Tag: dailyprompt-1951

The Internet Before the Internet

Do you remember life before the internet?

I’m 62 years old. I remember life before computers, when a TI-30 calculator was the epitome of technology. I remember the IBM-PC and the excitement of the WYSIWYG interfaces of Apple computers.

And I remember the Internet. And the Internet before the Internet.

Arpanet was considered the Internet before the Internet according to the history of the Internet. I remember sitting at a VAX terminal on Internet Relay Chat. but there was another system that featured chat, group chat, notes, and games. And that was the PLATO system. PLATO was an educational system that put terminals in colleges and universities, and occasional K-12 schools.

The interface was, by today’s standards, primitive. The classic PLATO terminal was a hulking box with an orange on black plasma screen. (The definitive book on PLATO is actually named The Friendly Orange Glow, by Brian Dear.) But the interface was far friendlier than the cryptically driven Arpanet. PLATO’s programmers and designers built an interface that allowed users to congregate in topic clusters (notes files) and communicate (chat). In addition, with very crude graphics, one could game.

This resulted in a fertile social milieu. PLATO people gamed together, chatted in interest groups, flirted online. There was (informally) online dating, and there were catfishers (I personally knew one, perhaps even the first one). I online dated and attended meetups before the cautionary tales. PLATO spawned its own slang, its own nerd culture.

PLATO and its programmers laid the foundation for things we take for granted on the Internet today. Our web browsers descend from the early browsers that were written by PLATO alumni. Dungeon-style online games started with the crude graphics of PLATO.

So I remember the Internet before the Internet, where I was a gamer and chatted in chat rooms, dated online, and wrote poetry in what we would now call forums.

Life Before the Internet

I’m 62, so I’ve lived life before the Internet. It was a time before information flowed readily and before we had the world at our fingertips (literally).

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

I remember researching before the Internet, which required reading through periodical indices and card catalogs. A lot of reading, and a lot of taking notes, and for someone like me who was not organized as I should be, a lot of frustration.

I could not write novels before the Internet. I wanted accurate detail in my books. For example, I had my idea for what became Whose Hearts are Mountains in graduate school, but I couldn’t pack up and live in the desert for a year to find out about desert life. It would have been hard for me to pick a spot in the desert and determine the flora and fauna, the temperature, and the layout. What I knew back then was that deserts were hot and deserted.

Now, facts flow almost as fast as I can type. I have written several novels, because I can do research while writing. I can access publication databases online from my home. I can answer random questions or look up childhood experiences to reminisce. I don’t know how I would do without the Internet, and I hope I never have to find out.