Before the Internet

Before the Internet

The pervasive sense of having been mugged by reality is a defining feature of Generation Y. As the last generation with personal memories of the pre-9/11 world, Ys have entered middle age with deep existential confusion over their role in society. Was “gorge on snack food, Nintendo, and Saturday morning cartoons; wander alone into the wilderness, and die” their whole life story?

As I’ve argued before, fading out confused, alone, and forgotten need not be Gen Y’s final fate.

To be sure, the Strauss-Howe cycle has been irreparably broken. Generation X was supposed to supply the heroes we needed. Dereliction of parental duty on the part of the Boomers thwarted Gen X’s calling.

Yet we’re seeing glimmers of some Ys struggling toward their role as artists and mentors to younger generations. Rising into positions of leadership just isn’t in the cards. But Gen Y appears to be figuring out its societal calling: Preserving and handing down knowledge of what the world was like before the Internet.

Gen Y remembers the early promise of the net. It would decentralize commerce and politics to bring the world together. Having a gorillion Libraries of Congress at our fingertips would revolutionize education and make people smarter, more self-actualized, and more free.

The reality was that the Internet mostly let nerds argue the minutiae of Big Brand X ad nauseam, gave kids the chance to learn new and exotic swear words, and made pornography nigh on inescapable.

And that was before the government colluded with Big Tech to kill the whole experiment and turn it into an omnipresent spying device.

At the dawn of a new, brutal age when participation in public life will be ruthlessly controlled by a Death Cult that knows everything about everyone, Gen Y’s living record of the Pre-Internet Age will become a precious resource.

No time like the present to get started. Here are just a few reminiscences about how the world of Gen Y’s youth differed from today.

Entertainment was more limited, but richer

Best Evenings

Today, any number of megacorp-owned streaming services offer instant access to pretty much any movie or TV show you could want.

While we’re spoiled–often paralyzed–with choice, increased quantity has come with a steep decline in quality. If a film maker in the 1980s hated his audience, he at least had to be subtle about it. Now, big tentpole pictures actively and gleefully attack their viewers.

Movies’ content and messaging weren’t the only contrasts with the current cinema experience. The ways in which people consumed movies differed substantially, with entire distribution and exhibition channels wiped out of existence.

In an age when Covid has crippled cinema exhibition, it’s hard to imagine a time when seeing movies in the theater was still the dominant film experience. Big cineplexes were still rare in many places as late as the 90s. If you wanted to see the latest Bond installment or the new slasher flick your friends were buzzing about, you went to the local theater. That theater was probably locally owned and had one screen–two to four at most. There, you enjoyed the movie with people who, for the most part, shared your cultural understandings.

Going to the theater was also the main method of rewatching movies. With the rental market still new and streaming not even a glint in anyone’s eye, movies stayed in theaters longer. Even middle tier flicks might run for a month or more. And popular films would be re-released for new theatrical runs.

Waiting to see your favorite movie in theaters again relied on the studios, distributors, and exhibitors agreeing, so the home video market emerged as a solution. The Friday night trip to the video store became a recurring ritual in most families’ weekend routines. Not even a video rental membership guaranteed you’d get the exact movie you wanted. Each physical store could only stock so many tapes. Limited supply meant you’d better come prepared with a second, or even third, choice in mind. The hunt for that hot new release meant keeping your ear to the ground for which store had the exclusive and arranging your schedule to beat the crowds. It added thrill to the chase and the savor of victory to bagging that coveted tape.

Gaming was a social activity

Social Gaming

This section’s heading may puzzle some readers. If so, those readers are probably Millennials or younger and extremely online.

Before the Internet ushered in online FPS and MMOs, video gaming usually meant playing with your friends in person. Whether hanging out at the arcade or gathering in front of your buddy’s folks’ console TV, vidya had a physical, social dimension that online gaming has all but destroyed.

If you remember holding the NES controller to move the duck while your brother wielded the Zapper, slapping a quarter on the Street Fighter II cabinet to reserve the next game, or dungeon crawling in Phantasy Star II while your buddy navigated from the Game Pro map, you know what I’m talking about.

Communication was less convenient, and it was great

Cordless Phone

Thanks to advances in telecom tech, just about everyone is reachable at just about any time. Not only does everyone carry a mobile phone, most of those are smartphones with social media apps that multiply the communications channels between people. If someone’s not calling you, he’s texting you, or messaging you on FB/Twitter/Telegram/etc.

