Do you remember a time before the internet?

I remember sending drawings via fax, going to school without a smartphone and using a landline (home phone) to call people. I was born in the nineties and I’m always amazed by how far technology has come in such a short amount of time but I also know that it has a long way to go!

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I was very young and my father had an old computer, with this router that used to make this typical sound when it would connect to the internet (i can even remember the tones to this day). It was the good old days, when I had to wait for 3 minutes for the computer to start the session ahah !

Then, in the early 2000s everything went faster and faster, and has never slowed down since. This is still unsettling for me to be honest !

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Oh yes, I remember the sound of dial-up internet well. If I was online in the 90s and one of my parents needed to use the house phone, they’d shout “Who’s on the internet? I need to use the phone!” As you say, the sheer speed with which technology is progressing is quite alarming!

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When I was 6/7 years old my school held an assembly to introduce us to EMAIL. We sent an email to a school about an hour away. It took us about 45 minutes to receive a response. They were having the same type of general assembly. That was before the web, somewhere between '91 and '93. The teachers were blown away, the students didn’t get it.
It was another 5 years before I was on the Internet or World Wide Web. Those were the days. Altavista and alt.box.sk, Netscape, Hotmail before it was bought by Microsoft, and hours spent really learning how to use computers. It sounds stupid, but when Internet was slow, like 14 baud and 28kbps modem slow, we spent lots of time testing out all of the things Word (probably Corel at the time) and Excel could do. I remember making a PPT on Windows 3.1 using Excel to create the slides and PowerPoint Viewer to show it to the teacher. It was just for fun, it was creative too, and it was simple and goofy. Our teachers let us take computers apart and put them back together too.
Most people my age preferred being outside before the Web and Social Networks found a way to suck our time and data.

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These were the good ol’ days… :3
Now, we have to move on and manage to find balance in all this ahah.

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Yes and no! A version of the internet existed all the time I was alive, but I wasn’t aware of it until we got Prodigy BBS in the mid-90s, with the wonderful/awful dial-up sound, and I didn’t do much online until I went away to college in the early 2000s. I don’t think I ever sent anything by fax, though.

I used to spend tremendous amounts of time just reading random forums and exploring. In some ways I miss those days. I learned a lot and gained a lot of empathy. Having an entirely online job killed most of my enthusiasm for reading on a screen, and I never took to the new social media platforms at all - so outside of work I’m a lot less “offline” now than I was in 2005.

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Yeah! Good to see I’m not the one who remembers the Box network (they’re still online, btw). Can’t beat an orange screen terminal on 2600 baud and a blue box. Poor kids these days don’t know what they’re missing.

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A bit inappropriate, but it’s just life anyway: I remember as a teenager to download XXX pictures over 56k modem in early 90s. Heart nearly stopped beating when waiting until the image loads from top to bottom in 5 minutes :slight_smile:

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I remember that too. :slight_smile:
Also, same as you @anon32618512, I remember my mom screaming “Turn that THING off!! I want to make a call!” when I was using dial-up internet. :wink:

Also when I changed my Nokia 3310 to iPhone 3Gs I remember that I had like 100mb of data with my SIM card. And I didn’t use this package in its entirety per month.

The world has changed and the amount of data transferred is unbelievable.

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I do! My father had dial-up through the 90’s for work, but I never used it and didn’t see the point. Most of the websites back then were simple novelty affairs, placeholders for corporations staking a claim on domains. I was also too young and to care much about usenet and newsgroups and all that stuff. By the time we got internet at my house that I was allowed to use, I was 11, and chatrooms open to the public (like the old MSN rooms) were in vogue. I spent a lot of time in those. I’d outgrown playing with toys by then anyways.
So yes, I do remember! I remember how exciting it was to have a landline phone plugged into my room so I could call my friends on their landline phones. I remember having to ask if so-in-so was home. I remember knocking on doors to see if a friend was around. I remember going into local businesses and asking to use their phone to call my parents when I was out. There was a feeling of autonomy then that doesn’t exist now. You had to make your own decisions, trust your own gut, your own sense of direction. You had to rely on street smarts. None of this “Hey, Google!” when you’re the least bit unsure of yourself.

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Well, I was born in 1980 and I even remember the times without a computer, then the era of the great zx spectrum with the cassette player, then my first and bulky pc with floppy disks, the noisy modem…

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I still remember my Commodore Amiga 500. :wink:
And the days spent outside without distractions, with no phones, without parents constantly checking on our location :wink: where best of the best.
On the other hand, these days are not to bad tho.

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Speedball 2!

I had an Amiga last for 12 years before we got a home PC. Didn’t get home internet til 2000 (33kbps on Dreamcast of all things).

Obviously the internet is very useful, but there is value in being able to escape from it.

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To answer the question, yes and no. What do I mean by that? Well I’m a child of the 90’s and grew up in a poor household. We didn’t have the internet at home, but. It did exist at my school. During Elementary and Middle school. The internet was this magical other world full of possibilities. Especially to a young child. I actually didn’t regularly use the internet until I was an adult, but when I was able too, I become addicted to it. Took a few years to break that addiction. I do miss my High School years were most kids didn’t even own a phone, those that did have flip and candy bar phones and people more apt to hang out, be cool, and not be distracted by social media. Those were the days.

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