…would the people who seem to use it exclusively for emailing stupid jokes resort to writing these jokes out on pieces of paper and snail-mailing them to us?
Just askin’. :dubious:
Faxlore.AKA Xereoxlore/photocopylore
This is how that stuff used to circulate, just not as fast or as far.
Funny drawing and joke photocopies of photocopies (recursion) got passed around between friends and people you just met at parties. Sometimes you had to lighten the photocopy to remove all that extra black, then trace the drawing and white out any remaining erroneous marks to make a nice photocopy for your file you kept of the joke or drawing.
It’s hard to get faxed porn.
I’ve been told.
Maybe the internet does not exist at all. Perhaps your personal computer (or Mac) came bundled with software that mimics these conversatons.
I would be happy with no internet as long as my computer was good at lying to me about that.
This OP makes me feel old.
Are there really people here who weren’t working in offices (or warehouses, or any damn place with a photocopy/mimeograph machine and folks with a low sense of humour) before everyone had internet?
It wasn’t that long ago, dammit. :mad:
For future reference, if the internet truly does burst into flames and we revert into a primitive cave-dwelling race, when sending smoke signals to friendly tribes, “LOL” is rendered as .-… — .-…
As part of my end-of-civilization preparations, I have a library card. I’m safe.
And I have a gun. Gimme your library card.
Of course you won’t be able to find anything in a library. There are no more physical card catalogs, the inventory is kept online these days.
It’s okay. You could start at book one and work your way up.
Granted, you’d run into a bunch of duplicated, and it might get really boring around the biography section, but who knows.
Yeah. I’ve been surfing the net since I was 8 years old. (I’m now 23)
I’m 51, and I remember getting mimeographed pages of stuff at school. I particularly remember the smell. My husband got a lot of photocopied porn when he was younger, and single. Or at least that’s what he claimed when I found a lot of porn.
My husband and his Air Force buddies had a lot of free time and a couple of Polaroid cameras…and so naturally I got some photos of him posing without wearing even as much as a posing pouch when we were dating.
I guess I am old, but I grew up without photocopiers and came of age when they were new, but rather expensive to use (10c a copy, equivalent to a dollar today). You wanted to make duplicate copies of something (an exam, a newsletter,…) you typed or even handwrote on a mimeograph or ditto master and ran off on a machine as many copies as you needed. There was one telephone in every house usually and most long distance calls cost $3 for each 3 minutes or fraction thereof. And we used something called “mail” to send letters or pay bills. You put them into a container and glued on a “stamp” that you bought at the “post office”. Somehow we survived and we could go back. And the pointless jokes and spam didn’t circulate. Oh, a computer cost at least $1,000,000.00 and there only a few dozen or a few hundred in the whole world.
During that long, sad time that I spent plotting ways to make myself god-king, I prepared plans to deal with just that problem. They will still work, although, unfortunately, a good number of you will have to be imprisoned in the Library of Congress to make it work.
You must not be as old as you claim, if you don’t remember hand written chain letters. Sometimes they were typed, and if they were, mostly they were typed one at a time, without benefit of carbon paper (remember carbon paper?) (we had a whole lesson on Proper Use of Carbon Paper in typing class). Usually, though, the chain letter was written by hand.
I’ll grant you that nowadays it’s ridiculously easy to forward things to everyone in the address book, no matter if they WANT to hear a heartwarming story or not. And spammers have it much too easy. But yeah, people did still circulate urban legends, jokes, and trivia, even if they didn’t have computers and emails back in the day.
Back in the day, spammers had the back pages of some of our Republic’s finer periodicals. They were scams then and they’re scams now, and it doesn’t hurt their financial viability one bit.