Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I was just thinking about this as I redesign my reviews website. I was in junior high before my family got the first computer. I was in high school by the time we got dial-up. Computers when I was little were green and black televisions that sat in the corner of the classroom. The only childhood memories I have in front of a screen come from PBS and Nickelodeon. Most of my childhood are play dates in parks, adventures in the woods, bike rides around town, amusement parks, family vacations.
For the HTFers with younger kids (or even junior high and high school age kids): Do you think they remember a time before the internet? I think the answer to that question has to be one of the biggest generational dividers in history.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

It will be. I did surf the net until my senior year in college. As inventions go, I think it changed the world more than radio and television combined.

I remember when it was a lark to see a "??????.com" in a commercial.

What a seismic shift in a short time.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I'm trying to think of a time before the internet. It was cold... so cold.

I remember finding my way into some university's computer system off of some BBS list I got from someone. That allowed me to view another university's site- not sure what I was doing, but it was interesting digging down through the menus to various stuff. That was 1986, on a Commodore64 with a blazing Hayes (compatible) 1200Baud modem. Good times.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

How about this: the divide between old-time Internet users and today's users. Does anyone remember using Gopher, Archie and Veronica searches, Internet Relay Chat, and other old-style Internet tools? We're all spoiled by Google and today's instant-messaging programs.

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If you entered college in the late 1980s or early 1990s, email was quite common, but the web was nowhere to be found. (Actually, I remember telneting into a web demonstration system around 1992.)

I still use IRC.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Heh. I remember Gopher. The early days of AOL too. Neither of my kids remember a time before the internet. My son was probably no older than 2 or 3 years old (17 now) when AOL came out.

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I think computers in general, and the internet in particular, has had the biggest impact on our lives. Going back a little farther, I remember running to the bank before 3 pm (6 pm on Fri) to cash my paycheck (no ATM's). And I recently asked my brothers 17 year old nephew why the store was called "7-11". He didn't have a clue.

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Kids nothing. *I* can barely remember how we got by without the internet. If you wanted to go out and get some Judas Priest on CD, you pretty much walked into the store and saw what they had. I'm sure there was a way to know exactly what was available and what wasn't, but I can't remember now.

I was on BBS for a while before I hit the internet proper, and I remember a friend trying to describe a web page. "It's got graphics and sound! It's like a presentation on a CD-ROM, but it links to other things!"

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To find out what existed on LP and CD back then you used the printed Schwann catalog.

http://www.musicweb-international.co...edia/s/S37.HTM

I first used an rlogon Internet connection while at UCSD in 1976 and yeah IIRC we used Gopher back then.

What's really a shame is everyone younger than their mid-30's has no recollection of men walking on the moon.

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In the industrialised world outside the USA and Canada, there are probably quite a few kids who can recall life without the Internet. In part because antiquated phone systems couldn't support the Net before major upgrades and also because in some countries, phone charges for using the Net were until recently extortionate. E.g. in the UK until about ten years ago, Net use was costing me an extra $200 a month (pre-broadband I needed a separate phone line and then you were charged by the minute for use of the line). Even now it costs us circa $60 a month to have a broadband connection.

My kids now have their own computers networked to the Net but that only happened this year. This is pretty typical of most UK households - networking within a house has only become commonplace in the last couple of years. Before then, folks were happy to share the one computer.

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My first computer was a Gateway Pentium 100. In 1994 my son was 2 and he played an old dos game on it. A train would go around a track and puffs of smoke came out. When the smoke was a shape, like a triangle, he would hit the space bar. The it would turn int a Teepee and Indians would dance around it. There were different shapes and levels. Real fun stuff. He has been on computer / video games ever since.
I think then we couldn't afford AOL and we used Juno free dialup. I think at first our connection was around 9.1 and we were happy when we finally got 14.4. Both my children were born after the internet took off, so I am sure that they don't remember not having it.

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That's insane!

