I REMEMBER WHEN THERE WAS NO INTERNET.

[byronius]

Just sayin'. Because there will come a time when someone like me is the very last person to have lived when there WAS NO INTERNET.

And that will be awesome.

I love you all.

Really. Everyone. Everything.

Especially that new weird alien civilization sending us radio signals from your weird planet.

Oh, I love you.

[Binkie The Clown]

1. Got you beat. I remember when there was no television.

In fact, my dad had a friend who was a ham radio operator and I remember going to his house with my folks to watch the very first TV broadcast in our city. We watched a test pattern for a couple hours, and then a few minutes of somebody's actual face talk to us about the wonders of television. It was pretty amazing.

Before too long we got a TV of our own and I watched Kukla, Fran and Ollie, Captain Video, and Kate Smith singing "When the Moon Comes Over the Mountain."

[yuiyoshida]

3. Got you beat...

I remember when we played with Rocks, because there were no games or toys. We USED our superior imagination! There were no Books!! No paper or even a language!!! No water color paintings!


hahaha, kidding XD

[Jeffersons Ghost]

15. me too, K&R

[Binkie The Clown]

16. I got you beat.

I remember when we were single-celled organisms. We could only dream of someday evolving, and until then, we had nothing to do but swim around in the muck eating mold spores. That was, oh, maybe 10 million incarnations ago.

And then there was this time when...

[malthaussen]

32. Wow, you had rocks?

I remember when there was nothing but primordial ooze...

-- Mal

[yuiyoshida]

86. So that's where your beer sig came from

The Primordial ooze bar!

[WhiteTara]

71. I had no idea that anyone else played with rocks!

Yes, we used our superior imaginations to create play.

[longship]

4. Oh no! Not Kate Smith!

Q: Do you remember Froggy the Gremlin and Smilin' Ed McConnell? (Later, Andy Devine)

Witness:

Plunk yer magic twanger, Froggy!

"Hi-ya! Hi-ya! Hi-ya kiddies!"



Then there's Ramar of the Jungle, which both Smilin' Ed and Andy's Gang made their cultural diversion. I mean other than Buster Brown shoes, the show's sponsor. "I'm Buster Brown. I live in a shoe."

What is he? One of the old lady's children?

[Kablooie]

6. Winky Dink and You!

Kukla and Olli say hi.

[longship]

8. Oh! Kukla, Fran, and Ollie were wonderful!

Here they are, with puppeteer par excellence, Burr Tillstrom.


And here's Tillstrom with Jim Henson:


OMG! What a legacy they made!

BTW, another good puppeteer at the time, Paul Winchell!


He later made fame as the voice over as Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh films. But he was said to be the best ventriloquist in the business.

Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smith are in the picture. "What's up, Winch?"

[Tactical Peek]

14. And Johnny Jupiter

And Major Domo, not to mention Reject the Robot.

[progressoid]

17. Yikes. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie freaked me out.

I wasn't afraid of them, but they sort of gave me a creepy vibe. Hard to explain.

Of course, I only saw them on the weekend toward the end of their run. Thankfully I had more sophisticated things to watch like The Jetsons!

[longship]

18. Oh dear! How can anybody not like Kukla, Fran, and Ollie?

Like the Muppets, the humor was a bit more adult. But as my parents liked it, I suppose that I did, too.

I still love "The Muppet Show" and "Kukla, Fran and Ollie". Both were high art.

[Cartoonist]

23. I'm one

The worst puppeteering ever. The action of the mouth never matched the words spoken.

[daligirrl]

81. They used to show that movie

"The Red Balloon." I think it was Italian. I was fascinated by it!

[longship]

84. French film.

Last edited Sun Sep 4, 2016, 02:21 AM - Edit history (1)

And it is wonderful.

Here (not sure if it will work here):

Thankfully, it works. A great film.

[Warren DeMontague]

50. Yeah, well --- Sid and Marty Krofft fucked my shit up, bigtime.

[procon]

58. Oh, me too!

Finally, I'm relieved to know I wasn't the only kid who didn't like those creepy puppets.

