What did people do before the Internet?

[Airencracken]

I've been spending a lot of time on the internet lately. Mostly because I finally have a semi-broadband connection (non-dialup, 768k DSL) and a working computer that is somewhat speedy (no longer my 500mhz Pentium II). Now I find myself wonder what I used to do with the time I've been spending on the internet. Now obviously some online tasks have replaced IRL tasks, such as paying bills and e-mail, but I'm finding it hard to imagine being disconnected from the internet. Even now, I'm using the internet as a medium to express my confusion with it. It's bizarre. Now maybe I've just been staring at my 19" CRT too long and I've fried my brain with radiation or something like that, but I'm inclined to believe that I have some sort of point somewhere. I still read quite a bit, I still do most of the things I always have done, so where is the time displacement? I don't know. Am I sacrificing IRL communication in order to increase e-communication (or i-communication for you apple users. )?

I don't know, maybe I just need a Mt.Dew.

[DarkFury]

Before the internet... I just watched TV and took much longer naps.

[Airencracken]

I guess TV could be part of it. I don't watch TV almost ever anymore...

[clutchy]

I've had a computer since... I think it was '85 or '87 IBM pc Jr... I started surfing aol chat rooms around 92/93. My friend showed me the WWW by way of porn. Seriously first use of the web for me.

and it's snowballed into an obsession since then...mostly games. It's pretty ridiculous that i don't know more about coding or web design. I'd say i've just used my computing for nothing...
25btw.

[Yossarian]

i've had once for the past 10 years, and i'm 20, so i was out side playi baseball ans other kid ****

[Memo]

Socialized, exercised, drank, ****ed.

[DaFunkyUnit]

remember the movie Mallrats?

there ya go.

[Airencracken]

****ed.

Does net pr0n count?

j/k

[ialsohaveadream]

What's the Internet?

[Itsme]

I've made more good friends through the Internet than I ever did without it.

[DarkFury]

Does net pr0n count?

j/k

Umm... that would be called "Cybering" back then.

[MikeD]

Heh, we were a lot less lazy than we are now.

[zero2dash]

Before the internet, there were AOL chat rooms and IRC.
Before AOL and IRC, there were BBS boards (back in the 14.4 days).
Before that, there was Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.
Before those, there was Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. (and Nintendo/Sega Master System before them as well)
Before then...life sucked.

/sums up my 28 y/o life

[jstreet]

Before the internet, there were AOL chat rooms and IRC.
Before AOL and IRC, there were BBS boards (back in the 14.4 days).
Before that, there was Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.
Before those, there was Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. (and Nintendo/Sega Master System before them as well)
Before then...life sucked.

/sums up my 28 y/o life

, completely and totally... who remembers playing Usurper & Legend of the Red Dragon on the BBS? Oh, the memories of my text-based life, mixing potions and sleeping with Violet the barmaid.

[Markel]

(back in the 14.4 days)
/sums up my 28 y/o life

Obviously a youngster. I can remember when 300 baud was an improvement over the 110 baud (aka KSR- and ASR-133) communications. And when Vadic figured out a way to boost that to 1200 in the early 1970s, we were REALLY impressed.

[Jeffbx]

I remember when a buddy & I rented a 9600 baud modem because he didn't have enough time credit on the elite BBS to download the full beta of DOS 6.2 at 2400 baud, but it was too expensive to buy a faster modem.

It's hard to believe I ever got married.

[zero2dash]

Obviously a youngster.

14.4 was the first modem I had in a computer. Compaq Presario 520 CDS...486 with Windows 3.1 and...4 megs of RAM? Hell I remember when I got the Mac afterwards, which was a LC475 with a 100 MB hard drive, a floppy, no cd, and 4 megs of RAM. I still can't believe I was able to have about 20 applications installed + the OS (System 7.51) on a 100 MB hard drive and still have like 40 megs of free space.

Youngster - yes.
On the cusp of the revolution - damn straight.

I also had a Sega Saturn NetLink as my first 28.8 modem using Concentric as the ISP before getting a PowerMac and an external 56k back in...97 maybe?

[Markel]

Before the Internet (and before the PC) - in college (and my first two jobs) I was working with a version of the PDP-8 (probably the closest thing to the first PC). In those days, punched tape was a common program storage medium (DEC wasn't so big on punched cards). The standard version of this computer had 4K of memory (12-bit words). Most real programming was done in assembler. Those were the days....

[DarkFury]

Heh... I remember a friend of mine who got his 300 baud modem tossed in the trashcan because he ran up a $200 phone bill by connecting to various "long distance" BBS servers.

His momma was SOOO mad, she almost tossed his whole computer (a Commodore 64) in the trash as well. It was TOO funny... he was cryin' his eyes out.

[ShawnLee]

Oh, the memories of my text-based life, mixing potions and sleeping with Violet the barmaid.

Funny, in your text-based life, you slept with a woman. Unless Violet... was A MAN!!!

It's hard to believe I ever got married.

14.4 was beyong my imagination the first time I went online... Nothing like Markel's experience, probably most lke zero2dash's.

Man... I remember flipping out because 56k was so freakin' crazy fast... And when the v92 protocol was standardized? Woo!!!!
Now? If it doesn't pop up immediately, I have half a mind to ping a website trying to figure out what's wrong.

Ah yes, back in the days of Dos 6, where Microsoft was getting sued and had to downgrade in their upgrade to 6.22...
Command lines and "Bad command or file name" repeating over and over.
When some games would flip out and play too fast if you upped the CPU clock on the 486 from 25mhz to the "turbo setting" of 33 mhz.

Shoot, and that's without going back to the XT monochrome computer.

