Does anyone really remember what it was like before the internet existed? - General

Yes. I also remember Betamax cassettes, the walkman, and having to remember all your friends phone numbers because mobile phones didn't exist.

Gather around Users and Admin alike and i shell you the story of what was and how much we've lost in theses Dark Times... [I][QUOTE= Star Wars]"For over a thousand generations the Library's were the guardians of knowledge and books in the Old Times. Before these Dark Times. Before the 12 Year-olds." [/QUOTE][/I] Our achievements in theses times haven't been match since, Some of the things that have been done have been demean to heretical and undo-able because of man power and costs. Yet in the past we didn't have such computing power as available today. A single Calculator has more power than all the computers used to get us to the moon and back, and even some of them failed while getting there. When man first tried to land on the surface of the moon the computer which was doing guidance failed and astronauts were force to take over and land the ship. [I][QUOTE=Jeff Wayne's - War of the Worlds]“No-one would have believed, in the years of the Library's, that human affairs were being watched and study from the timeless worlds of imagination. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of connecting the entire planet and removing library's all together. And yet, across the gulf of imaginations, minds immature to ours. regarded our knowledge with envious eyes; and slowly, But and surely, they drew their plans against us.”[/QUOTE][/I] Things that we've lost, As many of you may of notice. People are unable to talk to each other anymore without been rude. it isn't that its just most people today can't understand simple smartass remarks. We've got people who retreat away from the world simplely because they are unable to adjust to this [I]dark frontier[/I] that now exists. [U]That's all we've manage to recover from documents that have survived from thoses times. We now live in the age of secrets and oppression.[/U]

I remember buying issues GamesMaster (Philippines) for demos and cheat codes, also having to call all of my friends through the phone. Good times.

I played outside a lot with the neighborhood kids everyday before the Internet fully caught on.

I remember having to use actual encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc. Later I got those Encarta discs. There was no Wikipedia.

I feel like I would be doing a lot more with my life if the internet didn't exist.

I miss pre-internet times.

It was a wondrous time in a place called the "out doors". It was filled with clear fizzy soft drinks, eye contact and Nintendo Power magazine.

My house never had the internet until I was like 14 years old.

I remember we had dial up in the mid and late 1990s. Got Adelphia cable internet in 2001, couldn't believe how fucking fast it was.

Altough I'm only 16 now so didnt I really have acces to the internet until I was around 11-12. Well my parents did have a computer but I was not allowed to use it, and I didnt really used the internet as much until I got my own laptop at the age of 14. I was outside alot and played alot of games with friends alot more then I do now, but I still do that. I miss those times, god dang.

Lots of SEGA and bike riding.

I played soccer, and went outside and played imaginary games with my friends, was tonnes of fun. Then after Age of Empires came out, we still went outside, we just pretended we were people from Age of Empires haha.

It sucks how little excitement I get out of shit anymore. Remember as a kid how excited you would be when your mum would buy you a gaming magazine or something because you got to read about all the newest games, then you got your demo disk, got to go home and play that. I remember when we had 56k and I would always ask my mum to use the house phone so she couldn't check if I had went on the internet. The day Half Life 2 came out I remember sneakily turning the internet on every now and then to let it download on Steam. There was a rush in using the internet, using Limewire to try download some porn, usually of a celebrity you fancied but it was just her head photoshopped onto somebody elses body. It was so exciting. I remember the day I got broadband. I was so excited to set it up but nobody was at home so I did it myself, and the cables barley reached the computer so the router was hanging in the air, and I remember turning it on and being able to browse the internet at such fast speeds. I turned on Battlefield 2 and it was the best thing I have ever experienced. I invited friends over and we took turns playing CSS. I miss those times. There's not really any excitement anymore since you just get everything straight away. It's good and bad I guess.

[QUOTE=Over-Run;40229782]It sucks how little excitement I get out of shit anymore. Remember as a kid how excited you would be when your mum would buy you a gaming magazine or something because you got to read about all the newest games, then you got your demo disk, got to go home and play that. I remember when we had 56k and I would always ask my mum to use the house phone so she couldn't check if I had went on the internet. The day Half Life 2 came out I remember sneakily turning the internet on every now and then to let it download on Steam. There was a rush in using the internet, using Limewire to try download some porn, usually of a celebrity you fancied but it was just her head photoshopped onto somebody elses body. It was so exciting. I remember the day I got broadband. I was so excited to set it up but nobody was at home so I did it myself, and the cables barley reached the computer so the router was hanging in the air, and I remember turning it on and being able to browse the internet at such fast speeds. I turned on Battlefield 2 and it was the best thing I have ever experienced. I invited friends over and we took turns playing CSS. I miss those times. There's not really any excitement anymore since you just get everything straight away. It's good and bad I guess.[/QUOTE] I still get a little excited when I can finally afford something I've been waiting to get for a long time, like a new motherboard, monitor, etc. But yeah, games, music, movies don't really get me that excited anymore. I'm going place the blame partly on sleep "deprivation" so I rarely have the energy to play a game for more than an hour or two in one go.

