Work meant physical work before the internet came, at least for me. Work produced tangible results: a heavy object was moved from one place to another, a structure was built, a unit repaired, or an area cleared. Things that were dirty were made clean. Things that were clean were made dirty (usually me & my clothes).

I conducted research and reading at library, if I needed to. This took a special trip into town.

I'd call friends on a rotary dial telephone. We had a party phone back then: four families on one line. Different rings indicated different homes (we were two quick rings). One never knew who was listening.

We'd write letters to relatives. Replies would take a week or two. One time I even wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper, and they published it! All my neighbors said it was an excellent letter (regarding the editing of our High School yearbook).

Our television only received five channels - one of them French/Canadian. Late at night that last became very educational: the Quebec station lacked our Victorian sexual mores. The other stations were ABC (Channel Six), CBS (Channel Eight), NBC (Channel 13), and PBS (Channel Ten). We only received a few radio stations listen too. WBLM (the Blimp) was our favorite.

We played outside a lot. We played Army in the woods during summer, or we'd swim, or go exploring on our bikes. We went sledding during winter, usually staying closer to home. We'd play board games too: chess, Stratego, Battleship, etc. When I was older my friends and I would play Dungeons & Dragons. My Nana taught me to play Rummy. More specifically she taught me to cheat at Rummy.

So, to answer your question: work was different, communication was different, recreation was different, and learning was different. I won't say better, necessarily, but certainly much slower.

What free porn might have looked like.

sticky magazines.

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

If you thought of something and wanted to look it up, you had to remember it, or write it down so that the next time you went to the library you could follow up that thought.

Or perhaps you'd get out the Encyclopedia- if your family had one- but it didn't always have information on the subject you wanted.

Looking things up in the library involved going to the card catalog, and sifting through books. There was only rarely, or at a University, a grey little box called a computer that you could look up references using a set of coded entries. Usually they had little monochrome screens in green and black. Half the time you entered the wrong codes, so it refused to give you a return, or worse, it froze. That's when you'd get the lecture from library staff about not putting in the wrong search parameter codes...

Oh and if the bank wasn't open, you couldn't get any cash. The ATM was an infrequent sight, and usually was specific to the bank you did business with. It was rare that you had a bank card. You had to bring your little bank book with you to access your funds.

You had the telephone for talking to people, no chat or video chat. Long distance was much more expensive, local service was a lot cheaper, and you didn't have a hundred phone companies, just a handful.

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.

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

God that was annoying.

All phones had a cord.
You had to walk (uphill, both ways) to the TV to change channels.
You had to rotate the TV antenna towards the TV station.
Race riots at school.
Setting points and valves on the car Saturday morning.
VD would have meant getting a shot to cure it.


Gas was $.79 a gallon.
All boobies were real.
Police were not the mafia.
Almost all cars had at least 300 horsepower.

My pre-internet life, 1984:



/Yes, that's me on the bike.

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.

When I was a kid I had a favorite stick.

I was certainly outside a lot more... biking everywhere until the snow got to deep. In winter I would put on my skies and go 5km into the forest (lived right on the edge) because there was a tiny cafe in there that made awsome chocolate cake and hot cocoa - and it was always packed too, with people of all ages, just out skiing for the fun of it. Uphill most of the way off course, but all that meant was that we got home much, much faster - unless you fell over in one of the sharp turns off course. In summer we would bike up to the local swimhole - the one were the water was always pisswarm, bue to all the kids who just had to wee - or run around in the forest while beating each other with sticks.

It was amamzing how much time I spent with my nose in a book - I got my first library card when I was six, and I was eight when I was allowed to borrow from the grown up shelfs by myself. After all, thats where the good stuff like encyclopedias and books about the war was kept. Walked down to the librady at least once a week for as long as I went to school - just 10km each way or so. Still misses the joy of walking along the shelfs in the library looking for new arrivals.

Television was magic, and at the same time awesome and booring. Off course, we only had one channel in Norway when I first started watching, and the children shows were a half hour a day, followed by a half hour for teens. The rest of the evening was news and adult edutainent - more documentaries than drama. And off course there was no transmissions between midnight and six in the evening, apart from the 'school TV' - educational shows broadcasted so school kids all over the country could peer at the small screen the teacher would wheel in on a rickety table and place by the blackboard. And we were mesmorised by it - espesially when it was nature documentaries from BBC.

