How did people spend their time pre-internet?

[MacBH928]

If you are old enough and remember I would like to hear your memories. I remember as far back as the early 1990s. I was thinking all forms of entertainment today is connected to the internet. I would imagine it would be very horrific to be lonely at that time period.

I know people who would go to work have something to be busy with but those who are retired, between jobs, what did they do all day long? What I remember was people almost never stayed home. Every day for them was go out and socialise day.

 

[BigMcGuire]

In the 90s I was a kid so the below is from that perspective.

What did we do in the 90s before the internet? Read! I was lucky enough to have access to a collection of world encyclopedias which I spent a LOT of time reading. Ranger Rick (magazine) was huge for me as a kid - read those things over and over. A kind neighbor lady would save her LA Times newspapers for me and I cherished and read those over and over.

And yes, I was allowed to ride my bike down the street to play baseball with the kids on the block as long as I was home before dark. Had no cellphone, nothing. If you needed to communicate you had to use a landline phone to call - borrowing people's phones was acceptable as long as it was local.

Every night at a specific time (I can't remember if it was every week or once a week) there would be programs on the TV that we'd watch - Cheers, Hunter, Star Trek TNG at night. In the morning you'd get Andy Griffith, Gilligan's Island, Beverly Hill Billies. Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow on the weekends. Weekends often had "reruns" of your favorite shows all day long (Star Trek (Kirk)). You'd keep an eye out for TV Guide in the newspaper to find out what shows you wanted to watch. Just be careful, if you didn't shut the dryer off all the way, it would affect the TV! PBS was huge for me as a kid - nature shows, etc.

In the summer, us kids would find a kind neighbor who would let us use their pool - so we'd ALL go over there and do that.

There were many hours spending alone in the backyard playing with cars, building mud forts, using your imagination because parents would only let you watch so much TV or you'd rot your brain.

Events with friends was a highlight - but you rarely got to talk with them because at least mine were all long distance calls and I only saw them a few days a week (church - which usually met Sundays/Wednesdays). When we did spend time together it was spent playing sports, going to museums, watching movies in the theaters, seeing sights, going hiking in the mountains (camping was big).


My thoughts: It was not lonely at all. You'd use your imagination at home when you were at home - doing circles in the backyard on your bike pretending to be a semi, reading books, watching VHS tapes of Disney movies, and yes, hanging out with neighborhood kids/people/friends. If anything, not having constant access to friends made the times we spent with friends far more rewarding - made people work hard to make those interactions more enjoyable. You'd really look forward to summer vacation.

When we got access to the internet it was mind blowing to be able to send email via AOL to family across the country instantly. I could also pull up websites that gave me pictures of World War II airplanes - took 5-10 mins to load those photos. Family computer was in the living room so that kept us kids out of things we shouldn't. lol

 

[cthompson94]

I was a kid in the 90s and in my early years grew up in a number of apartment complexes and so my brother and myself played with the neighborhood kids until the street lights turned on most days of course unless it was brutally cold, raining, etc. Indoors umm it was VHS tapes, TV from antennae (then eventually cable), drawing, fighting with my brother, some video games like the Super Nintendo and a few others that my dad had when he was in his teenage/early adult years.

Just before my teen years we moved out in the rural area and in a house, but nothing really changed except played a lot in the woods with kids from my school, but now that there is greater distances between us (unlike my apartment living) it was biking for miles and meeting up a specific locations that we knew about in the woods and just doing random things like we probably built at least 2 treehouses (simple houses) as we played airsoft a lot and those were our bases. The woods had a huge pond and I remember making makeshift rafts and having races to see who can build the better raft and get to the other side first (you did not want to fall in that water it was very questionable and thinking back I can't believe I did that). A good friend and I created some board games (I don't remember if any actually had any possible merit) umm built a go-kart with the help of a neighbor who had the ability to weld. During the weekdays/school days it was a lot of quick figuring out plans on the bus ride back home that day and of course Fridays it was quickly going over who would be available and what day and time we are all meeting and we always had a rule that if someone didn't show within 30 min to an hour then assume for whatever reason they couldn't make it.

I guess it boils all down to it was a lot of tinkering and trying to do a kids version of the next best thing which always seemed to work our minds that much more. Man it sure was nice taking a brief moment to think back

 

[rm5]

In the 90s I was a kid so the below is from that perspective.

What did we do in the 90s before the internet? Read! I was lucky enough to have access to a collection of world encyclopedias which I spent a LOT of time reading. Ranger Rick (magazine) was huge for me as a kid - read those things over and over. A kind neighbor lady would save her LA Times newspapers for me and I cherished and read those over and over.