[Devhux]

My first computer was an 8088-based Hewitt-Rand PC -- which was ahead of its time. It had a 4.77MHz CPU that could run at 8.4MHz (oddly, one of the first "turbo-enabled" computers I ever saw), 640K of RAM, a newfangled 3.5" floppy drive (720k) and a MONSTEROUS 40 megabyte hard drive.

A few years later I received a 14.4 modem for my birthday and we somehow got it to work in that system (it wasn't easy though). Played a bit on BBS systems (I fondly remember L.O.R.D.). Once I got my 486 around 1994, we went with an Internet provider -- and I've been hooked ever since.

[BigJon]

There was life before computers and the internet?

I used to (and still do) read a lot. I drew. I went outside a lot. That's pretty much it.

When we got our first PC...we didn't have internet...so we just played Monster Truck Madness and Mechwarriors.

[DarkFury]

When we got our first PC...we didn't have internet...so we just played Monster Truck Madness and Mechwarriors.

Heh... YOUNG'UN!!!!

Man.. with our first pc.. we played ZORK!


/you have stepped into a room
/your lantern has gone out... and now it is dark

look around

/you can not see... it is dark
/you were eaten by a GRUE that stepped into the room. You are dead. A bright light envelops you and you find yourself lying in a field.

[Houdini]

Heh... YOUNG'UN!!!!

Man.. with our first pc.. we played ZORK!


/you have stepped into a room
/your lantern has gone out... and now it is dark

look around

/you can not see... it is dark
/you were eaten by a GRUE that stepped into the room. You are dead. A bright light envelops you and you find yourself lying in a field.

Heh...I remember those. Along with Pirate's Adventure, bowling, Oregon Trail, etc. All loaded from AUDIO TAPE to my Ti-994A. You could also save stuff to audio tape. Either way, it took FOREVER to load, and 5.25 DS floppies were just hitting the streets. Yeah, a 300 or so baud modem was available for it (the kind you had to put your telephone receiver on), but I never bothered. I DID get the voice synthisizer though, so I could make it talk like M.C. Hawking. I spent many an afternoon with friends trying to find out the proper sequence of letters to get it to utter the proper pronunciations of various vulgarities.

14.4 was beyong my imagination the first time I went online... Nothing like Markel's experience, probably most lke zero2dash's.

Man... I remember flipping out because 56k was so freakin' crazy fast... And when the v92 protocol was standardized? Woo!!!!
Now? If it doesn't pop up immediately, I have half a mind to ping a website trying to figure out what's wrong.....
When some games would flip out and play too fast if you upped the CPU clock on the 486 from 25mhz to the "turbo setting" of 33 mhz.

Shoot, and that's without going back to the XT monochrome computer.

I remember those days as well. A buddy of mine at the time bought a 14.4 while I was still clipping along at 2400 with a Wang Exec 3051 386sx20. 124 MB hard drive, though...very big for those times. Then, ahh...the 486. Mine went from 33-66 w/turbo. I was screamin'. Especially after I, with way too much time, loaded Slackware, bugs and all.

Before the internet, there were AOL chat rooms and IRC.
Before AOL and IRC, there were BBS boards (back in the 14.4 days).
Before that, there was Heretic, Rise of the Triad, Doom, and Wolfenstein 3D.
Before those, there was Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. (and Nintendo/Sega Master System before them as well)

Actually, I was on Prodigy for "serious stuff," and local BBS boards (at 2400) for local fun stuff. Still, Heretic came way after the advent of the internet as we know it today. I remember running Netscape and those other browsers that were very primitave at the time a couple of years before Heretic hit the scene. The net was around when Doom came out as well, but people had limited access or simply didn't know how to use it, as so much was text-based. But yeah, Wolf 3d really pre-dated any semblance of what we now call the internet.

[jstreet]

I vividly remember one of the first DOS tricks I learned to attrib Wolfenstein 3D files to make them hidden so the sysadmins at school couldn't find them. Glorious.

[zippyjuan]

I took a computer class in high school and there were two types of computers in the lab. One kind used punch cards and the other used a paper tape with holes in it. The printer was a noisy one that had a spinning head.

[Houdini]

I vividly remember one of the first DOS tricks I learned to attrib Wolfenstein 3D files to make them hidden so the sysadmins at school couldn't find them. Glorious.

Very nice.

[Freelance Superhero]

i apparently belong here even less than i first thought i did...

[ShawnLee]

I vividly remember one of the first DOS tricks I learned to attrib Wolfenstein 3D files to make them hidden so the sysadmins at school couldn't find them. Glorious.

Ha! You had computers at school that could run Wolfenstein? Man, I forget that you're younger than me.

I remember being freaked out by being able to run the Oregon Trail on the APple II/e's.
"How can the school afford such things? For each classroom?!?!?!"

And man... A class project when I lived up in Cupertino (ah, the silicon valley) was to make a rudimentary web page on the old Macs where you told a fairy tale through visual manipulation of the mouse on "hyper-texts" that were connected. "These hyper-texts will change the way we think about computers in the future. You'll be hyper-texting from file to file all over a network of inter-connected computers! You'll be able to share hyper-texts with your friends!"

Obviously, the language wasn't set in stone at that point. I wonder when that teacher finally tried to give up making people say "hyper-texts" to the files and went along with "links" to pages.

Of course, this was in the days where I had to have one disk for my PC files, and another for my Mac files. Stupid Apple-Mac people...

[irwin]

And man... A class project when I lived up in Cupertino (ah, the silicon valley) was to make a rudimentary web page on the old Macs where you told a fairy tale through visual manipulation of the mouse on "hyper-texts" that were connected. "These hyper-texts will change the way we think about computers in the future. You'll be hyper-texting from file to file all over a network of inter-connected computers! You'll be able to share hyper-texts with your friends!"

Were you using HyperStudio? If so, we had the same little project.