The radio was a bit better - at least there was two channels and a whole hour of broadcasts for the kiddies, even if the first half hour was for preschoolers. Local radio stations didn't start cropping up until I was in the equvalent of junior high, and mostly they sucked badly.

We got cable when I was in fifth grade - even if we didn't actually watch any more TV. I do recall being home sick one day and deciding to watch CNN just for the novelty... so there I was, running a fever, wrapped up in a blacket on the coach, seeing Challenger blow up on live coverage. And even being just a kid (well, almost 13) I recall thinking how amazing it was that news could be in my livingroom, halfway around the world, just seconds after it had happened. Made a huge impression on me, let me tell you - most news were printed and a day late at best.

Comics were bought in a shop, and at best there was a new issue every other week. I read most of them in the library, because who could afford that on our allowance?

Pornography was a whole other issue... the kids today have it too easy. We would get our dirty paws on magasines from god knows where, and since we would be dead if we were caught with it, we would religously wrap them in plastic and hide in a 'safe' spot - which usually meant one of out 'forts' or 'huts' in the forest. We could spend hours pouring over them, and we certainyl wasn't just reading the articles, let me tell you. One of my friends had managed to teach himself to pick the lock of his dads cupboard, unveiling a Super8 projector and reels of danish movies. We watched those until we knew the contents by heart... always worried that his parents would come home early.

Games were played with friends in real life, not online. Some of the best ones you had to put aside a whole weekend for - you can't play Axis and Allies for just a couple of hours; a full game could easily take six or seven evening to finish - the last half hour each time spent carefully making a note of where every counter was on the board. Computer games were smple and fun - I have still to find a game for my PC or consoles that engage me as much as Defender of the Crown did on my C64. Piracy was just as rampamt off course, off the couple of hundred games I had, I only bought two (Super Huey and Lord of the Rings). We would carry our computers to a friends house just to play and copy - shooting the shiat while swapping disks in and out of the horrible slow drives, or while waiting for the tapes to sloooooowly transfer to the disk.

I am off course viewing all of this through rose tinted glasses - nostalgia is a powerful thing - but I think that in many ways growing up before the Internet gave us a much fuller, busier childhood... we had to make our own entertainment, and by god we liked it that way!

I remember some other children I referred to as friends (but these were people I actually met in person and had physical contact with) would gather in a large green area called a lawn or a yard and conduct an activity we called "playing".

I also remember this giant ball of burning gas in the sky...the sun, I think we used to call it. It was warm and would make your skin a darker shade.

It was all really weird and probably sounds like a strange work of some science fiction author, but I swear it's true.

Lots of running around outside, getting tanned, playing with friends, staying rail thin due to all of the exercise. The portable radio appeared due to transistors. Played with various toys which required imagination. Watched TV on a B&W set -- usually one set per home. Most of us had only one, heavy, black, rotary dial phone in the house. Not everyone had a phone. Ate real, home cooked meals made from scratch. Ran around neighborhood with no fear of any form of attack. Carried a pocket knife from age 7. Had a basic, single speed bike with fat tires. Stores used huge, push button cash registers that were mechanical adding machines with no LEDs. Metal flags popped up in a glass display showing the prices and totals. (They sounded impressive each time the add key was hit.) Played war games and cowboys and Indians. African Americans were called 'colored folk.' Visited the library a whole lot. Read masses of comic books and regular books. (All of the classics -- Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Oliver Twist, Little Women, The Count of Monte Cristo and so on.) Went to the movies.

Got a calculator in the home. Weighed in at 5 pounds, so it was portable, and it did basic math printed out on a paper tape. Stereo system consisted of a small, monotone record player. We bought single song disks (records) for $0.98 each -- with a free, less popular song on the back or albums for $5.98. Most schools were segregated -- mine was not. Went to the beach, on picnics, traveled around the state on vacations in a car with no a/c. Dad might change a tire with a crowbar, sledge hammer and a lot of work to get it off and on the rim. Tires needed tubes. Mom saved bacon fat, which was chilled and spread on rye bread with mustard for a tasty snack. You didn't trim the fat off meats but crisped it for additional flavor. Gravy was made from the pan drippings -- including the grease. Lard was a common cooking ingredient. There was no skimmed milk. We had three TV channels -- all free. Kool-aid popped up. Moms and kids loved it as a cheap, flavored drink. Almost everyone above 17 smoked. Cigarettes were $0.25 a pack and $5.00 a carton. Cigarette machines were almost everywhere.

