to my friend on his PC, it all looked messed up! My first "cross browser compatibility" lesson there!
:D
Mani Karthik
I can't believe no one has mentioned MUSIC yet. The only dang way to find new music was go to a cassette store at the mall, or comb through Columbia House/BMG catalogs ... do you know how many times I looked for a Screeching Weasel tape at the local music stores, only to find a bunch of Screaming Trees? Ugh.
Which I guess ties into the thing I think is biggest (which someone did mention) - the advent of much more niched subcultures. Musical, political, metaphysical, whatever - with the internet, you could find people both locally and afar that shared your esoteric passions.
To true. I forgot to comment about the AMG Music catalog that you could occasionally find buried in the back of the CD section. Forget concussions, that thing would kill someone if dropped on them. And now: AMG Music, a nifty (poorly SEO'd) website.
Oh, these were great days actually. I like to recall them with some nostalgia.
The days when I was till reading books (not scanning them but actually reading) :) My father used to read to me and my brother - and these were adorable evenings...
I guess we were happy then, no? But again I was a child then - that's why things seemed easier then :) Internet is something that is associated with work and adult life - anyway I am glad I spent my childhood without it.
I remember handwritten school papers in Junior High and then papers on my electric typewriter for High School. Also, we had one family member, Uncle Al. And he could get you anywhere you needed to go in the tri state area. No trip started without calling Uncle Al for detailed directions and you had to get them down good because there were no cell phones if you lost your way!
Oh woops - I meant to do a new comment. Sorry!
how about writing letters - period? i can't remember the last time i wrote an entire letter, put it in a stamped envelope, and sent it to someone.
True. And scary. And sad. I even email my grandmother.
I smell a new site: AlQuest.com.
Hahaha! He would love that! He's got a GPS in his car but he never uses it.
Everyone has hit on the big ones for me:
No more having to go to the library out of necessity - now I go for peace and quiet.
Swapping games via floppies or tapes.
And if anything the Internet has cured me of the magazine obsession I had when I was a younger.
And for business: memos, memos, memos. I remember taking classes where we spent days over how to format and distribute memos. Some offices even kept "Memo notebooks" so you knew what was sent to you.
And for us gamers out there - casual or not - it used to be you could only play games with someone who lived in your town - and they'd have to come over to your house. Now you can play with anyone in the world who has an Internet connection.
Oh and lastly - playing Dungeons and Dragons in person vs. playing World of Warcraft online? Not even a contest for me: WoW FTW.
Oh and lastly - playing Dungeons and Dragons in person vs. playing World of Warcraft online? Not even a contest for me: WoW FTW.
Hehe, amen to that.
I remember the big thrill of going to my friend's house -- she had an Apple 2E.
How about coloring Sesame Street Pages with that little crayon, where you click on the color and then click on the space you want to fill in (now my son can play this online).
How about using the yellowpages to find other kid's phone numbers and prank calling them (I can't believe I am admitting to this). I wish this was all kids did today to each other -- new technology has enabled them to play crueler jokes. As for the yellowpages, now that they are useless for their intended purpose, why not use them for this.
And although this isn't completely computer related, did anyone else have the original Nintendo that after the games had been used for awhile you had to blow on the connecter part of the cartridge to get the game to work again.
lol - I did have to constantly clean the dust by blowing from the cartridges to get them to work.. up to sega mega infact...
I've just read almost all the comments on this post, and BOY, Do I feel old compared to almost everyone who commented. I remember in my hometown only having one TV station. It started broadcasting at 8am and shut down at 1030pm. I remember Sputnik being sent into orbit, Alan Shepards suborbital flight. I remember JFKs inauguration, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that dark day in Nov. 1963. Veitnam was VERY real to me. I watched Neal Armstrong walk on the moon. I've walked this small lump of mud and stone for a lot of years. Good Old Days, HA! These are the good old days, information is at humanitys fingertips, being able to watch news, streaming video of any and all genres (including those you dont want your mom to see). Best of all you have a chance to possibly change the world a little bit (hopefully for the better). Forgive my rant on these things, but I've been here since Eisenhower was President, and finally, with the internet humans just might ha ve a chance to exchange thoughts and ideas freely.
