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Do you remember life before the internet?

Warning: Slight mention of an attempt at CSA

I usually use writing prompts whenever I can’t fully think of something concrete that I want to write about. I would like to write a short story, or a series of short stories, but story-crafting takes a lot more energy than just typing words. Despite how much of it I have in drafts.

But, today’s prompt, is about a topic I can actually speak on. Why? Well, yesterday, I just turned thirty-nine. Yes. I was born in 1985. I have … glimmers of a memory of a time before we were all connected.

I remember sitting with my brothers as a child, a very young child, in front of a large wooden television. You know, the ones with the tube inside of them. And we’d be playing Super Mario Brothers together. It was a little house on the road down in New Jersey, and we had a neighbor who liked to skate on his long-board. Heck, I remember that house specifically, because every room was connected by doors in a circle, and you could run through it in seconds. But, I’m not writing this to recollect on the layout of a house I lived in toward the end of the eighties.

My Dad was a radio DJ, and there were things he needed at home to do his job. One of those things, was one of the first home computers you could get in the late eighties and early nineties. Now, I’m aware there were even older computers you could get or have, but I’m talking a DOS machine, that dialed into bulletin boards so that you could share your thoughts on a topic.

That was the extent of the internet we had when I was only five years old.

Before that, I don’t remember a lot. I just know that what my brothers and I did consisted of simply using our imaginations, playing videogames that were not online, heck, they didn’t even save our progress. And looking back at it now, it’s hard to imagine or grasp how I didn’t go nuts not having the entire world at my fingertips. But I didn’t! I was a kid.

I remember in another house, in the same state, one of my favorite cartoons were the Ninja Turtles, and we wouldn’t even dress up like them, we’d just run around the streets of the neighborhood pretending we were fighting crime. Yeah, I remember all of that. I remember the large gash in my forehead when I accidentally ran directly into the side-view mirror of a car.

But then you had the nineties, and I can’t really say fully that this was with the absence of the internet, because it was there, and it was in our house. But it wasn’t some interconnected thing where you logged on and spent hours babbling about politics and your thoughts on quantum physics. Nah.

The very first time I ever had tangible, live connections to other people online, at the same time, in one space, was a thing called Worlds Chat in like 1995. It still exists today!

You would log on and pick a two-dimensional avatar in something that looked like it was built in the same engine as Doom. And then you’d walk around in this … virtual chatroom, and just talk to people! That was … until a man somehow figured out that I was a child using this chat program, and propositioned me in a corner away from other chatters.

That was the last time I ever saw Worlds Chat.

I’m getting a little off-topic again, though. Mostly, life before the internet was a lot of phone calls, and no text messages. They didn’t exist. There was a lot of reading maps (a skill that is surely lost on generation z and alpha), and phone books. A phone book! What the hell is that?!

You see, we had these big old books that got updated yearly, and they’d have everyone’s name, address and phone number in them. And if you didn’t know someone’s number, you had to look them up in this book, a book that had literal yellow pages. I think you can see something like this in Back to the Future 1 or 2, and Terminator (I honestly don’t know if they’re still made today, in 2024).

It was a wild time.

As a kid without the internet, I spent a lot of hours just playing with toys. Making up scenarios in my head. Stretch Armstrong needs to fight the G.I. Joes, and win! Because … Yeah!

Or, I’d run outside with my brothers, clasp my hands together, and pretend we were soldiers shooting at each other. That was back before things got a bit darker in the world, and you really didn’t want to just let your kids run wild in a neighborhood. But we did, we did that a whole lot.

Even when I started noticing girls, I didn’t really use the internet to … explore all that. At least not until I was well into becoming a teenager. But, by that point, we had Geocities, and AOL Instant Messenger. Artifacts of the past I wish they’d revive. I don’t think many people would object to their presence.

I guess the gist of the story here is that, life before the internet was … really simple. You didn’t think about the war across the ocean, because you didn’t really know about it. You didn’t think about millions of people within digital arm’s reach in devastating situations, or reaching the end of their lives, because you just did not know about these things, at all.

There was no such thing as engagement farming, or clickbait, hell, even spam email wasn’t really a problem. Not at least until the late nineties.

There weren’t Twitch streamers, or Youtubers, or Instagram influencers.

There was just … people going about their lives, in an entirely different way that we, well, will never, ever see again. I couldn’t tell you if people were happier back then, because I just didn’t notice. I also can’t really say whether it was intrinsically better or not, because honestly, I didn’t really have a concept of all of this back then to really think about and compare.

Would it be better if we didn’t have the internet we have today, and people just kind of sat in their homes reading books and watching television? Maybe, but maybe not?

But that’s just what life was, before the internet.