been thinking about all the little moments tucked away in my memories that are a world unknowable to those younger than me, so consider this an opportunity to reminisce over old times, but also to ask those about the times you did not live through.
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?
Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?
How did you learn to do something? Books, a teacher, and hands on trial and error. I think most people learned most things from somebody who taught them.
When something interested you, you’d go read about it. Learn more, see all the “documentation”. You’d also just do it and see what happens.
The easy access to knowledge today is great, and learning is easier. Its night and day to be able to look up information quickly.
The one benefit beforehand was that information was hard to produce. You couldn’t just record a video in 5 min and upload it to YouTube. You couldn’t just write a book in google docs then upload it to be sold as an eBook. Things took time and money. So if that much investment was needed, it weeded out a lot of bad information. Today, just because it’s online or in print doesn’t make it any more reliable.
Technology has definitely made life easier and more fun. But it’s also a tether people rely on. Maybe even a noose around their neck. I think the fact that people are glued to their phones all the time is very reminiscent of the humans in WallE. It’s sad.
I take the stance that I lived in a time where you couldn’t be reached 24/7 and weren’t expected to always be available. It was okay then so it should be okay now. My phone isn’t always on even though I carry it with me everywhere. If I’m hanging out with you I talk to you, and don’t need to be interrupted by messages or doom scrolling whatever app people like. My time is valuable, as is yours, and I give it the respect it deserves.
Old person here.
before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Books! and People! And while they wouldn’t give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.
was a constraint lifted
Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you’d never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn’t available. The ingredients weren’t available, either, so you weren’t going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s – like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello ‘salads’.
Was life more simple
Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. “No one was ever fired for buying IBM.” – because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I’m pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can’t trust that online reviews aren’t paid advertising.
We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who’d had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than ‘healthy living’. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.
Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no “Sgt. Pepper’s” without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.
All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for ‘raising ducks’ generally doesn’t mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn’t bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.
To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.
This was very well explained. Thank you for posting.
I think the base knowledge inthe past was much closer to primary sources. If you wanted to know something about science, you went to the library and read a book by an actual expert. You didn’t have some youtube dumbass between you and the knowledge.
Also - you didnt mention magazines. Thats how people often learned to fix things or were exposed to popular culture. Magazines like Popular Science or Family Handyman would have articles on fixing things in daily life. Automotive manuals like Haynes (worse) or Chiltons (better) were available at libraries as well.
How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life? What if you’re 95 and you run out of money? It’s not like you can go back to work or take out a loan etc.
My retirement plan is eating bugs in the woods because it beats working until I die.
Sounds like a plan, perhaps I should plan something similar :D
How do you deal with the uncertainty if the money you saved for retirement will be enough for the rest of your life?
I live in a country with a pension sachem and it still scares the fuck out of me
I’m not sure I’m old enough to answer this, but retirement scares me, and I basically don’t know if retirement is financially likely or reasonable. Even if you invest enough into a 401k early enough, you have a pretty good chance of having serious health problems at some point in life that will probably take most of that money.
Basically the situation is bleak, so I try to focus on doing what I can to improve my situation without dooming about what I can’t control.
This were not as big of and issue. Pensions were better. You stll had brokers but investing was more costly and fewer people did it.More use of banks. PE ratios were far lower and dividend payouts higher. It was a lower risk less volatile time. You could still reseach investments either you could go to the libraray, your broker woyld send you photo copies, and stock prices were in the paper. You could phone and mail order mutual funds and information. There were investing magazines. Geopolotics was more stable too but no less scary. Jobs were more stable too and the wealth divide less.
Also do not forget Compuserve had forms and etrade access in early 90s well before the internet explosion.
In my state there’s a ton of state ran resources for seniors. It’d not perfect but its better than most. My taxes go into it and I’ve seen the end result. Very happy with paying them.
Well, in, my case first there was communism, so the state provided us with a pension regardless of who worked how much and what was happening in general.
And then there was the collapse of the USSR and in general after a while everyone realized that they would just work until death. And so it happened.
Save more than you need.
Run fiscal history simulations (several programs do this for you). If I had invested this money in 1900, how would this have fared? If I had invested this money in 1901, how would this have fared. Etc.
Accept that you can’t plan for everything except your own resilience. You may have to adjust your spend if things are looking harder than you had planned for. You’ll be fine. At least that’s what I tell myself.
