Life before The Internets
I can imagine years from now when I'm old and grey talking to a group of kids and telling them I remember what it was like before the internet and seeing them stare back at me as with a look of amazement as if I said I walked with the dinosaurs. I was born in 1973 before there was a PC in every home, before Bill Gates had taken over the world, before Google and before the internet. Sure you can argue that there were packet-switching networks around since the 1960's, but the internet we know and love really didn't come into existence until the early 1990's.
I can remember writing school reports using the Encyclopedia Britannica. My mother was duped into buying a set sometime in the 1970's and all of my reports were frozen in time based on the information in those books. Countries had divided, others had formed, but I would write my papers based on the stagnant information from that set of encyclopedias and that was just fine with my teachers since everyone else used the same musty books.
Life went on, I went to college and TCP/IP protocols became a part of my life. Oh I was on the cutting edge; I bought a 9600 baud rate modem and could jump on the internet in 5-10 minutes with my dial-up connection. The sites weren't as advanced as they are today, but that didn't stop me from searching the web using Magellan, Lycos, Infoseek and Web Crawler…remember them? I could search for news about my favorite bands and find out when they were playing in my town.
I remember booking my first travel on the internet. It was great to see all of the options and prices without calling the airline and waiting on hold for an hour. I can recall entering in my contact and credit card information and hoping that it would work. And work it did. Now, buying things online is second nature and there isn't a week that goes by that there isn't a package waiting for me when I get home.
Now, virtually everything I do is via the internet. I wake up in the morning and read the news online, check the weather, listen to music, watch videos, find the recipe for the perfect mojito, read plot theories concerning my favorite show Lost and watch TV shows I forgot to Tivo. Ebay, Wikipedia, My Space, Drudge, Digg and You Tube have become part of my life. While waiting for a conference call to start today someone made a comment about John Candy and I was able to find a soundboard with John Candy clips within seconds and respond in his voice to the delight of everyone waiting in conference call hell.
Sure PerezHilton.com isn't going to change the world, but I can't imagine going back to a time when information was updated on a yearly basis. I like the immediate gratification of looking something up and knowing I was right that New York is the state that has produced the most presidents or that rash looks like poison ivy. Don't believe me…look it up.