The World 30 Years Ago.
How much of it do you remember?
What would you be doing now if the internet and social media didn’t exist? Let’s take a look back at life before 1990, and see how much has changed in the past few decades.
I'll go one further…
Digital technology doesn’t exist…so, the invention of the smartphone happened, but it is used only for making phone calls and sending basic texts. Things like "Likes", "Subscribes" and "Emoji" buttons don't exist. Neither do apps or email. Imagine a world without email. If you want to send any sort of mail to someone, you have to write a letter, put it in an envelope, lick a stamp and toss the letter in the mailbox.
Smartphone voice mailboxes do exist, but only if you can afford them. Texting is charged per character, so it's very expensive. Hardly anyone ever uses texting. It's actually cheaper to own a home telephone with an answering machine. Imagine that in order to message anyone, you either have to call them, or you can text them...if you can afford it. If you don't have your own smartphone, you can always use the payphone on the corner. You'll need a quarter.
Music and Pictures.
By the way, music streaming services don't exist. The only way to listen to music is to play CD's, cassette tapes or vinyl records. Your smartphone does not have a music player on it because mp3's don't exist. If you want to listen to music, you have to have a music player of some kind. Boomboxes are rare, valuable items. If you can find one, it will cost you a lot of money. Stereo components are also in high demand. There is no such thing as Bluetooth. If you have headphones, they have to be physically plugged into the music player.
Your smartphone also takes the most basic pictures. The quality is okay, but the only place you can store them is on your smartphone. Hard drives, thumb drives - none of those things exist; so you can't transfer your pictures onto a computer - because computers only exist in the military, government and business offices. The smartphone doesn't have any sort of large memory either. That means that you can only take about 25-50 pictures before you have to start deleting them in order to take more. You can, however, print off those pictures by plugging your smartphone into a printer.
Money.
Cryptocurrency, Blockchain technology and instant money transfer services like Zelle, Venmo or PayPal don’t exist, but credit cards and cash do. If you don't have cash or a credit card to pay for your groceries, you can always write a check. Every service machine (vending, laundry, phone booths) requires coins or currency. Since the internet doesn’t exist, millions of people have had to find jobs that require actual work. YouTube doesn’t exist. Any would-be social media "content makers" have never existed.
Televisions are now free to watch (as long as you have an antenna connected to the TV), because digital cable TV doesn't exist. That means that television stations must broadcast over the air with analog towers. Radio stations have brought back real live disc jockeys and on air personalities. There is no such thing as satellite radio. All police scanners work with every law enforcement department, because digital trunking doesn't exist to block transmissions by using encryption. Everything can be heard if you have a good antenna. If you don't know the location of an address, you can always get a fold-able map. GPS and satellite navigation only exists for the military and governments.
Oh, and imagine having to turn on the lights in your house, all by yourself because Siri and Alexa don’t exist either.
What I am describing is a world that once existed before 1990; and I remember that world very well.
I got my first cell phone in 1995. It was a Nokia brick that could only be used to make phone calls. You could text on it, but it was very expensive to do so. If your phone call lasted longer than a few minutes, you were guaranteed to have a dropped call. It was an analog world back then. Digital cell phones existed, but the technology to build a digital infrastructure did not. I didn't get my first computer until 1999. I got online for the first time sometime in March. The very idea that I could send an email to my friend Curt, in Wisconsin, and that he would receive it and read it the same day, was mind blowing to me.
Back then, Google was still in its infancy stages of development. YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, and any social media format, simply didn't exist yet. There was a messaging service that you could use through Yahoo or AOL. It was called "Instant messenger". Gmail didn't exist until 2004, and you had to be invited to use it. If you wanted a website for your business, you had to hire a computer geek to charge you thousands of dollars to build one for you.
The first digital camera was the Casio QV-10. It came out in 1995 and cost about $500.00. I know this because I owned one. The only people carrying cameras with them everywhere were the tourists at Disney World. Selfies weren’t a thing. Nobody was wasting film by taking pictures of themselves or what they ate for lunch.
Smaller pocket-size digital cameras started popping up in the early 2000's. They were much better quality and much cheaper by then. Digital SLR cameras were also a new thing for practicing photographers. No longer did you have to use film to take photographs. You could take as many high quality photos as could fit on the memory card in the camera. This was how people took pictures before the smartphone.
Everyone had CD's and CD players or boomboxes. This was all the rage back then because CD's sounded so much better than cassettes. You had to carry your CD's in a pocket visor holder in your car - and that was if you were lucky enough to actually have a CD player in your car. There was no such thing as music streaming or satellite radio back then. Whatever music you wanted to listen to, you had to either provide for yourself or simply listen to the radio.
We used to go to the mall to buy all the things we needed to shop for. If we didn't go there, we went to Kmart or Walmart. Amazon and same-day shipping just didn't exist back then. If you wanted to rent movies for the weekend, you had to actually drive over to Blockbuster and rent VHS videos and play them on your VCR hooked up to your TV. When the first DVD video player came out in 1996, nobody could afford such expensive technology. It took a few years before they became affordable. Suddenly, everyone traded in their VHS tapes for DVD's.
Computers used to keep external memory on something called a floppy disk. Each floppy disk stored a little over one megabyte of digital data. This was plenty of room for things like saving emails and small files. It was common to have a case of these by your computer desk. Affordable CD burners on computers came out around the year 2000. Many computer makers began installing them in place of the floppy drives, as CD's held much more room. This was a great way to back up a lot of large files on your computer. Back then, external hard drives cost about a dollar per gigabyte. This was far too expensive for most people. This was why the CD burner was a great way to store lots of stuff without going broke. Computer monitors were mostly Cathode Ray Tubes (CRT). They were bulky and heavy. If you could afford to install a specific video card reader into your computer, you could hook up two CRT monitors side by side.
Here in the year 2024, technology is mostly taken for granted by the younger generations. I imagine that many of these people would have a very difficult time adjusting to the world I grew up in. As someone who has long since learned to embrace the amazing conveniences of modern technology, I am still marveled by the insane speed and progress of the digital world.
We balance on the precipice of the next revolution: Artificial Intelligence. Part of me wishes that I could live another 60+ years to see all that has yet to come in future technology. I was lucky to grow up when I did. I learned to appreciate the simple things like record albums and road maps. The generations before me didn't have many of the things I took for granted in my youth. I imagine that there will come a day when everything we know now about the modern day digital technology world, will be thought of as antiquated nonsense. Ah, but for a chance to rub the magical lamp one time to see into the future.