Yeah, and the encyclopedia set. Pull out any letter, start flipping through, go on a little journey. It was pre-internet info-surfing.
I don’t miss anything. The only thing I hate about today’s society is cell phones. Get rid of them and I’d be in paradise 
Is this not a function of rising affluence (on your part personally and generally amongst lots of people) and cheaper airfares as much as the internet? When I was a teenager I went to NYC with my brother, it was an adventure because prior to that all my holidays had been with my parents, and only one or two had been abroad. Since then I and most of my friends have ratchetted up numerous destinations. I know within Europe at least, RyanAir et al have made visiting more countries cheaper and easier than ever before.
As far as the US goes, different places used to have different feels to them, even in the 90’s. Now, most places feel the same. You see all the same chains of restaurants and stores in just about every town or city. I don’t really even notice different accents anymore unless they are very extreme.
I’m 30, which is old enough to remember LPs, mixtapes, card catalogues, travel agents, encyclopedias, books forever lost once your library’s copy fell apart, rare songs, comics pages, the evening news, eating dinner in front of the TV so I wouldn’t miss my favorite show, the heartache of lost snapshots, and catalogue mail order–including the kind that you had to go to the nearest Sears to claim, and navigate the labyrinth of little cubbies full of other people’s packages.
I honestly don’t miss any of it, and thank god every day for the internet. Sorry, folks.
Postcards.
The thrill of a postcard from a friend visiting a far away land is just so much better than an email sent from a foreign land (but even that is better than a facebook update)
Ohhhhhh wait, smartass me thought of something.
Keeping in touch via hand-written letters. I’ve somehow ended up with about a dozen boxes of stationery and nobody to write to.
I miss being surprised by television shows. Not only not being spoiled about a plotline, but not knowing about major cast changes or plot points in advance (with rare exceptions).
I feel the same way about letter writing in general. I never wrote great letters but up until my first couple of years of college, I loved writing and receiving them. That practice was already dying out, but now, with email, IM, Facebook updates, etc., that’s gone. (Didn’t see Sattua’s post before)
I agree. I don’t know if it was necessarily better that news, by necessity, was filtered in through limited sources but I could digest it more easily. Now, although the Net is partially what helped awaken me politically, I find myself constantly “twisting and shouting” as bits of data constantly barrage me from left and right (;)).
Same thing with a song you heard and loved but didn’t know the title or artist. Now you can just google the lyrics to find that info, but I remember hanging onto tapes I had made off the radio for years because they had that one song I was dying to identify and couldn’t.
I remember staying up really late in the summertime to watch “120 Minutes” on MTV (Sundays, 12-2 am) because that was the one of the only ways to learn about interesting new music. The other resource was a weekly radio show (IIRC Wednesdays, 11 pm - 1 am) on an otherwise classic rock station (WMMR in Philly; the show was called “Planet M” with Matt Cord, loved that guy) that I would record on my tape deck and keep my parents from catching me by turning the volume all the way down and praying that I didn’t sleep through the sound of Side A on the cassette tape clicking off when it ran out. Back in my day, we had to work to hear new music!
Or you would read about a band in a zine or something and have a serious debate with yourself whether it was worth dropping $15 to buy their album sound-unheard just on the basis of a good review.
The ability to get away from the fucking JOB ! :mad:
A-hem. Excuse me. 
And it’s not just the internet, but cellphones too that has led to this.
I miss the full time Record Shops that had knowledge employees. You could go in and ask for suggestions about a good, new Rock band. Best of all, they’d put the record on the store player and let you hear some of it for yourself.
Try going to Camelot Music and asking for that kind of music advice. Especially if it’s a niche area like classic rock, jazz or whatever. Amazon’s “suggestions” for related music are sometimes very helpful. But, I’d still prefer the old Record Shops.
I don’t personally miss this, even though I had a very enjoyable youth writing to pen-friends across the world; I am very excited by the instant social contact of the internet. But I am disappointed that new generations will never experience it the way I did.
Me too. I am in a situation where I almost have to download TV shows instead of waiting months for local broadcast, just so I can avoid spoilers (as well as participate in threads discussing them).
I don’t miss the “good ol’ days.” The Good Ol’ Days were terrible. Long may they live.
Vacations before Wifi and cell phones.
I like to camp in remote areas. I put in for vacation and my boss, after his hissy fit over me being gone for a week or two week (once a year), says something like “well, we’ll email or call if we need you.” Then he simply doesn’t believe me when I tell him that won’t be possible most of the time.
I love downloading music. I love having access to nearly any song I want. But I do miss used record stores. I used to hunt down used record stores in every town I visited. The thrill of finding some odd remix or bonus track I’d never heard of was wonderful.
Of course record stores also had posters, pins, bumper stickers, fancy gatefold LPs, colored vinyl records, and even calendars. I don’t think being a fan is nearly as “stuff” oriented these days, because there’s no where to buy the stuff.
Having spare time. Because the internet has definitely eliminated that from my life.
Amen.
Oh, and something I completely forgot: Google Street View. Google-Freaking-Street View.
Now don’t get me wrong. I think it’s totally amazing and I’m more than happy that it exists. I mean, you are basically there, wandering around. All you’re missing is the occasional waft of sewer gas from a manhole cover.
And can you imagine if, only 10 years ago, you had said, “Yea, in 10 years we are going to have this thing called 'Street View” and it’s going to work like this: blah, blah, blah…". They would have ruptured their spleens from laughing so hard. And then when they had collected themselves they would have punched us in the nose for wasting the calories burned in vibrating our vocal chords in spewing such drivel. And yet, here we are…
So, yea. Google Street View. It’s mind-boggling alright, but quite the dream killer.
I think it’s a combination of both. I mean, back in the late '90s, booking an overseas trip was a fairly complicated procedure that involved travel agents, trying to work out the best times to travel, organising hotels (or staying with relatives), all done via snail-mail, maybe fax if you were lucky, or expensive phone calls. It’s not like nowadays where you can jump on the airline’s website and book your flights, whilst checking out wotif.com to sort your accommodation, and sending of an e-mail to your cousin in Paris to let them know you’ll be in town Tuesday after next if they want to catch up.
I backpacked around China in 1995 with my then-girlfriend, and we placed a long-distance call to her parents, because my parents were visiting them. We had to book the call in advance, about three or four hours beforehand, then return to make it. It was touch and go if they’d be in to pick up the call. No voicemail so if they weren’t there we’d have had to book another call and return the next day to try again. We stood in a draughty booth and these reedy crackly voices came up the line after very long pauses. It was quite an eerie experience, and it felt weird actually to be talking to people so far removed.
Other than that, to communicate less expensively we would create long handwritten missives on air mail paper, one at a time per recipient and no cut-and-paste, and in return we used the Poste Restante system: friends and family would vaguely know what city we would be in and when, and write long letters to us c/o the city’s post office, that we’d pick up. I remember my delight at finding 16 letters from friends waiting for me when I arrived in Bangkok after China, and taking a day or two to savour reading them. Now, 16 emails? Not quite so exciting.
The other aspect is the relative lack of worry from our families: they didn’t expect us to be in contact for several weeks at a time. Now if you are off somewhere exotic and go silent on email, Facebook or SMS for two or three days, people assume that something nasty has happened. I’m off to Bangladesh on a boys’ adventure holiday in a couple of weeks and my girlfriend, who will be in central America at the time, has made me promise to buy a local SIM card so she can be sure I’m OK (and she’s doing the same, so vice versa, which will be better for my peace of mind too).