You could smoke in hospitals and Dr's offices, libraries and grocery stores.

We walked around town during shopping. We played in parks. We went to fairs and circuses. We went fishing and camping. We were required to have physical education in school. We mowed the lawn with gas powered push mowers. We raked yards. We had BBQ's and parties and potluck dinners. Adults came to play cards or sit and talk over coffee or a few beers. Any powered toys were mainly wind-up. Most were made of metal. We washed dishes by hand. There was no Teflon. Cooking utensils were made of steel or copper. Glasses were real glass. Tupperware was a moderately priced, colorful invention. (The products turned out to last for decades. I still have a few Tupperware items bought in the 50s and 60s.)

We mopped the floors by hand with a string mop, vacuumed with a heavy, big vacuum cleaner and washed the cars by hand and waxed them with paste wax. Eating out was a treat. We had three hamburger joints in town: Royal Castle, A&W and Quik Snak. (The latter was the first to install an air conditioned dining room. Usually, you ate in your cars.) Movies were taken with heavy hand held cameras and played back on strips of cellulose film through a noisy projector. No sound and it required a portable screen. Tape recorders went from suitcase sized to book sized and used reel to reel tapes. TV dinners arrived in aluminum trays. No malls. No major bulk stores. Sears was king along with JC Penny and Woolworth's. We shopped at locally owned hardware and building supply stores. Most homes did not have a/c. We used window and box or rotating fans. No ceiling fans. Cars had no seat belts, no air bags, no padded dash, no power anything. However, you could pretty well fix engine problems yourself. You changed your own oil. There were no cell phones. No portable phones. Bell Telephone was king. There were no redialers or automatic dialers. You had to look up information in libraries and books. Long distance communication was by mail -- which cost $0.05 a letter. Soda came in glass bottles -- which you returned for a nickel refund.

It was a great time.

Keeping in mind that, yes, I am old, but also I grew up in rural Wisconsin, which I think was about the last place in the US to get modernized.

We had a phone system which was still in use until I was about 10 years old. It was a wooden box mounted on the wall, that we had to crank for the operator. Everyone was on a party line of at least 4 people, and our phone ring was unique, as it was for every home. Four longs and a short, if my memory serves me. We finally got the modern phones with dialing numbers directly, but the phone was still usually a party line, and we rarely used the phone.

I got my first camera about the same time, a Brownie. Used very sparingly because film and developing were expensive. Was also about that time that my grandparents got indoor plumbing. My mother and her siblings were all born at home.

We did have TV even when I was very young, but of course it was B&W. We lived on a ridge in west-central Wisc, so we did get the big 3 networks (that's all there was). The TV stations were from LaCrosse, Eau Claire and Rochester Minn, and were only on limited hours of the day (test patterns FTW LOL). We finally got a color TV when I was in high school, and that was when I discovered that "The Wizard of OZ" was both B&W and color.

The village I grew up in was am tiny farming community. Everyone knew everyone else, and anything I did was known by my parents before I even got home. It didn't help matters that half the village were my relatives. But we were also very safe, and played outside from dawn to dusk when not in school, summer and winter. We went trick-or-treating without adults supervising us, and every house had candy to give out. It was such an innocent time for me.

Penny candy was my favorite treat. I worked mowing lawns and baby-sitting (50 cents/hour in high school).

We moved to a city of 60,000 when I was in Jr high school, and it was quite a culture shock! I was used to having my classes with 2 grades in each. When I moved to the city, each grade had their own classes, and more than one class for each grade. I got my first transistor radio, with it's own earphone, when I was about 13.

And as others mentioned, I used a slide rule for math calculations, or simply did it in my head or on paper. Tests were mimeo'd and always knew when it was a test day by the smell when walking into the classroom.

I went into the Army for 3 years after high school, and when I got out and started college, it was strange to see that some students had calculators, but couldn't do the math as fast as I could without one.

I got my first "computer" in 1985. It was an Apple IIc, with a second floppy drive and a dot-matrix printer, all costing about $1200 at that time. First PC was gotten about 1990 (a 386 with a 256 MB HD, 1 MB RAM--cost me $100/MB to add 3 more MB RAM), and it had dialup(measured in bauds, I think). I had moved back to the sticks, so my "internet" time was severely limited by the long distance phone charges.

