“When I Was Young…”

Do you remember life before the internet?

Today, if you forget your phone at home and remember it when you get into your car, you dash back to look for your phone because you need it for everything.

I got my first Nokia in 1998, and in the beginning, it was mostly something inconvenient, hanging from your belt, and you had to be careful not to drop it into a toilet bowl.

But to take a step back from that era, as we really didn’t have Internet on those phones. Heck, we hardly had anything else than capital letters for text messages in there.

When I was in school, and even in high school, we did our research from books, and libraries were actually places where you would go to do your research. We contacted our friends with landline phones, and if someone was late from your meeting time, there was hardly any way, definitely nothing like WhatsApp, to let your friend know you were running late.

In my childhood, we were running outside without our parents knowing where we were. If our friends’ parents saw us, they would give our parents a call to let them know that we had been spotted playing somewhere. And it might be that our parents conveyed a message that they wanted us home already.

That was much freer time. Much more disconnected.