[WinkyDink]

59. You rang? ;-)

[eleny]

72. I remember the day the magic screen arrived

[trof]

34. ARF ARF! That's my dog, Tige. He lives in here too!

?zz=1

[dixiegrrrrl]

46. Ohh...bless you!

I have for years now tried to remember where "Plunk yer magic twanger, Froggy! " came from.
since my family had a tv set only spordically, and we moved a lot, sometimes I would only see a few weeks of any episodic show.

Andy's Gang was a children's television program that ran on NBC from August 20, 1955, to December 31, 1960.
Wiki reminds me now.

[pressbox69]

70. Loved that show.

The Col. Bleep cartoon was great too.

[2naSalit]

77. was that

Mitch's dad?

[rusty quoin]

9. Leave it to Beaver for me.

The telephone numbers were like woodland 3 2610. I remember that as a kid.

Cars have not changed much.

We had the best subway system in the world. There's a scene from "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three" (1974), in which Walter Matthau is a representing and giving a Japanese group how advanced the NY rail system is.

You can laugh at how behind we are now, but we use to be the best. I'm sure the rest of the world laughs at us now.

I know Binkie that was not your intention, but just a reaction from me.

[rug]

24. From your name, are you perchance a retired NYC printer?

[rusty quoin]

73. No. I made the name up from an architectural name, rusticated quoin.

[JonLP24]

2. The internet was likely around 1986

But it wasn't until I was 8 to 12 the internet became widely used. I remember Netscape. Creating web sites just on html text on Angelfire. AOL discs were delivered freely to your house with more and more hours. Back then I had a WebTV the first time I ever connected down the highway into town
https://m.

[Odin2005]

33. WebTV was also my first experience of the internet!

[lunamagica]

37. I was so loyal to Netscape. I didn't switch to IE until I had no choice. I remember Geocities

where you'd built websites and placed them in "neighborhoods". I knew HTML like the back of my hand. Notepad was all you needed to build a website.

AOL CompuServe and...I can't even remember the other one.

Things are more advanced now, but I feel kind of nostalgic for those days, when everything was so new, and exciting.

[Different Drummer]

39. "AOL CompuServe and...I can't even remember the other one. "

Prodigy?

[lunamagica]

41. Yes, that's it, Prodigy! At one time or another I had an account with all three, but I only had

Prodigy for a little while. My favorite was CompuServe

[dixiegrrrrl]

49. Pssst......the grandchild of Netscape is here

called Linux.
Practically crash free, very intutive, and best of all...free.

[lapfog_1]

52. I was writing code for ARPAnet "routers" in 1976

And, I believe that early papers on packet routed networks were written in the middle 1960s.

[csziggy]

55. In 1982 or 83 I had a 300 baud modem for my Apple ][ computer

My "on ramp" to get on the internet was access through the inter library loan catalog system from the Florida Library system. It was unbelievably slow - I'd select a link, go run errands, make dinner, come back and the page might have loaded. Of course, back then our telephone cable quality was low. Down the dirt road on a curve, there was a big mud puddle. Sticking up out of the mud was a brnch with two spliced cable ends duct taped to it.If it rained hard or if someone ran over the branch, the cable splice got wet and the telephone didn't work. It did connect me to the Library of Macau for some research my husband was doing.

In the late 1980s I upgraded to a Packard Bell XT computer with DOS 3.1 and subscribed to an internet service called The Source. It was expensive so I didn't do much with it. A few years later Compuserve bought The Source and they opened up their social and technical forums to subscribers. It was still expensive but software allowed downloading threads, reading and writing replies offline so what took hours to read offline only took a few minutes to download and upload.

[Orrex]

88. I logged onto CompuServe w/ my 300-baud modem on my Commodore 64

Spring of 1983. Magical technology in those days!

[Binkie The Clown]

75. When I was at college...

we could get online when it was still called the ARPA net.

[Skittles]

5. my grandparents had outhouses

and I had to pump my own water and start a coal fire!

[madokie]

21. Hell we had outhouses

our water came from a hand pump in the yard carried into the house by bucket. The school I went too for the first 5 years had outhouses. We didn't even have electricity in our neighborhood until I was 5 years old.


Rural Northeast Oklahoma

[Kablooie]

7. I remember when we took our first steps on land.

[True Dough]

10. Well, I unabashedly love the internet

and everyone here is posting on it. If it wasn't for this vast medium, none of us from various parts of North America and beyond would likely be in communication right now.

