As a relatively elder millennial (1987), I’d concede the title of last true pre-internet generation to Gen X. My family got AOL dial-up when I was in 6th grade, which was a little behind the curve compared to my peers, but not much. So I certainly lived through a seminal transition period as the internet developed and became…what it is today.
But the hallmark experiences of the pre-internet times, payphones, paper maps, coordinating with others, I only did so in my limited capacity as a child. I had a cell phone by…10th grade, I could at least print out MapQuest directions, etc.
I remember a lot, but didn’t truly interact with most of it.
I often look at it as when kids were unlikely to encounter any analogue things regularly. Did you have analogue clocks and phones for any period? The only problem with my definition is schools kept analogue clocks around for long after you would not see them anywhere else.
I can see what you mean for phones, but are analogue clocks supposed to be a thing of the past now? I have like 3 in my home and know many other people, including young people, who still have them.
I have only seen them with a bit of a retro thing with watches or digital emulations of them for easily over a decade and the only reason I saw any in early 2000 is because I worked at a school.
Really? Where are you located? I walk past three clocks on the way from my office to the metro station alone.
chicago. I mean there are some old buildings where they exist but not on my commute. I would be bowled over if any el stations had them.
I wonder if it’s an America vs Europe thing? I’m in the UK and analogue clocks are still very common here as well. So maybe it’s just America that don’t use them much anymore.
I’m surprised at that, from my experience I think it’s still more normal than not to have analogue clocks at home, and I would always prefer an analogue watch.
Yeah gen-x here, at the beginning there were nothing.
Then I got this “home computer” with the blazing speed at 1MHz (yeah, 0.001GHz and quite unoptimized) bringing me wonders above comprehension.
And then it got faster, better, bigger, smaller, over and over and over … It felt crazy whaen anything doubled like speed, memory, discs, screen resolution, internet speed, …
I feel todays computers are more than enough (except for research basically) and that was a crazy arc, from nothing to basic completeness.
Well that’s how I feel it anyways 💖
First computer was a Commodore Vic-20. Second was a Tandy 1000TX. I remember dialling into BBSes pre-internet, but not on the Vic-20 of course.
I can still remember the feeling of seeing my first computer in person. Even in the late seventies it was rare to see even things like Atari 2600’s. By the early eighties most of my friends had an Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 400/800, Coleco Adam, Commodore Vic-20/64, Apple II, Tandy Coco, etc. By the late eighties most of the people I knew had PCs of some sort (Tandy 1000TX in my case), Atari ST, or Amiga. Modems were still rare. It was the nineties when modems and BBSes seemed to really explode, quickly displaced by the Internet. Granted I remember connecting to Gopher before I personally connected to BBSes.
I look back on how things changed from 1980 to 1989, and it seems so much more sweeping than 2010 to 2019.
Depends on your country and family circumstances. I’m one year older than you & I only started interacting with the Internet at school at the age of 11 & only had it at home at 19.
As for those hallmark experiences I had them all & a lot. I got my cellphone in the 11th grade, but it had no internet on it. I was 22 years old when I got a Nokia N95 that had wifi & with that I could look up information after hunting for an open public wifi.( those were the days xD)
Haha yeah, when I say I had a cell phone, I mean that I was essentially reachable at all times. I didn’t start using text messaging regularly until like…2009, and didn’t use it for anything else until I got my first Droid a few years later.
Fair point though, my response was very American-centric.
I had the exact same pattern as you except I was born in a small town in 1996, I guess I had a gophone in 2nd grade just because my family situation though
I lived before the internet. AMA
Way back then, how did you spend your time while having a satisfying bowel movement?
Reading shampoo bottles
My favorite was Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap. Absolute crazy talk on that bottle!
David Bronner, one of the grandsons of Dr. Bronner, is a fantastically interesting person with a lot of really charming eccentricities I think you were trying to capture when you said ‘crazy talk’. I’ve met him a few times at medical psychedelics conferences, he was introduced to psychedelics at burning man and has bought fully into how it’s expanded their mind and has helped them heal.
Interesting! What, precisely, have psychedelics healed him from?
Thanks for the links!
Oh shit! We call that the “God soap”! Recommended toilet reading for sure.
