What did you use to do before the internet and cell phones, pagers etc.?

I watched Sesame Street and played with Lego. By the time i dropped that routine, they were starting to be more common (pagers at least).

It was less stressed. Looking back at it now.
When you left the home or the office. No phone. Yea!
It was nice to do other things, besides the internet sucking you in.
And, we went to the library to study. Actually met people face to face.
Riding bikes, building tree houses and forts. Always a crowd hanging at the school yard, playing hand ball. As an adult you met someone on a date, not on Yahoo messenger.
I could go on and on and on and on.

Drank breast milk.

Skateboarding and sex.

I agree with @eponymoushipster, I would sit and play with Legos or K’NEX for hours and hours just lost in my imagination. The other thing I did a lot was create makeshift lightsabers and play Star Wars. I am the oldest with two sisters so I had to be very creative because I was always playing by myself.

I was bouncing around as an egg in my mother’s belly.
Life was so much simpler then….

I’m old

I listened to music and played outside. I wrote in a diary and polished my rock collection. I played the piano and watched MTV (before it turned to rubbish). Played a lot of card games with my sister. Made friendship bracelets and tie dyed t-shirts. Experimented with different hair-do’s. Caught lightning bugs and played jail break. Damn, I was a lot more interesting! I was about 12 when internet went mainstream- maybe 15 when everyone started “needing” a computer in their homes.

I was 25 when the internet was “available” or should I say worth my time and money..
In 1982, I was in 12th grade. The only form of “internet”.
What accessing the schools mainframe, and communication to another geek at another school.

I was SOOOOO fucking bored. I first got onto the internet in 1991, about 4 years before the WWW came about, this was after I moved from my small, pissant northern Minnesota town on the eastern side of the state to complete my last two years of college in a small, pissant northern Minnesota town on the western side of the state. Of course this being an actual State University as opposed to the Community College where I served the first two years of my sentence got the first two years of my higher education, their computer lab was a bit more advanced, and had access to telnet and FTP and the like.

What limited work study hours I was granted, I chose to take working in the computer lab, as even in ‘91, most of the students I knew, unlike me, did not HAVE a computer in their dorm rooms (at best they’d maybe have a word processor). So, when I found I could log in, and even keep in touch remotely with one friend I’d gone to high school with (we both met on the same IRC room which was based in Cleveland on Case Western’s freenet), it was pretty cool. I ended up getting a 2400 bps modem for in my dorm room so I could log onto the internet with my IBM clone 286 machine…I even met a few friends locally and a woman in Cleveland whom I travelled to see and had a whirlwind fling with before realizing she was a psycho hose beast. But I digress.

Basically, it was HARD coming down…when I went home over the summer between my 3rd and 4th year of college, I brought my computer and modem, and there was not a damn place I could log into. We didn’t even have access to Compuserve up there (hell, my parents to this day can’t get cable at their place). In those days I dreamed of having a computer monitor which could not only display color (I had an amber and black monochrome screen), but which could display pictures (or gasp even video)...I thought maybe some day.

As for pagers, never had one, and cell phones, I resisted that trend until 2001, the year my wife and I had a baby, and she was starting grad school…it seemed more important that we both have phones to keep in touch with each other. Now I have to admit it’s nice for job searching (which I’ve been forced to do a LOT of this decade…thanks, GW Bush!) and it definitely comes in handy if you get lost en route to somewhere or want to check for movie times on the fly, are trying to coordinate a get together with friends, or run into car troubles, but I don’t feel cell phones have had the impact to me that the Internet has.

Basically, I grew up in the 80s, 4 miles outside a town that wasn’t even big enough to have a McDonald’s (or any other chain stores for that matter). I couldn’t get MTV, we had one top 40 radio station that played at least some palatable music, but if I wanted to get my hands on good music, or do something entertaning, go shopping or what not, short of renting a video, reading a book or rubbing out some knuckle children, I pretty much had to travel about 90 minutes south to a semi-urban area which actually had things to do that I was personally interested in. I was never really an “outdoorsy” type, I guess you’d call me “indoorsy”, so riding my bike on the old dirt road, hunting for tadpoles in the neighbor’s pond or building a tree house was just never in the cards for me. I did however have a personal computer as far back as 1982 or 1983…it was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A and it had an add on speech synthesizer, a cassette player onto which I could save my programs, and 16k of built in RAM (expandable to all of 64k with an added cartridge I had!)

In other words, I spent a lot of time playing with my computer, watching TV and messing up my sheets. Kind of like today, except the computer is more powerful, the TV shows are better, and I have a partner to help me with the sheets.

I remember when I was 11 or 12 and my next door neighbor had just gotten a cd player, which was the first one i had ever seen.