The internet is like anything else, best used in moderation, but it's a magnificent tool! I sometimes think I have allowed too many hours to pass here, yet I still work full time and volunteer for 4.5 to 5 hours per week so the guilt isn't overwhelming.

[Phentex]

27. I agree. It saves me so much time...

I think of the hours it took to make phone calls, look up something in a book or encyclopedia, drive some place you'd never been before. Folding and unfolding road maps!

[True Dough]

38. All excellent examples

It's a huge time saver -- less standing in line at banks and stores. Arranging travel insurance is so much easier. There are lots of examples.

[japple]

57. I don't think any here is knocking the internet and the strides that

have been made in technology. Most of us are huge proponents. But there are those of us who were born in the dark ages that remember a time when we didn't have any technology available for our amusement. The kids in my family chased after the DDT truck on our bicycles when they sprayed for mosquitoes on summer evenings in the US southern states. Kids in the rural areas, went out to watch the crop dusters when the cotton fields were dusted with poison on a regular basis. Life is a whole lot different now than it was in the wayback.

[airplaneman]

11. Our Daughter grew up with no internet or cell phones.

Even today we consider ourselves lucky because life was simpler. Parents who have to deal with these just make life more complicated and dangerous. Unfortunately I think our fate is habitat destruction and society collapse along with the internet coming to an end. I do not see us having a future expanding out into space either. Enjoy the good times while they last.
I love you all too. We do live in an amazing world.
-Airplane

[struggle4progress]

12. I remember when there was no intelligent life down here

[WinkyDink]

60. Sometimes it feels like just yesterday.

[struggle4progress]

67. I can't recall: maybe it was this morning

[Dr Hobbitstein]

13. I remember primordial soup. nt

[randome]

30. I remember the Moon before the green cheese grew stale and gray.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]

[WinkyDink]

61. We used to eat it with oyster crackers.

[Warren DeMontague]

19. back when people had to get their porn from magazines, or on videotape.

Verily, t'were the dark ages.

[KittyWampus]

25. what you said was funny because

it's true.

[Historic NY]

36. 8mm smokers......

on the clickety-clack of a projector.

[tonedevil]

43. I worked at a place...

with pinball in the front and 8mm peep shows in the back. I sat between and gave change to both sides. This was in 1975 and it was a throwback to a much earlier time even then.

[madokie]

20. I remember when there wasn't any tv

and then when they started getting popular hearing people say that the tv would be the ruin of our civilization

[annabanana]

22. and it was

i guess they knew what they were talking about

[KittyWampus]

26. yes, they may have had a point.

NOW GET OFF MY LAWN SO I CAN YELL AT CLOUDS IN PEACE!

[malthaussen]

35. No, rock and roll ruined civilization...

... or maybe flouridation.

-- Mal

[tonedevil]

44. Floride...

saps and impurifies our precious bodily fluids. Apparently the communists put it in our water in 1946. Im not making this up you can research it in the documentry Doctor Strangelove.

[Dr Hobbitstein]

63. Rock n roll makes me smoke crack and worship satan. nt

[ananda]

28. LOL

We got our first tv when I was 7.

I got my first computer, a Mac Classic, in 1992.

I learned about the internet in the late nineties,
which was when I started using email and got
a net provider.

I got my first cell phone in the early nineties.

I got my first iPhone in 2011.

I abandoned landline just a few years ago.

I resisted entering the electronic age; but now
I'm accustomed to it.

[GP6971]

80. Our first tv

Was 1954. A HUGE wood box with a small glass screen.

[JaneyVee]

29. The Dark Ages.

[randome]

31. I still have 850 videotapes, all expertly organized and cataloged. All worthless to me now.

Mostly self-recorded stuff because it was cheaper that way and I was obsessed.

I learned how to type on a manual typewriter. I remember music stores.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]

[Different Drummer]

40. "I learned how to type on a manual typewriter."

Me, too. My grandmother had an old Smith-Corona manual typewriter that she used to type up her church's news to submit to the local newspaper. When she wasn't using that typewriter, I learned how to type on it.

[lunamagica]

42. I got my first computer on '95. It was a Pentium! Everybody was impressed

[edbermac]

45. I REMEMBER WHEN THERE WAS NO ELECTRICITY.

We had to watch TV by candlelight.

