Onions were probably on belts at the time.

/is 22
//and off your lawn

Have you seen cave drawings? Yeah, that was us.

How is babby formed?

This was also before the days of 24/7. We only went to 11/7, or 7/11 if we wanted something to drink.

sticky magazines.

I'll out myself as submitter. I just think that everything about my life is related to the internet. I moved from SC to AK because of a job I found online. I keep in touch with my friends on line, I make new friends online, I get most of my news, information, and research and visual entertainment online. I'm even studying computer technology because of my experiences online. I really really can't imagine my life without the internet.

gadian: I really really can't imagine my life without the internet.

Boy, are you gonna be disappointed when this thing becomes self-aware and kills us all.

I played outside a lot, read a metric ton of books, and talked to my friends in person, and letters to grandma had to be written on pieces of paper that were then put in a blue box and magically whisked away to where she was... a week later.

/had 56k until I moved to college
//dad just upgraded last year
///yeah, I remember a time without constant internet

I bought two or three newspapers a day. I used to always have inky fingers.

I was conceived in the internet fallopian tubes, so I am getting a kick out of these replies.

gadian: I really really can't imagine my life without the internet.

You used to be able to disappear.

Now, everyone has their third-grade lunch buddies getting up in their grills on Facebook, asking about whatever happened to Joanie Eisner and did that weird kid Marty who sat in the back of the class and kept watching the clock really shoot somebody when he went to college?

Sheesh - it used to be a quiet, pleasant world.

I first got an internet connection when I was in 7th grade, but I had dial up until I moved to college at age 19.

I read a lot, or played football and baseball in the front yard with my dad and little brothers. Back in my day, video games came in bulky cartridges and 16-bit graphics were all the rage. I recall when the first non-2D game came out and being excited by that.

I also played guitar a lot. I would spend hours in my garage just noodling around.

Dirty, brutish, and short.

And that was just the women ;)

We used to write letters and sent them through the mail. We had to lick the stamps.
We used to spend time chatting with people over the phone for much longer periods of time.
We used a slide rule to calculate things to 3 significant digits. We actually had to learn what logarithms were and how to use them.
We did not use U for YOU or BRB for be right back.
If our car stalled we needed to walk to a phone booth and use a dime to make a call.
We bought 45 RPM or 78 RPM vinyl records. Audiophiles bought reel to reel tapes.
The news took 1 to 3 days to reach the airwaves after it happened.
We did not realize the TV shows were in black and white when we watched Ed Sullivan or I Love Lucy.
It was surprising if the weatherman got the next day's forecast close to correct.
Once a month we got our supply of porn from Playboy which only showed boobies.

I know how to use an abacus.

Books, called dictionaries and encyclopedias, generally kept in places called a library.

Back copies of newspapers were kept on microfiche.

I had more personal freedom than you'll ever hope to understand when I was growing up in the 60s. During the summer, when I wasn't picking beans or strawberries, or mowing lawns to earn spending money, my sister and I would spend the majority of the day riding our bikes, going to our friend's homes & playing various games, etc. This went from shortly after breakfast until dinner time. We didn't come home for lunch most times because we either made some sandwiches to take with us or one of our friend's mom fed us lunch. We had to be home by the time the streetlights came on, which was shortly after dusk. We didn't think about computers because personal computers didn't even exist back then. You can't miss something that didn't exist. Our evening was spent watching TV on one of the two TV channels available (ABC & NBC affiliates). You couldn't get the CBS affiliate unless you have a rooftop antenna since the station was in Portland, a good 100 miles from where we lived.

We took family vacations every summer and went to the Oregon coast (mainly Florence) at least monthly during the summer & several times during the fall/winter/spring months. When I was 12 we took a vacation to Victoria, B.C., my first and only trip out of the U.S.

We lived in a world where nobody had video cameras, either. We had Super 8 camera and Super 8 film where you had to decide what you wanted to commit to film AND you only had 2 minutes and 50 seconds of recording media.

THEN, it took about a week to get the film developed and sent back to you. So, you were pretty careful about what you shot and you made sure that the camera wasn't just shooting while waiting for something to happen.

Remind me to stay off youse guyses lawns.

/609, what?

