Before teh Interwebs...
March 30, 2006 7:45 PM   Subscribe

Remember life before the internet? How did anyone cope?
posted by Effigy2000 (107 comments total)
 
That's what USENET was for!
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:51 PM on March 30, 2006


i learned to type on AIM when i was in 6th grade and, before that, my family had prodigy and i remember playing that maze RPG where the creepy guy is always wanting you to stick around and "quaff a tankard of ale" with him (remember that you guys?).

so i guess my answers to those questions would be "no" and "i can't possibly imagine."
posted by radiosig at 8:03 PM on March 30, 2006


CrayolaShop contests
posted by HTuttle at 8:14 PM on March 30, 2006


I was into this thing called BBSes, and I'm always at a loss when I try to explain them to the uninitiated.

"Well, it was kind of like a blog that only one person could read at a time. Also, you got to meet the people who left comments, because they all lived in your city."
posted by Afroblanco at 8:15 PM on March 30, 2006


Internet Addiction Disorder is a compulsive behavior in which a person spends more than what are considered normal hours online,

What the hell's normal about the internet? What, they have 50 years of case studies to define typical behavior already? What if your work, play, entertainment and learning all come from the internet? And what if those four domains all bleed together like some kind of warped Venn diagram that consists mainly of 4 circles neatly aligned atop one another?


Internet Addiction Disorder: Xanax can help


Thank you very much, drug company buzz agent.

I love how they talk about online gambling being an internet addiction. No, it's a gambling addiction, dorktits. That's like saying someone's addicted to the planet earth because they can't stop going into casinos and losing all their money.

While I'm on the internet a whole lot, I wouldn't call it an addiction any more then reading books is an addiction. I know it's not addiction because I can go camping or travelling and not go through anxiety or withdrawal. Not being able to obtain relevant, timely information induces anxiety, but that'd be true even if I was using Carrier Pigeon or a cell phone or whatever. And it's not the lack of connection that's causing the anxiety, it's that inaccessibility of key points of information to make things happen in the real world that would cause anxiety.

Cigarettes I'm addicted to, alcohol, a bit less. MeFi, well, fuck, you got me there.

The internet? That's just life. It's like saying you're addicted to air or gravity.

Has your amount of time spent on the Internet increased since you first became "connected"?

Actually, no. I used to pull 24-72 hour nonstop dialup sessions to my local BBS just for chatting and playing text games.

All in all, my time spent online has probably decreased a fair amount, especially if you only count the pure entertainment stuff, and discount the time I spend on the net for work, and the mundane stuff like bills, phonebook-style info retrieval and lookups and all that - all of which save a whole lot of time and aggravation.

And the density of information exchanged and tasks accomplished in the same time period has increased enormously, despite Windows bloatware's best efforts to grind everything to a halt.

Paraphrased: Are you addicted to the internet?

No. Are you addicted to making sweeping, panicked statements without qualification or any real supporting logic about something you apparently have no clue about?
posted by loquacious at 8:15 PM on March 30, 2006


before the internet, you could go to a used video games store and NOT pay $50 for a decade old game cartridge.
posted by mcsweetie at 8:18 PM on March 30, 2006


Usenet? Before I got dial-up terminal access to the local university's Intenet connection (so I could surf Gopher sites for Apple updates, mostly), it went like this...

I was a Jewish kid posting on a nationwide discussion board for Christian kids, connecting on a 28.8k modem (if it was even that fast), and coming home from school each day to see what new messages loaded overnight. And by loaded, I mean the BBS calling another BBS over the phone in a modem-based peer to peer content network. I could even send private messages by putting some recipient information on the first line of the post... which always made for amusing accidents when people got it wrong. I think we talked about Tori Amos lyrics quite a bit, and a girl named Melissa in Canada introduced me to Sarah McLachlan and sent me her zine. My one wish was a US Robotocs Speedster modem.

Before that, I just did graphic design in CorelDraw all the time. Wow. I really haven't done any of that kind of graphic design since then. Damn Internets.
posted by VulcanMike at 8:21 PM on March 30, 2006


Ah, I very fondly recall the BBS days.

I think that things were a hell of a lot better back then.
posted by drstein at 8:22 PM on March 30, 2006


Sorry, it was a 14.4 modem, which I fished out of one of our older computers. Nobody in my faily paid attention to the thing and I only did after reading about BBSes in a magazine of some sort. I can't remember an other experience quite like the excitement and anticipation as the modem dialed, negotiated and slowly downloaded the new posts. Quite easy to take for granted these days.
posted by VulcanMike at 8:27 PM on March 30, 2006


Remember life before MetaFilter? How did anyone snark?
posted by pmbuko at 8:37 PM on March 30, 2006


Hell, I remember life before ATMs. We were able to cope back then quite well.
posted by Eekacat at 8:40 PM on March 30, 2006


I remember the BBS days...in our area, along with homemade roadside signs advertising "Work from Home!" and "Lose Weight - Ask Me How!" were signs promoting local BBS with their phone numbers. My husband was online long before I got interested (he used Q-Link); I think we had a 9600 bps modem when I first discovered Prodigy. That was in the days when you paid by the hour, and I racked up a couple of $200+ bills playing trivia games online. I remember when this new thing called the World Wide Web was coming into vogue, and URLs were approximately 1,489 characters long. There were no hyperlinks, and no such thing as "www.mycompany.com" - web addresses were always a long, complex series of letters and digits.

We eventually beat the high cost of hourly online access by subscribing to AOL and becoming hosts for their online trivia games. We had to undergo X amount of hours of training, run a minimum of two 90-minute games per week, and got free AOL in exchange. When they ditched the hourly charges and went to the flat-fee payment plan, two games per week suddenly became a lot more work.
posted by Oriole Adams at 8:45 PM on March 30, 2006


Junior high. I remember the first time I used ZTerm to reserve a book at the public library. I entered my library number, and was blown away when it spat out my name and address.

After that I registered an account on the Greater New Orleans Free Net. GNOFN was free, text-only internet access. Your login name and email address was automatically your initials followed by a number. Mine was "seh01." My father's was "djh02" because someone else with his initials had already registered.

Unless web designers remembered to include alt information (not often), all images showed up as [IMAGE]. Image maps were long lists of [IMAGE] links. I started learning HTML around that time, and for years I made sure that my pages would show up as text-only friendly.

