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A comment on What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life before the internet. Parent comment

Re:What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life be... by dabeeeenster on Sunday August 28, 2016 @09:38AM (#12376444)
Curious to know if the parent poster was alive before the internet was available to consumers?

It's hard to get over just how isolated information was before the internet. If you missed a sports score, for example, unless you heard the result fortuitously, you had to wait and read it in the newspaper the next day. CAN YOU IMAGINE?

If you wanted to know something relatively obscure, you had to travel to a library and look it up in a dozen books. Sure, phones provide an additional sort of last mile for that sort of thing, but the difference before and after the internet is almost impossible to communicate.

Can you imagine "missing the news" on the TV?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life be... by jpatokal on Sunday August 28, 2016 @09:44AM (#12376464)
Yes, I was, see another reply below. "The Internet" in the pre-Web form I first encountered it was quite different from what you describe, and close to useless at answering your questions.

Also, Teletext was a thing, and it solved the "missing news" problem pretty well, as did TV and radio.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:What it feels like to be the last gen to remember life be... by dabeeeenster on Sunday August 28, 2016 @09:51AM (#12376486)
Yeah admittedly in 1995 it didnt solve these problems either but by 2002 it had done...
[ Parent | on HN ]