In the olden days, if you wanted to get in touch with someone, you had to know his phone number and dial it by hand–speed dial notwithstanding. Actually reaching your party meant calling while he was at home or the office. If you missed him, you had to leave a message on an answering machine–or with his secretary or mom–and wait for him to get it and call back.

Alternately, you could just stop by your friend’s house or workplace and ask if he was in. The hit-or-miss aspect of telecommunications preserved the utility of friend groups having regular hangouts, like the aforementioned arcade, where they’d congregate to share the good word and make plans.

These dynamics all came together in ways that instant, foolproof communication has nearly erased from daily life.

If on a given Saturday in the 80s you wanted to see a new movie with your buddy Tim, you’d dial his house’s sole land line and ask his mom if he was there. If not, she might not know where he was or when he’d be back. Your next move would be to hit up the local arcade, since chances were good that Tim would make his way there at some point. After a few rounds of TMNT with a couple of your other friends, Tim would show up, and the four of you would grab lunch at A&W before heading to the movies.

Nobody could track you. Nor was anyone constantly looking over your shoulder. Big Brother lacked the spy tech he has today, and helicopter moms were a generation off. We trusted our kids a little and gave them a modicum of responsibility.

What other cultural touchstones do you recall from the Pre-Internet Age?

41 Comments

  1. I’m sure this is debatable, but one thing I think the current generation misses out on is the touchstones of rewatching/rereading/replaying the same content until we practically had it memorized.

    For those whose families didn’t make weekly trips to the video store (that was maybe a once a month treat for us) we watched a lot of the same movies that we owned, or had recorded off the TV over and over again. Save for a few (mostly Pixar made) kids movies, my kids can barely be bothered to watch a movie once, much less twice.

    Same for games – with limited choices and budget, most of us could speedrun our favorites, simply because we’d played them so often.
    The sting of spending your hard earned dollars on some glossy box at the store, only to take it home and find out that it really wasn’t very good hurt a lot.

    In the case of games, near instant downloads and thousands of cheap indie and retro titles leave so many more options. That’s definitely an overall improvement.

    • CantusTropus

      I must confess that this is true of me, too. Even though I have completed many of the games I own on Steam, the number I’ve replayed is very small (though in my case, that may be partly due to Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings eating up literally thousands of hours of replay time each).

  2. Zeedub85

    On the communication topic, if you were out driving around with a friend and wanted to see if another friend was home, you’d probably stop and use a readily available pay phone. They were everywhere, then very suddenly disappeared in the 2000s (if I’m remembering correctly — I know I used one, in an actual booth, in 2003, and remember reading an article about AT&T taking them all up). Zoomers have never seen one, mostly likely. Nor have they ever looked anyone up in a phone book.

    More phone fun. I delivered pizzas in the late 80s. If you needed to call your store because the customer was unhappy, you had to ask to use their phone. Which could have been a Series 500 rotary phone. And of course, as the customer, you had stay alert for the doorbell or knock, because the driver couldn’t call you to tell you he was outside.

    • Even how we talked to each other required more discipline, lower time preference, and higher trust back then.

      • Imagine, this century, just… having the personal phone number of everyone in the county automatically delivered to your door. Bedlam.

  3. Malchus

    Memory was valued. If you didn’t know something, and there was nobody to simply ask, you had to go to the local (or school) library and look it up in an encyclopedia that might be out if date. (The USSR took 5+ years to not be in local encyclopedias) For more obscure topics, or for more information, you had to know how to use the card catalogue to find a book and hope it hadn’t been checked out, and there was no Amazon if the book wasn’t available anywhere nearby.

    When it was that hard to get a piece of information, few people cared about anything that could be considered trivial, and when you did learn something, you remembered it.

    This is even more evident with digital photography and social media. Nobody savors the memory any more like they did when cameras could only hold about 30 pictures and you had no way to know if they were any good until you had them developed, and then, you usually had only 1 copy. Now, people need the pictures just to remember what happened.

    There’s also the trick of being able to find an address or plotting a trip with nothing but a giant, 50 state paper atlas.

    • I’m old enough to remember when using Google or Wikipedia for a school assignment was considered cheating.

  4. Rudolph Harrier

    In high school we had a trip to DC. One of my friends decided to bring along an N64 which we would play at nights in the hotel. On the last night of the trip the chaperones found out about this and we all got chewed out for being antisocial loners who would rather play video games than enjoying a trip with other people.