I was a member of two BBSs. The New Orleans Mac Users Group (First Class Client) and A Place With No Name (ZTerm), a BBS for "talented" students, their parents and teachers. All the art and lit nerds in the public schools were on there. Fun stuff.
posted by brundlefly at 8:46 PM on March 30, 2006


I drank a lot, read tons of paperbacks, worked manually in a factory, and had never seen any giant, silicone-injected penises.

I'm not sure my life's better.
posted by moonbiter at 8:47 PM on March 30, 2006


Metafilter: Well, fuck, you got me there.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 8:52 PM on March 30, 2006


Legend of the Red Dragon.
posted by brownpau at 8:59 PM on March 30, 2006


Actually, I have a harder time remembering life before cell phones.

"You mean that people behind the wheel actually used to go through the hassle of finding a pay phone, pulling over, and paying a quarter just to make a phone call? Incredible!"
posted by joedan at 9:06 PM on March 30, 2006


We spent days on end playing Pitfall, Dig Dug and Seaquest on the Atari 2600. We dreamed of sending a photo of our TV to Atari in the US, hoping to get a Seaquest badge or a certificate or some other crap. Of course, we live in Australia, so it was never going to happen. The US may as well have been on the other side of the universe.

We spent hours copying BASIC code into a C64 from books and magazines, hoping to be able to play something better than Wizard of Wor. The code always had syntax errors, even though it was exactly as printed. I think once I got a skiing game to work. Your skiier looked like this: !!. After a while we spent all our time playing Wizball, IK+ and Druid. We dreamed of getting a Commodore 128, or, if we won the lottery, an Amiga.

A friend got an IBM with a colour graphics adaptor. We played Police Quest on an amber screen, or swapped floppies with Falcon DOS or DR DOS to play Hack. When we weren't on the PC, we were playing D&D - until my parents were born again and destroyed our books, anyway. Then we played at other kids houses, and lied that we were playing Robotech.

Another friend had an Apple IIe. We played the original Wolfenstein, Aztec, and spent hours building Loderunner levels that spelled out rude words in ladders. We played a lot of Talisman and Battletech around that time. D&D degenerated into quests to find scantily-clad cleric girls who'd rub Keoghtom’s Ointment into our groins. I can't believe I can remember the name "Keoghtom".

PC technology improved. I remember the first time I saw Battle Chess on an EGA screen, and nearly wet my pants. We played Wasteland, and Kings Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry, and the new Police Quest games, praying that one day we'd be allowed to shoot somebody, anybody. Most of our money went on Double Dragon, Black Tiger and Shinobi at the local fish and chip shop. We listened to lots and lots of Queen.

One day, in 1989, a friend's older brother who was at uni told me he'd been playing MUDs all day. I couldn't get my head around it. In 1990 I used a dumb terminal to exploit Gopher so I could get telnet access - just follow a dud link, and you were dumped at the telnet prompt. MUD, MUD, MUD til 4am. We believed that the more Gopher menues you drilled into before jumping off the harder it was for the network cops to trace you. Walk 2 hours home from uni, get fresh bread from the just-opened bakery, watch Robotech repeats, sleep all day, wake up, catch the last bus to uni, MUD some more. I knew I was addicted to the net when I decided that levelling up or chatting in Somewhere Else was more important than a Japanese exam.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:12 PM on March 30, 2006


We spent hours copying BASIC code into a C64 from books and magazines, hoping to be able to play something better than Wizard of Wor. The code always had syntax errors, even though it was exactly as printed. I think once I got a skiing game to work. Your skiier looked like this: !!.

Holy shit, yeah. I think I copied that same game! Did the trees you had to avoid look like this: A?
posted by brundlefly at 9:17 PM on March 30, 2006


obiwanwasabi: That description totally takes me back. Reminds me a lot of my own early years, minus the born again parents. That was harsh. Sorry to hear it.
posted by nightchrome at 9:24 PM on March 30, 2006


Ok, I think I copied that same game.
posted by furiousthought at 9:27 PM on March 30, 2006


and before Wacom...

there was the KoalaPad.

/getting nostalgic
posted by pruner at 9:29 PM on March 30, 2006


Lightweights. I remember life before answering machines.

The protocol was to wait for seven rings or so before deciding that somebody wasn't home. And then you had to call them back later and hope that you caught them the second, or third, time around because otherwise you'd just not be in communication at all.

Yes. People could not only be out of touch, but unreachable.

Kids, lawn, etc.
posted by jokeefe at 9:32 PM on March 30, 2006


That's what USENET was for!

Um, USENET was on the internet, dumbass. From the wikipedia link

Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name.
posted by delmoi at 9:33 PM on March 30, 2006


Did the trees you had to avoid look like this: A

Yep.

minus the born again parents. That was harsh. Sorry to hear it.

It was actually pretty cool. D&D is never as fun as when you're not supposed to be playing it.

Little brother at dinner table: Man, you kicked butt with that +2 Flaming Sword of Dragon Slaying. It was rad.

{glare from father}

Me: Erm, a "Flaming Sword" is a kind of missile, and a "Dragon" is a new Zentraedi battlepod. It's cool, Dad - there's nothing occult about it.
posted by obiwanwasabi at 9:34 PM on March 30, 2006


I got my first computer just before highschool, but before that I would go to the ISU comptuer lab and surf the web on Mosaic starting in middleschool.

It really is just impossible for me to imagine doing anything the world without the net.
posted by delmoi at 9:34 PM on March 30, 2006


I mean I can imagine not being online. Just like having the power out, you know. You don't have it, and life stops for a while and you relax. But you know, in the back of your mind that everywhere else people have the lights on. I can't imagine a world without electricity, and I can't imagine a world without an Internet.

Of course, back when you people were playing around with BBSs many people were actually on the TCP/IP internet at universities and stuff, posting on newsgroups or whatever. But before that, there really was not net. That is hard to imagine.
posted by delmoi at 9:41 PM on March 30, 2006


Come sit by grandma, delmoi, and I'll tell you about what it was like trying to make a transatlantic phone call from France to Canada back in 1978.... *settles into rocking chair*
posted by jokeefe at 9:46 PM on March 30, 2006


The protocol was to wait for seven rings or so before deciding that somebody wasn't home.