JerryVO: We used to write letters and sent them through the mail. We had to lick the stamps.
We used to spend time chatting with people over the phone for much longer periods of time.
We used a slide rule to calculate things to 3 significant digits. We actually had to learn what logarithms were and how to use them.
We did not use U for YOU or BRB for be right back.
If our car stalled we needed to walk to a phone booth and use a dime to make a call.
We bought 45 RPM or 78 RPM vinyl records. Audiophiles bought reel to reel tapes.
The news took 1 to 3 days to reach the airwaves after it happened.
We did not realize the TV shows were in black and white when we watched Ed Sullivan or I Love Lucy.
It was surprising if the weatherman got the next day's forecast close to correct.
Once a month we got our supply of porn from Playboy which only showed boobies.

I was an adult before I ever saw a Star Trek episode in color. My grandmother relented and bought a color TV after our black & white model, which my grandparents had purchased when I was a toddler, finally died. Of course color TV sets were really expensive back then.

We didn't scan stuff and send it to a printer. You went to the library and paid a DIME per PAGE to make a copy of something.

White-out liquid was a standard thing to buy - - you were very careful how you typed because you didn't want to get out the White-out and paint over what you typed on a paper.

Paper tests at school weren't printed with black ink. Instead, they were printed with blue mimeograph ink and everyone would get high sniffing a freshly-handed-out test paper. There's a scene of this in the final exam part of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, only nowadays nobody gets what the kids are doing in that scene.

DarthBrooks: ...THEN, it took about a week to get the film developed and sent back to you. So, you were pretty careful about what you shot and you made sure that the camera wasn't just shooting while waiting for something to happen.


Heh, Polaroid cameras were the BOMB when they first came out. You got to see your picture right away.

Play Risk. It's like a flamewar on the internet, only you get to punch each other in the face in person.

I remember having to (ugh) TYPE my papers in college. With a TYPEWRITER. Onto regular paper.

God that was annoying.

It's a wonder Einstein or Feynman got anything done without the computers.

DaCricket: Heh, Polaroid cameras were the BOMB when they first came out. You got to see your picture right away.

I remember Polavision movie - - horrible idea, and incredibly bad timing. VHS came out about the same time.

After hunting the wild game, I would take my pic of the women folk in the village (my choice only limited by the size of my kill).

When you wanted to hear a song you had to either go buy the song or tape it off the radio or have a friend tape it for you.

If you wanted to converse with someone across the country you had to either write them a letter, or call them, but long-distance costs made talk times short.

We used to play turn-based campaign style war games through the mail. One game lasted a year and a half.

Yeah, it sucked.

Although this was cool, and still is.

I remember loading up floppy disks of ShareWare Doom with a hushed anticipation.

DarthBrooks: We didn't scan stuff and send it to a printer. You went to the library and paid a DIME per PAGE to make a copy of something.

White-out liquid was a standard thing to buy - - you were very careful how you typed because you didn't want to get out the White-out and paint over what you typed on a paper.

Paper tests at school weren't printed with black ink. Instead, they were printed with blue mimeograph ink and everyone would get high sniffing a freshly-handed-out test paper. There's a scene of this in the final exam part of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, only nowadays nobody gets what the kids are doing in that scene.

I was old enough to know what they were doing, but that's because they picked several trusted girls from each year's advanced typing class to type up the mimeograph stencils for upcoming quizzes and tests. I was one of those selected to type them up and then run them through the mimeograph machine.

For you young ones, this is what a mimeograph machine looked like:



And this is the stencil you typed on. It was then attached to the mimeograph machine & you turned the crank to imprint the writng from the stencil onto paper.

I travelled thru Europe and the middle east in the early 1990s.

I had to find phones everywhere in order to communicate with people. Pay phones in Eastern Europe are no fun, lemme tell you.

Meeting friends who were also travelling was an exercise in random chance -- notes left for each other in hostels, calling each other's parents to find out where they expected their kids to be next week, messages left at AmEx offices across Europe.

Need a place to stay at your next stop? A book or good travel advice was needed. No intertubes to find me a nice pensionne or guesthouse.

And I brought home lots and lots of film from my travels to be developed into photos.

Booking airline tickets needed a travel agent.

At work I used to have all the info I needed in giant volumes of books that were updated two or three times a year from the major performance rights societies. Today that's all on-line. I used to have to run around to music stores to get the tracks my clients needed. Today I can steal demos on-line and I don't have to leave my desk. I'd have to burn info onto a disk and send to studios. Today it's all thru ftp sites or on-line ftp like yousendit.com.

Kids today don't know how easy they have it.

/tying an onion to my belt

Even at a public school the guys needed to wear ties and either a sport coat or sweater. No jeans, no shorts for anyone. (Boston).

Four gallons of gasoline cost the same as a movie. Oh wait - it does now! Only in those days a movie cost about $2. (born when Truman was prez).

