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What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

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Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#21

Post by eli »

aluhut wrote: post #6
jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

Being one of those pre-internet era kids who started out with a C64, I don't think so. Not having a company and private mobile phone wouldn't change anything to me. I rarely use it and the company can call my cable phone at home when I'm not in the office (where mobiles don't work due to the architects fail). When I'm not at home and not in the office, I'm in the car where I'm forbidden by the employer to use any mea…

I doubt your skills are so specific to the internet that you would be unemployable in a universe without it.

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#22

Post by digi_owl »

tgarma1234 wrote: post #17
increment_i wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its funny how many 90's sitcom episodes were based on this exact premise - the uncertainty of someone's location, not being able to contact them, etc. It was a major problem back in the day.

I definitely remember using the phone at the bar I used to hang out at to call home to check my messages on my answering machine to find out where everyone else was planning to be. Or just walking around to familiar places to see if anyone was around. Life was a ton better living that way honestly. People were certainly more real. Now whenever I am around people I find they are compulsively checking their phones for…

Similarly i recall my mom using a payphone at some diner during a summer trip to call the grandparents back home.

Then some years latter dad got a mobile phone (a brick of a Nokia) that was used sparingly for the same task.

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#23

Post by tgarma1234 »

nul_byte wrote: post #4
jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

Access to information has been a double edged sword as well. I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time. E…

Yes indeed. Libraries. Walking around the stacks looking for books in college and not necessarily knowing what would be in the book other than what was briefly described by the card catalog. You couldn't wikipedia a topic, so you had to really know how to scan a books contents and decide if it was worth the time to read. It was such a huge time commitment to learn anything at all from books back then. I love learning but I don't think that books/libraries were a better way to find information than the internet is. Every book should be digitized in my opinion.

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#24

Post by fauigerzigerk »

For the benefit of younger generations, here's everything you need to know about the pre-internet era:

You didn't miss anything. Everything was strictly worse. Much, much worse. It makes me shudder to even think about any of it. Count yourselves lucky that you didn't have to live through those dark ages.

If you ever feel the urge say something like "but the internet gave us mass surveillance", just stop and think wether you would really complain about hospital waiting times to someone who had to have surgery before the invention of anesthetics ;-)

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#25

Post by DougWebb »

nul_byte wrote: post #4
jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

Access to information has been a double edged sword as well. I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time. E…

Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page.

I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched a YouTube video about the origins of cavalry and how long it took after the domestication of horses before anyone tried riding into battle on the backs of the horses. Chariots, on the other hand, were widely used much earlier. Just from that 20 minute video I learned a lot about an important part of history, and I know that if I wanted to I could spend a few hours, right from home, learning far more about it than I could have gotten from days or weeks of research in libraries when I was growing up.

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#26

Post by proofmaster »

jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

I have to agree with you on that one. Phones did change our lives in a day but internet was like a whole new world for me. It's nice to know you can find literally anything of your interest in just 2 seconds. If people used it more for exchanging and sharing knowledge rather than boosting their ego with social media the world would be so much better.

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#27

Post by dabeeeenster »

jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers?

It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day. CAN YOU IMAGINE?

If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and look it up in a dozen books. Sure, phones provide an additional sort of last mile for that sort of thing, but the difference before and after the internet is almost impossible to communicate.

Can you imagine "missing the news" on the TV?

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#28

Post by hobs »

tgarma1234 wrote: post #17
increment_i wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its funny how many 90's sitcom episodes were based on this exact premise - the uncertainty of someone's location, not being able to contact them, etc. It was a major problem back in the day.

I definitely remember using the phone at the bar I used to hang out at to call home to check my messages on my answering machine to find out where everyone else was planning to be. Or just walking around to familiar places to see if anyone was around. Life was a ton better living that way honestly. People were certainly more real. Now whenever I am around people I find they are compulsively checking their phones for…

Yeah the picture thing frustrates me, my parents used to have a photo drawer and albums with all the important stuff, now its just facebook.

I remember her talking about them as if they were the one thing she would save in a fire, but I doubt she has ever looked at an old facebook photo more than once.

Re: What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet

#30

Post by jpatokal »

dabeeeenster wrote: post #27
jpatokal wrote: post #2

I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…

Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers? It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day . CAN YOU IMAGINE? If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and…

Yes, I was, see another reply below. "The Internet" in the pre-Web form I first encountered it was quite different from what you describe, and close to useless at answering your questions.

Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.

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