Get ready to hear more about "pre-internet" times

Before internet times I had a girlfiend that i often called. That was our main connection. After our breakup(dont remember how that happened) I lost her number and forgot her last name. She could be dead and I wouldn’t know.

My parents were quite cautious drivers, and they did practically everything very locally, and often eschewed freeways if it were at all possible for their routes.

My father kept a meticulous log of mileage and gasoline fill-ups in a pocket notebook that stayed in his car's center console. If we filled the tank but didn't update the notes, we'd catch hell for it.

Another indispensable auto accessory was the Thomas Guide. We had Thomas Guide maps for every conceivable nook and cranny of our extended metropolitan area, and also for places we nearly never traveled. And I loved these books. They had such layers of meaning in the colors and symbols. You could literally get lost among the pages and learn so much about your local topology, in terms of streets and roads and blocks.

So it was nigh-impossible for me to get lost, even as a novice teen driver, when that Thomas Guide was right in a seat pocket. I absolutely never needed to ask directions. I usually planned out trips in advance, especially the unfamiliar locales; it was easy to pinpoint a destination in Thomas Guide and then work towards it.

The interesting thing is that I was also a rather local motorist and there were many, many parts of the city where I never learned the streets, because I had no reason to drive there. Contrast that with the place where I live today: we've got an incredibly rigorous grid system with predictable numbering, and so if you show me an arbitrary address, I can tell you exactly what the cross-street and region it's in and give directions, without even glancing at cartographic aids.

There should be a lot more discussions of preInternet times by/for the young folks (<40 y.o.). Those of us on the bleeding edge of IT who also lived over half our lives in the “before days” naturally kept the best parts of preInternet culture while picking up those particular elements of digital culture that are (nearly) an absolute Good (and skipped the rest). The digital natives never knew the “before time”, and so need to make the same conscious effort to learn and integrate those preInternet wisdoms, as their forebears had made when learning digital technologies.

Those preInternet lifeways are only deprecated if you tell yourselves they are deprecated. You’d be amazed how backwards compatible your 2023 life can actually be, with a little tweaking here and there. Might be worth the effort.

I was born in 1955, so I was around 40 when the Internet became a thing for everyday people (however, I was very much online before that...BBSs, CompuServe, QuantumLink, even exchanging email via UUCP).

We still have a Thomas Guide on our bookshelf. Just in case Apple Maps goes away.

This article doesn't mention carrying around paper planners, pocket calendars or little paper phone books, but Daytimers were a big thing when I was in college, followed by Filofaxes a few years later.

For finding things to do, there were community bulletin boards...literally cork boards you could pin a flyer about your event to. They were in grocery stores, coffee shops, etc. And telephone poles in heavily-trafficked areas were often covered with flyers for concerts, lectures, rallies, and babysitting opportunities, among other things. A lot of organizations had phone trees, where a group of people called a few other people, who called a few other people, etc. Churches were (and in many cases still are) major community hubs, not only for members of their congregations but for other community groups that used their facilities. Also, since newspapers were ubiquitous, community calendar columns and classified ads (anyone remember those?) were very common.

You got to know people through things you did...school, church, work, neighbors, extended family. There were a lot of fraternal organizations, especially for men, like the Elks and Moose lodges (these really expanded after WW2, and shrank as that generation started to die off). My dad's best friend for decades was the fellow he partnered with in the late 1950s-early 1960s to write one of Boeing's first computerized accounting systems; their kids were almost like cousins to us.

The now-lost art of letter writing was a big deal as well. I wrote to a cousin quite a bit, but I also spent time with a girl my age at a state park one summer, and we exchanged letters several times a year for around a decade.

Finally, if you were bored standing in line waiting for something...that's what paperback books were for.

> There's mounting fascination among the "youngs" in how people socialized, found where they were going, and got things done before the mid-1990s, when the internet, email and mobile phones started becoming common.

Mostly badly. I remember the thrill of printing MapQuest directions and if you missed an exit, your passenger then had to pull maps out of the glove compartment and start comparing them and the directions to find out the easiest way to return to your route. And hell, that was after MapQuest which in itself is Internet-based. I also recall vaguely being a kiddo when we would do family road trips, and my grandpa would navigate in the passenger seat with 2 or 3 different maps on his lap, switching between them as needed for a better look at wherever we were going.

I also remember my last truly "analog" friendships were in an apartment complex I lived at before we moved elsewhere and got our first internet connection. I have no earthly idea where any of those people are today, hell I don't even remember the school that well. We basically never "arranged" anything, and I mean, it's not like we were incapable, but we had no ways of contacting one another outside of when we'd meet at school or the bus stop. If a friend of yours was sick at home, you just didn't know what was happening with them for that day at all. Or, hell, if someone moved, unless they announced it ahead of time, that person who you might've been deeply acquainted with just vanished from the world one day, or over one particular summer.

Even as someone who technically spent the vast majority of their childhood without much technology, I don't recall really having many friendships until my first email account and later, flip phone with SMS enabled some manner of autonomous communication for me. Not sure if that's everyone's experience but it was certainly mine.