What was life like without the internet?

Fewer cumshots before the Internet.

People actually knew things, instead of knowing where to find things (there is a big difference).

You had to read the paper the next day to find out what happened the day before.

For running, the top times were released once a month in magazines. There wasn't a good way of knowing what people around the country were doing. I remember running a 2:06 800 and wondering where that put me in the state rankings. It turned out that the answer was nowhere, but you had to wait until the end of the season to see where you stood on a state level.

Kids played outside after school everyday, and came running home to mom at 6:30 in time for dinner. No electronics to distract anyone.

Did I mention that ejaculations have increased exponentially since the internet showed up?

I agree with 'stuff you like to pee out'

A degree is worthless and if you're motivated you can learn mostly for free or very low cost.

jim jones wrote:

I agree with 'stuff you like to pee out'

A degree is worthless and if you're motivated you can learn mostly for free or very low cost.

^ One more moron.

I don't want to start a rhubarb here--this is just an observation--but people seemed to be less polarized, religiously speaking, back then. Yeah, you believed or you didn't, but most people didn't seem to make a fuss about it either way.

With the Internet (and its tagline, "where religions come to die"), people seem to feel much more obliged to pick an extreme position now. If anything, there seem to be *more* young-Earthers now, for instance, and many more "out" atheists. Maybe it's a coincidence and unrelated to the 'Net, I don't know.

What frequently boggles *my* mind is remembering that there was no YouTube before 2005! How did we live?

Do yourselves a favor and don't have the internet at home. Especially if you have kids. Go to someplace like a cafe when you want to use the internet. Read books at home.

brick and mortar record shops, brick and mortar video stores, raves with map points that could be heard from a quarter mile away, random encounters with people on the street cause everybody wasn't such a homebody, random encounters with drugged up naked raver chicks at parties mentioned above.

I was born in 1980, meaning I lived my entire childhood without the internet. I recall using it for the first time at age 16 or 17, there were AOL chat rooms. But the internet wasn't widely used until I was in college, around 2000 when I was 20.

Anyway, I remember these things:

- When I had to write a report, I would start by looking up the subject in the encyclopedias at the school library. Then from there I could look for further primary or secondary sources.

- I used to use the phone book. If you wanted to call someplace in your home town or even surrounding towns, they would be in the phone book. Phone books also had town maps, which was useful. I think they also had a telephone sports/trivia service which was free. I could call and get automated sports scores rather than waiting for the newspaper the next day.

- USA Today used to publish baseball stats for every player in the league once a week. My friends and I played fantasy baseball and we would have to transcribe our player's stats from the newspaper, compile them, then submit them to our team commissioner on a weekly basis.

- How I found out about the good runners in the country was that Runners World or Running Times had a free high school supplemental section that our coach got for free. That's where I was able to read about Michael Stember, Sharif Karie, and Jonathan Riley threatening 4-flat. It was so much faster than anyone else was running in my area, they didn't human.

More later, gotta get back to work.

taquito wrote:

I don't know, but I'm sure you can Google it.

/thread

swag dome chicks n sht wrote:

[quote]Bad Wigins wrote:

Those of you who are like 35+, would you rather be in the pre-internet age or this age? I think that Facebook really screws our generation up sometimes...

This looked like a troll thread at the start, but this is an interesting question. I choose the internet age and to be not part of Facebook.

Well we were outside more. We played more and used our imagination. We used creative thinking skills, created our own games, built things and blew shit up.

The negative? When your parents were an hour late you were board out of your mind waiting for them.

That's about it.

GR Runner wrote:

What's your address? I will write and mail my reply.

Ha! That's good... and true for those times.

Can anyone under 30 even write in cursive anymore? What a disgrace!

Growing up, my family would sit around the radio at night and listen to Paul Harvey. If we wanted to learn about a subject outside of school we actually had to use encyclopedias.

There was way less corporate advertising in our lives!

And the govt didn't know squat about us!

Played Math Blaster a lot

I remember trying to do research for papers in college and being referred to resources in microfiche, which was a nightmare, and almost never produced results. For those not familiar with it, imagine reading a film version of a newspaper with a microscope.

I started writing papers in middle school on a typewriter, and then we got an electric typewriter, which seemed awesome. Then for college, my parents bought me an early version of what I think was like a Mac Notebook. Basically a laptop that was just able to create documents. I saved them to a hard disk. Seemed pretty high-tech at the time.

While things may be easier as an adult with access to the internet, I'll still take growing up in the pre-internet times. I rode my bike or walked everywhere. We could leave the house for hours at a time, and as others have stated, played a ton of sports and made up games like I haven't seen today's youth be capable of.

You read more, got more done, but it took longer. Many things you can do much more quickly now and the wealth of information is almost limitless, but it's like having 100,000 cable channels for TV when all you might really need is three networks, PBS, a movie channel, and sports.

Sit down on this log and I'll tell you what it was like.

Back in the day. I used to work research at various institutions of higher education. We had computers as long as 30 years ago (before that it was mostly geeks, or just short timing in a lab for stats or a database search). But if you wanted information you went to the library.

At the library you would walk over and find the card catalogue and flip through those, searching by author or title. When you located your reference you wrote it down on an index card and hoped your handwriting was good enough to read once you got into the stacks. Usually you'd take several references at a time (say three to ten).

Then you'd have to find out where in the library the darn things were. A map could help you, and if that proved too much then ask a reference librarian. Human contact, what a concept.

On the way up, you might stop into the periodicals section and find USA Today to see Dick Patrick's reports on the latest running events. Or you might dig into the newspapers from various regions when you knew there was a big race in say the Twin Cities, or LA or Chicago. You might get a listing of the top 100 men and women at some of these events.

If you had some more time to kill you might look at a recent Sports Illustrated (they'd occassionally have some running-related articles) or Track and Field News, which were published about 3 or 4 months after the event. So now in July, you might be reading about Mt. Sac, Penn, and Drake Relays, and seeing if you recognized anyone running 29:30 or even 28:40 for 10K (you probably would have picked up on some bloke going 27:50, as that was significant news).

Back to the stacks, armed with you index cards, you'd take the stairs or elevator to some remote section of the library and set out to find your reading materials.

Once you found your sources either you had a copy card or a bunch of change, or you'd go to a cubicle or desk to take copious or cryptic notes. Or you could check out the books.

Being one of maybe a dozen or two running geeks in a town of 50,000 - 100,000 you might bump into a buddy on the way back from the library, so you'd pop into the campus bagel shop for a bite an talk about the recent issue of Running Times or the Runner (never-ever Runners World!), or maybe a blip from NY Times.

Back to the office and onto your PC (that is post 1984-85) or could dive into the articles that you just xeroxed. Forget about running for a few hours and be lost in your work, maybe daydream a bit about the upcoming afternoon workout or next week's race.

That's how it was in the good old days.

jim jones wrote:

I agree with 'stuff you like to pee out'

A degree is worthless and if you're motivated you can learn mostly for free or very low cost.

Yeah, that's why consulting is a dying profession and all those experts can't make crap for a living (kind of like horse whip manufacturers). Who the heck needs experts when anyone can be an expert on anything if they are just motivated?

Well, there weren't five different versions of the truth. News articles were vetted and sources were verified BEFORE publishing. Opinion was not considered fact as it is today, and being anonymous was very difficult. You needed to be able to back up what you were saying because your name and face were attached to your 'facts'. If you were wrong or crazy, you were dismissed and forgotten, and not let back in the door.