been thinking about all the little moments tucked away in my memories that are a world unknowable to those younger than me, so consider this an opportunity to reminisce over old times, but also to ask those about the times you did not live through.
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?
Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?
Old person here.
before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Books! and People! And while they wouldn’t give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.
was a constraint lifted
Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you’d never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn’t available. The ingredients weren’t available, either, so you weren’t going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s – like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello ‘salads’.
Was life more simple
Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. “No one was ever fired for buying IBM.” – because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I’m pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can’t trust that online reviews aren’t paid advertising.
We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who’d had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than ‘healthy living’. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.
Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no “Sgt. Pepper’s” without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.
All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for ‘raising ducks’ generally doesn’t mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn’t bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.
To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.
How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life? What if you’re 95 and you run out of money? It’s not like you can go back to work or take out a loan etc.
I’m not sure I’m old enough to answer this, but retirement scares me, and I basically don’t know if retirement is financially likely or reasonable. Even if you invest enough into a 401k early enough, you have a pretty good chance of having serious health problems at some point in life that will probably take most of that money.
Basically the situation is bleak, so I try to focus on doing what I can to improve my situation without dooming about what I can’t control.
This were not as big of and issue. Pensions were better. You stll had brokers but investing was more costly and fewer people did it.More use of banks. PE ratios were far lower and dividend payouts higher. It was a lower risk less volatile time. You could still reseach investments either you could go to the libraray, your broker woyld send you photo copies, and stock prices were in the paper. You could phone and mail order mutual funds and information. There were investing magazines. Geopolotics was more stable too but no less scary. Jobs were more stable too and the wealth divide less.
Also do not forget Compuserve had forms and etrade access in early 90s well before the internet explosion.
Well, in, my case first there was communism, so the state provided us with a pension regardless of who worked how much and what was happening in general.
And then there was the collapse of the USSR and in general after a while everyone realized that they would just work until death. And so it happened.
How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life?
I live in a country with a pension sachem and it still scares the fuck out of me
Save more than you need.
Run fiscal history simulations (several programs do this for you). If I had invested this money in 1900, how would this have fared? If I had invested this money in 1901, how would this have fared. Etc.
Accept that you can’t plan for everything except your own resilience. You may have to adjust your spend if things are looking harder than you had planned for. You’ll be fine. At least that’s what I tell myself.
My fiscal plan has me running out in 0% of historical scenarios, which is belt and braces. Still need to save a lot before I can retire according to that fiscal plan.
In my state there’s a ton of state ran resources for seniors. It’d not perfect but its better than most. My taxes go into it and I’ve seen the end result. Very happy with paying them.
My parent’s generation all had pensions. You didn’t have to worry about it unless the accountants cooked the books and didn’t manage it honestly. I was too young to know all the details, but I gather that system got upended by two things: 1) several pension funds that went bust and 2) shift from people working at one place forever to job-swapping which made pensions basically impossible (before computers).
They converted to 401k scam
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Um, we used textbooks, or RTFM
I just went to libraries and asked my friends for information.
By the way, the internet didn’t suddenly become filled with all the knowledge in the world. The first internet pages were like personal blogs filled with not-so-useful information. In those days, the internet was similar to today’s darknet. Google was just starting out, and there was no search engine as such. As a result, people just shared websites with each other. The current internet is the result of millions of people’s efforts to fill it with information. So, having access to the internet didn’t change my life overnight.
But we used to buy collections of websites and data on CDs when CD-ROMs first became available, and that was pretty fun.
UPD: and at some point, people started exchanging data through modem calls, and that’s how fidonet was born. It was a whole cultural layer where you could get an address and slowly receive newsletters and exchange data through late-night calls to sisops. It was like a prehistoric torrent, but instead of pirating, you were exchanging data.
How did you learn to do something? Books, a teacher, and hands on trial and error. I think most people learned most things from somebody who taught them.
When something interested you, you’d go read about it. Learn more, see all the “documentation”. You’d also just do it and see what happens.
The easy access to knowledge today is great, and learning is easier. Its night and day to be able to look up information quickly.
The one benefit beforehand was that information was hard to produce. You couldn’t just record a video in 5 min and upload it to YouTube. You couldn’t just write a book in google docs then upload it to be sold as an eBook. Things took time and money. So if that much investment was needed, it weeded out a lot of bad information. Today, just because it’s online or in print doesn’t make it any more reliable.
Technology has definitely made life easier and more fun. But it’s also a tether people rely on. Maybe even a noose around their neck. I think the fact that people are glued to their phones all the time is very reminiscent of the humans in WallE. It’s sad.
I take the stance that I lived in a time where you couldn’t be reached 24/7 and weren’t expected to always be available. It was okay then so it should be okay now. My phone isn’t always on even though I carry it with me everywhere. If I’m hanging out with you I talk to you, and don’t need to be interrupted by messages or doom scrolling whatever app people like. My time is valuable, as is yours, and I give it the respect it deserves.
What did it feel like before security cameras and personal surveillance became affordable and ubiquitous? Nowadays, I have to internally accept that a majority of my life will be recorded, auto-labeled, and probably marked in a digital vault for sale or future use by some organization. There’s very few ways for my generation to reclaim our privacy - everyone born after the 2000s is basically hosed.
Was it better back then? Did people actually trust one another?
