As I said when I responded to the question last year at around this time….
Sorry, WordPress, but I think you’re asking the wrong question. It should be, “Do you remember life before the World Wide Web?” Why? Because very few people had access to “the internet” before April 30, 1993, when the World Wide Web was released into the public domain.
I think it’s time for a little history lesson.
“The internet” started in the 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. Computers back then were large and immobile and in order to make use of information stored in any one computer, people had to either travel to the site of the computer or have magnetic computer tapes sent through the conventional postal system.
The first workable prototype of the internet came in the late 1960s with the creation of ARPANET, or the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network. Originally funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, ARPANET used packet switching to allow multiple computers to communicate on a single network.
But it wasn’t until January 1983 that the internet actual came into being. Prior to that, the various computer networks did not have a standard way to communicate with each other. A new communications protocol was established called Transfer Control Protocol/Internetwork Protocol (TCP/IP). This allowed different kinds of computers on different networks to “talk” to each other. ARPANET and the Defense Data Network officially changed to the TCP/IP standard on January 1, 1983, hence the birth of the internet.
But unless you worked for the Department of Defense or for a university as a researcher, you didn’t yet have access to the internet. It wasn’t publicly available for another ten years until the the launch of the World Wide Web in 1993.
So, let’s agree that the question is really asking is about life before the World Wide Web. But to simplify answering this question, let’s assume the “the internet” means the “World Wide Web” for essentially every one of us. Thus, you have to be over 30 years old now to even have existed before public availability of “the internet.”
I’m well over 70, so more than half of my life was spent before the internet. My short answer to the question is yes, I do remember life before the internet. It was analog. It was slower. And it was simpler.
This, That, and the Other 
A very good history lesson Fandango
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Thanks, Sadje, although nobody cares. Nobody talks anymore about the World Wide Web or “WWW.” now it’s just “the internet.”
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Indeed that’s true
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Repetitive prompts are fun, right? 😝. I prefer your question as well, because it’s more true to nature. The WWW has been around for ages.
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I love how you went and gave a history lesson as a response to this prompt, Fandango.
The WP daily prompts are just not as they used to be.
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No, they are repeating the same ones from a year ago.
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The WP daily prompts haven’t been like they used to be since about two years before they decided to do away with the Daily Prompt blog. I actually enjoyed them back then, but they started getting repetitious and unimaginative, which I get to an extent (It’s not easy to come up with fresh prompts weekly, much less daily), but they also seemed to start focusing on their “younger” (read under 30) audience rather than those of us who have seen the other side of at least 40, and in many cases (myself included) the other side of 50. Those few prompts that did seem more directed toward the older crowd always seemed to focus on some form of “Wouldn’t you like to be young again?”
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I had to punch 2.5×6 inch stock cards, insert them into the room-sized computer and wait a half hour for any results. More than 1/3 of the time, I received zero response to my “input”…Worked at AFIC/Washington. cards were color banded and I was only “allowed” to input the blue banded ones…….made me nervous to even be in the vicinity of the red banded ones…
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Ah, the dreaded punch cards. When I was in college taking a course on COBOL programming, we had to wait 24 hours for our output from our lunch card deck.
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ha! I knew the Military was good for sumthin….just joking as I have the Military to thank for a dang good life.
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I’ve done cards like maybe once (for the nostalgic experience of it is I think what the teachers were doing per 1980). Then it was that paper with weird edges that would stack up sort of like a fan.
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And it rapidly moved to universities. But sometimes in the late 1980s and all through the 1990s, it because the world’s biggest and most easily available shopping center. My boss in those years thought we should have a credit card swipe stick built into the machine. He was righter than he knew.
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Very informative. It sure was a simpler time!
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