My dad had a book called Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader (no clue which one) in the bathroom for the longest time.
Yeah there were comics or some 180 pages catalogue, or even a “porny mag” (no sex, some titties or the one big flash) in the bunch of stuff.
People were all alone at almost all times so people did a bit of anything whenever they felt like it.
It was a crazy time compared to now in that manner, like you’d walk home and no one would worry if you weren’t like one or two hours late. Meeting up? Other is 1h late? Yeah there were probably some problem (it happened to all of us), or they decided to not come…
So I had my café where I went, you met those who made it :-)
Ha ha went off the rails there, cheers & good night from the EU!
I definitely miss parts of that.
The connectivity of the modern world has a lot of benefits, but it’s also a pain in the dick.
Yeah sure is, but hopefully it’s the new wave of stuff and we’ll sort it out (it sure feels like this new shiny drug IMO), like with work from home and less bureaucracy I guess. Hope for. 😊
You’d read the labels of whatever the hell was within reach. Shampoo bottle, toilet cleaner bottle, soap, whatever.
Shitting is better than working. Next question.
Trying to remember that last TGA downloaded from a BBS the night before…
…and 30-odd years later, by writing this on Liftoff for Lemmy on Android.
Oh yeah! I remember using BBS prior to WWW.
Reader’s Digest.
What my parents used, yes!
People listened to records, cassette tapes and CDs
Recording formats often get mentioned, but they are not the important music thing of which kids today are often unaware. The important thing is that we used to have record collections (which were mostly composed of CDs by the time I was old enough to have a modest one.)
I now have a more extensive one and enjoy it greatly, only now it’s in mp3 form.
Oh to prepare a mixtape on a dual cassette player… Now that I migrated as well to a digital mp3 library it would be dead easy to make playlists, but somehow the convenience kills the fun out of it.
Timing to hit the pause button (to unpause) in order to start a recording JUST as the DJ stops talking and the song kicks in…
I wish. The DJ would always talk over the start of the songs, and then start jabbering again before it ended.
Now I’m wondering if part of why DJs talked over songs was specifically so we COULDN’T get clean recordings on cassette…
Get free DJ software and do crossfades. You couldn’t do that with dual cassette players.
I didn’t like the music on commercial radio so I would listen to community radio which would either forget to back announce or would play such long brackets that I would lose count so I would call the DJ to ask about that special song. Then to buy the song…
I had to catch a train from the suburbs into a city import record store. Often they would not have what I wanted so I would put down a deposit for a vinyl record which would be ordered from overseas then I would return a week or two later to pick it up.
It was expensive so whenever a friend had a birthday I would buy a record we mutually wanted but make a cassette copy for myself first.
For the first listen-through I would set aside an hour, undisturbed, liner notes in hand, getting up half way to turn the album over.
Am still into obscure music so…
Now I pirate-download music to play on a net radio station I run with overseas friends where we also play ambient electronic music we make over the Internet with laptops.
I would rather get together to jam with musicians in real life but now that technology lets musicians make music on their own they don’t bother collaborating, and besides, too few local people my age have time to get together in person to make music just for fun.
That’s why I advocate against Spotify. At least as a sole way to listen to music (it’s maybe good at finding new stuff).
CDs are still king with me. 1,957 and still counting. I feel cheated if I don’t get to enjoy that romance of flipping through the liner notes while listening to the CD that first time. I rip the songs I like after a few days of listening to it. I suspect the day will come when MP3’s will not be free.
DVD’s too. Almost 1,400 of them as well.
I did have to let the cassette tapes go. I kept some of the rarer ones, but they weren’t meant to last 40 years and would not likely survive another rewind.
I rip all my CDs to FLAC so I can listen to them easily while working or driving or walking or otherwise where having headphones and a phone is easy but carrying a book of burned backups and a CD Walkman would be hard.
But I also have a humble collection of vinyl because I actually really like the ritual of placing the stylus and listening and turning the record over when I want to just… hear the music and enjoy it for itself.
Best part of pre internet was a friend would call saying the got the latest obscure album and we would all rush to their place for a listening party. While something like spotify, etc makes access easier the music culture suffers
I might even suggest that having an mp3 or other file-based record collection is still in the same vein.