And yes, I was allowed to ride my bike down the street to play baseball with the kids on the block as long as I was home before dark. Had no cellphone, nothing. If you needed to communicate you had to use a landline phone to call - borrowing people's phones was acceptable as long as it was local.

Every night at a specific time (I can't remember if it was every week or once a week) there would be programs on the TV that we'd watch - Cheers, Hunter, Star Trek TNG at night. In the morning you'd get Andy Griffith, Gilligan's Island, Beverly Hill Billies. Sesame Street, Reading Rainbow on the weekends. Weekends often had "reruns" of your favorite shows all day long (Star Trek (Kirk)). You'd keep an eye out for TV Guide in the newspaper to find out what shows you wanted to watch. Just be careful, if you didn't shut the dryer off all the way, it would affect the TV! PBS was huge for me as a kid - nature shows, etc.

In the summer, us kids would find a kind neighbor who would let us use their pool - so we'd ALL go over there and do that.

There were many hours spending alone in the backyard playing with cars, building mud forts, using your imagination because parents would only let you watch so much TV or you'd rot your brain.

Events with friends was a highlight - but you rarely got to talk with them because at least mine were all long distance calls and I only saw them a few days a week (church - which usually met Sundays/Wednesdays). When we did spend time together it was spent playing sports, going to museums, watching movies in the theaters, seeing sights, going hiking in the mountains (camping was big).


My thoughts: It was not lonely at all. You'd use your imagination at home when you were at home - doing circles in the backyard on your bike pretending to be a semi, reading books, watching VHS tapes of Disney movies, and yes, hanging out with neighborhood kids/people/friends. If anything, not having constant access to friends made the times we spent with friends far more rewarding - made people work hard to make those interactions more enjoyable. You'd really look forward to summer vacation.

When we got access to the internet it was mind blowing to be able to send email via AOL to family across the country instantly. I could also pull up websites that gave me pictures of World War II airplanes - took 5-10 mins to load those photos. Family computer was in the living room so that kept us kids out of things we shouldn't. lol

Wow, this is very interesting to read as someone who's grown up with the internet, thanks for the perspective! And I totally resonate with your point about spending time with friends being much more valuable back then!

 

[mollyc]

You make it sound like the Dark Ages.

We would read, talk on the telephone, find a project, make stuff, bake, garden, watch nature out the window, go for a walk...All the same stuff we do now, just more of it. It was lovely not to have social media.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Reading, spending time with friends, reading, playing with toys (Lego and so on), being able to head out with friends for what is now referred to as (unsupervised) "unstructured play", which was what we simply called "going out to play", and that included exploring places, playing on building or construction sites (very exciting), in parks, exploring a local woods; reading, playing board games, watching specific programmes on TV, chatting to friends on the phone (some of these calls lasted for well over an hour), reading, visiting museums, galleries, plays, (the latter three often, but not always, with my mother), occasionally going to the cinema, (if someone had a birthday, or a movie you wished to see was showing, or parents really wanted you out from under their feet, you would be given money for the bus and the cinema) cycling - heading off for hours at a time on cycling trips, sometimes with a destination in mind, sometimes not, sometimes with my brother, more often alone, head out for a walk, (later, as a teenager) also sometimes arrange to meet a friend for coffee....

There was always lots to do. And yes, I agree with @mollyc, it was lovely not to have social media, and it was lovely, too, to have such freedom; in summer, we would be gone somewhere for hours at a time, entirely unsupervised, with instructions to be home by a specific time.

 

[ThisBougieLife]

These descriptions don't sound all that different from how I spent my time as a kid, despite having grown up with the internet. I used the computer occasionally to play educational games, but I otherwise spent my time reading, playing with my sister or my friends, and enjoying my time outdoors. At least that's how it was before I got my own phone and computer. The problem is that the internet has now become a substitute for in-person communication, with each technological advancement pushing virtual communication as the norm; people spend so much time online because it's the only way they can connect with anybody. We all have the potential to live without the internet, but some of us have forgotten how.

 

[Dismayed]

I spent a lot of time in libraries because I went to grad school twice. Usually 1 or 2 nights each week we'd visit the campus pub for a few beers. I spent spare time running, swimming laps, going to plays, and reading.

 

[Mousse]

I played, unsupervised, in a junkyard. Tetanus chased me for years, but I was always one step ahead.😁 A lot of my playmates got lockjaw though.🤕

When I reached young adulthood, playing with friends took a backseat to studying. I spent most of my time at the library among musty tomes from the Sci-Fi panteon: Asimov, Bradbury, Crichton, Heinlein, Le Guin, Niven, Orwell and so on. I did a bit of studying between reading about space adventures.😉

 

[max2]

Movies and console gaming

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Yes, studying (and reading stuff that wasn't study related) took up a lot of my time once I attended second level; I was (still am) a voracious reader.