I got my first "cell phone" in the mid 1990's. It was a box with a handset (wired, of course) and a big antenna that was attached to the roof of my truck by magnets. Only got it because I traveled alone every day for lots of miles in the middle of nowhere.

I now, of course, have most of the new gadgets, and feel like I have lived in two completely different eras. But I wouldn't have had it any other way.

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

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

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.

Before the internet...

...Searching for porn consisted of CSI -esque (YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! *sunglasses*) detective work to find your brother's/father's porn stash. I made Jack Bauer look like Corky from "Life Goes On" when I found that stash of Easyrider (hey, they may have been biker chicks, but something was better than nothing).

...Googling a girl resulted in either a beating from her boyfriend or jail time, sometimes both.

...America's Funniest Home Videos was the only way to watch people make complete asses of themselves in a video format.

...I had to actually talk to girls to get their number, now facebook does it for me (speaking of which, girls, don't put your mobile number on facebook... really. Don't do it).

...Getting pirated media often involved visiting that shady shop in chinatown that also sold helper monkeys. You had a chance of getting bitten and contracting AIDS or worse, but damned if Goonies wasn't worth the risk!

But most importantly, before the internet... I was an upstanding citizen, now I'm a depraved, lecherous creep that gets his kicks by making fun of others vicariously through digital means.

Hmm.

Well... we didn't always have a TV when I was a kid in the '70s. At least, I don't remember us always having one. If we did, it didn't always work. If it did, it was black and white. Years later, someone pointed out a van that was painted like the Mystery Machine from Scooby Doo, and I didn't know what van they were talking about, because to me it was always grey. My parents got a color TV around the time I left for college. And a VCR. They still don't have, or want, cable.

We did, though, have books. Thousands of 'em, right there in the house. And a big yard and forests and creeks and marshes and all that stuff (nowadays we call this "the big room with the blue ceiling and the bright lights"). Spent a lot of time hiking, biking, birdwatching, etc.

First computer was a Tano Outpost II... serial number 000006. Followed by a Commodore 64, followed by a Commodore 128. 300bps. 1200bps. QuantumLink. BBSes. 2400bps.

(This is my twentieth year of Internet access)

In middle school, we used to carry around long lists (printed on our dot-matrix printers, natch) of the pirated games we had on 5 and 1/4 inch floppies for our Apple ]['s. We would trade these games by swapping floppies and then copying them at home using the COPYA program.

One time a kid got mad at me for trading Karateka to another kid; he thought he should be the only person "allowed" to trade it because he had it first or something. Good times.

/vote for this entry
//all proceeds will be used to maintain my lawn.

I played with lawn darts.
I played pool, but not on games.yahoo.com
I learned what it was like to biff on a banana board that had ceramic wheels.
Saved by the bell was new.
Movie theaters had a dark corner where you could, like, you know. EVERYTHING.
I could ride a bicycle backwards.
I used-to-could do 4,000 situps in one session. No joke.
Cable television consisted of flipping between A and B.
Pr0n consisted of flipping between channels 80 and 81 and hoping to catch a 1/2 second glimpse of b00b3rs. Spice channel, ftw.
Discovering my parents' stash.
Trying to smoke my parents stash and realizing why they coughed so much for a month after we got an illegal cable hookup, complete with the orange tag.
Building a tree fort.
Extreme downhill bigwheel slolams.
Swimming.
Jumping off of a roof. (aw, fark! ow!)
Nailing my shoes to a nerf skateboard and letting my dog out whilst holding the leash. (another big ow)
Playing with fire.
Joining the boy scouts for learning how to cut shiat up and/or burn it in an eco-friendly way.
I knew exactly what you couldn't do on television without being slimed or watered.
The motherfarking MONKEES.
Pleading with the workers of your nearest military base for a strap of rubber, slapping a patch of leather on it and calling it a slingshot before running the fark away from the car that screeched to a halt.
/seriously. It was fun.

