The very nature of this question puts forth a clear dividing line for the answerer. If you remember life before the Internet, you’re ancient. If you don’t, you’re a baby.
Count me among the ancient. Yes, I absolutely remember life before the Internet. With our current dependence on technology, it’s hard to believe we ever survived without it, but such was life before PCs, Bluetooth and smartphones. It was definitely a different world in the 1970s and 1980s. We actually had books that contained information and when we wanted to know something, we’d open one of those books to find out what was inside. No, the information wasn’t up to the minutes, but it also wasn’t altered by a pimple-faced goofball who thought it would be funny to rename “Gerald Ford” as “Gerald Fart.”
There were also these places called “libraries,” and a lot of those weird books were in those libraries. When you got there, you had to look on cards that used the numbering of the Dewey Decimal System (which, you might be shocked to learn, is still in use in most traditional – and frequently vacant – library buildings). My family even had a set of encyclopedias. Just before I became a parent, I bought my own set of encyclopedias so that my child could be well-informed.
Smartphones, you ask? Not even cellphones. We had landlines – two of them, in fact. The main one was often in use, so if your best friend tried to call and your sister was on the phone with her boyfriend, your friend would get a busy signal and would have to try again later. And long-distance calls were billed by the minutes, so you had to keep them pretty short.
Keeping in touch by phone was definitely a challenge, so people did this crazy thing called “writing letters.” (I know, that’s a crazy concept, but we were just foolish enough to do it.) We checked the mail every day, not so we could throw away all of the junk mail, but so that we could see if we got any letters from friends and family who lived far away.
And while we’re talking about reading news from loved ones, we might as well talk about the actual news. My Dad ran a newspaper, so the written news was a big deal in my house. Probably half of my town read a newspaper at least once a week, and most people watched the news on one of the major networks. There were none of those same Wikipedia-defacing, pimply-faced geeks who today claim they have a source deep within the Pentagon who can prove the existence of alien life on Earth. No, our news came from reporters who researched stories in the field and then wrote about them in papers or broadcast them into our homes. I wasn’t fortunate enough to get my disinformation the way many of you do through TikTok.
It was such a crazy, mixed-up world. And many days, I miss the simplicity of it so much.
I refer to myself as a dinosaur a lot.