Pre-Internet Days

I guess I am on a bit of a nostalgic binge and so would like to talk about the world before the internet.

In many eyes, we were outside more and not glued to screens, active and glowing with health, living the pre-download life; sort of. We of a pre-2000 generation like to reminisce that we as kids were on our bikes without helmets all day with other neighbourhood kids, drinking from garden hoses and living some kind of spartan existence of scraped knees and parental neglect. It seems to be a bit of a fashion to recall going home when streetlights come on after a day of climbing trees and being chased by dogs, bulls, goats, ducks and any other animal real and imagined. It did happen but we also had plenty of downtime. From personal experience, we watched a lot of TV on big three-dimensional boxes and listened to music on hi-fi systems that these days seem outdated but quaint. We weren’t exactly Huck Finns or Our Gang ideals; more like Brady kids and casts of a bad 1980s horror flick.

Many memes populate the internet now about how we used the phone and ordered food and paid bills and checked the time or weather. List, lists, lists. More lists are to come.

How did we cope not being able to book, read, write, watch, debate, flirt, invest, expand, create, cheat, blog, vlog, masturbate, stalk, bank, troll and chat online?

We had travel agents, books and magazines, writing paper and typewriters, television, meetings, canvases, X rated magazines, deposit and withdrawal slips, letters, subscriptions and other paper items.

We turned up a friend’s houses unannounced many times, expecting a coffee and a chat out in the back garden.

We bought expensive plane tickets in triplicate and travellers’ cheques, guarding them with our very life.

Oh, I could go on, but I won’t even though it’s tempting.

The picture I am painting is not as grim and primitive as younger people would imagine it to have been. We survived and progressed.

But it is sobering to think that in the future the last person to have licked a stamp for an envelope will one day die.

And then there’s AI.

Another blog.