My fiscal plan has me running out in 0% of historical scenarios, which is belt and braces. Still need to save a lot before I can retire according to that fiscal plan.
My parent’s generation all had pensions. You didn’t have to worry about it unless the accountants cooked the books and didn’t manage it honestly. I was too young to know all the details, but I gather that system got upended by two things: 1) several pension funds that went bust and 2) shift from people working at one place forever to job-swapping which made pensions basically impossible (before computers).
They converted to 401k scam
I think your number 2 is in the wrong order.
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Um, we used textbooks, or RTFM
GenX here. Before computers… that’s a lie, my father always had computers, long before computers were cool. What we didn’t have was the Internet. Before the Internet, I read books. My father had a couple encyclopedia sets. One was more for kids and had colorful bindings. The other was the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So yeah, books were our Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is based on the encyclopedia concept. It’s right in the name!)
I’d ask if things get better, but I don’t know if I want to know the answer.
It really depends, but they really did get better for me. I think if you continually and persistently invest in your needs, eventually you make progress. Learning to have a regular sleep schedule, a healthy diet, regular exercise, and developing a career that gives you enough financial security that you have at least more than your basic needs - securing these things can allow you to start to work on higher order problems. It took me decades to get to that point, and I basically still struggle with the fundamentals - but it really can get better. I often look back at my younger self who desperately wondered if it was worth being alive then for a future that may or may not be worth living, and while I’m not sure I would choose the suffering again and I sympathize with the pain I experienced, I do affirm my life today and it is practically heaven compared to how I lived before.
Yes they do. Not sure if 48 counts as older than you, but I’ve definitely seen economic cycles and peace/war cycles come and go. This too shall pass.
I just went to libraries and asked my friends for information.
By the way, the internet didn’t suddenly become filled with all the knowledge in the world. The first internet pages were like personal blogs filled with not-so-useful information. In those days, the internet was similar to today’s darknet. Google was just starting out, and there was no search engine as such. As a result, people just shared websites with each other. The current internet is the result of millions of people’s efforts to fill it with information. So, having access to the internet didn’t change my life overnight.
But we used to buy collections of websites and data on CDs when CD-ROMs first became available, and that was pretty fun.
UPD: and at some point, people started exchanging data through modem calls, and that’s how fidonet was born. It was a whole cultural layer where you could get an address and slowly receive newsletters and exchange data through late-night calls to sisops. It was like a prehistoric torrent, but instead of pirating, you were exchanging data.
Remember webrings? You would find webpage you liked and they would have webring links to similar sites the author found and liked. It was pretty basic but it worked.
Somedays, I would spend 4-5 hours at the library, just to figure out one thing.
Before computers I was an ignorant little shit who read fiction books and fumble-fucked around until I could figure it out. All my education came from teachers in school literally talking to me in class, me reading the textbooks, me reading sci Fi, and me running around like a little feral goblin outside.
How do you live with pain related to aging?
Ibuprofen.
Or did you think people were just like, “Well, my knees were kinda sore going up the stairs today. Guess I’ll go slash my wrists?”
What’s your favourite LP?
Big Star Radio City And while you’re at it listen to all their albums (there’s only 3…I don’t count the 90s album) #1 Record is superior in a lot of ways and is phenomenal in it’s own right. Third is an artistic expression that is its own animal. Beautiful and brilliant in the most unconventional ways.
From back then? The Lonesome Jubilee by John Cougar Mellencamp.
These days I just use Apple Music. Costs less than Spotify, pays artists more, and doesn’t finance the alt right. (Well except for that dumb participation trophy Tim Cook gave Trump.) Anyway, I pay for music because I love music, and I neither smoke nor drink, so it’s like, my vice, I suppose. That and coffee.
Anyway, I have access to all the music I had back then and since on the
handheld Macphone I carry in my pocket.V-3’s “Hit Dead Center With My Disease”, which is actually a trilogy. It was released only 3 years ago, but the music is mostly from the late 80s or so.
On top of that, I have a Live LP by Nirvana, I quite like it, too.
For album art (by H.R. Gieger), Emerson Lake and Palmer’s Brain Salad Surgery. An almost monochrome skull folded out to reveal a monochrome woman, it included notes, band pics, and even the LP label had art.
More complete details can be seen in these seller posts:
Not a LP per sé, but
Killer Moses – Unseen EP
From a teacher. You learned UNIX from the person sitting next to you.
