We were paranoid about sex, but that meant condoms were everywhere! For free! Just baskets of condoms everywhere you went! In shops! In the nurses office! Everywhere you went as a teen they were plying you with condoms!
Man, how times have changed…
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It sounded like a Yeti mating call.
And using the Internet would horrendously drive up the cost of the phone bill, because both used the same landline. There was no Ethernet yet.
Don’t forget about LAN parties. We’d all haul our computer equipment* to one guy’s house, then set up a local area network, and play on our local network in the dark.
*not laptops. Laptops weren’t powerful enough yet to support video gaming.
When we were able to connect remotely, we’d strap the landline headset to our heads with a belt or duct tape or something, then go on a multi-party call with our teammates so we could strategize via voice chat while we played our games. Not even joking.
That alone is enough to confuse a late Millennial or Gen Z.
Whippersnapper. In my day, you had to call Marian the Librarian directly and ask her, and she would look it up in a card catalog that was literally made of cards. There wasn’t an online system of any kind.
We had car phones. Basically, these were tactical radios hacked to work with the phone service. If you’re not familiar with mid-to-late 20th century military communications devices, we had to rip the motherfucking armrest out of the car and shove the tactical radio in there, because those things were not small. It impressed people* to be called from someone’s car on the way from Point A to Point B. Such a luxury, surely only for people in big stretch limos! Even more impressive, when people made calls from their car phones, they pulled over to the side of the road.
*erm, not really. But if you’re an ex-80s yuppie reading this, we were super impressed honey, sure we were!
On the subject of things that plugged into car cigarette lighters, cars didn’t come with CD players standard, so if you wanted to listen to CDs, you’d get a low-power transmitter, power it through the cigarette lighter, and connect it to the mic input on the Sony Discman (which in those days was a luxury item and now is something that requires explanation).
We also used our cigarette lighters for, well, lighting cigarettes, because everyone smoked in those days. Cigarette packs came with only small warning labels, not the huge ones. There were cigarette machines left unattended in the lobbies of restaurants, and any 12-year-old walking home from school could put their money in the machine and walk out with a pack of cigarettes. Of course, these cigarettes were meant to be smoked inside the restaurant, because we can and did do that then. In fact, it was considered kinda prissy to complain about smoking in restaurants and to insist on being seated in the non-smoking section.
My first memory of gas prices was when my brother was driving me somewhere and needed fuel to get there, but all he had for money was $5. That $5 bought him a good 2/3 of a tank.
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Yes, but that’s the good type of paranoid. Must be good to have grown up in a country where people are reasonable and respond appropriately to things.
In the Midwestern US, there was a stigma about everything sexual. We didn’t have sex education, judged the hell out of people who used birth control, believed weird urban legends about sex (like, you could give an STD to yourself), practiced “technical virginity”, etc. At this time, most of the country felt that abortion should be outlawed.
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I was told that condoms don’t work, and that latex-free ones never work.
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Because WWII was a current event back then.
Also, the newer atlases we had had two Germanies. The older ones had four.
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No, it only covered The World War; if it had been written during the Second, it might have referred to The First World War.
I remember, when dad got a mouse, the store had another device called the koala, and had a boxed thing called Sticky Fingers-- I think it’s basically the same as the common operating system setting. Reading up on it, I’m glad the mouse won out over the koalapad for the next 15-odd years.
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had to explain to a millennial co-worker that you had to know the exact url of a website, or you could find new stuff but only by following links from page to page. there were no search engines at first. there was a sort of shocked look for a second while he thought about that.
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O_o
Did that predate the Rolling Stones album?
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I fail to see the part that youngsters today wouldn’t believe; that sounds a lot like stories I’ve heard, recently, from the Bible Belt.
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When I was growing up we had an encyclopedia set that didn’t even have an entry for airplanes. Or any president past Roosevelt.
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Airplanes were invented during the middle of what would have been McKinley’s second term, or two years into Roosevelt’s abbreviated first term. So they didn’t even get most of Roosevelt.
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We used to have the best joke. Remember early screen savers? We had one that looked like the horizontal hold was off on your Windows desktop. Remember horizontal hold? So we’d wait til the screen saver kicked in, then complain loudly to our victim, bang on the side of the monitor (while surreptitiously tapping a key on the keyboard to end the screen saver). Voila! All fixed! Hilarious hijinks!
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Nobody thought of the internet as something that could or should be searched. Instead, it was like a place you could go to read about commercial products or whatever.
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We’d copy everything on the desktop to one folder, screenshot that folder, and make that image the desktop background.
Or we’d send messages over the LAN messenger pretending to be the administrator, screw with the spellchecker, make prank VB scripts, etc.
I wrote a VB script to open a notepad window, type “coffee time” into it, and eject the CD tray at 3pm every day. It wasn’t a prank, I just used it for myself to remind myself to get coffee. I also opened my CD tray on my last computer via VB script after the little button stopped working.
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Netscape Cool Site of the Day was generally decent
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Remember WordPerfect? And all those codes? And then when it upgraded you could still open up the code and edit the code?
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I remember before it was about commercial products. It was mostly about research, hobbies, science fiction, and people’s weird opinions, all in their own words, on their own home pages (not clickbait articles or branded blogs or twitter feeds). They each linked out to others with related ideas and formed ‘web rings’ of links from one to another.
Before that, I remember when the internet was all plain-text mode, before the web.
- You’d dial in to the local university, telenet to other universities, and from there you could dial out to whatever BBS was local to that distant university…without having to pay long-distance charges! Of course, the ANSI colors and line-drawing characters would get dropped or garbled going through all the systems along the route.
- Browsing was done via Gopher, and there were search engines called Veronica and WAIS. The web had nothing like that.
- If you wanted to download a file, you used Archie search engine to find it and then sent off an email requesting it. Over the next couple of days, you’d get a bunch of emails with chunks of the file encoded to plain text, which you would then piece together and decode to get the binary file.
- If you wanted to chat with people, you’d telenet to the IRC servers in China. Because they were Chinese, the text would be somewhat garbled, but you could chat with anyone in the world!
- On Usenet forums, posts propagated around the world over the course of a day or a few days, replies could come out of order depending on how far away they were posted from, so good quoting and threading was essential.
- Most BBSes only had one line, so while you were using it, no one else could. Therefore, they had posting quotas and daily time limits. Then you’d get kicked off so that someone else could log in.
- There were also download ratio quotas so that you could only download files if you uploaded some in return. You’d upload files that you’d downloaded from another BBS in order to be able to download files from this one, and that’s how shareware spread.
- Since BBSes were mostly local, it was common to have meetups, picnics, etc. where all the users of a site would get together in person. (Imagine all the users of Facebook getting together for a picnic!) I remember meeting a guy at a grocery store to exchange floppy disks of software, because it was quicker and easier than uploading them.
Despite all those limitations, it had a really positive feel to it - everything was there because someone wanted to share it (and was willing to go to all that trouble to do so) - including the people themselves.
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In my high school, you knew when the typing class was on, because you could hear it. And there was the one student who would stop the second the teacher said to, and then we’d have to wait a good minute before her machine did.
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I like the idea that you were forced to play D&D, to ensure you were nerdy enough for your course.
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