They really didn’t.
Before the internet was commonplace I had access to the library of the TU Delft. I cannot tell you how much time it took to find an article even if you knew the publisher, the author(s) and the title.
More obscure stuff: forget about it.
A repair manual for anything?
You better be officially affiliated with the manufacturer. An owners manual for some device you found in the attic? LOL.
Yeah, even the sort of questions we casually ask like: ‘Are blackberries the same as black raspberries?’; ‘how do I open a bottle of wine without a corkscrew?’; ‘what kind of bug is this?’; ‘I found a baby bird, what should I do?’; ‘why is there a block of concrete inside my washing machine?’ - you’d have to either already know the answer, annoy multiple people until you found someone who knew the answer; in some cases, you might maybe figure out the answer by trial and error and breaking stuff, or invest significant time and effort researching the answer in books - not that there’s anything specifically wrong with that; half the stuff I know, I stumbled across in the search for the other half, and books are great for that.
But you couldn’t just ask the question and have the answer* right away, from a device in your pocket (*or multiple possible answers, with illustrations and videos and links to more information)
Pre-internet I was talking to a woman about a building in our small town. She told me it was once a really wild place. She was blanking on the name of the place back then, and it was frustrating her.
She picked up her phone and called the town library. She described the location of the building and the librarian (a woman in her 80s) immediately knew the name.
Sure, that’s remarkable for the reason that it’s an exceptionally quick answer for an obscure question in the pre-internet age
They worked fine for some people and some situations - I live in a place where I have access to three public library systems that don’t cost me anything but I know people who didn’t have access to any public library without paying a yearly fee ( a couple of hundred dollars). And even with access to three systems, not every book is available. I could buy a book I wanted in the pre-internet days, but if it wasn’t popular enough , I’d have to go to a store, special order it , wait for it for at least a week or two and then go back to pick it up. If I needed a replacement owner’s manual, I had to call the manufacturer, order it, maybe pay for it and wait for it. Works for some things , but not for others.
Anyway, as far as the OP , I think it would be a net loss - most of the problems of the internet existed before , maybe on a smaller scale or less obvious . But people spreading false information existed before the internet. Maybe not so far or as fast - but the very same features that spread false information further and faster than before also spread true information further and faster. And apart from spreading information, they keep people connected in a way that didn’t really happen before - pre-internet, I had loads of relatives that I didn’t hear from except at Christmas and people I lost touch with when we graduated or changed jobs. Now, with social media , I can keep current on what’s going in my grade school /high school/college friends and former coworkers lives and it makes setting up in person reunions way easier than in the pre-internet days. And then there are places like this - pre-internet, I never would have been having conversations with such a diverse group of people . Not diverse in regard to race/ethnicity/religion - I live in NYC so I’ve always had that. But the only people I know in real life who live in a rural area moved there from NYC. Usually to places like the Catskills or the Poconos that are full of NYC transplants. I don’t think those people have the same perspective and experience as a life-long resident of those places, much less the perspective of someone who has always lived in a rural area where the “new people” moved in fifty years ago.
Robust, celerious communications networks are great for people who live off the beaten track, especially when it comes to wireless communication which can be deployed without raising utility poles or digging tunnels in places like the middle of the jungle. Just the contribution to being able to do business is crucial. Books and entertainment are nice too (and systematic pirating has democratized these so as to be available to everyone).
If you had access to a library carrying them. Fine if you live in New York, not so fine in the middle of Montana.
I did the literature review for my dissertation in 1978, well pre-internet. It was tough, and my field was pretty small and I knew all the places stuff got published. I missed something even so. A lot more time today is spent actually reading the material, not browsing through journal back issues for papers you might need.
Every reply to me only talks about library access. Didn’t you have home libraries and magazine / newspaper / catalogue / newsletter subscriptions? No need to leave the house, even in Bumfuck USA.
Had an obscure question you really needed an answer for? You wrote to the pertinent specialty publication and an expert answered your query, either in the publication or in a personal note sent by…gulp…mail. I did it dozens and dozens of time.
It amazes me that people like me who actually lived pre-Internet paint a picture that getting information, feeding niche interests or keeping up to date on myriad things wasn’t really feasible until the net.
Don’t think anyone said it was generally unfeasible (though in many cases, it was very much next to impossible), but more like a royal pain in the ass, and something that may take a few seconds of search today would takes weeks to months to get answers to by mail.
No thank you. It is far superior today. Don’t know how it can even be argued.
Sure, but the net gain in this case is that with more catalogues and archives networked you can do your research faster.
There is a thread now about whether tourism is good for Hawai’i: on one hand, they bring in money, but there are many side effects and consequences to supporting large numbers. Perhaps there is a (weak) analogy with the Internet.
You could do all of that, yes. But the barrier to entry was higher and it cost a lot more to do it that way. No, most people weren’t retaining their own libraries of old magazines. The questions that went into magazines were simpler in nature because people DIDN’T have the capacity for anything more.
The original baseball encyclopedia (not the original but the MacMillan one) came out in 1969. There were other encyclopedias but they had fewer statistics. Sporting News published a book called Daguerrotypes, but that was only for selected players. Now I suppose you could turn up your nose at the 1969 book, why doesn’t everyone simply retain their decades old Sporting News Guides and Registers and look things up that way. Gosh, I don’t know. It takes resources to maintain your own library?
