Hey old guys, what did people do in before computers/internet?

While cleaning out my office in preparation for retirement, I pulled out 2 slide rules. The young engineers enjoyed watching the fossil run through some calculations ;)

Drank beer, smoked some dope and fooled around with chicks.

How the Internet was born at UCLA

http://www.dailynews.com/news/ci_13669715

My son earned a Degree in I.T. and is now a security specialist in that field.

We never owned a computer while he was a Student.

He used to go to the Uni in the middle of the night and use theirs.

We didn't feel the need to give everyone updates on what we were doing / thinking / feeling every 15 minutes.

Our friends were people we actually hung out with. We didn't have hundreds of them.

We would call all the stores in town to find the best price for an item.

We would write a paper longhand and edit it before typing it.

We would go to the library to research a topic.

We would balance our checkbooks by hand

We paid for music.

A lot of my time went for waiting for buses. On a good day, I could be waiting, oh, 2.5 - 3 hours.

I used to leave the house a lot. You actually had to leave home to meet women. In college, in a rural village in the American wilderness, I went to every concert, film society classic, and play they had, and I absorbed novels by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Stendhal. We'd sit around having meaningless discussions about who the best guitarists and drummers were that seemed pretty meaningful at the time.

When I became a journalist of sorts, I used to cut and paste (actually tape) articles I wrote and then Xerox the pages. For even older guys in the pre-Xerox days, coping must have been hard. I used to use snail mail to send my article to editors.

Ask photographers what they did in the era before digital. That really was an entire other existence.

other Swede wrote:

As for measuring distance...something like maymyrun.com would have been right up there with the Jetsons. I remember getting a city map from the local chamber of commerce and tracing my loops around town with a ruler (1" = 1/2 mile or something like that)and drawing them in different colored pencils. It got better when I was old enough to drive and could measure routes that way (but had to drive them twice, just to make sure).

Man, I was (am) a dork!

That is EXACTLY what I did. Turns out that hilly 4.3 mile loop I did was really only 4 miles. I did run on the highway a lot more though because there were mile markers. Of course they were all off some, but I got to know which were shorter than the others. Some of those markers have never been moved in 30 years and are still as inaccurate as ever.

We were able to carry on an intelligent conversation on a variety of subjects, something the internet crowd seems incapable of. Computers have ruined their communication skills, both written and verbal. Too bad.

We just sat around and watched the Ed Sullivan Show, Milton Berle, The Honeymooners, Archie Bunker and Liberace. Then we told each other lies about how it was in the good old days.

shut up wrote:

Off the Grid wrote:

There is more information in 1 week of NY Times than everything a person ever learned in his life 100yrs ago.

The main form of communication was print - newspapers, books, writing letters. TV was the means of indoctrination for everybody.

Ideas tended to be localized. So I grew up in DC, and had no idea what NYC was like, or any appeal it might hold.

New movie? Had to see an ad in the paper. Review? Had to be printed the day you were checking.

The first sentence of your post is full of shit.

Maybe not 100 years ago, but pretty close. I recall reading about Ben Franklin being multi-talented and it was apparently not horribly difficult to be an "expert" on countless subjects back in the good old days because there wasn't so much information.

There were doctor/lawyers. People who invented amazing products and were musical and literary geniuses. The Renaissance Man is dead.

Waited for the monthly TNF News to get race results from outside your region. Felt like you had begun to make it when your name was mentioned in the brief meet highlights rather than just in the results.

Was enroute to hit the black jack tables alot. The ladies took up most of my time. Lots of weekend trips and dancing. Always enroute somewhere. I use computers and cells now, but never noticed any difference in the old days to today. Cells are little more easier but always got my calls in and out no biggy. Computers are just a game like playing xbox

Yes. Track and Field News was the way to get results...of races from 1-2 months ago. It really was the bible of the sport.

Sometimes the paper would have results.

News at 11.

Lot's of TV.

Just walking around campus hanging out and not keeping up with my assignments.

No cell phone.

My parents didn't even have an answering machine until I was in high school.

Thanks Al Gore!