Heh. I'm only 31, yet I remember being taught to give eight rings to people you knew were elderly. I vaguely recall them telling us that this was 30 seconds or so, enough time for someone to answer. Of course, being 8 or so at the time, everyone seemed elderly at the time.

I've been meaning to write an essay about the social things that have fallen by the wayside due to the internet's destruction of information scarcity. Never again will kids have to whisper about who managed to buy 2LiveCrew's "As Nasty As We Wanna Be" and spend an hour biking to a kids house to be titillated by three minutes of "Me So Horny", which was the ultimate in forbidden possessions. Never again will one kid have a photocopy of a "Flippin' Mickey" (MMouse giving you the finger) and make others beg to see it while not letting it be copied again. Never again will somebody go on vacation and come back with a "Tijuana Special" comic given to him by his cousin which featured the various Disney critters in compromising situations. All these things are available in a matter of seconds to today's J. Random Teenager.

*sniff*

(Cue voices of people 31 in 1910 reminiscing about kids today "Never having to ride a horse 15 miles to school" and so on and so forth...)
posted by unixrat at 9:48 PM on March 30, 2006


Oh yeah, and the first inkling I had that computers could be more than glorified adding machines came when Neuromancer was released back in 1984. I wish it was possible to convey just how electrifying that book was when it first came out (or at least it was for me).
posted by jokeefe at 9:49 PM on March 30, 2006


I watched a lot of teevee. It was like the Internet. I even talked back at it.

Not only do I remember life before answering machines, I remember life before VCRs, home computers, walkmen, pocket calculators, ATMs (which meant you had to take all your money out before the bank closed on Friday, or you were fucked all weekend), and video games. What's more: I'm only 37.

We sent telegrams if a message absolutely had to get to someone (which was pretty rare). We read books. We listened to music at home, listened to transistor radios, and sang it in groups on the bus on the way to and from school (ah, the days of an entire group of junior high kids singing "Juke Box Hero" together). We used slide rules, if the math was complex enough. We played board games and D&D. I went to the library a lot. I went to second-run movie theaters, beginning in 6th grade. We watched some movies at friends houses on Super-8 or 16mm, often in abbreviated form. We had pen pals.

It wasn't actually all that different, although it was a lot slower.
posted by Astro Zombie at 9:50 PM on March 30, 2006 [1 favorite]


I recall reading "The Cuckoo's Egg" back in '89 or so and being enthralled by the idea of the internet.

I knew computers could connect to bigger computers and various other things like that, but being able to move from machine to machine, giving usernames and passwords, now THAT would be the coolest thing ever.

I spent days on the Apple II coding up user logins and password screens...
posted by unixrat at 9:54 PM on March 30, 2006


Wait a minute (reads last link) you can get a prescription for Xanax for having internet addiction?

Jesus Christ. I've got to get a shrink!
posted by delmoi at 10:05 PM on March 30, 2006


unixrat, indeed. I especially am conscious of how the whole process of finding out about new music has changed beyond all recognition. You used to have to have older brothers and sisters with record collections (or friends with big allowances who could afford to buy new records, or have friends who worked at record stores), to even hear about bands that weren't played on AM radio. And then there was having to scour the city for magazines sold only in a few places (back when Rolling Stone was actually considered "subversive"), in order to find out about anything new or interesting... and then once you'd read about it ("Who is this Patti Smith chick?"), you might not actually hear the music itself for months. All this went along with going over to somebody's house to listen to an album, and if they really, really liked and trusted you they might let you borrow it to play at your house. So music has gone from something that was intensely woven in with social networks to something you can explore, instantly, in a solitary kind of way. My son hears something interesting, he's listening to it, or has the entire album, minutes later. I would hear something I liked on the local "underground" radio station (which I listened to on a transistor radio-- oy) and assuming that the DJ managed to remember to announce the song and band names (always hit and miss) then I would write the information down, and then try and find a store that sold the album, something which would not always be easy. Sigh. It took me nearly a year to identify and track down "Thick As A Brick". We had to work for our pleasures, dammit.

What's that, sonny? Speak up, now!
posted by jokeefe at 10:05 PM on March 30, 2006


The days before the internet? I'm sure it is not a revelation to anyone that they were like slogging through a dookie pile.

Party line telephone shared between four houses.
Lousy small town library populated with everything BUT classic or modern literature.
High School library, research capabilities, and curriculum were equally a joke.
Black and White TV; good thing we had some Canadian TV stations so you could watch Python, else chock full o Lawrence Welk.
National Geographic and horrible local newspaper the only window on world events. Media giant Paul Harvey huge at the local barbershop down the street.

That evil internet with it's crazy-delicious addictive properties?! We're just making up for lost time from being insane with Boredom for a century.

F those psychobabble lens-blur mor-Ans and their disneyfied history. I'm off to look at AlDaily!
posted by somnambulist at 10:33 PM on March 30, 2006


Hell, I remember my first ever use of a computer.
1985 (or was it 1986). First grade, every two weeks we had a lesson of "computer class", where we where taken to a lab full of Commodore Vic 20s (about 16 black and white screens, and two colour screens that I was never quick enough to get on to). The first half of the lesson was spent very much not using the precious machines. It was some kind of very basic computer theory about memory, and programs, and bits and bytes, and so forth. The sort of thing I imagine they'd never teach kids now. I remember one lesson the teacher demonstrated a Logo "mouse".

Then we got to use the computers, to play a game. It was the same game every week - you were a mouse running around a maze trying to avoid cats, while collecting cheese. We had to insert the floppy and type the appropriate "Load" command to get it running. While playing this game, I remembered that the teacher, at the start of the lesson, had told us that computers could be used to do lots of other things as well...to "paint" for instance. I figured out how to get out of the game. Hitting escape, or break, or whatever the key was, and started typing PAINT and DRAW at the BASIC prompt. The teacher saw the errors I was generating and told me off for, basically, unauthorized use of the equipment.

I know it's not addiction because I can go camping or travelling and not go through anxiety or withdrawal.