We played the Top Gun soundtrack on cassette and on CD to compare the sound quality.

This is sort of off topic, but I guess it relates in the sense that when I was little, we had toy computers, so they were obviously becomming more mainstream. I remember having this toy called the Tommy Tutor Toy Computer which I remember being the most awseomely amazing toy ever. You would “type” and the screen would scroll up to show different scenes. If you pressed the space bar, the plastic layer on top of the scene would move, giving the impression that whatever on the screen was moving. My favorite part was the last scene which was this “Space Invaders” -esque looking scene.

I went to high school.

I am old so I actually grew up without internet and cell phones. In some ways I think it was a better time for kids and all people actually, there were not so many organized activities so we had to devise our own fun. Year round, no matter the weather, we were outside for all daylight hours, playing what are probably now considered silly games, hide and seek, scavenger hunts, king of the mountain, also all sports, but just pick up games on the playground. With no hydration breaks, I might add.

Now I love the internet, I love all of modern technology but I think it is kind of sad that today so few kids seem to use their imagination or have a quiet moment or simply rely on themselves. Now everyone is one their phone as they walk down the street and parents seem to spend their entire lives ferrying kids from one organized activity to the next.

But one must acknowledge that access to the internet in particular has opened up a world of information that never ceases to astound me. There is nothing I can’t research endlessly with a few typed words and clicks of the mouse.

Guess it is one of those deals where life is full of little trade offs. (That was a line in a movie I have forgotten which???)

We didn’t get a computer till I was about 47. I was angry at my husband for getting it. I thought it was self-indulgent, show-offy and irrelevant.

No TV till I was 8, and it was so limited it was barely worth watching.

When I went to boarding school, I relied entirely on handwritten letters to get in touch with my parents, because long-distance calls were too expensive. If I was worried about something, I had to write to my parents, wait for the letter to get to them, wait for them to think about it, and wait for them to write back. That would take about ten days.
By then the problem would have gone away.

Everyone knew a lot of songs. We used to read a lot. I used to go in my room and make little paintings. I learned how to do smocking. We built dams. We climbed up on the garage roof and ate Frosted Flakes. We used to write and produce plays. We used to go to dances. We used to go swimming. You only knew people you could physically touch.

When you weren’t at home and you needed to make a phone call, you would find a thing called a “phone booth”, or ask a person in a store if you could make a local call on their store phone. Sometimes they would just let you do it, and sometimes they would ask you for a quarter.

Because you couldn’t reach people easily, if you made a plan you pretty much had to stick to it. People didn’t schedule as many events into their days. People went to their jobsites and stayed there for 8 hours. Men dictated letters to their secretaries, who took them down in shorthand and then typed them up. Then the bosses would change them and give them back to their secretaries to be re-typed. Secretaries used carbon paper and manual typewriters. If you made a typing error, you had to erase every carbon copy with a special eraser, as well as erasing the top copy with its own special eraser, and then retype the correct letters. While you were making erasures in the whole packet of copies, the paper would shift slightly in the machine, so that the correction wouldn’t quite line up with the rest of the text.

Hard to imagine this lost world, even though I remember it vividly.

umm…being born maybe

We used to get a couple of frozen orange juice cans, and string a wire between them, attached to the bottom. I’d climb one tree, and Mark would climb the other, and we’d talk to each other through the “telephone.” Man, as far as I can tell, technology really hasn’t improved since then!

Tin cans and a piece of string.

Oh and my neighbor and I when we were little used to flash our flashlights at each other at night, since our windows faced each other. We had a little Morse Code of Flashlights going on.

hee hee

I read thousands of books as a child. I didn’t watch a lot of TV because we had no cable when I was growing up because we lived way to far out of town. There were only four channels and we could only get 2 of them very clear. We didn’t even own a TV with a remote until I was probably 15. I read books and played outside.

I remember when my parents first got cell phones. It was like the huge old bag phone. They hardly ever used it because it was so expensive! I think it charged a certain amount for every minute. My dad hauled it everywhere with him. People called it his purse, which I don’t think he even minded because he thought he was fancy as shit with his new fangeled cellular telephone.

I was telling my 9 year old daughter that when I was a kid we didn’t have cable tv, computers or video games we had the Atari 2600 and the 8 bit Nintendo, but I wasn’t telling her that, I was trying to point out how good kids have it nowadays and she asked me if the telephone had been invented yet when I was a kid! Smartass.

I get a nap

A lot of morning cartoons, from Bugs Bunny to the old X-Men and Batman: The Animated Series. Also toy cars, Legos, going swimming, picking on younger siblings, methamphetamine, ride my bike around the park, play soccer with the neighbor’s kids, etc.
Ah, good times!

I danced to Michael Jackson, played sports and rode my bike.