Let's see, twenty years ago I would have been just finishing high school. Admittedly, I was a geek at a young age, so I had a computer back then (some PC clone as I recall.. would have been I think the second computer I'd owned). Having a computer at home was just starting to be more common among late teenagers (maybe 25% in my demographic). Nowadays of course, if they don't have a computer by the time they are six, most kids would run to Children's Aid screaming child abuse. We'll just gloss over my being a pretty good assembly language developer by that point in time as completely anomalous but somehow being good for building character. I had used one Mac (the original one) back then, and had seen a Lisa.
Internet? Nowadays the kids couldn't imagine a time without it. Back then, nada. I did actually get a modem back then (300 baud, then a 1200 baud one). The homegrown BBS systems were at their heyday back then; the cool ones actually had several lines, and some even a real time chat feature (not exactly MSN!), along with a messaging system. It was only the hardcore geeks who were into that stuff; most people seemed to survive quite fine without an electronic existance.
Again very atypically, I'd attended a science, technology and business camp called Shad Valley the summer before, which was run through the university. Got my first tiny exposure to Unix there, and also ended up with an account on the university's Amdahl mainframe system (MVS) for the next few years, again which supported email and a sort-of real time messaging. It was connected to Bitnet, one of the many networks that were the precursors to the Internet. If you were really clever, you could actually send mail from one network to the other, by manually routing things through various gateway machines using specially coded email addresses.
And don't even get started about phones and iPods. No cell phones, that's for sure. Our school had (I don't remember, but I'm guessing) a few pay phones. There was also one phone in the office and one in the yearbook office (yes, I was a yearbook geek too, but it was a good place to go when skipping class). Can you imagine kids today without a phone? Portable music players were around then (cassette).. the Sony Walkman had been around for a number of years, so lots of people had those or ripoffs of them. People still stole music back then, but through copying audio tapes, not by swapping MP3's.
I feel really old now.
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