Precicely, locquacious. In fact, I love it when I have to go "out bush", beyond the range of cellphone coverage, with no internet access, out where only AM radio goes. It's actually a relief to have escaped all that information...all that contactability and accessibility. The strange thing is, I use the internet a lot more than my wife, have a lot more "invested" in it, yet she seems to be much more addicted to it than I am. She has to check her email several times a day. If we are on holidays somewhere, she scopes out where there might be an internet cafe or wireless hot spot so she can keep in touch. I generally couldn't care less.
posted by Jimbob at 10:37 PM on March 30, 2006


Correction...Logo had turtles not mice, didn't it?
posted by Jimbob at 10:38 PM on March 30, 2006


ah, the days of an entire group of junior high kids singing "Juke Box Hero" together

I still do that in buses. Nobody joins in, though.
posted by brundlefly at 10:39 PM on March 30, 2006


It really is just impossible for me to imagine doing anything the world without the net.
posted by delmoi at 10:34 PM MST on March 30 [!]


Do you have a hard time getting laid?
posted by Eekacat at 10:52 PM on March 30, 2006


Yeah, logo had turtles.

I can't imagine why a teacher would get upset about you doing something on the machine, since it has no hard drive you couldn't damage it. Ah well.

You should have seen all the stuff we did to these poor macintoshes at my highschool. They had this filesharing system setup. If you could "own" a box, you could setup your own share. I managed to do this, and created a share called "demon land" which was visible on every machine in the school, except the actual machine it was hosted on. I put every mac-hacking tool on the thing.

Of course, it was setup read-write, so the administrators could have deleted all the files from any machine. but no one ever did.
posted by delmoi at 11:02 PM on March 30, 2006


I think the Internet is older than I am. And I don't mean ARPANET. So, while I remember what life was like before I used computers (although I was four or five when I first played educational floppy games), it would be impossible for me to remember life before the Internet. I can't really remember anything pre- Mosaic, actually. I have absolutely no nerd cred, but hey: I learned HTML in 6th grade. And computers are instinctive for me in a way they never will be for my parents.
posted by MadamM at 11:03 PM on March 30, 2006


I had a KoalaPad. Damn, that thing was cool. Kinda. Many hours making space battles.

I still have a few copies of Byte magazine's compendiums of BASIC program listings. Luckily we actually had not one but two 5.25" floppy drives, so I only had to enter them - correctly - once.

The thing is, though, we had not an apple II or IIe, but a Franklin Ace 1000. Same thing, more or less. Except on the Franklin Ace 1000, the reset button was right in the front of the case, below the keyboard, kinda pointing down on the bevel on the underside.

Exactly where I'd have the wide format softcover Byte program listing book propped open so I could copy code in. Every so often I'd just wiggle the wrong way, the book would slide forward and hit the reset. It seems like it always happened near the last few lines of a 1000-2000 line program - say Star Trek - wiping everything from memory before I saved it.

I don't think I ever finished entering in that listing, damnit.


Thank goodness this thread turned out nice and positive even though I unloaded a bunch of nerd angst on the FUD-soaked tone of some of the articles. Thanks, guys.
posted by loquacious at 11:04 PM on March 30, 2006


It really is just impossible for me to imagine doing anything the world without the net.
posted by delmoi at 10:34 PM MST on March 30 [!]

Do you have a hard time getting laid?


Err, I think I mistyped that. the words "doing anything" should have been removed and replaced with "the world".
posted by delmoi at 11:06 PM on March 30, 2006


MadamM: You were born in 1989 ~ 1990 maybe?

When I was first playing around with Mosaic you were literally three to four years old.

Freaky.
posted by delmoi at 11:09 PM on March 30, 2006


I remember Battle Chess! I'm old too!

My cousin and I used to play just to watch the characters bash eachother's brains out, trying to see each of the 35 characters fight eachother. He had some flight game too; he was a rich kid.

And then one day my grandma gave my mother money and we got ourselves an Acer with good old Windows 3.1 (and when we updated to Windows 95, I found out it had a crappier art program, one of the suckier days of my life).

And the first time I saw the internet was when my sister was doing a project; we used one of those AOL cd's. It was very slow and a little rotating AOL triangle watched over you and counted your minutes. They didn't let me use it.

Ah, memories. They're pretty useless, aren't they?
posted by Citizen Premier at 11:26 PM on March 30, 2006


Yep. If you can remember typing in the games from Ahl's Basic Computer Games, then you are part of my generation. Or if you can remember moving up from a computer with 4k of RAM to 32k felt like a world of endless possibilities.

What did I do in high school? Go find the phone and hope nobody else in my family was using it. Walk over to my friend's house and hang around - maybe listen to records. Maybe head down to the arcade and play some Asteroids.

Books and knowledge came via the local public library which I sucked dry for great literature, books on math and physics. I wouldnt say kids today know more than me on many particular subjects. While the Internet has breadth, it still lacks depth only available in books.

The killer feature for me is not email but IM. Send over an instant thought to friends all over the world as if we are all sitting in the same room? Amazing.
posted by vacapinta at 11:40 PM on March 30, 2006


Scary. I reached university in England just as net connections were filtering into students' rooms - had one in my 3rd year and it was TEH COOL. Now, thirteen years later, I get cross if I stay in a hotel that doesn't have Wi-Fi.
posted by athenian at 12:08 AM on March 31, 2006


I get to know a lot more people with internet then without, mostly because I can pinpoint people I share interests with, which obviously self-promotes getting to know them.

There's a downside to that : if I constantly socialize with people like me, I'll never get to know how to socialize with people waaaayy to different, so different they don't even use the internet as much as me.

I don't know why, I feel this is bad.

Also if I keep socializing only by the net, which is a welcome facilitator, what if the net is took away from me ?

This is obviously bad.
posted by elpapacito at 12:17 AM on March 31, 2006


Ahh... 4th grade my teacher gave me a copy of Battle Chess for a quarter (i was buying the disk not the game) old skool p2p
posted by matimer at 12:18 AM on March 31, 2006


Yep. If you can remember typing in the games from Ahl's Basic Computer Games, then you are part of my generation.

I used to type in those games! And they didn't work, because I had an ABC80 - a Swedish computer with a b/w 80x80 pixel display.

I think once I got a skiing game to work. Your skiier looked like this: !!.

