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Back in my day...

The internet was not on computers, it was between people.

Less information was available because less data existed. The error rate seems unchanged however.

Newspapers mattered and you could see actual news on a TV. Radio stations used humans to play vinyl and they were individually owned and operated. They were not owned by 3 corporations sending out the same content everywhere. Actual music, not music product, could be heard if you looked for it.

People who didn't believe that we walked on the moon were correctly identified as idiots. Notwithstanding, many people who got the whole moon thing still believed that copper bracelets pulled poison from your body.

Since the internet, we've learned that that's not true about copper. The real deal is mystical crystals that focus your energy to destroy the toxins. Braided ropes of metal do this as well and also make you a better ball player. No one knew that before.

The Scopes Monkey Trial decided the fate of creationism in schools. It was laughed out.

Everyone who threw spitwads, laughed in science class and then grew up stupid and left behind discovered that with the internet they could organize and vote for their children to be just as stupid.

Honest consumer advice was hard to come by, you had to go by word of mouth and most all of what you heard was third hand.
 
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Back in my day : radio pirates. Between England and the Netherlands on the English Channel there were illegal radio pirateships. Called : Radio Caroline and Radio Veronica. Radio Veronica is still in the dutch sky as Veronica broadcast organisation. Simply called Radio Veronica.
 
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It was a whole universe in its own way back then. Beautiful ships, .....the crew,......the music. I talk 60's now , the music from the USA in that day, the soul from Muscle Shoals, and Detroit. Those days are never coming back. Today there is Itunes, but i like the oldfashioned way, to hear a tune and want the record. Gladly there is Google, and from there you find your way to buy the record. Even if you have to buy a plane ticket to get the record from Amoeba Records on Sunset yourself.

We did that ...........
yoji.gif
 
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Babies got to wear cotton diapers. Which felt so aweful once wet, that you were potty trained in no time.

A phone was a thing not every household could afford. Neighbours shares luxuries like that (tv set included) It was a heavy, black thing with a turntable to select the numbers and make a call. The hearing and microphone part was connected to the main device with a wire.

You didn't need to wear belts in the car, in the back nor in the front seats. Kids didn't need helmets on when they were bicycling. Women were smoking their lungs out while pregnant, and sigarets were offered in glasses on the table when you had visitors.
Smoking was deadnormal everywhere; even the newsreader on tv was puffing.

Kids would run or cycle home after school, or to their play dates with friends. They would play outside, safely in the streets. Being offline.
 
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You also had party lines on phones. One party always seemed to hog the phone, and if they weren't talking the other parties were listening to your conversation.

I had an elderly relative revert at one time. He picked up the phone and kept yelling at "Central" to get him his number!

There were no zip codes, and phone numbers were 5 digits. Then went to a word prefix like Capital - CA7, then to the 3 digit we have today.
 
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In my "youth" there was no internet. The phone was in the hall and never rung unless a family member had an accident, died, or it was Christmas and you had the obligatory call to relatives in Australia. TV had three channels all of which closed down before 12.30am with either a test card, nothing at all or "Teletext or Ceefax" Until around 7.00am.

Home computers came with 1k of RAM and 16k of ROM (that held the OS, such as it was) The RAM was used to program the thing in BASIC or Assembly language. You could load software via audio cassette into the 1k memory. They had a monochrome display and had to be plugged into the coax aerial socket in the back of your telly. Once it was switched off (ie you pulled the power jack) it reverted to the state it was out of the box. Nothing could be saved on it and only saved to said audio cassette.

Rainy Sunday afternoons in winter were spent playing cards, dominoes, cluedo or Monopoly with friends and family. Sunny summer sundays were spent in the woods or park getting sunburnt. Home by dark or else. When said home computer arrived all Sundays were spent "POKING" in hex characters into a "REM" statement above a flag in the 1k RAM called RAM_TOP to make rudimentary space invaders that crashed on RUNNING. A bit later these same Zilog Z80 based computers became colour, got 48K memories and had rudimentary high res graphics. A 48k game or other thing used to take 5minutes to load from audio cassette, entire weekends were spent entering Assembly language or Hex code into it to make a maze game or platform game.

Home tech improved in leaps every five years, not five weeks. A VHS video recorder was regarded as cool, a BETAMAX one even cooler, and music was played from a vinyl disc or recorded from the radio using the same audio cassette recorder that was used for the computer.

I was young, very young, and thought I knew it all. Now I am approaching middle age and realise I actually know very little, but a heck of a lot more than I did.
 
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Well do I remember PEEKing and POKEing the VRAM, among other things... of course, when I was young, computers were bug things that occupied entire rooms.

Board games were great for rainy days-- Life, Stratego, Chess... my sister would literally own the bank in Monopoly, but I always won Scrabble.

My dad was retired Navy, so we learned card games like Rook (that was a special deck), Hearts and Spades. We also learned Acey-Deucey, which is an aggressive variation on Backgammon.
 
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Memes were called post cards.

Tinkering with your phone meant Ma Bell might catch you and deny you phone service for the rest of your life.

Other adults would beat you for misbehaving. Then your parents would beat you for embarrassing them by convincing others that they didn't beat you enough to behave. No one went to jail for that. :D

YouTubes existed only for children. They entailed a box with a big screen hole cut out and hand puppets. If you didn't have puppets you pretended that you did. The soundtrack had three voice types - falsetto, low and slow, and arguing that the voice types were being done wrong.

Surprisingly, those YouTubes often had commercial breaks.

There was an undying myth propagated that two cans or paper cups connected by a waxed string was sufficient to form the core of a covert communication system. Despite the endless failures to make this system work, adults kept telling children that it would if they did it right. Following that and prior to the invention of the Internet, a large number of young people turned to drug abuse.

Experts still wonder why.
 
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