And yes, libraries - especially university libraries, were places where I spent a lot of time both as a student and for a few years immediately prior to that; indeed, a few years before I attended university, some friends (who were students) used to ensure that I had access to the local university library (using their library cards) during the the summer vacation when nobody was around and the books were not in demand; highly irregular, but, they didn't need their cards, and I loved having access to the books of the university library; I used it mostly for reading up lots of material in history, English and French.

 

[compwiz1202]

Football, cops and robbers, freeze tag, go to woods and swing on the vine.
I don't actually remember when the Internet started compared to it being fairly easy to access. I mean there were Bulletin Boards, but those were somewhat complicated to access and cost money. Then was AOL, so you could do stuff within AOL. Eventually, you could go on an actual browser if it worked right. Then we got cable and then DSL, and you could go right on a browser. And there there were consoles: Pong. Atart 2600, NES, Sega Master/Genesis etc, Playstation 1 2 3....And then standalone games on PC. But also been so long that I don't remember how the first consoles worked into the timeline vs the Internet.

 

[john123]

A few other things that I remember spending many afternoons doing:

- Shooting at target traps with my BB gun and pellet rifle
- Massive lego projects
- Home art stuff like water colors, stained glass kits
- I remember this fondly: https://hackaday.com/2017/09/15/retrotectactular-capsela-is-dead-long-live-capsela/
- Chemistry set
- Hanging out in a treehouse with a friend from down the street
- Atari 5200
- Instrument practice
- Reading my mom's anatomy book (this is how some of us learned about the birds and the bees before the interwebz)

 

[Scepticalscribe]

If you are old enough and remember I would like to hear your memories. I remember as far back as the early 1990s. I was thinking all forms of entertainment today is connected to the internet. I would imagine it would be very horrific to be lonely at that time period.

I know people who would go to work have something to be busy with but those who are retired, between jobs, what did they do all day long? What I remember was people almost never stayed home. Every day for them was go out and socialise day.

You know, there is a difference - a striking difference, to my mind - between being "lonely" and being alone, being on your own, choosing to spend some time by yourself.

I have always been an avid reader, and reading is a solitary occupation; that is not being "lonely", that is being comfortable in and with your own company. For that matter, as an adult, I write quite a bit, and when writing, not only do I prefer solitude, I need it, actually, I demand it.

Another activity I forgot to mention in earlier posts was stuff such as painting, drawing and writing, on wet days; my mother had read her Dr Spock, and was very keen on encouraging children to express themselves creatively; thus, we always had paints, pens, markers, and writing materials to hand and were allowed (from a young age) - actually encouraged - to use my mother's type-writer for writing.

As children, we wrote plays (one of my plays was staged in primary school).

And, of course, while classical music and jazz always featured at home, - and my parents encouraged us to listen to a wide range of music - once we were teenagers, there was the discovery of music with a more modern sensibility, and the desire to start our own music collections; for, as adolescents, we spent hours listening to music, and saving up for LPs, (CDs had yet to make an appearance) and visiting music stores on visits or outings to nearby cities.

 

[Big Bad D]

We got on with life and made and learnt from decisions using common sense and selective info.

 

[antiprotest]

I read a lot books -- printed ones of course.

And I listened to lots of cassette tapes. Mostly books and lectures, but some music too.

I biked a lot and ate a lot as well.

 

[martint235]

Went to the pub a lot as I remember

 

[compwiz1202]

A few other things that I remember spending many afternoons doing:

- Shooting at target traps with my BB gun and pellet rifle
- Massive lego projects
- Home art stuff like water colors, stained glass kits
- I remember this fondly: https://hackaday.com/2017/09/15/retrotectactular-capsela-is-dead-long-live-capsela/
- Chemistry set
- Hanging out in a treehouse with a friend from down the street
- Atari 5200
- Instrument practice
- Reading my mom's anatomy book (this is how some of us learned about the birds and the bees before the interwebz)

Wow this makes me remember other things:

Legos and Lincoln Logs
Those electronics kits
Remember the World Book Encyclopedia with that anatomy diagram and all the Childcraft books.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I spent a lot of time in libraries because I went to grad school twice. Usually 1 or 2 nights each week we'd visit the campus pub for a few beers. I spent spare time running, swimming laps. going to plays, and reading.

This is a big one that I completely forgot about.

Libraries were HUGE. I read the entire Hardy Boys series - then devoured anything else I could find - (Star Trek novels, etc). LA Libraries were always something I looked forward to pre-internet (and even after).

Speaking of books - garage sales - you could often find tons of books for super cheap. As a kid/younger person this was a gold mine - for toys, books, magazines, etc. Often times people would let those stuff go for dimes, quarters.