We didn’t think about the absence of things we’re didn’t have. It’s easy to look back and say “I could have gotten away with so much” but we didn’t think about it.
Your whole life being recorded was a thing for my generation (X)… if you were rich. Rich families had video cameras and they did record all kinds of things. Birthday parties, holidays, vacations, and so on. We saw cameras. We either tried to avoid them, or tried to flip them off — so the cameras avoided us. They didn’t wanna see the poors anyway. And for the most part, they were, and mostly did their filming, in places you couldn’t go if you/your parents worked for a living.
I still remember paranoia about phone lines being tapped, though - in the era of the Cold War there was a sense of government spying abilities and it’s not like camera surveillance wasn’t around, even if less common than it is now.
In my experience people didn’t trust each other more, but it did feel like you had more autonomy. Cell phones are what really changed everything, for better and worse. I think the dumb phone era was the best because you were no longer in a position to need to walk miles in the countryside due to a breakdown, but also they weren’t ubiquitous enough that everyone demanded constant contact (old rules of phone etiquette were still in force). Also no algorithms. Brain rot was confined to TV, magazines, and radio.
Before security cameras were everywhere, things felt ‘normal’. There have been security cameras in store for a looong time before everyone had them – so common even the culture touchstone movie Terminator (1984) showed their use and they were common well before that.
Unlike most folks, it took me over a decade to come to grips with the loss of anonymity. Once the internet existed, I never entered my actual name into anything online, wouldn’t join facebook, and wouldn’t let anyone take my picture lest they attach my name to it. Eventually, I realized that even if I didn’t put my name online, everyone with my phone number put me in THEIR address books and anonymity was simply a lost cause.
At the same time, I’ve noticed that news/tv no longer show faces in their generic street-scene footage about anything that might be damaging (like ‘How fat is our town?’) and instead just show people waist-down, blurred, or very distant. That also happens a lot for less embarrassing content, and there’s generally less footage of generic local people.
That said, I’m really glad everyone has a cell phone with camera to catch bad police behavior. Lots of people used to dismiss such reports as people with a grudge making stuff up, but now there’s too much evidence to hide it.
GenX here. Before computers… that’s a lie, my father always had computers, long before computers were cool. What we didn’t have was the Internet. Before the Internet, I read books. My father had a couple encyclopedia sets. One was more for kids and had colorful bindings. The other was the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So yeah, books were our Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is based on the encyclopedia concept. It’s right in the name!)
Somedays, I would spend 4-5 hours at the library, just to figure out one thing.
Is mid-forties old enough?
I had a computer, just no internet.how did you learn to do something?
You didn’t.
It was trial and error, ending up with a half-baked solution
and then thinking this was the best solution
or just giving up and no longer bothering.
I can see in older people’s other answers
some romanticized version of their past,
but this was the reality.Sure, there were books in libraries,
but how many books would cover the exact thing that you were looking for of your particular situation?
Very little.Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?
The big constraint that has been lifted is when you asked a semi-stranger for help,
who were the only ones with that knowledge, you had a 5% chance that
they either thought it was hilarious to just lie to you and keep feeding you with new lies
when you came back and asked why it wasn’t working,
and a 50% chance they would just flat out refuse to tell you,
because “not caring is not sharing”.Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?
Yes. And it has forced people to be more honest to me and everyone else.
I never want to go back to that time.Removed by mod
How do you live with pain related to aging?
deleted by creator
This is not really in the spirit of this post, rhetorical questions and anger directed at the older generation are not welcome.
It’s not a rhetorical question and not in anger. I would like to know what I have asked. However I see that it puts the reader into a corner. I couldn’t come up with a better way.
I find it hard to believe you genuinely are just asking whether the older generation knows they have to be involved politically … the question is practically a paradigm example of a rhetorical question - designed to put them in a corner and suggesting what you think they should see as true.
Regardless, whether you recognize the hostility and pressure in your question - I still would prefer you not bring it up here, if you read my post, this thread is not about politics but about understanding times before yours.
You over estimate the importance of computers. Computers primarily resulted in editable documents, and provides for faster less error prone and more precise computation. It meant these thing now take less manpower and are less costly. Not so much else.
Internet and telecom. This is separate. Communiction has gotten faster and cheaper. The mail service less used and less reliable though express services like Fedex faster. Frankly these changes are a mixed bag.
Do not forget too that compuserve, bullitin boards, usenet, and forums go much further back then most people think. Think 80s and some sruff before that. Computers go further back. I used them in the 70s and my dad in the 60s though the costs were a lot higher. Electronic computers go back to the 40s and before that there were mechanical computers and relay logic too.
This question kinda of erks me, cuz this a geographical specific question. Most of the world technological progress was slower than the US and adjacent countries, especially in developing countries, so by the time everyone their internet, we still had those old CRT TV and flat screen were for the ultra rich.
About the looking about stuff, even tho I was born in 2000s, we didn’t have internet/a home PC until 2013, before then you would either ask a teacher or a family member who specialise in that field, if its not your parent first. Contrary to popular, library are not that common outside the US and mainly in Universities. Really, this how most ppl are the world looked up stuff, just us around.
Before computers I was an ignorant little shit who read fiction books and fumble-fucked around until I could figure it out. All my education came from teachers in school literally talking to me in class, me reading the textbooks, me reading sci Fi, and me running around like a little feral goblin outside.