It was a big thing if you owned an answering machine for your telephone.

Pin-ball games were awesome. And a thing called "heavy petting" did not refer to the weight of your date.

Oh, the usual. I bowl. Drive around. The occasional acid flashback. ...

But seriously, Summers I would get on my bike with a snorkel, fins, mask and a basketball and spend most of the day underwater, or sitting on my basketball in the water. Or I would just launch out into the forest, going wherever the creeks or trails took me. Or riding horses with friends. When I was older and wanted money I farmed for a couple different farmers, baling hay, milking cows, driving tractors, whatever.
When I grew up America was still pretty much a free country.

It was really difficult to keep up with old friends and classmates before the intertubes.

I didn't have the internet till college.
I just wasted my time in front of the TV, instead of wasting it with you guys.

You'd just watch more TV and read more books.

Since you're a TFette there's no real need to go into how you try to get a look at boobs in your early teens.

But let me tell you, you'd have sold your soul.

Hmm, I was born in '78 ...

Pre-Internet to me means everything up to the age of 17 (the only Internet connections in town were two or three private long-distance dial-ups, and the Library's carefully rationed long-distance dial-up).

So, I masturbated a lot to half-scrambled, black-and-white Cinemax.

Now my porn is much more efficient ... but I honestly can't say it's better. Must be nostalgia.

Lots of playing outside, lots of outdoor activities, lots of playing with stuff in imaginative ways. We made stuff, had hobbies, and watched stuff on all three channels.

I was born in 1967, and in 1973 my folks bought a set of encyclopedias. They got used well into the 80's for homework. It might not seem like much, but having a set of books like that at your house was a big deal. We could do homework at home, even research for term papers and such. I recently took a look at them. The bit on lasers, for example, is hilarious. But back then if they printed it in the encyclopedia, it was taken as truth.

Speaking of which, I wonder about people not questioning the veracity of their information. They see it online, it must be true, right? We had no need for snopes.com back then.

People knew how to spell. You typed (literally; that or wrote) the word "you" when using the first person singular. The first person possessive was "your", not "ur". All this text-speak bullshiat is fingernails on a blackboard to people who had to either learn how to spell or look things up in a dictionary constantly. But you don't know what a blackboard is, do you? Or why nails on it might not sound good. All your classroom time has been in front of projectors and dry-erase boards. You don't even know what having to stay back and dust erasers or clean blackboards meant, do you?

Cooking was a chore, and involved making things from discrete ingredients. Popcorn at home was from a little deal used in the fire or a hot air thing that made it taste like packing foam. We bought one of the first microwave ovens in our city in the early 70's. You wanted hot water? All you had to do was put the cup in there and turn the dial to 2 minutes. Never mind grandma thought it would irradiate her thyroid, this was the oven of the future! Making thanksgiving dinner in it was not such a hot idea, though. No pun intended.

We used white-out. The backspace key was meant for over-striking, or using that new-fangled white-out tape on the IBM Selectric.

TV had all your news. Well, aside from the morning paper. Your parents would spend like 45 minutes each morning reading about what happened weeks ago in the dead tree edition of the news. While pops was reading the financials, you sat there and ate your King Vitamin or Quisp and moped that you didn't get that BMX bike or GI Joe for Christmas.

TV had all your entertainment. That or the movie theater/playhouse. Buzz about new movies or shows happened at work, around the water cooler.

People used the phone when they had an issue with something. If you needed info about a product or service, you opened the yellow pages and dialed someone. They answered your questions, and if you felt squingy about their replies, you let your fingers do more walking and called someone else.

The fax machine was made from magic.

We had to be kind and rewind, not download. I once paid $65 for a Betamax copy of the first Indiana Jones movie. But, you know what? I felt like I owned it.

Seeing a movie was an event, not a crime.

Everyone wanted to hear the b-side to a record, not download cover art from iTunes. You owned a record, and played its songs in series, like it was meant to be played. Record players had no "shuffle" setting.

The world was a big place. A person in your town who was from Australia or India (or even New Jersey) was from a Far Away Land full of weird strangers. You communicated with people in your community, back when that word had actual meaning. People that could help you, people that knew you. You didn't need ID to cash a check, which was good because you only had Diners Club (that or Master Charge) and the store didn't take that card. But he knew your neighbor and so your check was good.

When you got your bank statement, you read it. And you actually looked through the stack of canceled checks. Once or twice a month, you had to sit down and balance everything out, and then pay all your bills. Everyone had a roll of stamps for mailing out checks for the utilities and such.

