The Long Mars

CIS-191-OL5: ITT (On-line): Life without the Internet 

After reading this week's material and watching the videos, they brought back memories of the days when I was growing up. I can basically affirm what life was before the commercial internet. I grew up in the 60s and 70s and my background is electronic technology, in fact, I work for companies that were already using the internet before it became commercial, but I digress let me write to you about those days.

The internet is about one thing and only one thing, the transmission of information or data at lightning speed. In the 60s and the 70s as I recall it we had technologies that enable communications in the transmission of data. Let me give you an example. I played chess with my cousin via snail mail back then it was just known as postal mail. It took about a week to make a move and of course, you had to write the move played. My cousin had his chess board out, as well as I. It took months to play a game.  Today with the internet you can play not just one game of chess but many games of Chess at the same time running off of Chess.

 

In the 60s my family was spread across the United States and the Caribbean. We wrote letters to each other for regular family business and chatter. For emergency situations, we use the phone. Today our phones are just another instrument attach to the internet and we can text our family and friends almost in real time. Back then every family had a photo album where they would store their favorite pictures and when we would visit one another we would show our pictures. I actually saw how our pictures moved from black and white to color. Today you have Facebook, Instagram, etc and you can send pictures and videos across the globe on the internet almost in real time. And in some places in real time. 

In the United States in the 60s and 70s and probably earlier on, the country did have a form of rapid communication and this was done by radio waves and telephone lines. Let me give you an example. When John F Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King were assassinated, through the major news broadcasters we knew or the whole country knew what happened almost in real time. Rapid communication was for important or special events. 

Let's move on to education when I went to school and I had to do research I went to the local library. In New York City sometimes I had to take the bus to the public library and of course get material from encyclopedias and books today, of course, you can go on to the internet and search for some material. I think a big difference today at least in regards to looking for information on the internet is that on the internet information might not be that reliable and comparison to getting information from Britannica encyclopedia. I am sure that today everybody is familiar with the definition "fake news". The only fake news you had back in the 60s and 70s then I can remember we're in the magazines called Mad and Crack. 

En Fin, all the internet has really done was to speed up communications in regards to social behaviors. There are people who still will not use the internet. My mother is one of those. If you walked into her house it is like walking into the past. There are no computers in her house, she has no smartphones, and she gets her news the old-fashioned way. Newspaper, television and the radio. And believe it or not, she can still keep up-to-date with what is going on in the world. What she probably doesn't know or doesn't understand is that the media use the internet move information one place to another just as fast so her newspaper, television, and radio are just an attachment to the internet. 

I can basically say that I have lived a life before the commercial Internet,  Life was just slower, not that much different. I could go on and on, about mail catalogs etc. But I would bore you, the reader.