    But, as you say, there was a huge social dimension. The games of course were multiplayer, with Goldeneye and Mario Kart 64 being the two main ones we played. We always had more than four people around, meaning that some people were not actively playing but instead chatting with everyone else. On at least a couple of occasions things got too crowded in the room and some people left to play Magic: The Gathering in the lobby. We also got to be friends with a couple of guys we normally didn’t interact with, and only future days of the trip we walked around the town with them. In fact, we generally only went back to play in the hotel room after talking a long walk around the neighborhood to see if there was something interesting, like an ice cream shop, hobby store, movie theater, etc. in the area. In contrast most other students just watched TV in their own rooms at the end of the day, maybe calling another room on the internal hotel lines.

    Similarly even though my group of friends all thought of ourselves as social misfits and generally unpopular, we had several LAN parties with double digit attendance. In those days having 15 or so people was a tiny party, but it’s much bigger than even the average Zoomer experience.

    • It used to be a given that adults had no understanding of video games outside primetime news scare stories. In the 80s and 90s the narrative was that vidya stunted kids’ social development and caused ADD. By the aughts it had shifted to framing games as school shooter training sims.

      Those attitudes disappeared overnight. Now that video games are a multi-billion dollar a year industry, even octogenarians are expected at least to feign familiarity with them. It’s uncouth.

      • Now the people who hate them have to pretend to be gamers and want to “fix” the industry.

        Where we wanted to get rid of Jack Thompson, we now support people who have the same end goals as him purely because they pretend to be “experts” in the field yet have less knowledge than someone who scans wikipedia articles.

        But at least they’re not those totally equivalent fundies who literally had no impact on any industry and destroyed nothing.

  5. Xavier Basora

    Brian

    Playing outside alot. I’d go to a friend’s house and very soon like a flock of birds we’d go from house to house, yard to yard. We’d even have snacks and stuff.

    xaviee

    • I never see kids doing this anymore, but I do see them dressed in clothes not too dissimilar from what I wore at their age. They even blare music not too different from what was around at the time on rap radio. It is like nothing changed, even though everything has.

      Now that’s eerie. It would be like seeing kids in the early ’00s dressed like it was still 1975 and cranking Foghat on their boomboxes.

  6. D Cal

    But did your school librarian teach you the Dewey Decimal System? Did you watch THE MAGIC SCHOOLBUS, and did your school ever host a Scholastic Book Fair?

    • Xavier Basora

      Dcal

      No but my parents did buy books from the Scholastics book catalogue. That’s how I learned English outside of school ( my brothers and me went to English school) and enjoyed reading.
      xavier

    • Andrew Phillips

      The Magic Schoolbus was after my time. I remember Reading Rainbow and Square One. I never got into Mr Wizard. In retrospect, Bill Nye the Science Guy and Beakman’s World were steps down toward FC mandated edu-tainment. I also grew up with things like Sesame Street, the Muppet Show, and Mr Roger’s. All this was before the humanist rot at PBS became obvious. I feel a certain nostalgia for those things, and their opposites, the real Saturday morning cartoons, but it’s tempered by the knowledge that they were not harmless either.

      • D Cal

        There are good non-SJW history, engineering, and computer hardware channels on YouTube, so edutainment is just fine when it isn’t sponsored by the death cult. Even the SCIENCE! (TM) tubers have useful knowledge to impart if you ignore their climate change propaganda.

        • Even CGPGrey’s delusions of conquering death and philosophy of “minmax pain/pleasure.” Even despite that, he has some good stuff on how political systems work and behaviors guaranteed to make you miserable.

      • I think my favorite episode of Reading Rainbow was the one with Bartholomew and the Oobleck. It was freaky enough that even LaVar couldn’t quite be level, when he was narrating the wizards, plus we all got a fun experiment with corn starch out of the deal. Of course it wasn’t terribly sticky, but still.

        • Erm. Since no one’s responded, I can’t just leave this here.

          There is no Reading Rainbow presentation of Bartholomew and the Oobleck. There never has been. It doesn’t even fit the template, being already famous, and not a bit multicultural. This has been a test of the false memory formation system, and if you had any memory whatsoever of this episode being a thing, then Bartholomew looked the King square in the eye.

  7. Post-internet kids are going to think the stuff they do now is far weirder than what we did beforehand.

    • We thought we could trade social capital for convenience without paying any consequences.

  8. Andrew Phillips

    Bookstores and libraries. I can’t remember quite when Waldenbooks and the other one (pre-big-box Barnes and Noble, perhaps) disappeared from the malls, but a mall doesn’t seem like a mall without a bookstore. Writing a research paper was a different proposition then, before the Internet was everywhere and included library catalogs and the books themselves.

