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Comment by sacman08 | Hacker News Reader

Yes I have. It was called the 1980's.

Came here more or less to say this. I really think a pre-Internet, pre-highly connected brain is different from one where the Internet is ubiquitous. I am not saying it is better, but it is different. The idea that to look something up you have to remember it or note it down by your family's telephone on a slip of paper, go to the library, find a reference book you can't even take home with you, research it in that and maybe two other books, and so on... Yeah, 1980 was a very different time in terms of looking into topics of interest, especially for children.

Yeah the 80s are definitely outside of my frame of reference, growing up in the 90s alongside the growth of household computers and the internet, living with technology has been the baseline for me. It's interesting to hear the experience of those who grew up on the other side of that divide and have an insight into both of those worlds.

Even during most of the 90s, you had computers but not always with real connectivity on either laptops or phones. Thus, while I definitely was around and used computers in the 90s, they weren't omnipresent and connectivity was pretty much of the tethered sort.

Thus I did unplug during that period for several month-long trips to Asia but the baseline level of connectivity/online information/ubiquity/social media/etc. was much less than in the 2000s (especially the latter part of the decade).

Maybe I'm an outlier but I'm old enough, and I think the phone/screen thing is a fad. The moment more natural peripherals become usable the screen will go the way of the landline. (I mean things like AR in your contact lenses, input through gesture and dance via "wearable" sensors, holographic sound, and so on.)

I think you're also going to get colonies of non-tech people. (The Amish are among the best farmers in the world and have large families. They are the meek who will inherit the world, eh?) There may arise small towns and enclaves that are retro-tech as a way of life.

I’ve had the same thoughts about societies like that forming. It seems inevitable once brain-machine interfaces become available to the general public.

The biggest thing for me are the trivia. Wanting to know something that wasn't actually important didn't used to be an itch. Hell the urge to know it would slide right off one's mind, because it was impractical to follow up. Way too much work to find out. Hardly a concern.

Now with the world's trivia (far from all the valuable or deep knowledge, even decades in to this experiment, but by god, we've got the trivia covered) available with maybe ten seconds of effort, it's so hard to resist looking up every little unimportant thing. "Who was that actor in that one thing?" Ugh, why do I care? Why would anyone care? ... but yes I'm going to check.

I was computer-free from about 1984 to 1989, but I still had a phone.

1990s as well was mostly internet free for an average person. It was probably towards the end of the 1990s when people started getting wired.

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