We didn't have no internet
But man I never will forget
The way the moonlight shined upon her hair.

born 76
Got on internet in 96

--movie trailers were extra special to watch, because you could only view the ones that were before the movie you paid for
--to find a job you had to actually leave your house
--got my news from tv and radio
--relied on friends and advertising to decide to purchase a game
--relied on events and get-togethers to meet new people, if you stayed home, no one would know you existed
--music was bought at a store. To get the song you wanted you had to buy the whole crappy CD.
--to find a certain song, you had to pray that they announced who it was, or call them (never did that though)
--the library was the only place to do research because of their indexing
--movies were even a bigger hit or miss, you relied more on the written or televised critics, there was no other timely reviews
--You had to pay to see nakedness, or go to the libary and find a photography book or some old paintings
--Home movies were only for that family. You would really risk boring everyone by sitting everyone down to watch your own home-made video
--Multiplayer was generally taking turns on one controller, or two controllers - two at the same time in the same house was freaking awesome
--Catalogs were thick and you relied on the picture to order through phone or mail in your order. Not many people had a fax machine
--Beepers would go off if someone needed you, and then you'd have to find a phone to call in to see what was going on

Life was very different then. The electronic gadgets all had vacuum tubes. Carrying a radio meant you were lugging a five pound piece of shiat that was unreliable at best.

The price of gasoline was low. But that was relative. So were wages. There weren't any lasers, or portable telephones, or anything digital. No one had computers except large corporations and the government.

A phone call was a nickel, and a cup of coffee was a dime. No one had laser range finders or night vision goggles. When you serviced a target, you gauged crosswind from the movement of dust, bushes, grass, etc. No one had the data to consider temperatures and humidity and all that gee-whiz stuff in figuring trajectories.

In the field, you ate crap out of a can and were thankful to have it. There weren't any delicate snowflakes to whine about smoke when you lit up your Lucky or a Raleigh. People smoked anytime, anyplace. Well, except for inside theaters. There was a separate balcony area for smokers. You could sit in a theater all day long on the same dime. See two feature films, maybe a cartoon and a few newsreels, too. Watch as long as you wanted.

Women wore nylons and garters! None of this panty hose shiat. Some wore girdles, but they weren't so bad. Especially seeing some of the wide-trays waddling around now. Women didn't seem to run to jiggly fat so much as they do now. I guess the fear of actually needing a girdle helped keep that away.

The movies were generally better. The actors could actually act and not rely on special effects and CGI shiat to make the movie a good one. Hollywood had ideas, not endless remakes of remakes.fark. I'd give up computers to be back there now.

Life before the internet:

make me some tea: Although this was cool, and still is.



jeez. make that as votable as banging violet.

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.

Dirty, brutish, and short.

And that was just the women ;)

I played Nintendo. Next came the Genesis. Then I got Super Nintendo. Then I got the internet.

Lots of Columbia House subscriptions.

Scrambled porn.

Stamps. Lots and lots of stamps.

I used to spend my time masturbating a lot. So the arrival of the internet changed nothing for me.

You used to be able to go home on the weekends, or even go on vacation, without having your job chasing after you and refusing to leave you alone. Now between the laptop with the VPN, the cell phone, the e-mail, and the Blackberry, there is the reality that the ability to be available 24/7 has become the expectation of being available 24/7.

But, there was also no such thing as telecommuting. Going to work every day meant actually getting out of bed and going to work every day.

Anybody besides me remember "pip" as in:

pip b:file.txt a:file.txt

Wow, interesting question. And good one too.

In a sense I did have access to an Intranet when my grandparents went to the bay area ( 'frisco ). I was too fussy and bored walking around looking at antiques and other garbage so they would drop me off at the Lawrence Hall of Science. This place was great. It had a museum -- but the big deal was the computer room in the basement.

You'd actually go deep into the depths of this place, cold white hallways with ominous radiation signs on some doors ( which were locked, I tried opening of course ) and there would be a room full of teletypes. Upstairs you had paid your $1 an hour fee and hand over the receipt to an intern in the computer room and play games. This was in the early 1970s. Imagine playing Star Trek games on a teletype, especially the grid one. You'd type, "warp to 7,1", wait two minutes, and then the result would come back. These things were hooked up to tape drive "super computers" and the delay was insane. They had other games, like Rogue ( impossible on a teletype ). But not a seat was ever empy and at times there was a waiting list. At the time this was the most awesome thing ever.

