IMAGINE WHAT LIFE WOULD BE LIKE WITHOUT TODAY’S TECHNOLOGY?

By Vincent Lyn

It’s hard to imagine life before technology. What if you had to get through a day without the internet? What about going on a road trip without Google Maps? Or getting gifts in a pinch without Amazon? That all probably sounds nearly impossible these days. But not only did we do it a few decades ago, some of us like me even miss those simpler times. We managed to get just as much accomplished, but we just did it a little differently.

Today’s modern conveniences are easy to take for granted, but it’s important to look back on just how far we’ve come. “There’s a great saying that if we don’t know where we come from, how can we know where we are going?” says Francine Cefola, co-author of the book Tell It To the Future. “I am a firm believer that we learn from the past, and if we ignore things we can’t conceptualize because it seems too archaic or slow or unproductive, we miss understanding how we got to where we are today.”

In case you don’t remember life before technology took over and made everything “easier,” here’s a glimpse of how different the world was in the 20th century.

Anyone who took numerous road trips in the 20th century didn’t have Google Maps handy. Instead, we had to take our atlases along for the ride. Spiral-bound and just over 160 pages, these atlases contained highway and road information on all 50 states. But navigating from point A to point B was still tricky. And because the atlases were only updated once a year, the information wasn’t always accurate.

I remember being on the open road, guided only by not-always-trusty Rand McNally road atlas. Sometimes there were missing roads, or a road on the map that didn’t technically exist. But I’d figure it out. You can’t be complacent with an atlas, not like those people who put all their trust in a GPS. I never drove a car into a swamp because my Rand McNally told me to, I’ll tell you that much. Though I remember I had planned a weekend getaway in upstate New Hampshire. I was driving a convertible and my girl friend, with map in hand being blown back and forth trying to figure out what exit to take, it blew out of her hands and flew away lost forever.

But with that one could even pull into a visitor’s center. They’d know the exact change you needed for tolls, and if there was any construction ahead we needed to worry about. After a long day on the road, it could just be nice to hear another human voice. Plus, they had maps, too. Free maps!”

If you wanted to send a message to someone without actually talking to them before the 2000s, you had to write them a letter. Yes, a letter — by hand, with paper and a pen or pencil. And then you had to go to the nearest post office to buy stamps.

The messages involved a little more effort and many people feel like it was a healthier way of communicating. Letters have always been a nice way to show someone when they are gone that you’re thinking about them. I lost track of the amount of greeting cards and love letters I wrote to girl friends. E-mail can never replace the excitement and thrill of receiving and opening a personal letter.

Long before Wi-Fi was a reality, the only way to go online was with dial-up internet access.You’d need a regular landline, which you would then pluck out of the wall socket, and connect the cord to your machine. You’d also need a monthly internet subscription. And in 1998, it would cost you $21.95 a month for an unlimited connection to AOL. If you have only one phone line, you have to make sure nobody else in the house picks up the phone to dial while you’re connected to the internet, or your connection will ‘drop’ and you’ll have to dial in again. Some cities had only one or two dial-up numbers, each connected to a switching system and a bank of maybe 10 or 100 modems. So during busy times of day, you might not be able to connect to the internet at all because all of the modems were in use by other users. And everyone remembers the noise you hear as you dialed in.

Cameras, remember those? A good Nikon or Cannon an original user’s manual is 60 pages long and contains detailed instructions on everything from shutter speed, to depth of field distance charts, to the 11-step process to load the camera. It took me weeks to learn how to take a decent photo. And with film, seeing what you photographed was anything but immediate. You mailed away the film or took it to a film developer and you’d get it back in about a week. Then you’d see if you had anything in focus or the right colors. That said, even back in the day, you could still take a “selfie” of sorts, as long as you were fast and your camera came equipped with a timer. You could prop the camera up and run to where it was aimed and a week later you’d find out if you were actually in the photo.

Getting money to a friend or family member in the days before Venmo invariably required face-to-face contact. If you owed somebody 20 bucks, you had to get the physical currency — either from an ATM or by walking into your bank’s branch and requesting a withdrawal from one of the tellers. And then you had to bring that cash to the person you owed it to and hand it directly to them. Or you could use a check. I paid a lot of debts by handing people a personal check. But it doesn’t have the immediacy of cash. They have to bring that check to their bank, sign the back of it, and fill out a deposit form, and then wait up to three days, and sometimes much longer, for the money to clear in their account.

