These days when I am at work doing tech support, if I want to feel/act very old I’ll throw in the phrase “hey, I go back to the punch card era!”. I guess I am only a few cranky rants away from wearing my pants under my armpits.
I have been using the internet since 1991 before there even was a WWW. Newsgroups were where scientists exchanged information about particle physics. Ok, in my case it was the latest episode of Star Trek! But I won’t even go back that far, let alone to punch cards (and Van Halen and The original cast of SNL, work boots worn to school….).
Let’s go back to say 1998: An even decade. By then almost everyone I knew was using computers and the internet either at home or at work. E-mail had become an acceptable way to communicate with others. But everyone was still on dial-up so downloading music or full-length videos was in its infancy. Yahoo was the number one search engine. If you wanted to hear a radio program you had to, well, listen to the radio or record it on to a cassette. You could buy CDs but few could make them themselves. DVD players were around if you were rich and no way anyone was ever going to make them themselves (what do DVD-Rs go for now – 40 cents?).
Most people were still learning from things called “books”. Now it so happens in that year all my books were about computers as I was a tech student at tech college.
Yes, it was a very primitive world. You were lucky to get 75 channels on your tv! If you even had a cell phone you could not get an e-mail there. AND you had to make phone calls from a phone and not your computer. That’s right you had to use your radio for radio, your phone for phone calls and your computer for emails. What the fuck?
Camera’s used something called “film” and unless you had a neato Polaroid, you had to pay someone to develop this film. Only then would you find out that 11 of your 12 pictures completely sucked! (There was no “delete” button).
When you rode the bus, or drove your car, you had to play a CD that you actually had to buy, or deal with the performance loss of a cassette player if you wanted to cheap out and record other people’s CDs. Anyone with a laptop on the bus was actually WORKING and not watching Season 4 of “Corner Gas”.
And while there was spam, it did not comprise 95% of all e-mail.
Today I got an e-mail from Stanley Kowalski. That’s right – Spam is now so bad even fictional characters are sending it!
STELLA!!!!!.....HEY STELLA!!!!!!.....
TWF