    • Borders. Closed shop in 2010 and broke my heart.

      • Andrew Phillips

        It occurred to me later that it might have been B. Dalton’s. I also miss independent Mom and Pop places.

  9. I’m just on the cusp of being a Millennial, and my childhood was the time of modems, not no-Internet-at-all. But that meant waiting for Dad to get off the phone (he was a very gregarious man) in order to add some more quirky JavaScript novelties your Angelfire homepage, and in the meantime, imagination had free rein. We took the spare pieces from the book brackets Mom jigsawed and crayoned them into cute snakes, who went on epic quests, fleeing the largest one, which we decided was evil, and at direst extremity consulting the baby doll, who we decided was a sage. (Sisters, of course. Even if our parents were willing to shell out, we thought video games were fundamentally stupid.) We would pretend leaf-raking was the term of servitude Prospero gave Ferdinand (we didn’t read any full Shakespeare play, but we did watch Wishbone.)

    Our school was in walking distance, and so were the various kids across the two nearest streets, and we would play in one another’s yards. On days off, we would bike to the park and avail ourselves of the merry-go-round, which was a thrill of centripetal force you can no longer encounter this side of a carnival, and all hand-powered. And the library – which, to our lasting wonder, carried a bootleg sub of the Sailor Moon R film on cassette – and two convenience stores. The one nearer school had barred windows, a sour and suspicious clerk, and bags of chips with the extravagant markup of two dollars, but the one nearer the library was much friendlier, a tiny red stucco thing (now abandoned and boarded), and it would sell Duvalin packets for ten cents apiece. And on the Fourth of July, all the older kids would lead a massive illegal firework party. It was not an entirely safe neighborhood, but we were trusted to look after ourselves in that four-block radius.

    • A Sailor Moon R bootleg was one of my first anime movie experiences.

  10. CantusTropus

    This is a strange one for me. I was born in ’93 so I might count as either Gen Y or Millennial depending on how you count, but being in Ireland, which is always behind the American curve, my childhood was a bit more like what you describe than my age range might suggest. I remember a time before PCs in the home, I remember VHS tapes as the main way of recording things, and I remember the Japanese Invasion of the late 90s (my childhood was largely defined by Pokémon, YuGiOh, and a little bit of DBZ). I remember the times when you’d play videogames primarily with friends, though video arcades never existed where I lived.

    • 1993 would be solidly Millennial by my standard demarcation. However, since I’m not going by arbitrary ages but cultural backgrounds, it’s entirely possible that folks outside the US came of age in a Gen Y environment after 1989.

      • CantusTropus

        Ireland is perhaps an unusually strange outlier, due to the fact that we were a de facto Third World country less than a century ago. My mother fits squarely into the Boomer age cohort, but she remembers a time before flushing toilets in the home, as well as when TV was a relative novelty. She was also born in the latter stages of the Rural Electrification Project, meaning that she was born as *electricity* was just starting to become normal in the area she was born in. Ten (certainly twenty) years before that there wouldn’t have been so much as an electric lightbulb in the whole area.

      • Andrew Phillips

        I think the experience of cultural lag is itself a cultural touchstone, particularly for trans-oceanic members of the Gen X and Y cohorts. Before social networking and certainly before the Eternal September, things took time to cross the pond. I lived in a bit of a time-warp, because my folks didn’t care about TV and we only had one channel (the Armed Forces Network) in Germany anyway. It wasn’t much of a time-warp, I suppose, because I did see TMNT around the same time it came out stateside. In fact, it was the first movie I went to see all by myself, by walking to the one screen theater in our housing area. That was probably because the DoD made an effort to make American military housing areas little islands of American culture in the host nations. Americans who truly lived as expatriates would have had to wait for American culture to reach them.

  11. I am bemused to see all this nostalgia for Blockbuster and home video and movie theaters. I was born in 81, and movies weren’t that good even then. Blockbuster was an endless quest to find the one or two new movies that hadn’t been checked out, or settling for some b-flick you’d seen a million times. I remember standing in Blockbuster and listening to the TV that only played movie trailers saying something like, “So and so was caught cheating on his girlfriend … with his WIFE!” The Death Cult was alive and well back then, too. Jurassic Park 2 exists, after all. The internet had no search filters, and search engines weren’t very good, so getting redirected to porn sites was a thing. It was hard to find stuff unless you used weird things like web rings, which I still wish would come back. So I don’t really buy the thing about how the world was better. Ever read Prophet, by Frank Peretti, where the news networks controlled literally ALL the news? That’s how it was. Had Prophet been written today, the news anchor could have leaked the video to the internet and it would have spread. But when there was no internet, there was nowhere to leak the truth to. And you had the news anchor doing the story to the dead cameras, and there was that despair because They controlled everything.

