Strictly speaking I wasn’t alive before the very very beginnings of what we now know as the internet, but I was certainly alive before its wide adoption. Pretty much knowing anything that is something that only exists on the internet will make you old faster than anything going on outside of it.
There are certain things like 8-track tapes (or just cassette tapes in general) that make someone feel old when younger people don’t remember, but that’s even more extreme with internet memes and sites. It was only a year or two ago that a friend of mine who is only six years younger than me asked me what “Friendster” was. That’s when I got to thinking about what is the minimum period of time something on the internet must be irrelevant before it’s completely unknown by people only a few years younger than you.
Incidentally, there are indeed people who have posted the question “What did people use before Google?” Most of the answers seem to be wise asses saying “the library.” Personally I was an altavista guy because you could use plusses and minuses to hope in vain that it would help improve your results.
Nowadays these kids on my lawn don’t realize that if they just typed the question they submit to Yahoo! Answers into Google, they’d get their answer.
I must honestly say I’d never heard of friendster, but before that, it was e-mail, forums and meeting in contact….
Before youtube there was no such thing as online “I saw this video” … well there was ebaumsworld where you could download videos, save them then play them from your hard drive.
Searching before google: Altavista. Or clicking links from geocities. But there have been search engines really from the start of the internet.
Life before internet …. was there such a thing?
I organize a lot of students events, and I really can’t imagine anymore how that worked without having a cell phone – even though I was one of the last ppl to have one (I managed to keep from having one till I was 19)
Friendster is mostly popular in Singapore and parts of Asia now, but other places entirely supplanted by something like Facebook. Before YouTube I used Hotline which was kind of cumbersome, but was a good way to get random files and weird quicktimes like the dub of Winnie the Pooh that made it look like he was worshipping satan.
I think people who know what came before Google could really blow kid’s minds by telling them that Yahoo! used to have people manually sort their links O_O
As for cell phones, what I find funny is a very large amount of Seinfeld episodes wouldn’t exist if the characters had cell phones.