Don't you guys actually get better broadband over there nowadays compared to what we get on our cable systems?

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I don't know what your special method was, but I used the yellow pages and a telephone! I think home networks only really took off with Wi-Fi. I know I didn't have a router until I moved off campus in college. Thinking about broadband, it's hard to believe that less than one in ten American households had a high-speed connection just seven years ago. Now, of course, with packet shaping and bandwidth throttling, the trend is starting to move the other way...

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Not trying to hijack this thread, but a much more interesting development/dilema is the effect of having the internet at their disposal.
Those children, now adults entering the job market, are used to/accostomed to/can't imagine a world without...instant access to information and people.
Most college grads we hire, cannot imagine turning their cell phones off and not using the internet while they are expected to work from 8-5 !

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I'm talking about even knowing what was in print. I had a Rolling Stone Rock Encyclopedia (still have it, though it's in several pieces), and it would list a band's discography. Before something like 1990 or 1991, there was no Queen on CD, so I could call all the record stores and say, "Do you have Queen's Sheer Heart Attack," and they'd know they didn't but that wouldn't tell me that no one had it. Probably a bad example, since it'd become clear fast that there was no Queen to be had, but for artists who were represented on disc, it would be harder to figure out which albums were out and which were not. In fact, I know that my only method was to walk into the stores and take a look at what they had.

Before someone calls me a whippersnapper, I remember a time when the stores were filled with LPs. At Sound Warehouse, the main floor was LPs, with a fairly nice-sized room full of cassettes. Then, they replaced a couple of rows of bins with CDs, and they slowly took over from there. Now, the internet is slowly doing away with those as well. I love the internet, but I'll never fully embrace downloaded media.

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In most cases we do - now. Over the last few years there's been a drastic overhaul of the phone service. In the main, it wasn't the cable to the house that was the problem but the local exchanges. These have all been upgraded. But ten years ago before you could contemplate getting even a simple network connection you had to have a check done to see if your local system could handle it.

I'm a university professor and the internet has revolutionised my working life. E.g. a case in point. This afternoon I started to write a book chapter and I needed a couple of references to journal articles. Twenty years ago I'd have had to haul my ass to the library and spend the better part of a day tracking them down using printed citation indices, or book (expensive) time with a computer archivist to track them down using one of the two or three machines that could do a very primitive journal search. Now I can type a couple of key words into a computer and have the full text articles on my screen in a millisecond. I tell students starting their PhDs that a literature search used to take 6-9 months of doing nothing but going through the stock of the university library and they look at me like I'm a fossil. I can remember more than one occasion during winter months when I went to the library when it was dark, went down to the old stock section in the (windowless) basement and came back up in the evening when it was dark. I once didn't see daylight for a week. It's a miracle I didn't get rickets. Now students grumble if after doing the basic search (maybe a matter of a day) they have to wait a week for an esoteric journal our library doesn't stock to be delivered by inter-library loan.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

I'll bet Andrew also used to have to climb the stairs - uphill both ways - in the snow from that basement too.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

As incredible as it may seem, I've been working in the computer field for twenty years now, but I've obtained my first real computer only ten years ago! An IBM ThinkPad 600X!

It still works...barely! The battery no longer works, the network card is on its last legs, and the screen is turning yellow. But I can still install Ubuntu on it and all the devices work!

As for the evolutionary discussions, I'm also astonished as to how quickly everything has evolved. But at the same time, I'm also astonished as to how many "retro" items are making a comeback such as vinyl records. I saw a young person yesterday, probably not even twenty years old, carrying a copy of Michael Jackson's "Thriller" LP! And the first thought that crossed my mind is "my God I still have a copy of that LP in my record collection! Oh the horror!"

I still dabble in old technologies such as vinyl records, double-8 and super-8 movie film and cameras, and even old Polaroid Land film technologies. I even filmed and spliced together a couple of my summer vacation trips on 8mm film. It's impressive how the super-8 film's resolution is comparable to high definition video material. Many of my antiques will continue to work reliably for many years as long as I can find the appropriate material that makes them useful such as film stock and records.