    • D Cal

      To be fair to the 80s, the search engines are crappy again. They’re only good for finding DIY home and automotive maintenance, because the algorithms have been tweaked to return watered-down (or even dishonest) search results from large corporations.

      • Rudolph Harrier

        Sometimes I want to look for something really obscure and specific, so I do a target search that requires several exact terms. In theory these should get me to the five or so pages on the internet that are actually talking about what I am looking for. In practice search engines completely freak out and give me completely random pages. It’s not even cases of people trying to game the system by putting every word in the dictionary into their pages, since searches of the pages and metadata will come up blank for the search topics I entered.

        It’s another reason I like https://wiby.me. The database of pages searched is much smaller and usually outdated (since they have to be “Web 1.0” in design.) But I can clearly see that it is trying to find specific terms on each page and as such while it doesn’t always give me any good results, it very rarely gives me page after page of IRRELEVANT results.

        • Rudolph Harrier

          The more practical answer for making the web usable again is to re-embrace webrings. The problem is the same as back then: search engines suck, so how do you make your page visible?

          The main mistake with webrings the first time around was centralizing their management. The whole point of webrings is that they can be maintained without much difficulty on each page (with one simple list page maintained by one person.)

    • Christopher Lopes

      Very uncouth. In fact, I’d say it’s a little creepy. Adults should be letting kids have their own space and interests. This Peter Pan shit is another gift from my generation.

    • As late as the 80s, America was still overwhelmingly Christian and white. Rates of home ownership, marriage, and child-bearing were higher than now, and suicide and drug abuse rates were lower. Those are not coincidences.

  12. Durandel Asturias

    My childhood, though I was not much for the arcade. I recall the 8 of us in my neighborhood gathering at one of our houses to play on the NES/SNES/Genesis. Can’t find Billy, look for the house with all the bikes in front.

    I do think a big part of why kids had the freedom to roam out in the neighborhood was 1) you knew your neighbors back then thanks to Block Parties and other local socials and 2) there was less diversity be it race, politics or religion and 3) there was less perversion…seems like there are more predators and paedos out there now than in our day. The cops were also well known and mostly your friend, usually letting you off for your pranks because he did the same as a kid, and your mom was his 3rd grade teacher, etc.

    • You nailed it. The flood of diversity had not yet wiped out our store of social capital and social trust.

    • I grew up in a pretty racially diverse neighborhood, but it was the ’90s, and neither we nor they were expected to care. That said, our black friends down the street had no father (we had no idea why the question of where he was was so offensive), and a mother who was either absent or loafing on the couch, and were raised by a mean, withered old grandmother like something out of V.C. Andrews if they weren’t all so poor (note: still not too poor to occupy a whole, century-old house a ring removed from the center of the city.) We had many happy childhood escapades, but there’s only so much that can do: the younger brother was twelve, smelling of tobacco, and dealing badly with puberty the last time we saw him.

      Now, the black family across the street had both parents and three grandparents and birthday parties that looked tremendous fun, and seemed happy enough. But neither we nor the other black family nor any of the other kids I knew ever got close. I don’t remember why, but having enough cars that no one ever needed to walk seems a likely culprit.

  13. Harrison

    I’m a millennial, but I miss going to the local game store and checking out their huge collection of wares as a kid. The retro games store (though back then it wasn’t retro) I’ve frequented since childhood closed a few years ago and I couldn’t be more heartbroken. I couldn’t even make it to the closing blowout sale.

  14. Biggest difference: “Go outside and play. You can take your bike go all the way to the middle school by yourself, or to the edge of (xyz) farms, but be home when the street lamps come on. Don’t talk to strangers.” – no joke, that was the entire safety brief and ROE.

    We had a home computer around 1987 or 1988, and Apple IIe clone called a Laser 128EX which I used for games and poor attempts at programming in Basic. I had an electric typewriter until high school when we bought a word processor for the computer and a dot matrix printer.

    The first internet connected computer I ever used was a Pentium 90, Windows 3.0 my freshman year of college (1995). First emails, first websites. When we upgraded to Pentium 166 and Windows 95 I thought we hit the big time.

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