Book stores existed. Like, real ones, which had chairs and friendly people working in them. They wanted you to come in, sit down and peruse the selections. They wanted regular customers and the people working there knew what you liked and could suggest other authors or books you might like -- often with uncanny precision. They were the only place to special order books not in stock. Because nobody knows the phone number of the local book distributor.

Sometimes you'd be able to get a hold of the European version of a record you owned -- and it was all different! Sometimes there's be different songs, different ordering, all sorts of changes. You'd buy "an album" and then if you were a real fan, you bought "an import" of it. All your friends wanted to hear it when it came in the mail.

People were nice. You had to be; there was no chance to be an internet tough guy.

Roook: Since you're a TFette there's no real need to go into how you try to get a look at boobs in your early teens.

But let me tell you, you'd have sold your soul.

Forgot this one. Cable came to my area as sort of a test in 1980. It had HBO and one other movie channel I can't recall. I do remember seeing MTV's first video. We saw the announcements for MTV and were really wanting to check it out.

Anyway, back then the cable box was a faux-wood thing that sat on your TV andhad a million push buttons on top. Your TV had two dials: One for VHF and one for UHF. You turned the VHF (which clicked between channels) to channel 1 and then tuned the UHF dial (which moved more smoothly, like a radio dial) in order to pick up the cable box's channels. You had to correlate the set-top box's channel button with the UHF dial.

So when HBO is showing a movie that's got nekkid in it, your older brother comes along and shows you what his buddy at school told him about: you very very carefully get the UHF dial in between "channels" until you can see the restricted HBO or cinemax channel with like a fuzzy bar in the lower portion -- but the rest is fine as long as you like your movies kinda wobbly and in black and white.

You'd watch "porn" that way. I saw Porky's that way, for example. Kim Cattrall is still hot, too.

Sun God: It's a wonder Einstein or Feynman got anything done without the computers.

If Youporn existed when Einstein and Feyman were still around, we'd be lucky to be getting around to the atomic age now.

Analog masturbation. Stealing skin mags or videos from my older brother or my old man. Or, just having to use my imagination. That sucks.

Sex without condoms with complete strangers, or sometimes with your friends sisters, was what you did instead of looking at porn. Usually a promise to pull out was sufficient, but just in case, you'd carry a condom in your wallet so there'd be no excuse.

We didn't have Facebook or MySpace to figure out where the parties were. Usually, nobody knew, so you'd drive around all night with your buddies, and follow people, eventually someone would yell out the location of a party to a passing car, "party off Beach Drive!", then you'd have to know where Beach Drive was instead of looking at your iPhone, usually end up following the caravan of partiers assuming someone up front knew. Most of the time it was a joke, but every once in a while there was a rager, and you'd drink until you puked, get in your car and drive home.

We did have modems. You'd call up a guy's computer on your telephone line, it was called a BBS, and he was the SYSOP. Only one person at a time could view the files on the BBS, which were mostly articles written by 14 year olds on how to make piss bombs, or make free long distance phone calls. This was at 300 baud, or bits per second, which is about 4000 times slower than most DSL today, and could only be used when nobody wanted to use the phone.

Computer games had no sound, no pictures, no graphics, no joysticks, mostly a bunch of text that maybe looked like graphics, or most often just a bunch of words. "You are standing at a storm grate", then you'd type something like "turn left", and it would say something like "you've been eaten by a grue".

If you wanted to go wireless, you had a CB radio and could talk to truckers, but had to learn the 10-codes, and say things like "10-4 back door, there's a smokey at the offramp" which meant "I saw a speed trap at the offramp."

Read a lot more books-I'm down to about 50 a year now

Watched TV...which I really don't now

Read the local paper...no need now

Bought what was needed at the first store that had it

Slept a lot more

gadian: I moved from SC to AK because of a job I found online.

You moved to Alaska for a job? Christ, I hope it pays well...

Victoria's Secret catalogs. I still remember them.

Reading and playing outside was the thing to do. In summer, riding bikes. In winter, snow forts, snowball fights, and generally getting soaked with snow.

The first ever gaming console that was fun to play was the Commodore 64. And then Atari came out with Pong. It was graphical! And then my Dad brought home an old work computer. IBM PS2 (I think). Everything was loaded on 5.25" floppies, even the OS. It even came with ASCII porn.

Well I see onions have been covered.

Oh, and you'll never get to enjoy Crystal Pepsi. What a bleak future.