Do you remember life before the internet?
The formative years of my childhood took place in the 1990s. There were no flat screen televisions, only garish, round masses of glass mounted on a wooden compact frame. To change the channel, we had to physically move from our couch or floor to turn a dial to one of five channels. On the oft chance that the dial was broken or missing, we had to use needle nose pliers or a flathead screwdriver to channel surf.
The NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, Nintendo 64 and the PlayStation One were the consoles that either lived or visited in my house, but I was limited to an hour of play during weekdays due my grandmother wanting to watch her ‘stories’ (soap operas) or The Price Is Right during those hot summer months. In that time in which she took over the television, I often went outside and played catch with a tennis ball, practicing my windup on the side of my brick house. Failing that, I would find a nice wooden stick and swing that around, pretending I was a Jedi or Sith (depending on my mood that day), practicing my lightsaber skills on a poor, defenseless tree.
Our ‘Google’ was encyclopedias that traveling salesmen pitched from door to door or through school fundraisers. Making a pizza order required using a rotary dial phone with an obnoxiously long and coiled wire, that was mounted to the wall. Cellular phones were large and heavy monstrosities that resided in the fancy cars of the well off or rich, as far we were concerned. To anyone born after the year 1996, this will be foreign and outrageous. For the rest of us, it was the good old days that are now referred to as ‘vintage’ (shudder…). Speaking for myself, I really miss those days and wouldn’t mind some semblance of that feeling in some capacity.
The Musings of an Average Guy 