Things were considerably more difficult if you lived in a different city than the person you were trying to send money to. You could mail them a check. You could also mail them cash, which my grandparents sometimes did, but that was always dangerous. I remember my parents telling me, ‘If you’re going to mail cash, make sure it isn’t visible through the envelope.’ So we’d wrap cash in paper or a greeting card or something to conceal it. And then, again, there was a wait involved. A letter could take several days to get to somebody. And sometimes weeks.

Even when personal computers became the norm in the mid to late 1990s, we still didn’t entirely trust technology to keep our files safe and secure. So if there was an important document you absolutely needed access to, you’d print it out on paper. I recall most offices being taken up by filing cabinets, and also had a walk-in safe, similar to the ones found in banks, and it was filled with more filing cabinets. The safe was not there because of a theft worry, but because it was fireproof. You’d need an entire staff of filing clerks whose sole job was to retrieve, file, and update records kept in this cabinets.

Seeing the hottest new movie during the 20th century wasn’t as easy as streaming it on your smartphone or adding it to your Netflix queue. You had to go to a theater. If you didn’t catch a film during its original run, you’d have to wait for it to air on TV in an edited form with commercial interruptions. That would take months… or even years! For example, Star Wars, which was originally released on May 25, 1977, wasn’t available for pay-per-view subscribers until 1982, and it didn’t come to HBO until 1983. That’s a six-year wait! The theater was really the only way to actually see a movie the way it was meant to be seen. I stood in line for two hours to get a ticket to The Empire Strikes Back, and then stood in another line for an hour and a half to get into the theater. As recent as the mid-’00s, if you weren’t available to watch your favorite TV show live, you were out of luck. There was no Hulu or On Demand service to catch it on the next day. Your only choice in the ’80s and 90s was to try to record the episode you knew you’d be missing via your VCR. But even that wasn’t a surefire success. The VCR didn’t have its own tuner, and needed the cable box, and there was no communication between the devices. As a result, you would have to set the channel on the cable box and then the timer on the VCR. Mess either up, and you miss your show. Anyone born before 1990 probably remembers that gut-wrenching feeling of 90210 not recording, or learning your parents had taped over your favorite episode while trying to record NYPD Blue.

Keeping a kid entertained during a road trip involved a bit more creativity decades ago than just handing them a tablet. When I was younger, we would play number car games with our parents. My father would think of a number between one to 100 and we would guess. He would say ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ until we got it right. When we took plane trips, we always brought books and a whole backpack full of coloring books, crayons, and colored pencils. It was fun to be creative. Though when my brother and I traveled together as young as 10 and 5 years-old respectively. My mother had a high position with British Airways so the Captain would come out to meet us and bring us into the cockpit. Those were great moments.

The short of it is, kids had to entertain themselves. I remember spending all of my time looking out the large windows of our car to see what I could see. If we happened to be driving at night, I would boost myself up so that I could look up at the moon and stars. There was also no reading during a car or plane trip unless you remembered to pack a physical book. And if you didn’t own one, you had to head to the library. Books came in all sizes and you could borrow them from a library. But finding that perfect book required an understanding of how they were arranged in a library. I had a part time job at the Boston Public Library sorting books while in University. Library books were arranged by the Dewey Decimal System — a system of numbering to put books in their respective genre. For every single piece in the collection, a paper card is typed up with the item information. … For a patron to locate an item, they look at the files and sort through the cards. When a patron finds a card matching the selection they want, they can use it to locate the item in the collection. They then bring both the card and the item to the circulation desk, where they take the card and place it in a dated file, insert a dated due-date card, and return the item to the patron. Clearly, the Kindle was just the stuff of science fiction in those days.

A New York Times story on “space age clothing” from 1983 included a headband made with a “lightweight insulating material and a special cooling gel” that could “lower the temperature on a forehead by 30 degrees and thereby help reduce perspiration loss and the discomfort of strenuous exercise.” But according to the headband’s inventor, customers weren’t actively looking for sweat-repelling workout clothing. “People walk into Bloomingdales and see one of my headbands for $14.95 and they think it’s just a headband,” he told the Times. “They don’t know it’s a cooling system.”

We learned what was the cool new thing to wear by reading fashion magazines or watching music videos. But probably the most immediate way we learned about what was fashionable was the department stores. Major chains like, Lord and Taylor’s, Marshall Field’s, Macy’s, TJ Maxx, JC Penney, and Montgomery Ward didn’t just provide the latest clothing brands, they also served as style gurus. People today laugh at this, but it really did make people buy a lot of fashion choices based on what the mannequins at Macy’s were wearing. The store put a lot of effort into creating these dioramas. The mannequins would be interacting, so it was easy to fantasize that this was what your life could look like. It really was the Instagram of its time.” Most people had a more personal relationship with their local clothing stores. My mom would take me into a store, and we would know the sales ladies by name. The sales lady brought her different sizes and also other outfits that she suggested for her to try on. We relied on certain name brands for quality and style, and sometimes for social status.

