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 ;-)
>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
...I'm sorry, I don't understand how that parable is supposed to make sense.
Wow, that was a downer to read and I'm sorry you feel that way. I feel much different.
In fact, some of my best memories and seemingly happiest times were my pre-teen through post teen years through the 80's and early 90's. Without internet but was still immersed in the geeky stuff. Simpler times as the cliché would say.
Things like seeing what my friends were up to actually involved a sense of more freedom and independence because you had to actually get on your bike and knock on their door as your parents told you to stay off the phone (that cost like .3/minute to call a block away). The only "tech" that interfered with our lives was in our homes. Parks, lazing around with friends, exploring, baseball.. etc. Whatever you could do to pass time and enjoy ones company. Driving my bike to nearest field to see who else was there and sharing baseball cards, stories, flirts, etc was our Facebook.
But this was also a time of exploring the exploding world of hobby electronics (Radio Shack, Popular Electronics, First IBM PC and DOS, etc) but was more hands-on physical rather than the post-internet software/webpage intangible is king. Like I said before it was all in your home and my house was the epi-center of this stuff in my neighborhood as I was the one known to have it. If not outside getting dirty, we'd be in my house playing Earl Weaver Baseball or NFL Challenge. A pittance compared to todays sports games graphics-oriented games as these were more numbers/strategy based.
I also remember once modems became affordable that there was actually an "online" world BEFORE the internet. BBS's, usenet.
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 ;-)