Anyone remember bulletin boards (BBS)? The cool ones would have funky flashing ansi "graphics"... Used to dial into one on my 14.4k modem to play my weekly Doom2 league games.
In a way I miss the small tight-knit geek communities you got there ;)
I remember floppys and commodore 64's - I had an amstrad (dont ask me what model cause I dunno) Funny enough, I had a whole set of the Encyclopedia Britannica....
I remember playing commandos on the Amstrad, and using audio cassettes to load the games - and then we figured out that you could actually copy these and make *ahem "backups" by using a normal cassette to cassette recorder...
When I went to tech we were taught basic and pascal. The computer room only had two colour monitors, the rest were all monotone. Floppy drives were those big ones, with the smaller, new technolgy being called stiffies.
Windows 95 was a gateway into mainstream computing for me, got given Windows for Dummies as a birthday present, it was easy from there on in. Remember taking days to get windows 95 to accept certain new devices, notably scanners with scuzzy cards, and then trying to get scanning done without crashing on 32MB RAM......hahahahahahah
The blue screen of death was evident often in the early days, especially when you were halfway through a design, and havent saved yet...hahaha
Cool nostalgic posting, am happy to be here though, as the early memories of working with computers was to wait....wait......wait....until something gave....
Being from Chicago, now living in Austin, but going to school in Kansas, I'm walking the miles in the snow!!! I wish I could live out all those stories I was told about like " The Great Snow Storm of 1968" in Chicago!! Something like 20 inches fell! How awesome that must have been!
My mom is a teacher and always tells me about how, back in the day she had to "write her own computer programs"?? She can't explain it to me though.
One last thing....what a colletion of albums we have stored at my house... sell on ebay? (I never heard of half the bands)
Hey, my boyfriend has a lot of stuff on vinyl. Don't knock record players!
Boyfriend eh? I think I just heard several hundred hearts break simultaneously. ;-)
Wow!
It has been so long since the Pre-Internet AGE, that I had forgotten all about it. We are the last Generation that has a Pre-Internet experience and even though it hasn't been so long it feels like it was another life!
This makes me remember other ANCIENT things like my all time favorite COMMODORE 64 and my ATARI! Wow... those were the times… And then came the 1st ISP’s and the 1st Modems and … well wow! This is real ancient history…
Well, nice article, you get a “thumbs UP” from me!
Cheers!
I just loved the Modem noise and I miss it a lot!
In fact I think I remember what I had to type to connect:
atz
atdp + (telephone number)
Good times...
Dial Up Modem?
Have no fear - your noise is here!
....would never knock the vinyl!!! What's a record player? (JK)!!!!
Vinyl is good. 8track, mmmm....not so good.
I remember saving my pennies to buy my first computer, a Commodore 64, but I couldn't afford the floppy drive so I would have to reprogram all my games every time I turned the computer off. Needless to say they all stayed pretty simple.
Modem noise? The first time I mentioned a modem in public school I got laughed at. Boy did times change, now all those guys have CS degrees and IT jobs. The irony.
Oh - as I was out and about I forgot something: dating.
I know about a half-dozen couples that would not be together now if it weren't for things like aol chatrooms, myspace, match.com, etc.
Oh and to let everyone know - I want to leave you with this - the real reason Rand is going on Oprah:
Google Buys Oprah
(btw: for those unfamiliar with it - Dateline Hollywood is a satire/spoof site. So there is no truth to this story. There is no way they would pay that much for Oprah).
The 6 actually me ton the internet and the rest of them stayed in touch via email so I guess it would be even more who wouldn't be together.