A few years later they got a -- gasp -- green screen monitor. Just one. It went for $5 an hour. Imagine that! It wasn't much faster but it looked cool and didn't go clackity-clackity-clack. However you didn't get the coolnes of taking your gaming experience home on a roll of brownish teletype paper. I saved those things in a box, like some prized treasure.

By the time i hit high scool life had gone to crap and wasn't able to go there anymore. But fond memories. That's what it was like for me before the Internet. It sucked in retrospect, but at the time, gawd smiled upon this poor soul.

/ clackity clack clack

I had to go over to the girl's house and look through her bedroom window to see her boobies. Sometimes she changed her clothes in the other room and all I got was a glimpse of flannel. Talk about a let down.

Laying in the hallway at school and hoping some good looking girl in a short skirt would walk over me was a waste of time. Painful too. Ever been hit by a floor buffer?

Then there's the time when you are talking to this girl face to face. Maybe it's about school work, maybe it's just talk. But you really hit it off and you're connecting. Know what a big moment killer is? Asking to see her boobs. "Wow Michelle. You are so smart. I could never remember that formula for the volume of a cone. Speaking of cones, can I see yours?" Every time, they get up a walked away.

Then there was that library thing you had to go to, newspapers to read and waiting for entertainment on the TV. That stuff kind of sucked too.

Oh yeah. You also had to spell things out correctly or people thought you were brain damaged.

I got on the Internet in 92. Paid for my first browser (Netscape).

Playing guns with the other kids in the area. We used sticks...



/pew pew pew, I got you! You have to count to 20!


The C64 and I were perfect for each other. I learned that Germans made some perverted games. (sex games)



/Ahhh, another visitor. Stay awhile...Stay forever!!

Playing D&D helped keep me single through high school



/Let's play The Keep on the Borderlands again and again and...

- making wish lists from Sears catalog wish books
- walking or riding bikes everywhere, disappearing for hours every day during the summer without my parents knowing where I was (as a teenager)
- meeting people took effort, you hung around in groups
- eagerly awaited new episodes of the A-Team, Moonlighting, The Highwayman, Knight Rider, The Dukes Of Hazzard, and hoped you had a blank VHS tape to record it on, otherwise you might not ever see it again
- computers booted in 1 second (but no internet for me)
- my parents used me as a remote, to go turn the knobs on the TV
- urban legends seemed more real and menacing, because it was much harder to look it up to see if it was true, now everyone goes to WikiPedia or Snopes and in 5 seconds knows the truth.

SwingingJohnson: In the 80's, the bigger the better.

Very well, where do I begin? My father was a relentlessly self-improving boulangerie owner from Belgium with low grade narcolepsy and a penchant for buggery. My mother was a fifteen year old French prostitute named Chloe with webbed feet. My father would womanize, he would drink, he would make outrageous claims like he invented the question mark. Some times he would accuse chestnuts of being lazy, the sort of general malaise that only the genius possess and the insane lament. My childhood was typical, summers in Rangoon, luge lessons. In the spring we'd make meat helmets. When I was insolent I was placed in a burlap bag and beaten with reeds, pretty standard really. At the age of 12 I received my first scribe. At the age of fourteen, a Zoroastrian named Vilma ritualistically shaved my testicles. There really is nothing like a shorn scrotum, it's breathtaking, I suggest you try it.

I am a draftsman. When I did jobs for people out of state I had to make copies of them on an ammonia based copy machine (blueprints) then drive 20 miles downtown to the nearest Greyhound bus station to load them on a bus to the fabricator. Sometimes this was done at 1:00 am. That is why I rarely did any work for people who were located out of state. Now my customer base can literally be world wide.
I did my work with a pencil on paper at a drafting board. You used templates to make circles and a ruler to measure lines. An adjustable triangle or a drafting machine was used to make angles.


I bought an expensive set of encyclopedias when our kids were born because they would need them to do homework (I still have my leather set). Almost everyone had a home library.

If your car broke down on the freeway, you had to wait until someone gave you a ride or walk to the nearest gas station.

I still remember driving down the road listening to "Born to be Wild" on my eight track.

The weather was a surprise and news was always hours old before you first heard it. The daily paper was full of stories about what actually happened in your town instead of what was happening everywhere but your town.

My children will never have the joy of playing with the tangled, 30-foot-long telephone cord in the kitchen.

OH OH IT'S MAGIC, YOU KNOOOOOOOOOW.