Oh, you had it easy. I had to create my games from scratch. And I didn't have a tape recorder, so if I wanted to save a game, I had to write down the code on paper. I still have the source code for my Space Invaders game written down somewhere. I think it took about two seconds for my aliens to move one pixel.
posted by martinrebas at 12:34 AM on March 31, 2006


An observation from the point of view of an incurable backpacker: it used to be that you would write letters (not emails) to your friends & family, specifying a range of possible poste restante return addresses - "I might be in Mumbai in two months, but best to photocopy your letter & send one copy to Kathmandu & another to Calcutta, just to be sure..."

I must say that despite the convenience of ubiquitous internet / email access, nothing beats waiting at a poste restante counter & finding that there are letters for you there.

The last time I used poste restante was in Istanbul a few years ago. I needed some hard copy documents from home, so email was ruled out. The Poste Restante at the main post office in Istanbul consisted of a shoebox containing my documents and one other item of mail. I felt saddened by the death of this institution.
posted by UbuRoivas at 1:21 AM on March 31, 2006


Come on, I can't possibly be the only one who buddied up to a friend whose father had some incredibly impossible access to our local Universities (sp?) mainframe in the late '70s. We played Adventure, and the moon landing game, and we loved it.

Then he bought an Apple II, and we played Zork until the sun came up. I'll never forget the moment when I loudly declared "I think you should go southeast from the round room! We've never tried that before, and it says 'all directions'."
posted by Sphinx at 1:34 AM on March 31, 2006


I can remember just how damn hard it was getting hold of porn before the Internet. You young people today, you don't know you're born...
posted by Pericles at 1:55 AM on March 31, 2006


I didn't have any kind of access like that, but my father did work at a computer graphics company in the late 70's and early 80's, and I got to play on their machine a couple times. Imagine a primitive vector drawing program – I don't remember if it used bezier curves or not, but it did have pretty rich color – run with a big digitizing tablet (I thought it was the size of a drawing table at the time, but looking back on how little kids relate to size, it was probably about as big as the larger Wacoms) and one of those old-style digitizing tools with the crosshairs and the four buttons. It printed to slides.

I remember how cold they kept it in there! The whole room was a heat-sink. Ah, old computers.
posted by furiousthought at 1:56 AM on March 31, 2006


Important words:
MUD, MOO, MUSH
posted by beerbajay at 2:32 AM on March 31, 2006


Ernest Cline, of course.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 2:59 AM on March 31, 2006


When I was 12, my best friend Robin and I played D&D on her dad's Heathkit, which he had built. I still remember the floppy drive loading the program, clickclicklickclickclickclickclick...

We learned BASIC and LOGO in elementary school, and made little Mad Libs programs that we delighted ourselves with. I made a little low-res drawing program, too, but it was incredibly crude. We played Lemonade all the time on the Apple ][s at school.

Many years later when I first read about this "World Wide Web" proposal thingie on Usenet, I thought it sounded like the dumbest idea ever. Hypertext? How incredibly lame. Heh.
posted by beth at 3:07 AM on March 31, 2006


I especially am conscious of how the whole process of finding out about new music has changed beyond all recognition.

God, I miss the wonderful hardships of getting music - seeing an advert in the back of a fanzine, writing to someone offering tapes to trade, or just getting random tapes from folk who'd read your fanzine, the incredible rush when some new bootleg arrived in the post, entering into long correspondences with strangers, some in different countries! And I'm only 29. Heck, I even get nostalgic for Napster sometimes - reading tips on a message board that someone was online with an obscure album, crossing your fingers when you went to bed in the hope the whole thing would've downloaded by morning...

Come to think of it, it hasn't changed that much - now I download an MP3 from a weblog, email the weblogger for more info, or suggesting something else they might like, scour eBay and record shops for months looking for the vinyl, but I guess all that makes me a terrible luddite clinging to the ownership of artifacts.
posted by jack_mo at 3:13 AM on March 31, 2006


What pericles said. Anyone who has seen, ahem, friends, desperately smuggling grubby magazines back from the continent (back then UK laws were pretty tight) knows that the internet is a wonderful and liberating thing. Still I can't help but think that perhaps hardcore comes all too easily these days...
posted by rhymer at 4:05 AM on March 31, 2006


The best modem ever made for BBSing was the Hayes Smartmodem 300. I spent hours upon hours in the dark bathed in the red glow of its LEDs...

I was so dissapointed when I found out that later models had gone to tiny square red LEDs instead of the big round LED "bulbs" that the originals had.

I still lust after a Hayes Stack Chronograph even today.
posted by mrbill at 4:08 AM on March 31, 2006


The Source. Over a 300 baud modem, the kind with the rubber cups for the telephone handset, on a frickin' teletype.
posted by pax digita at 4:12 AM on March 31, 2006


I remember when the USR HST modem came out... my BBS actually got a preview HST before they were out to the general public. We put it on one node for the fat cats and let the swine play about on the other two 2400 bps. nodes.

I miss the good 'ol days.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 4:14 AM on March 31, 2006


Ahem. Some of us are old enough to remember life before computers. When I was at school we got our first computer terminal when I was in the sixth form (age 16/17 for the non-Brits). That's computer terminal. Dumb terminal, connected to a remote mainframe (ho ho, you kidz have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?) somewhere in the next town. We had (get this) a one-hour time slot in which we could use this thing. I won't even tell you how much memory we were allocated because you won't believe it.

And you know what? We had plenty of fun. We went out and lived. I was off watching the Sex Pistols and the Damned and the Stranglers every weekend. I was out on my bike getting up to no good. I went fishing with my mates. I hung around the arcades down the beach and heard great music on the jukeboxes. I read. A lot. I played guitar. I went to the pub. It was just fine.

God knows I love the net (whereas I hate cellphones, iPods and many other mere trinkets of the modern age) but sometimes I do feel it's making a generation extremely lazy and spoon-fed.
posted by Decani at 4:41 AM on March 31, 2006


Being a UseNet node, while the ENGINEERING COLLEGE I was at was not even on the Internet. (Because I hooked up with local UNIX admins and used thier connections) How did I know about UseNet - back before the great reorg? (I want my, I want my, I want my net.bazzare) That is how we pirated the Apple ][ games. Gent would come back from prep school and I'd use his access for reading the 'net and getting access to the 100's of 'new' Apple programs. Using bang paths to send mail.