[randome]

48. That actually took me a moment.

[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]

[procon]

62. We lived in Europe in the 50s and electricity was sporadic at best.

No electric appliances, even the tiny fridge was run off bottled propane. The few electric lights we had used very low wattage bulbs that gave off a dim, very yellow light and frequently exploded. We did have a radio, but the brown out conditions made it almost useless.

Even in the 60s my grandma's farm in central California had no electricity.

[lunatica]

47. I remember before we had TV, but I love both the TV and the internet

I was a science fiction fan from the time I was a teenager so I waited a hell of a long time for all these cool modern things! I even think most of them were invented by science fiction fans.

[orpupilofnature57]

51. We're coming to the last people born before Television .

[raven mad]

53. I remember when there were 3 TV stations -

and rabbit ear antennas............

My mom remembered when it was only radio ...............

[randome]

66. And a circular UHF antenna for channel 30! At least it was 30 in St. Louis.

And that's where all the monster movies were shown.
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[AgadorSparticus]

54. I remember it too but I sure as heck am not going to glamorize it.

Sorry, but the days of doing research digging through boxes of microfiche SUCKED.

INTERNET has its ups and downs. And like anything, it requires responsibility which some folks have thrown to the wind. That's on them. But I sure as heck appreciate all that it has done to improve life and society.

[csziggy]

56. Yep, me too! What we use today was science fiction when I was a kid! nt

[randome]

64. Woolworth drugstores. Ben Franklin stores.

Goldies dept store. Venture. Dolgins. Grandpa's dept store. All gone now.

I remember when you could walk into a grocery store WITHOUT A SHIRT ON!

I remember when Pluto was a planet.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]TECT in the name of the Representative approves of this post.[/center][/font][hr]

[nolabear]

65. Mr. Bear and I were among the early adopters.

He was in Computer Sci at Duke U. and I worked there (psych dept. and hospital research, mostly running rats). Begot into one of Duke's computer networks to play Empire (with the inventor, I might add) and foremother branched on out as it developed. Man, the development of wifi was the best thing that ever happened. Dialup drove me crazy.

There was a time when few people typed, my children. Oh, I could tell you tales...

[many a good man]

68. There have always been internets

There were slower, that's all.

[Thor_MN]

74. BTW, the "alien" signal was from a Russian military satellite...

[chillfactor]

76. I can remember when...

there was no TV, no internet, and dial phones with NO private lines and I read by gas lanterns because electricity was only for the rich. WOW! Hard to believe I am that old.

[kimbutgar]

78. I used to love reading long epic novels

But the internet ruined that for me.

[Socal31]

79. I remember it as if it were yesterday.

Wait, it was yesterday. And about twice per month. Thanks Time Warner!

[spanone]

82. i remember when there was barely teevee...

black & white - and three channels

[IcyPeas]

83. department stores used vacuum tubing for cash ....

I vaguely remember seeing this in some department store (maybe in the 60s). they'd put your money in a tube and seconds later the tube would come back with your change.

[bhikkhu]

85. I remember my old dial-up BBS in LA...

I thought it was so awesome to be connected, though of course it wasn't connected to much - "cool" graphics cobbled out of backslashes, periods and quotations marks and so forth. Lots of tech talk and help on forums. I built my own computer in 1993 from local geek shop parts. At the time I had been writing seriously for awhile, long-hand on college-rule and sometimes (to be formal) on an old Smith-Corona. Looking at new options I debated either getting one of those typewriters with a screen that stored a line or two and let you edit before committing, or a computer. I knew I was was much more prone to rethinking and massaging phrases and paragraphs, so I built a computer.

I remember having to go to the library to find out about stuff, and hoping to find information less than a few years old.

Its hard to remember what the internet was like at first - I still recall reading about the first commercial enterprise, and all the principled debate over whether selling things over the internet should even be allowed...

[HockeyMom]

87. No Ancestry.com

Started doing genealogy in the 70's the old fashioned way. Legwork visiting libraries for census records, Birth/Death Indexes, mailing away for records, visiting cemeteries, etc., etc. This took years but I did manage to get back to the 1800's and my immigrant ancestors. I was accepted into a Genealogy Society which gave me access in another state to closed to the public census records. Got in my car and DROVE there.

This is what we did before the Internet.