On the flip side, it's sad that today's technology doesn't age as well as the old antiques I like to collect. Even though computer technology has dramatically improved our lives for the better, It does irritate me that as soon as a computer component is no longer useful, it's simply thrown away and there's no reason to go back to it.

Still, I'm not looking back. I collect old machines purely for their historical aspect and the enjoyment of seeing how they actually work, often with no need for electricity. But today's technologies such as computers and the Internet are what made me earn a decent living for the last twenty years. And new technologies yet to be introduced will guide me to fantastic new business opportunities in the near future.

The Internet? That's already old hat! Bring me the next big thing! NOW!!!

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Unfortunately, I don't know any high-school kids these days, so I can't just ask and find out. But let's see here... The web was invented by Tim Berners Lee in 1989. I saw it coming into University use in '93; I really saw web pages for the first time around '94. So I'd say that anyone born after 1989 to 1990 will not have known a time before the web. Certainly any kid born in 2000 or later will not have know anything much less than what we consider the web today.

Which is an amazing thing to me. I grew up with the computer revolution, starting with the Timex Sinclair in the early 80s. So I still marvel and enjoy the increased power and program sophistication.

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My brother had one of those Sinclairs. All he did every night was sit in his bedroom and use it. Nobody in my family had any idea what he did with it or why he was fascinated with it....My mother literally thought something was wrong with him and discussed with my father trying to get him to see a psychologist because he never went out and spent every waking moment "wasting his time on that toy" as my mother would say.

He ended up making mom look pretty silly....he got a job managing some Novell based networks eventually, and later worked for stock options at a start up company which eventually went public (and later, bust) during the big IT boom. He retired at age 35.

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I spent the last five-six years working for local government, supervising high school and college student seasonal hires. We never had the internet, because the money wasn't there to network the database. The early years were alot of fun because there was nothing to do during the slow periods but sit around and chat. I knew it was time to move on this last summer when we had a crop of hires as young as fourteen. The room was silent except for me turing pages of a book and the click-clack of their thumbs on cellphone numberpads. Even in the real world, life is apparently better virtualized now...

That said, what desk jobs don't require regular internet use at this point? Even the office I managed would have been much more efficient if we could have network our database to the tax rolls. (Since so much of the work was redundant data collection of information already held by the tax department in a different building.) Interesting point. Most of the CD stores I frequented had a chalkboard that listed upcoming new releases. I'm not really sure what I did for catalog stuff; I was probably to young to care about music older than the present. My degree is in print journalism. I find it incredibly frustrating that reporting has less context than ever before when, thanks to tools like LexisNexis, the past is more accessible than ever before. I think the databases might actually be part of the problem. Before everything was easily available at one's fingers, publications valued staff well-versed in general knowledge. Thanks to technology, knowledgable and well-informed people can be (and have been) replaced with cheaper people who can merely find information. We're quickly learning that they're not the same thing. I enrolled as a Freshman in (ironically) Computer Science. I would spend days in a computer lab arriving before dawn and leaving after midnight, breaking only for class (in the same building) or a trip the vending machine. The lights in the labs were on a motion sensor that would turn the lights off if no motion was detected for a half-hour. I can remember being in a lab full of people and having the lights turn themselves off because no one had moved anything but their hands in that time. Part of why I picked journalism is it was the farthest thing from Computer Science I can find. Sunlight is important...
This is the biggest problem I have with our commodized culture. It used to be a person'd send $200 for a VCR (for instance) and $20-30 to take it somewhere for repair. Now we buy a $60 VCR, and when something goes wrong we throw it out and buy another $60 VCR. There's something incredibly wasteful about that trend. I remember when I had my 95 Cirrus. After pulling into work one day, the receptionist who'd followed me into the lot commented that my break lights weren't working. I checked the bulbs, but they were fine. Turns out there was a circuit board in the tail lights that had malfunctioned. I pulled out the wires for the break lights and the turn signals, bypassed the circuit board and soldered them directly to the wires the bulbs plugged into. Had someone hit the breaks and test the blinkers while I watched from behind. Problem solved. Sometimes technology adds an unnecessary level of complexity.