World Wide Web? Why bother, when the cool tech is WAIS.
posted by rough ashlar at 4:50 AM on March 31, 2006


I won't even tell you how much memory we were allocated because you won't believe it.

Nevertheless, do tell -- how much, or more to the point, how little?

I remember walking a mile and a half to dink with the brand-new TRS-80 at the Radio Shack at the mall -- it had a whopping 4k of RAM.
posted by pax digita at 5:06 AM on March 31, 2006


Typing Basic games from MAD magazine and loading basoc from little IBM PCjr cartridges.

Up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A start actually seems fairly recent in my memory, even though it came years before I was ever online.
posted by VulcanMike at 5:09 AM on March 31, 2006


I remember walking a mile and a half to dink with the brand-new TRS-80 at the Radio Shack at the mall -- it had a whopping 4k of RAM.

Ah you think you remember something ? I remember switching myself an Altair 8800 till I become schizofrenic , for reasons that still escape me !
posted by elpapacito at 5:10 AM on March 31, 2006


SYS 64738
posted by papercake at 5:18 AM on March 31, 2006


10 PRINT "I miss my rubber keys"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
posted by twistedonion at 5:29 AM on March 31, 2006


Um, USENET was on the internet, dumbass.

Is now, dumbass2, but in the old days, it wasn't. USENET and mail was carried over modems (god, those lucky enough to have Telebit Trailblazers[1], singing whale porn as they synced up to almost 19000 (!) baud, and compressed on the fly! They got mail in hours!) No TCP or SMTP involved, all UUCP and spool files.

You'd dial into a site, on the backbone, if you were lucky, where the Cabal (TINC) kept things moving, or a leaf site if you weren't lucky, and forwarded up all your email and posts, and sucked down the newsfeeds and mail for you. It was the days of greenscreens, sixty users per box, EMPIRE until late in the morning, and bang paths.

The the Septemeber That Never Ended came, we got USENET to SMTP gateways, and B1FF, the end of the Cabal (TWNC), and NNTP. USENET mail was gone, replaced by domanism and SMTP, and news moved over NNTP rather than UUCP links, which allowed vastly more crap to flow.

The BBS world's version was, of course, Fidonet.

Punk.

!{duke,unc}!uncg!hamlet!eriko

[1] Real modems. High speed when 1200 baud was cool. Legendary for getting data through noisy lines -- and doing so quickly. They were almost half-duplex, they did high speed in one direction, but had a low speed command channel that would allow it to reverse the high speed connection. Finally, it could spoof UUCP acks on the local side, relying on remote retransmit requests for reliability, which made it seriously fly when hauling UUCP traffic -- a Trailblazer, synced at 2400, would often move three to four times the traffic a regular 2400bps modem would in the same time, and when the line was clean, wow, it flew.

Lord, they weren't cheap, but man, when you were paying for long distance calls to your upstream site, they paid off in fast.
posted by eriko at 5:52 AM on March 31, 2006


All I know is this -- if and when my computer dies, I will be ordering a new one within a day. My computer is as essential as having electricity and running water. I can't imagine ever going back to dial-up.
posted by bim at 5:53 AM on March 31, 2006


First computer I ever used was in 1980 or '81... a Commodore PET. Our family, by 1986, had two computers (when few folks in our town had even one): an Atari 800XL (*love*) and a Coleco Adam.

Then there was about 10 years when I did nothing of significance on computers, it seemed (other than beating the pants off my teachers at Jeopardy! on the IBM PCs at school and the "Computer" class I took as a freshman in HS).

My world before the Internet? Kind of slow and I felt so frustrated at my inability to get some decent information about my favorite subjects.
posted by grubi at 6:14 AM on March 31, 2006


Well, we were using FidoNet, SkyNet and... well, we read more.
posted by volandmast at 6:31 AM on March 31, 2006


Before the internets? We went outside and played. We talked to people face to face. We found our information in books. Life was good.

Exploring the forbidden nooks and crannies of a university mainframe system was fun, and advent(ure) was too, but the internet has truly lived up to all its early hype.
posted by caddis at 6:42 AM on March 31, 2006


the internet has truly lived up to all its early hype.

This is an important thing to note.
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane at 7:04 AM on March 31, 2006


Oh, what ever would we have done without stupid mystery meat navigation on metafilter. Gawsh!
posted by KirkJobSluder at 7:04 AM on March 31, 2006


First computer used: Commodore PET
First computer owned: Atari 400
First computer loved: Apple ][+
Online first via compuserve, also BBSed like mad - (InventionFactory anyone?) and then the folks at dorsai.org got me on the internet. I remember collecting long lists of BBS numbers.

Every once in a while I unplug from the net and it is quite relaxing, but I really wouldn't want to go without it for a long time.
posted by bashos_frog at 7:05 AM on March 31, 2006


I'm Late Wave.

I sysop'd on a BBS.
I remember the feeling of victory when we figured out how to unzip Wolfenstein 3D.
I remember doing chores for AOL hours.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 7:15 AM on March 31, 2006


Our local access station had the greatest show when I was in 5th-6th grade. It was called "Pirate Radio." Of course they played music, but instead of people it was a computer screen, where messages would scroll. You'd call the station and tell them what you wanted to say, and the person would type it in for everyone watching to see. You wanted to confess a crush? Tell someone they are a loser? Share a brilliant thought? You could do it. My friend Shawn and I used to call in every so often and it was always a thrill to see our messages up there. (We'd say things like "Duran Duran Rules!") I wrote a program on my Commodore 64 to have little messages scroll on my screen like they did on Pirate Radio. (I called my version Cool Radio, even though there was no music, and pretended these were messages from my classmates and celebrities. Yes, I was a dork back then. ; ))
posted by SisterHavana at 7:25 AM on March 31, 2006


My first computer.

Quickly finding it completely useless, it was traded in for a C64 and the popular C64 tape drive. I too spent hours typing in machine code from a C64 magazine. It took hours just type in the code for the compiler needed for these programs.

I was a freshman when our school got its first TRS-80.
posted by DieHipsterDie at 7:35 AM on March 31, 2006


I at least remember life before p2p networks and the abunancy of MP3s.