Those books were great when they existed, but no, they were not as good or as usable as the online versions, which are now searchable databases where you can do things much easier than you ever could with the old books, to say nothing of the period prior to the books, where if you want to turn up your nose at today, you can just say “Why not just retain your own library and use paper and a typewriter to get the same result.”
Yes, there were sources, but it wasn’t as good a system.
I’m struggling a little to conceptualise how we could have a world with electronic communication intact, but without the web (i.e. browsers, web-pages, and their assorted paraphernalia). After all, if you have the infrastructure for the former, and the know-how of how to create the latter, surely the internet would simply be resurrected from whichever fate had befallen it ? Some catastrophic server failure? Satellites and undersea cables damaged? They’d make new ones. It might take some time, but the loss would be temporary (and the effort and expense allocated to said recovery would be immense).
But let’s go with the premise that the internet (here, the term comprising web-pages, online apps, etc…) is out of action for a significant portion of time, due to [insert sci-fi reason] (I dunno, solar flares…). The upside would be that disinformation and propaganda would spread less quickly, true. The well-publicised negatives of social media would be cancelled out, and we wouldn’t be able to spoil the ending of films we are about to watch as quickly. So far so good.
However, the downsides would be catastrophic, and far outweigh the upsides. Entire industries would collapse overnight, and the world economy would be radically re-shaped and re-defined. Unemployment and economic recession would devastate societies and economies, alongside the unrest and (civil) wars which would inevitably follow.
It’s easy for those of us who are old enough to remember life without the internet to wistfully speculate about how things would be without it now, but the entire global economy is now dependent on it. As smug as we might feel claiming that we could just ‘dust off the old fax machines and go back to rotary phones’, the mass re-adoption of 50±year-old technology would involve a huge re-alignment of the world economy and its workforce, and it would not go smoothly.
My 2c, anyway…
I bet you Google for information 100x as frequently as you wrote. What magazines published answers like that? I don’t remember any.
Sure you could do it, but it wasn’t easy. When I was in high school I had to shlep myself to the Queens central Library in Jamaica, Queens, to look up stuff in the Readers Guide or Times index and get it on microfilm. It took 3 hours for something that could be done in under 15 minutes today. I used to get post cards requesting reprints of my papers from Eastern Europe, still behind the Iron Curtain back then. They had the journals they appeared in, but they weren’t allowed copying machines. Slowed them down a lot, which I guess was a good thing.
And there were a lot fewer papers in computer science back then. Researching biology unless you had access to a big library with all the journals would have been a nightmare.
I have a big home library of SF books, but I still use the library for other things. Do you think people would want the equivalent of the piles of National Geographics everyone had for all magazines?
Hell, when I was in school I typed on a manual typewriter. I could do it, but it took a lot longer than a word processor. That’s not internet related, but it shows that being able to do it is different from being able to do it efficiently.
Nobody said that. It was possible, but:
It wasn’t always quick; You couldn’t research the idea that just popped into your head in mere seconds, order the materials necessary to try it out in minutes, and be up and running to try it out the following afternoon.
It wasn’t necessarily easy; If some really trivial curious question occurs to you, you can now google it with one hand while you sip your coffee. Pre-internet you’d have to do some time-consuming legwork. Would it be worth doing that for a really trivial passing thought? Not always.
It wasn’t parallel; if you wanted to know about some niche thing you could seek out people who knew how to answer, maybe attend their club and ask about it; now you just find their discord, post the question, then go off and do something else (or lots of things else) before checking back for the answer.
None of these factors absolutely prevent people from pursuing niche interests, but they absolutely do reduce the productivity and throughput you would experience in doing it.
In some cases, that restriction in throughput means the person wouldn’t reach that kind of ‘critical mass’ situation where a whole load of rapidly-and-simultaneously-arriving ideas start to snowball into something brand new.
And that’s quite aside from the stuff that simply wasn’t readily available - like the ability to scroll and zoom recent aerial photography of the entire planet.
It’s like when the vote was extended to the unwashed, uneducated masses.
Trust the principle. Connecting the people is an overwhelmingly good thing. It may take time to look like it is though.
Exactly. The problem isn’t the internet. It’s a lack of education, which will take time to fix.
I like to think that this phenomenon is what Green Day song “Wake Me Up When September Ends” is about.
I think it’s about the loss of a band member’s father.
But I always think of it as a song about having to live through the terrible political aftermath of 9/11… Which we’re still living through twenty years later. (At least in part thanks to the Internet!)
And you didn’t even have to do the search yourself. You could have the butler do it while you are off on the yacht!
I had a thought that the internet is like an enormous library, but Google had that library filled with yellow pages. In fact, I believe Google is responsible for the loss of Billions of Yahoo personal web sites back in 2009 (or so… dont remember the exact date). Granted, there were huge amounts of junk, but there were some gems. It may have had to do with their algorithms and rankings not playing nicely with the Yahoo pages.
Doesn’t Google basically run a “pay to play/payola” scheme with their searches?