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I met my first 'serious' girlfriend whilst doing that blasted journal search - great for the first two months and then two years of trying to get rid of her. Believe me, climbing snowy stairs seems idyllic in comparison.

You just don't want to know the image going through my head at this moment.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Before I owned a computer, I would call the local BBS's numbers and listen to the squelch of the modem on the other end waiting for a handshake. I would wonder what it was like to be "online".

My first computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer with a 300 baud modem. Upgraded to a Commodore 64 which kept me happy until I saw Castle Wolfenstein 3D on a PC and bought a Gateway 2000 Pentium 60 with the infamous faulty floating point CPU that was recalled from Intel.

Modems speeds were more important than what computer you were using. 300 baud, 1200 baud, 2400 baud ... 56k was disappointing if your phone line couldn't handle the speed. It was always a challenge to connect and stay at 56k and the phone company couldn't help you.

As with modems, my computers saw upgrades from Pentium 60 > Pentium 90 > Pentium 120 > Pentium 133 > Pentium 166 > Pentium 233 ... it was extremely hard to keep up with the processor speeds back then. It seemed like a new faster CPU came out every month.

As for internet, I remember how it was linked with the local BBS's and you would just FTP to a directory to download some pirated games. Not much else to do with internet until the browsers were introduced.

- Colton

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

My family has always been a bit of a late bloomer when it comes to technology. I never had a computer of my own until 2000 and before that, I only used one either at work for data entry (no web access) or at my friends house (to play pc games such as the amazing text game of Hitchhikers Guide to the galaxy and Fool's Errand).

The first time I ever accessed the internet or email was at a friends house. She needed to " check her email" and showed me on her dial up all about this web thing. I remember it taking forever to load and I lost interest before it even came on.

In 2000 when we got our first computer, I got online to get tickets to a Madonna concert. After that I discovered the message boards over on Depeche Mode.com and then slowly found my way to HTF.

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Even granted the computer nerd stereotype for *ahem* self-gratification, this is a room full of people we're talking about here. As bad as that experience was for me, it wasn't quite that tramatizing.

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I remember that Hitchhikers game! I also remember a Star Trek type text game (and a few others) on the first computer I used at work in around 1982 or so. They had to remove them for obvious reasons. But how good would a Hitchhikers text game be on todays powerful computers. The original one was pretty good, all things considered.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Douglas Adams can write. BBC added graphics to their version, though.

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Filing a Certificate of Death still has to be done on a typewriter and handed to the county clerk in person (mail takes too long). Of course the places that still sell typewriter ribbons know that if you're buying ribbon you must really, really need it and so they can mark it up eighty billion percent.

Re: Do today's kids remember a time before the internet?

Could this be it ?

I too played that around the same time. Blew my mind away. my junior high had Apple IIs. next step was high school and their TRaSh of the 80s (TRS 80) then they and a friend of mine moved on to PCs by 85-87.
I had a Commodore 64 at home. Bummed around with other C-64 owners. One friend moved on to the Amiga in 87/88ish.
From there, PCs took over my life at college.
First used IRC around 92, pre-WEB. Then compuserve then the web hit and the rest is history.

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What did we do before the internet? Lots of questions/inquiries must have gone unanswered. But now, all you have to do is mention some obscure, early attempt at a video game and someone has the details. Like these two: Thanks for the link, Jeremy. I haven't had a chance to look at it yet but it's on my lengthly "to do" list. I think it is! I Couldn't remember if it was actually named Star Trek or not. Played that stupid thing for hours (mostly off the clock) until they pulled the plug on it.