Do you remember life before the internet?
Yes! I remember life before the internet 🛜 quite well. I’ve lived half of it prior to that time and in some ways it was a lot less stressful. Now, our entire lives are on a cell phone 📱 and we’ve become dependent on them to a degree almost unthinkable twenty years ago. It’s astounding how much time we spend checking, deleting, and sending emails before even considering all the other things we have to use them for (social media being a huge, often disturbing waste of time). Watching movies and videos on my phone is one of the things I do love about having the internet. However, I can remember quite clearly when the internet and everything pertaining to it was completely unknown — and somehow we all survived!
Before the internet and cell phones, the phone was only something that you talked on and was a rotary-dial, or push button device with a cord and receiver that either hung on the wall or sat on a desk or end table with wires connecting it from the home to underground cables. You couldn’t listen to music on it (unless you were on hold for something) there were no apps on it, you couldn’t activate anything else in your home or car from it. There was nothing like Amazon or Etsy to order merchandise from. In fact…there was no online anything!!
If you wanted to buy things, you usually had to get in the car and drive somewhere to accomplish that, or you ordered things from big paperback books called catalogs provided by nationwide chain stores like KMart, JC Penney, or Sears & Roebuck. These retailers are rapidly passing out of existence. This is happening in part because online purchasing 🛍️ is wiping out traditional shopping. By the way, when you needed other services whether it was calling a plumber or seeking an attorney, you had to haul out another huge paperback book called the “Yellow Pages” and look it up!
Getting back to phones for a moment, I clearly remember actually having to talk in them! There was no keyboard, so therefore no texting 💬! We did have typewriters though. This machine required inserting sheets of paper 📄 into it, and had to be used when writing high school 🏫 and college papers, they were used by secretaries in businesses and government offices on a constant basis. Paper was the primary form of record keeping before digital media and these documents were stored inside innumerable metal filing cabinets. I still have one of these in my home office like many other people, and It’s unlikely they will disappear completely.
Another thing, until Google maps arrived on the scene, we had to use cumbersome paper road maps to figure out how to travel to places we were unfamiliar with like cross-country trips. Most of the time travel agents helped people plan their vacations before online sites were available. There were no online sites like Expedia, or TripAdvisor to book rooms. I could go on endlessly about how different life was before the internet 🛜 was available to the general public around the world. Some changes have been for the better and some have been bad for us.
For me, one of the best aspects of the internet is using my phone to take pictures. Before this was available we had to have cameras 📸 loaded with film for this, which had to be developed. Then we had to go back and pick them from the Kodak shack after several days or week, whenever they never ready. I never cared for all that fussing around, and like being able to store them on my phone and on the “cloud” now. These days, cameras are mainly the preserve of professional photographers or hobbyists. In any case, even though the internet has changed our lives a great deal (so many of us were alive well before it came about) we managed to get along just fine without it. Most people under 30 find this hard to grasp. It comes down to this: before it was invented, we obviously didn’t have to be concerned about what we didn’t have!