Hmm would I rather buy Oprah or Yahoo!? :)
I remember times when games came on tape and the introduction of a 'loading screen' was revolutionary.
I can remember saying to my big brother "wow! have you seen the graphics on this loading screen?" and we would get over excited looking at it while the tape screeched and loaded the game in the background.
I'm tempted to get the noise of a modem loading and put it on my phone as a ring tone to see how many people recognise it
I remember, so well, before YP........
I remember our first television
I remember our first family car
I remember my Dad's darkroom
I remember our first reel to reel
I remember playing on "bomb sites" as a kid (in my native England)
I like change - that's why falling into SEO back in 97 suits me ;)
David
Charlotte - San Francisco - London (South)
....tell me I don't look 56! i certainly don't act it.....
You look like early 30s. How old is your avatar?
A sad state of affairs having to own up to just how old "the good old days" really are.
However, I have to say, one thing that sticks out in my mind from elementary school is all of those handwritten book reports (typed if I was getting fancy), resplendent with illustrations sliced and diced and Elmer's glued to the paper, from my father's back issues of National Geographic.
I totally agree with you Rand, those good old times :P
I notice that many people miss the dial-up modem noise. A bit annoying indeed but kinda funny.
In the future I'll tell the stories about the times I used to grab some books to do my school work :P
That Modem Connection Noise was very annoying, but also meaning that is some short seconds or minutes actually, I would have a CONNECTION ! Until, while navigating at the speed of 56 kb/s, the screen would freeze and you had to redial and do the whole thing again.
These were the days...
Excellent post - although I now feel really old!
I remember speaking to my Marketing Director when I got my first job as a Marketing Assistant about how he used to work pre-internet / email etc.
Artwork had to be biked to and from client and creative agency with comments in marker pen - the timelines were a nightmare - even for a relatively simple newspaper ad.
Likewise when I went to school - any research you did was at the library wading through unwielding handback books - ah the joy!
Good comment about magazine addictions....
I don't buy them these days - when I first moved to the US in 1995 I would easily spend $60 - $100 a WEEK on mags and newspapers ........
This was at Harold's in San Francisco where I could get my favorite British mags and newspapers, Football magazines etc (it's not Soccer).
I subscibe to Wired now and that's it - not even the local newspaper as I read it online....
David
I've become so reliant on a web connection that I can't really remember what it was like before 1999, but I do know this;
Online shopping changed my life!
Web design changed my life!
Who remembers 300 baud modems?
Hehe I can remember logging into a local BBS over my 1200 baud modem - and they had access to Usenet! I read a post from someone in FLORIDA - wow, amazing!
Ah, I miss library card files.
Here's another one for you, kids (que in a squeeking chair on a porch).
I remember the days when all your banking had to be done in a bank! And we thought the ATM was almost as good as sliced bread...
Absolutely! Remember "ugly tellers?" At least that was what the ATMs were referred to in my area at the time :)
And all banks closed at 4PM and were not conveniently located within your favorite grocery store! Also, to purchase goods you wrote an amount on a slip of paper and signed it. And if that slip ended up being no good it would get posted behind the cash register... to the great communal embarasement of the check writer.
The other option was the old school credit card machines that took an impression instead of a swipe.
Rick Astley was just a singer
Jane I played Rick Astley when I was a DJ in 86???? LOL
Recently I've noticed that my handwriting is getting even uglier! We use to write things by hand, actually - can you believe that?! And quickly manipulate big numbers without using a calculator! Hooa!
OMG, my handwriting is so messy now too! And it actually hurts to have to write for long periods of time now (on the rare occaision I have to take notes by hand).
During university, my handwriting was immaculate. Tiny, pretty little words crawled along the lines, never a pen-stroke out of place. Now, I can barely write my own name without it looking like the amateur scrawl of a five year old.
So true! My handwriting during High School was great too, now... well it looks like my pen threw up on the paper. :-P
i can't remember anything pre-internet. my memory banks are full. it's time for an upgrade. :p