While I enjoy being able to hear virtually any song ever released almost instantly, I remember being a teenager and having the seemingly unattainable goal of finding a rare orange cover copy of KMFDM's "NAIVE", with the uncleared O Fortuna sample. Nothing will replace the sheer 'holy shit' moment of flipping through a stack of records at Music Trader in San Diego and finding a pristine vinyl copy for $2, and upon return home, hearing, through the rustle of my old record player, that long awaited track for the first time.

Now you can pretty readily find either that track on some P2P network, or eBay a copy of it fairly readily.

Sigh. The internet makes it hard to be pretentious.
posted by Uther Bentrazor at 7:40 AM on March 31, 2006


I first started using BBSes (via C-64 and 300 baud modem) in around 6th grade or so. I reveled in the anonymity and generally acted like a jackass for the first few months I was online, posting silliness, teasing people, etc. But BBS communities back then were small enough that you (or I, at least) couldn't act like a jackass for long before feeling bad about it. Since BBSes back then were largely local, I also started to fear that I would run into online acquaintances at the store or something. And I realized that I was much, much younger than most other users. So I shaped up and have been a perfect passable online citizen ever since.

One thing that was cool was the lack of immediacy. An e-mail took some time to deliver; the pace of discussion on boards was much slower. I think people took more time to compose what they wrote since they got fewer cracks at communicating their point. I know I would look forward to logging in with much greater anticipation back then (as much of a thrill as it is to check MeFi for the 10th time in a day). But I am probably mythologizing the old days, just like people who wish everyone would go back to writing paper letters.
posted by brain_drain at 7:42 AM on March 31, 2006


Christ you guys are young.

I remember when digital watches were the hot new futuristic thing. And pocket calculators.

I went to college toting a mechanical - not even electric - typewriter, though some people had these newfangled word processor thingies.

In my first reporting job, we used walkie talkies to talk to the desk. We had to talk in code because the competition would monitor our frequencies.

I'm not even 40.

Time for my nap.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:47 AM on March 31, 2006


My mom remembers being the first family in the neighborhood to get a TV and having everyone come over to watch.

The changes we have seen in just one lifetime really are staggering when you step back and take a look.
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:49 AM on March 31, 2006


"You mean that people behind the wheel actually used to go through the hassle of finding a pay phone, pulling over, and paying a quarter just to make a phone call? Incredible!"

I remember when those phone calls only cost a dime.

And those hillarious early digital watches where you had to press a button to see the time, meaning that if you were carrying something you had to set it down to see what time it was.
posted by JanetLand at 7:56 AM on March 31, 2006


I went to college toting a mechanical - not even electric - typewriter, though some people had these newfangled word processor thingies.

In my first reporting job, we used walkie talkies to talk to the desk. We had to talk in code because the competition would monitor our frequencies.

I'm not even 40.


I'm older than you and remember that also. My dad bought a very basic calculator in the 70s for $150. Our first VCR was $1400. And I can remember how cool it was that my friend had an LED watch.

And at one time it was even amazing to type and see it appear on a TV screen.
posted by DieHipsterDie at 7:59 AM on March 31, 2006


We found our information in books. Life was good.

We found information, often incorrect, out of date, or outright manipulated -- and with little way of finding out alternative views/studies/etc.

Not everyone lived/lives in a big city where enormous libraries reside. The internet would have made my life a whole lot better when I was living in North Alabama and Middle Tennessee. The Internet has provided (among other things) a quick and easy way for people who cannot otherwise get to up-to-date information to get said information.

But I appreciate your cynical point of view.
posted by grubi at 8:01 AM on March 31, 2006


And those hillarious early digital watches where you had to press a button to see the time, meaning that if you were carrying something you had to set it down to see what time it was.

I just bought one of those -- red LED, two buttons, two functions: Time and date. I got it from Fossil. All my young friends think it's fab.
posted by Astro Zombie at 8:10 AM on March 31, 2006


I had a digital watch that had a Pac-Man game on it. It was the coolest watch in the world. : )

I remember when having a VCR was a fairly rare thing. Anyone remember when movies on VHS cost over $50 to buy?
posted by SisterHavana at 8:13 AM on March 31, 2006


Summers in remote locations before the net and/or portable computers could be horrific. I spent part of most summers in a remote Upper Michigan spot with no other kids around -- very pretty, but you can only spend so many days staring at water too cold to swim in. And not just pre-net, but pre-cable TV for most of them (at least there).

So one year I came prepared. I decided I was going to simulate an entire 162+playoff Baseball season with a boxed board game called Pursue the Pennant. It had this set of 1000 or so custom player cards with weighted dice rolls on a d1000 scale where you could sim an entire game with rolls in about an hour on a typical box score sheet. I saved up until I could afford ~200 photocopies of that sheet, and went at it all summer -- updating the team's stats manually after every game played. I'd run two series a day (5-7 games), and about two months later, finished the whole thing. I've kept the final score sheet all these years since just to prove to myself how bored it is possible for a human to be.

Now, I suppose, people just spend that kind of time playing WoW. If I ever wanted to do the above again, I could just download a sim program from the net and do it in five minutes. Short version is, I guess -- we wasted a lot of time before the net doing things that probably same insane in retrospect.
posted by Pufferish at 8:14 AM on March 31, 2006


I remember being in college and this new "web" thing was all the rage. I remember thinking why if fuck's sake would I want to sit and type at a dork in China, when I've got dorks and geeks surrounding me here??

Then all of the sudden the internet was everywhere, by the the time I got to grad school a few years later it was unimaginable to do any sort of school work without some internet information.

I remember my first library job, typing catalog cards and sorting them. I remember having to get up and change the channels on the television for my dad because there was no such thing as a remote control. I remember payphones and letters and typewriters.

I have to say, my job would be a hell of a lot harder without the internet, computers or automation. But at the same time, each little step forward we've taken, we've added a level of complexity to life.

Right now I'm cool with that. As me again in ten years when middle age hits full force and I'm disappointed in these kids today cause they can't do x, y, or z.
posted by teleri025 at 8:22 AM on March 31, 2006


grubi: We found information, often incorrect, out of date, or outright manipulated -- and with little way of finding out alternative views/studies/etc.

And how is this different from the way internet-based media works?

