What did you do before the Internet?

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I don't know how I survived. I sort of wish we had had the Internet when I was young. Although, I'm pretty sure my parents wouldn't have let me spend much time online anyway, and I probably wouldn't have had much privacy.

When I was a kid I used to go for long walks, long bike rides, I read A LOT, both fact and fiction (probably saved my life), the library was my second home, wrote stories, listened to music although my choices were not many since music cost a lot back then, played the guitar and the lonely nights when I was awake but had to pretend I was sleeping, I listened to shortwave radio with headphones.

When I was a young adult, I played games (really simple but hard ones) at my pre dos computer, watched a lot of TV (When I was a kid we only had TV from early evening to not very late, and as a young adult, the channels I had stopped around 2 - 3 am), talked on the phone a lot, especially with friends who lived in other cities, even made a phone friend through a support group, never met him just talked on the phone and started to get loads more music (Still vinyl recods).

So I managed to be a book/TV/phone addict before I became a computer addict. If I had had a computer back then and Internet, I think I would have felt better, on the other hand I had to do more and be more creative.

Before internets? I thought I was the only person like me that liked Transformers. I watched lots of TV, played Nintendo/Supernintendo/Playstation.

When I was growing up I read a lot, rode a bicycle when I had one and had various hobbies such as drawing and stamp collecting.
Computers weren't available until my late teens and early twenties and they were not used for recreation. My first computer I bought was I was
in my early thirties back in 1992. The internet was still Darpa-Net and very few people were using it. The only online services were America Online,
Genie (The GE network run by General Electric) and Compu-Serve. All were 2400 Baud dial-up services.

You missed the point of the question... I was doing the same as I do now... Playing games, looking into making my computer better. And wanting to get more out of it. I even had a job to build my first PC. Before that it was just a simpler computer. I was even doing some BASIC programming. After BASIC was CP/M, then DOS, then Windows, then Windows NT.

I was born in 1986, so I started internetting when I was 11. Before then I spent most of my time reading, writing stories, and playing computer games. I also watched a lot of TV.

I was lucky enough to be born (1985) and grow up to the point where I could appreciate the power of the 'net just at the time where it became useful and entertaining to the masses. Before then I had Video Games, school work, TV, LEGO.

hmm, this might be a question that could not be properly answered by a (not so) typical Gen Y'er like myself

Read every book I could get my hands on.

I just hung out with other kids like everyone else.

i watched a lot of TV, played video games (by myself), looked at books & magazines, drew pictures, and listened to my cassettes & CDs. those were my typical activities i did as a lonesome & pathetic Aspie kid. when i was in Hell...i mean...boarding school, all i could do is write letters to my mom from overseas, and sometimes she would call me.

Oh god I dunno what I would do if there was no internet. There goes socializing, learning, gaming (well maybe to a lesser extent, I'll just play a console) in my life.

I got into computers and the internet (or what existed of it) at a fairly early age, around 12 or 13. Other than that, my answer is the same as most here.

Spent a lot of time at libraries, reading books, watching movies and TV shows, listened to music, played a ton of video games, and collected hundreds of cassette bootlegs of certain bands.

Please tell me someone here remembers the ImagiNation Network? It was the very first thing I signed up for on the internet. I had only dialed into BBS's at that point, so this pre-dated Compuserve and Prodigy for me.

The Imagination Network was the first of its kind in online multiplayer gaming. The thing I remember most was the awesome WWI simulator called "Red Baron", where you could dog-fight other players over the internet. All this in 1991!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ImagiNation_Network

Reading that article is pretty funny. Remember when the internet had "service plans" of varying prices, based on how many hours you could use per month to be logged into the internet? 10, 15, 20 hours in a month? I could burn that in a single day now.

I also remember when AOL first offered its "unlimited" plan, and having to sometimes spend hours trying to dial into a local number to connect because I kept getting a busy signal. God help you if you ever got disconnected, you might have to spend forever trying to re-dial back in and get through.

Video games and books

Ran Ch@os BBS (dial-up). Skated.