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My memories of what life was like before the Internet

April 2nd, 2024 by Benj Edwards

[Benj’s note — I originally wrote this in 2020 and had it sitting around until now. I still think it might be useful to someone in the future, so I decided to publish it.]

Many Americans alive today witnessed one of the most dramatic cultural transitions since the invention of the printing press: The rise of the consumer Internet, beginning around 1994. For everyone else, life before the Internet may seem like a distant, foggy past. To help future generations understand what happened, here’s what life was like back then, mostly based on my personal recollections as someone born in 1981.

The Internet first made its way to the world as the ARPAnet (1969), a computer network that linked universities and government institutions. The network grew quickly in size and capability, and soon, it opened up to private companies and individuals. Not long after becoming publicly known as the Internet, this global network first made a big splash in the mainstream American press. Around 1995, commercial ISPs began springing up overnight, and soon America was rushing to get connected.

As a result of easy and inexpensive Internet access in homes and businesses (and now in our pockets), many aspects of our society have changed, and I’m going to go over some of them below.

This is a broad generalization

Everything you’re about to read is a generalization. Individual experiences before the Internet differed greatly depending on your location, age, and socioeconomic status.

In fact, experiences varied year-by-year as culture and technology shifted. And obviously, life before the Internet spans back into prehistory. So to simplify things, I’ll be talking about life from the point of view of a middle-class American family in the years before the Internet hit it big—roughly the 1970s to the early 1990s.

I was born in 1981 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, and raised there in what might be described as an upper-middle-class white suburban family with a technologically literate father (who was an electronics engineer) and access to varied computer platforms and telecommunications from an early age.

I still think this summary of differences might be useful to people in the future since it is coming from the perspective of a veteran tech historian who has spent nearly two decades writing about these topics.

So first, a very big disclaimer: Your Memories Will Vary .

Life Before the Internet: Media

Getting News

Today, the news is always in our faces thanks to social media, news websites, YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and more. The news cycle is instantaneous and runs 24 hours a day. If you blink, you could miss something. If you don’t miss it, you faint.

Before the Internet, the news was mostly a daily event. Local news came to most people through local TV news channels and newspapers. The three major broadcast TV networks in the US—NBC, ABC, and CBS—broadcast a 30-minute national nightly news program every weekday. You could also hear national news on the radio. In the 1980s, one of the few cable news channels that cable providers carried was CNN, and you needed an expensive cable subscription to see it.

Monthly magazines and printed newsletters were the primary sources of news for specialized topics that were too niche for deep coverage in newspapers, such as vintage cars, video games, computers, crafts, etc. These publications arrived once a month in your mailbox, and you felt like you were up-to-date with current events in that field.

Research

Today, researching almost any topic from home is easy. The Internet puts most of the world’s knowledge at our fingertips thanks to web-based services like Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, IMDB, Amazon Kindle, and much more. You can find scientific journals, scans of books, and libraries of old newspaper and magazine articles online, and the volume of information is growing every day.

Before the Internet, research on a topic usually involved a trip to the local public library. You’d have to consult a card catalog or ask a librarian for help in finding certain books, then you’d read through the books and make notes. For more specialized research, you could visit a university library.

When researching school reports, students in the pre-Internet age frequently used printed encyclopedias—large multi-volume sets of books organized alphabetically by topic. Every school library had an encyclopedia set and many families did as well.

Whatever people couldn’t find in a library or in books was unknown, and there was no way to get that knowledge until someone happened to research the subject and publish a book or article about it. Then you had to be lucky or diligent enough to buy a copy while it was still in print.

In the time before you...