These descriptions don't sound all that different from how I spent my time as a kid, despite having grown up with the internet. I used the computer occasionally to play educational games, but I otherwise spent my time reading, playing with my sister or my friends, and enjoying my time outdoors. At least that's how it was before I got my own phone and computer. The problem is that the internet has now become a substitute for in-person communication, with each technological advancement pushing virtual communication as the norm; people spend so much time online because it's the only way they can connect with anybody. We all have the potential to live without the internet, but some of us have forgotten how.

Agreed, even when the internet came, it was expensive, slow, time consuming, and only worked on heavy duty 486 PCs that weren't very mobile - and often we had a time limit on how much we could use them because someone else wanted to use them for old PC games/or actual work.

 

[compwiz1202]

I read a lot books -- printed ones of course.

And I listened to lots of cassette tapes. Mostly books and lectures, but some music too.

I biked a lot and ate a lot as well.

I remember when CDs came out, and you could shuffle, but I'd still be remembering the next track from playing the cassettes, but it wouldn't be in order anymore And the requesting and recording from the radio and the high speed dubbing of cassettes.

EDIT: And playing the records at a different speed than intended to hear slo mo or sped up Chipmunks singing.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I remember when CDs came out, and you could shuffle, but I'd still be remembering the next track from playing the cassettes, but it wouldn't be in order anymore And the requesting and recording from the radio and the high speed dubbing of cassettes.

EDIT: And playing the records at a different speed than intended to hear slo mo or sped up Chipmunks singing.

Walkmans were huge. I remember how cool it was when I finally got one. Being able to listen to the radio and play cassette tapes anywhere (my parents had a ton). Went through a LOT of batteries. It's a weird feeling when people mention "oldies" that were songs I listened to early 90s on Star 98.7 FM (southern CA). lol. KFWB 980 AM for news. lol

When CD players came out, they were expensive and often times ate batteries much faster. I remember the "anti" bump technology where it would try to cache a few seconds so if you actually jostled the CD player it wouldn't skip the audio.

 

[maflynn]

I would imagine it would be very horrific to be lonely at that time period.

People are lonley now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'd say the current state of technology is such that people are more lonely and isolated now then when I was a kid (in the 1970s).

Growing up, we spent huge swathes of time, outside in the summer, we'd ride our bikes, go into the woods. Do anything and everything that we could.

Inside, I'd build models, read, both books and comic books. We played games, both traditional, but also made up.

You make it sound like there was no fun prior to the internet. I'm going to say that kids have missed out just being free to discover and do anything now. I'm going to say that there's something missing from the youth, as they grow up in such a technological advanced society.

 

[Scepticalscribe]

Walkmans were huge. I remember how cool it was when I finally got one. Being able to listen to the radio and play cassette tapes anywhere (my parents had a ton). Went through a LOT of batteries. It's a weird feeling when people mention "oldies" that were songs I listened to early 90s on Star 98.7 FM (southern CA). lol. KFWB 980 AM for news. lol

When CD players came out, they were expensive and often times ate batteries much faster. I remember the "anti" bump technology where it would try to cache a few seconds so if you actually jostled the CD player it wouldn't skip the audio.

I remember my Walkman CD player with great affection; journeys were measured in battery times. How many batteries did I need for both legs of particular journeys?

But yes, CDs, and cassette tapes - in college, some of my male friends would prepare mixer tapes of stuff that they liked and give it as a gift, a wonderful way of being introduced to new music.

And there were long talks - conversations - with people, sometimes, all night talks.

Pubs featured (yes, quite a bit) in my student days (and later), but not as a child or teenager.

 

[dmr727]

Damn this thread makes me feel old.

My parents kicked me out of the house a lot in the summer - I rode bikes or skateboards with friends. We lived at the base of some hills and there were trails and even a couple of caves that were fun to check out. This was the late 80s and early 90s so I played Nintendo and PC games - mainly lots of Sierra and LucasArts adventure games. My Dad had CompuServe, so I explored that a lot too.

I remember those times fondly - I certainly don't look back and think the internet would have improved things. Quite the opposite, really.

 

[martint235]

Damn this thread makes me feel old.

My parents kicked me out of the house a lot in the summer - I rode bikes or skateboards with friends. We lived at the base of some hills and there were trails and even a couple of caves that were fun to check out. This was the late 80s and early 90s so I played Nintendo and PC games - mainly lots of Sierra and LucasArts adventure games. My Dad had CompuServe, so I explored that a lot too.

I remember those times fondly - I certainly don't look back and think the internet would have improved things. Quite the opposite, really.

You feel old. I was graduated and working in the late 80s not messing about on skateboards 😂