I don't know about the lack of excitement. But when the is a big game being released on Steam or you join a community of something big being launched you really get that feel of being part of a community and feeling like you are a part of something. Specially with my wacky sleeping patterns I barely get to see my friends all that often so when everyone is asleep I speak to people that live outside my country mainly people that live in the States or Canada.

I was about 6 or 7 and I would play Diablo, Starcraft, Warcraft 2 and Unreal Tournament with my dad on lan. Although my dad tells me he had me in his lap trying to teach me to play Doom when I was 2 years old. The only console ive ever owned was a dreamcast and it was my dad's. I guess I was literally born a PC gamer. Funnily enough I didn't have my own internet until 2007 when I got the orange box and found out there was no singleplayer v.s. bots in TF2. That was the final straw I guess. Now that I think about it im not sure how I managed to even use steam back then if I had no internet. I used my parents computer in the basement to play games like Unreal Tournament 2004 and I didnt have any internet connection for my own computer for a long time. I've been brought up with and around technology my whole childhood.

I remember when I didn't play video games for hours on my computer. I played video games for hours on my Playstation.

When I was about 10 I remember my dad playing a lot of virtual chess against the computer and flight sim games that had like 3 polygons. It wasn't until I was about 12 that my mom got us WebTV, it was silly and I never bothered with it. I remember looking for free flash games on some website and coming across the original Runescape, it was my first experience in an online game so I was pretty amazed when I realized all the people around me weren't bots.

[QUOTE=BCell;40193940]Teenagers would buy audio cassette to listen to their favorite tunes on their Walkman music player or even carry a big boom boxes radio.[/QUOTE] Tape trading was still going on into the 90s around here What's this "buy" audio cassette??

[QUOTE=Zeke129;40250127]Tape trading was still going on into the 90s around here What's this "buy" audio cassette??[/QUOTE] Yeah pretty much. My parents have a shittone of recorded cassettes from when they were my age and through the 90s. They would have someone get a song off a record, tape, or (in the 90's) CD that had a nice tape deck. Heck, my mom recorded a bunch of top 40 radio shows, which is always interesting to listen to for radio personalities and old ads. Its was pretty much the filesharing of the time.

This cassette talk reminded me of the demo tapes from the covers of PC magazines in the old days. I remember spending what felt like an hour with a big 80s boombox plugged into my Amstrad waiting for the demo of Lemmings to spool up. The only really cool part was that you could apparently record programs and games off the radio directly onto a cassette, then load that into your computer. So futuristic.

I do, and it was shitty.

Being a little kid and having a computer with no Internet was pretty amazing. MS Paint entertained me for hours.

[QUOTE=OneFourth;40256438]Being a little kid and having a computer with no Internet was pretty amazing. MS Paint entertained me for hours.[/QUOTE] That and doom shareware edition.

ive always had internet since i can remember because my dad had to use it for work, but i never really used it until i was 10 maybe, i just played the games my dad bought for me on my pc until i got an n64. i remember just playing lemmings and other little fun games. i never really had any need for it until middle school maybe

Shopping online makes life easier. I can remember trying to get a retail copy of GTA Vice City and it was probably the hardest game that I ever tried to find. That was a flaw of a gamers life. Trying to get the biggest game currently out. Now you can either go to a retail website or order from digital distributor. Well the internet was around then but not in every house hold. I didn't even have a PC round that time.

[QUOTE=d_cover;40281213]Shopping online makes life easier. I can remember trying to get a retail copy of GTA Vice City and it was probably the hardest game that I ever tried to find. That was a flaw of a gamers life. Trying to get the biggest game currently out. Now you can either go to a retail website or order from digital distributor. Well the internet was around then but not in every house hold. I didn't even have a PC round that time.[/QUOTE] Since I had no income of my own as a kid, I had to wait until my birthday, Christmas or if I was lucky, that they had the game at our local used game shop. Using the internet or even just going to the store to buy a game was a far flung fantasy at that point.

this is like dumb teenagers who are like "i can't remember what it was like w/o a phone! #90s" basically i just watched tv or fucked with some other electronic and did more work.

I remember before the internet. I was born in 94 so I mostly played NES and N64 before the whole home computer thing happened. My father bought us a 3000 dollar computer. Dell with a Pentium D processor with around 500 mb ram and 13-20 Gb of storage. I got dial-up for it and used AOL. I mostly stayed offline and played Freespace, ONE OF THE BEST GAMES I'VE EVER PLAYED.