I spent many an hour as a kid either playing outside or building dollhouses in my grandfather's woodshop when it rained. I'd have my parents drive me to the hobby shop to buy the wood or - if I got a hold of a catalog at said hobby shop - I'd order a part I needed. If the shop or the catalog didn't have what I needed, too damn bad - I did without, or figured out how to Rube Goldberg it. There was no surfing the net to find some shop in another state/country which had the parts I needed...and you had to find an actual Encyclopedia to look up who "Rube Goldberg" was if you didn't know.

"Price comparison shopping" and "browsing" consisted of actually going to various malls to see the stuff you wanted to buy in person or flipping through mail order catalogs. There were catalogs of other catalogs you could order, but you had to pick'n'choose the ones you might actually buy something from since they charged you for the postage.

There was one rotary phone (landline, of course) for the entire house. If my sister was yammering away at her friends, the rest of the family couldn't make/receive any calls, which led to many an angry confrontation (esp. if another family member was expecting a call.) Oh, and you had to make plans in person if you were going to call a friend or two because they had to make sure their sisters wouldn't be hogging the phone later that night either.

A great party consisted of meeting up at the roller rink for some actual rollerskating, playing Space Invaders until you ran out of quarters, then going over to your friends' houses to watch M(usic)TV because your neighborhood was in the styx & too bassackwards to have cable yet. Kids whose parents had unscrambled cable were the coolest kids in school, and you could usually sneak a drink from the liquor cabinet or steal a cigarette too.

Speaking of Styx, your music collection consisted of bookcases filled with record albums - records which you were careful to keep in their protective plastic sleeves so that they wouldn't get scratched - or old wooden fruit baskets filled with 45s & the adapter to play them. The record store was a popular hangout and you knew the owner personally, hoping he would give you a discount on the new diamond needle stylus you needed. You often physically fought with your siblings if they hogged the one record player you had in the house; scratching a record was grounds for a beatdown.

If you were really cool, you had a boombox (with one cassette player) to record songs off the radio - hoping to God the idiot DJ didn't talk over the songs or the reception from the antenna didn't cut out. You got pissed off if you didn't know the name of the song & the DJ forgot to mention it after it played; the only other way to find out the name of the song was to sing it to your friends & hope they knew what you were whargarbling. If you only had a tape recorder and a great song came on the radio, you held the recorder up next to it & made do.

Mostly though, life before the internet meant you 1) had to plan ahead for the things you wanted and 2) had to choose your words a little more carefully when you spoke/wrote to someone, because you weren't sure when you'd get another chance to see them. People also had a lot more privacy - something I sorely miss.

/apologies for the Tolstoy
//born in '71
///prone to rambling in my old age

You had to be snarky face to face with people, it was a much more dangerous time...

Last week I told my friends 20 year old that she sounded like a broken record. I got one of the blankest stares I've ever gotten.

///best thread in a loooong time!!

pre-internet?

i can still remember (barely) having a checking account in the "pre-ATM" days.

pre-internet: let's see, you want some pr0n pics. easy, just log on to any of the dozen or so local BBSes. turn on the XP clone, fire up Telix. Now, make sure the phone line is free and queue up a few of your boards on the dialer menu. After a few re-dials, you'll be logged on to a BBS. Assuming you've already convinced the high school kid running the board that you are, indeed an adult, there should be some sort of CD system download screen where you can look through hundreds of directories of filenames.

Select the 10 or 12 pictures you want to download, then let ZMODEM do its work.

Make sure you have some files to upload, or you're ratio will go down and you'll be locked out of that BBS.

Shell to DOS, unzip the D/L and then load up CShow or VPic to look at your fresh new nudie GIFs. Some will be in high resolution 400x300 256 color beauty. (Dithering makes me so HOT!)

yup .. it sucked.

i would lie in a field with my pants around my ankles waiting for the clouds to form the shape of a breast

We tended to not compare people to Nazis as much as we do now.

There was less hype about movies. People didn't get excited about the advert for the TV spot being premiered on TV (thank you Wolverine).

If you were a complete nutter and psycho people would tend to ignore you (or at least have the option to).


/and your butt was kinda of like an about to explode bratwurst

...and you had to rent them from Bell Telephone.

...and to call someone in town I only had to dial (see why they call it "dial"?) five numbers.