I’m just short of 50 and can probably give some answers to those questions. I’m sure there are folks even older who can go deeper.
before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Books and other people. My father taught me a lot of basics around home improvement. I spent several years in auto-shop in high-school. I used to read a lot of things, just to satisfy my curiosity. Honestly though, the internet has made this sort of thing much easier. You’re far more likely to find information on what you want to learn. However, you’re also able to find a lot of bad information. And most of social media was a bad idea.
Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?
Can’t say it “changed my life”, but it’s certainly a much better situation. Though I will say that the internet and easy access to information is still no substitute to having someone on hand to teach you for many subjects. Just the ability to ask questions and get immediate feedback is invaluable. Especially when analyzing your screw-ups. Having someone there to talk though what you did right and what you did wrong and how to avoid those mistakes in the future just can’t (currently) be replicated by Youtube videos. Still, I’d much rather have the internet than not.
Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?
It’s a mixed bag. Part of the “life was simpler” is just the rose colored glasses of nostalgia. There wasn’t the constant barrage of information and distractions. However, if your local library didn’t have the books you were looking for, you were up a creek. At the same time, I think there was more opportunity to fix things and tinker. When toys, bicycles and cars aren’t 90% semiconductors, you can actually pull out a set of hand tools and fix a lot of stuff yourself. On the down side, being a nerd or just being different led to a lot of bullying, with most authority figures basically telling you to “suck it up”. Not that I’d condone it, but I sort of understand why some kids turned to violence. So, as I said, a mixed bag.
Oh and adjacent to the access to information, the access to stuff is still kinda amazing. Sure, it’s easy to hate Bezos and Amazon. But, the fact that I can click on an item on the internet and it shows up at my door a couple days later is fucking amazing! I would ride my bicycle to the hobby store and hope they had any interesting D&D books. One time, I even got the owner to special order a book for me, which was a bit of a disaster. It’s really hard to explain how fantastic it is to just pick a random item out of millions and it just fucking shows up in days. Like, what even is this magic?
TV watching is also so, so much better. While I do sorta miss the Saturday Morning Cartoons ritual, I like not having to time my life around network schedules or setup a VCR timer and hope it works correctly this time.
So ya, overall I think things are better now. I’m just waiting for all that really cool tech like cybernetics and flying cars which is supposed to show up in the distant future of 2020.
I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?
Books, radio, and TV. Also, learning from others.
Before the Internet (because computers didn’t really replace any other information mechanisms before the Internet), if you wanted to learn something you might start by talking to someone more knowledgeable than yourself.
If there wasn’t someone who knew more than you, or you needed to learn more than the people around you knew, then you’d go to the library or the bookstore. Where other teenage guys would fumble around in sex unable to find the clitoris, I’m enough of a nerd that I went to the library and found a book that gave me the info I needed.
There were also TV shows that would actually impart knowledge. Before the rise of cable channels in the U.S., Public Broadcasting would have shows that shared knowledge. News and history, of course. Science too. Back then, broadcasters took their responsibility to educate the public much more seriously.
I probably learned more about math and grammar from School House Rock during Saturday morning cartoons in the 70’s than I was learning from school (Interjections [hey!] show excitement [yow!] or emotion [ouch!]. They are generally set aside from a sentence by an exclamation point or by a comma if the feeling’s not as strong… Conjunction Junction… Number Nine… Three Is a Magic Number…)
On TV you had shows like Nova which would report on science topics. There were, of course, cooking shows where the host would make recipes, not to win a contest, but to show the audience how to cook them.
I learned an enormous amount of what I know about home repairs from obsessively watching shows like This Old House and Home Time, and I picked up a lot about woodworking from a show called The Woodwright’s Shop. I also watched [Nahm!] The New Yankee workshop.
I watched a lot of the original version of This Old House where they would spend a season renovating and rehabilitating one house. It’s probably a big reason why my wife and I bought an old Victorian house.
Where other teenage guys would fumble around in sex unable to find the clitoris, I’m enough of a nerd that I went to the library and found a book that gave me the info I needed.
I guess we’ll have to go back to this, when sex education will be banned from the internet.
my wife
And it seems that the books worked lol
And it seems that the books worked lol
Well, I’d defer to her judgement, but it seemed to.
We had to use newspapers, books and encyclopedias - lots of print stuff. Or someone taught us. Sometimes we learned stuff from tv. Less efficient for sure. It seems like there was less misinformation. It was different, but I don’t think of it as bad.