Not everyone lived/lives in a big city where enormous libraries reside. The internet would have made my life a whole lot better when I was living in North Alabama and Middle Tennessee. The Internet has provided (among other things) a quick and easy way for people who cannot otherwise get to up-to-date information to get said information.

Of course, you still have to deal with the digital divide. At least one of the interesting things that has come out of the internet in the last few years is the realization that power structures such as racism, classism and sexism adapt pretty well to changes in information technology.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:32 AM on March 31, 2006


Delmoi, "internet" wasn't a word back then. I started using USENET in 1979, and it wasn't on the internet because there was no such thing.

Some of the traffic for USENET passed over the ARPANET, but the ARPANET wasn't the internet.

I don't have to consult Wikipedia on this because I lived through those years. (And Wikipedia is wrong on this one.)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:46 AM on March 31, 2006


My grandparents had a TV with a "clicker" when I was a kid. We thought it was amazing, and I'm not even that old.
posted by Pollomacho at 8:56 AM on March 31, 2006


I once knew a fellow office worker (school holiday temp job) who could read outgoing telex tapes by eye.


Fortunately, she was otherwise extremely peculiar, so I wasn't inspired to emulate this skill - which must have been useful in the history of modern communications for about a nanosecond!
posted by Jody Tresidder at 8:57 AM on March 31, 2006


My first computer
posted by Decani at 9:27 AM on March 31, 2006


Delmoi, "internet" wasn't a word back then.

Yeah it was -- but it was spelled just like that. We didn't have the Internet until later, but there were plenty of internets in the late 70s/early 80s.

"internet" is short for "intranetwork" -- several of the big geek sites had various internets connecting various bodged together networks together in various incompatible ways. ARPANET was an internet, as were the various X.25 based networks. Heck the UUCP backbone of USENET was an internet.

You're right, though, in your core point. USENET had at least 700 sites on 1 Jan 1983, when ARPANET converted to TCP/IP, which marks the birth of the Internet as we know it.

Remember, kids: Flaming predates the Internet.
posted by eriko at 9:52 AM on March 31, 2006


Y'know, I feel real old reading threads like this.

And I'm only 38ish.

I hand-soldered memory chips piggyback-style to my first computer, doubling its memory from 4k to 8k. (I also had to run some wires to control bank switching.)

I did much the same in adding a higher-speed serial port to it so I could use a modem.

I was on Usenet back when it was a dozen or two groups, at a time when alt.sex was always on-topic, highly informative, and Elf Sternberg (sp?) was the resident god.

And I'm pretty sure those of you who are a decade older are dumbfounded at how young I am, just as I'm dumbfounded that there are 1990's-born kids out there who are now remembering "the dark ages when I only had a 14.4k modem and dial-up net access."

[/curmudgeon]
posted by five fresh fish at 10:33 AM on March 31, 2006


And FWIW, the one thing I can't imagine living without these days is this: instant access to nearly the entirety of human knowledge.

It is simply mind-blowing that within a few hours I can find out anything I need to know. Found a weird insect? Identify it. Gotta know how to make sushi? Done. Product reviews? Naturally. Etc.

Most awesome thing ever, this global knowledge repository thing.
posted by five fresh fish at 10:36 AM on March 31, 2006


"We spent hours copying BASIC code into a C64 from books and magazines, hoping to be able to play something better than Wizard of Wor. The code always had syntax errors, even though it was exactly as printed."

Obiwanwasabi, thank you, you brought back some great memories for me. After my Dad brought our first computer home, a TI-99, I'd sit on the floor for hours and read out the BASIC programs for him line by line. Of course, they never worked, and since we had no compiler (gasp, what's that!), I'd have to start reading all over again at the beginning. It sounds like child torture, but it was actually really fun.

When I wasn't doing that, my brothers and I would be fighting over our Atari2600 - trying to get the Yar's Revenge easter egg to appear, or using our parachute accurately in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
posted by Liosliath at 10:47 AM on March 31, 2006


Five fresh fish, you don't need to feel old as long as you've never used a computer with core. (The PDP-8, my first love!)
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 11:26 AM on March 31, 2006


I gotta add to the chorus of 'back whens' -- I too remember a world without pocket calculators, computers, cell phones, remote controls or VCRS, and a world with manual typewriters, reading for pleasure, letters, spelling tests and times tables, and writing essays in longhand. And I'm 40.

Oddly enough I still do a rough draft in longhand when I simply can't order my thoughts any other way: there's something about the single line of ink that can't be corrected, diverted or re-written without starting from scratch. And I find my students do better in in-class essays than term papers: the discipline imposed by a single line of thought is helpful.

Then again, I remember what a *bitch* it was to make a typo on the very last line of a typewritten page. And god bless spellcheck and all its incarnations.

I do worry about information: the net is fabulous for opinion, ideas and entertainment, but like TV it can distort information: students used to rely on outdated, clunky and censored but accurate encylopedias or books, which have largely been replaced by up-to-date, skimpy, inaccuate and heavily plagiarized websites. There's a HUGE division between the quality of work produced by someone who's done all their 'research' on the net and a student who's learnt to use the library.
posted by jrochest at 12:02 PM on March 31, 2006


I am addicted to the internet, but if I wasn't, I would be addicted to something else.
posted by craniac at 12:23 PM on March 31, 2006


Five fresh fish, you don't need to feel old as long as you've never used a computer with core. (The PDP-8, my first love!)

[fffish weeps]

I have used a PDP-8.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:30 PM on March 31, 2006



I remember what a *bitch* it was to make a typo on the very last line of a typewritten page.

I remember liquid paper. Does that still exist?
posted by CunningLinguist at 7:45 PM on March 31, 2006


I'm so jealous of people sho can reminisce about those early, clunky, wonderful computers. I just sort of emerged from the jungle and started college in 1996, when Netscape was in full bloom. Many hours i killed in the computer lab, looking up information on anime, or "japanese animation" as we called it back then.

I still wish that some game company, in a stroke of genius, will create a totally bad-ass, 3-D rendered MMORPG update of "Oregon Trail."
posted by ELF Radio at 1:06 AM on April 1, 2006


It appears that the internet with it's amazing speed makes everyone, no matter how old you actually are, feel very, very old.
posted by piratebowling at 10:54 AM on April 2, 2006


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