If you wanted to stay in touch with loved ones who didn’t live close by in the 20th century, and a phone call didn’t have the intimacy you wanted, there was no FaceTime to solve your problem. But there were other ways to feel connected to those living far away. I remember when I was in high school, we would record messages of us singing in tape recorders and send those small cassette tapes by mail to my brother and aunt, who lived abroad. They said they felt happier and their longing for family was eased with our letters and recorded messages and songs. Phone call fees were often based on distance — the closer you lived to the person you were contacting, the cheaper the call. The first minute was always the most expensive. Long distance rates were so steep that you could fill your tank up with gas for the price of talking on the phone for an hour. The other factor was the time of day. Calls were cheaper on weekends and late at night. In most homes, long distance was forbidden except on weekends. If you absolutely had to call on a weekday, it would have to be late in the evening and you’d have to make it super quick. … I recall having to wait until 10:00 p.m. on Sunday night to call relatives, and the bill typically added up to $17 for an hour, which was a lot of money back then!

Today, we all know how frustrating it can be to wait for your digital spot in line when tickets go on sale for your favorite artist’s tour. But just a few decades ago, it was an entirely different experience. You had to go to an actual retailer, like a record store or a venue’s box office, to get tickets and sometimes wait for hours many times people would tent outside staying in line over night. The box office opened at 10 a.m. and even with 10 or so clerks selling tickets, they still didn’t make it to the front of the line until around 6 p.m. That’s because you’d point to a spot on the venue floor plan, and the clerks would go see if there were any tickets in that section. You’d repeat this process until you found open seats you were willing to live with. They weren’t even updating these sheets to show what areas were sold out. The only other ticketing option was even riskier.

Any family in the 20th century that wanted ‘round-the-clock access to tons of information couldn’t simply hop on the internet. As an Orlando Sentinel reporter explained in the late ’80s, families would invest in a huge set of encyclopedias that were “hardback volumes with gold-lettered bindings and pseudo-Greek titles, such as Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana.” And they weren’t cheap. The price ranged between $300 to $1,500. There were even door-to-door salesmen who used “high-pressure sales tactics” to hawk costly encyclopedias. During dinnertime arguments, I remember using the family’s encyclopedias to solve problems “like, ‘Do bananas grow up or down?” We’d discuss the problem, someone would then decide to solve the issue by dashing for the encyclopedias, and guessing if the answer would be under B for banana or F for fruits. Just flipping through an encyclopedia would introduce us to other topics of conversation, and away we would go down the rabbit hole of learning… together.

Before you had every single item imaginable at your fingertips and needed a random knick-knack, you headed to the local dime store. The dime store was once an innovative concept in retailing. Shoppers could find a variety of everyday goods at low prices. Stationery, sewing notions, toys, health and beauty aids, dishes and some apparel remain the staples of the variety store. If somebody really wants a purple zipper, he can go to his dime store. And if he doesn’t have it, he will order it for you. On top of that, dime stores served grilled cheese and malt milkshakes. Can Amazon do that?

Maintaining your social circle required a bit more effort for past generations. In the 20th century, you had to call someone on the phone and then make plans to meet them. And if you missed the call, that person could eventually fall out of your life, for better or for worse. You could go years, decades even, without ever hearing from your old high school friends or a distant cousin that lived six states away or all your ex-girlfriends. You had no obligation to interact with any of them. It was amazing. And if there was information you wanted someone to hear, you had to say it to them directly or pass it along via a third party. If there was a meeting or a reunion, you’d just tell two or three people and let them pass the news verbally. Or we’d go from house to house to let people know the meeting time and place. It was a personal thing. We communicated face to face.

Yes our world has changed and it’s not necessarily better or worse, just different. Sometimes it’s important to reevaluate what’s really important to us and to how much time we should devote to the new methods of technology namely social media. Life is always about balance.

Vincent Lyn

CEO/Founder at We Can Save Children

Director of Creative Development at African Views Organization

Economic & Social Council at United Nations

Middle East Correspondent at Wall Street News Agency

Rescue & Recovery Specialist at International Confederation of Police & Security Experts