The big departure, imo, is people who don’t own their music collections. They rely only on Spotify or Apple or Amazon or whatever and just stream.
One day, when their contracts with the labels or whatever expire, or the service is discontinued, or you move to another country… your collection evaporates. It’s happened before.
Also worth noting that records are sort of at risk - waning are the days when you’d listen to a record front to back “as intended”, and singles are increasingly popular - no doubt due to YouTube.
Interestingly and perhaps relatedly, even the musical techniques are changing.
Either side isn’t good or bad, but the change is interesting to observe.
I’m really bad at remembering how to drive places, and always have been. Zero sense of direction. Pre-GPS life sucked ass for me in that respect.
But I do miss pre-internet socializing. Phone (voice) calls, cocktail parties, cookouts with the neighbors, and work mixers could all be very pleasant experiences.
Also miss not being tracked and recorded every minute of every day. It’s creepy AF how we leave digital trails everywhere we go now.
I’m almost 37. I remember as a kid being my parents’ "navigator’ on family road trips with the map. My parents still carry an atlas in their cars, but ofc, they’re using GPS on their phones/cars like anyone else.
As far as actual pre-Internet, I was on the Internet at a pretty young age (back then). I think was 8 or 9 when my dad signed us up for AOL. Roughly 1995/1996. And I was all over that (only briefly did he put a filter on my account). So I don’t have a whole lot of experience truly being pre-Internet. I was playing online PC games while my friends were playing on the N64 or whatever.
As a kid playing in the neighborhood, I either called my parents from my friends’ houses (which I rarely did to my mom’s anger) or periodically stopped back home. Or at the very least, be back before the streetlights came on.
I had a cell phone by 9th/10th grade, esp since I was involved in band and other activities. I think I used pay phone maybe once before that? And then never again.
I was driving before GPS was widely available on phones (which existed pre-smartphone), but you just printed out MapQuest directions before leaving. Which obviously relied on the Internet.
So yeah, I don’t have much experience pre-Internet, really.
I just want to return to a time before the technocracy, and the metricization of everything, before we started caring about clicks and views and the algorithm, for the sake of squeezing every last bit of monetization and efficiency out of everything and everyone.
Some days I just have to unplug and spend the entire time outdoors.
We just need a proper solar flare to help us get back on track
I miss the anticipation.
I’ve never felt older
One thing about the pre-Internet times I don’t hear much about is how much more centralised our media were and how, as a result, people or ideas on the fringe of society didn’t get much attention. That includes for instance how the strange ideas about vaccines or ethnic groups now spread much easier than they did before the Internet, but also how trans* people and other marginalised groups find it much easier to find and support each other and be a united front against oppression.
In summary, I don’t thing that what has been termed “the great awokening”, nor the organised opposition against it, could have taken place before the Internet. At least not at this scale.
True.
Ancient
I had an AM radio I listened to while delivering papersA Magnevox tv/radio/record player, with glowing tubes. You could stack up a few records
8 track tapes were an infinite loop abomination. 4 loops of 2 channels = 8 tracks. I had a friend with a quad 8 track, 2 loops of 4 channels. the tapes started to drag after some plays, requiring various gymnastics to keep them playing. Recording at home was rare. Cost more than vinyl, lower sound quality. Let the enshittification of music begin
Cassettes Had their own weirdness, pre recorded cassettes had crap tape, crap shells & higher costs. Pre recorded tapes shed the magnetic coating & dirtied up the player which would eat your tapes.
Quality blank tapes cost about 1/4 of what an LP cost.Moving into the cd age I stuck with cassettes, as that’s what worked in my car/trucks. cd’s got recorded. my favorite technique was 3 albums on a 90 minute tape, cutting out the annoying songs.
I got a computer in 2005 started making LP’s & cassettes into mp3’s. I pretty much try to keep the files under 5 minutes
I still have a bunch of files without proper song titles as I got bored after artist, album, year. Itunes was my go to importing cd’s. Later I found out any of the metadata I changed was in a changlog or some shyt, not the actual files, there was very little rejoicing…
Great insights, although the one person talking about accessing money forgets that we had ATMs even in the late-1900s, as they were invented prior to the moon landing. Even today you can still find them with a telephone modem in some places.
