"Last generation who knew life before the internet"

[Nextphonewontbesamsung]

I heard this phrase on R2 or R4 recently (sorry I can't remember the specifics). It was a discussion programme, possibly about something on at the Edinburgh Fringe, and the general consensus was that it was quite unique to be a person who has lived through as an adult straddling that boundary between no internet/then internet.

I am in this generation and I DO actually feel in a bit of a no-mans land. Anyone else? and how old are you roughly? when did the internet become a thing in your life?

I was at work in 1994/5 when I first heard the word "internet". The Chief Exec was having some extra wiring done into his office but he was the only one in our company of about 50 people. I was over 30 so had lived many adult years without it and it was many more years before it become a thing that I just had access to.

I'm struggling to think of a more life-changing invention. Maybe fire? or the wheel?

I hate how people won't use the phone at work any more
We don't HAVE phones at work anymore. They took away desktop phones a few years ago. We use Google Hangouts conferencing though the laptop.

I remember writing up my Thesis in 94/95 using WordPerfect. And spending hours in the library going through citations at the end of articles to try and find other articles/sources that might be useful, and then filling out forms to get copies through the inter-library loan for journals my library didnt have. It was an almighty faff.

I remember getting a modem and using Ask Jeeves to search and it taking ages. And using AltaVista which seemed better but gave so much irrelevant search returns. I was told about Google in about '99; complete game changer. They used Lotus Notes at work, and I remember the upgrade from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95.
My nokia clamshell held a charge for about a week. I think the introduction of the smartphones was when things really took off though.

My daughter is 8 and to her you can find anything you need to know from your phone. If ever I say I don't know something the answer is google it on your phone Mummy!

The idea that a phone only phoned people is also weird to them!

Yeah, I know what you mean OP

In 1996 I still typed my dissertation on a type writer

In 1998 I had a job in tech, I did market research and tried to persuade my colleagues about using Google.

I also set up my first hotmail account for personal use, which I still use.

My kids once asked what world changing events I lived through, and I said:

• end of the cold war, fall of the Berlin wall
• invention of the internet
• invention of the mobile phone
• 9/11

In 1998 I wrote a market research report about computers. My verdict was that handheld devices would never be a big thing and would remain a niche market. The future was desktops, and maybe laptops for those who travel a lot for work

I remember reading an interview with Courtney Love in Vogue in 1995 where she talked about how obsessed she was with the internet. She said something like she went into 'chat rooms' and could be a teenager from Arkansas or wherever in the morning and a businessman from Paris in the afternoon, which she found fascinating as people interacted with her so differently depending on which persona she was using. I thought at the time, hmm, I'm not sure about this internet thing if people can hoodwink others like that. I'm glad it's only for rich people and will never catch on!

Later that year my friend went to visit family in Canada and came back with loads of black and white A4 printouts of pictures and facts about our favourite actors (Brad Pitt, Stephen Dorff, Gary Oldman iirc). She said her uncle had 'the web' and there was LOADS of stuff that you could just print, for free!

I was 23/24 at the time and it seemed like madness. I honestly thought it was a fad for wealthy people. For all its negatives I think it's been an overwhelmingly positive thing, mainly to ease the isolation felt by so many (including me over the years). Which is exactly why Courtney Love liked it in 1995, when she couldn't leave the house because of depression and being hounded by the press.

I will be seventy this year and we had television and telephone from when I was born.
The first mobiles were amazing though. DH had spent the eighties and nineties travelling all over the world for his job and I always had to wait for the first phone call to know he had arrived safely. I think phone tracking, apps for seeing where ferries and planes are, messaging and FaceTime would have made it all so much less stressful and much easier for the children.

As a slight aside, I love this article from FHM from October 1995. The price of getting online!

First heard of it in 1994 when I was in my early teens. We were always early adopters of technology (something I’ve carried through for my kids) so we were online at home from maybe 1996. So my 1990s adolescence was actually online, which is probably relatively unusual.

There’s a term for the microgeneration whose childhood was offline and adolescence online - xennials. It’s a silly term, but it fits my experience.

Ophelia I love in that article under 'Reasons not to surf the superhighway', they have Social Life, as nobody will be able to get through to you to invite you to things ever again!!

I'm 36 and dont feel that unique as anyone older or a few years younger lived before internet. What I do think is amazing is how much phones changed I remember just before my dad died he was looking at his flip phone that had a camera and saying how amazing it was and how he didn't think they would be able to top that amazing technology. Sadly he died young and never got to see smart phones but I think they would have blown his mind. I remember when I first saw one thinking they were amazing the way you could move stuff around with your hand and find things online.

Does anyone else sometimes feel like it's too easy to find out things now and that we often just take whatever google says the answer is as being true. I just feel that we are losing the skill of looking for answers ourselves. Maybe that's just me being old.

My dad was born in 1925. He lived in a house with no running water inside (tap in the yard) until he was 15 by which time he'd left school. The milkman had a horse drawn cart and cars were rare. Nobody had a phone in his area. In his 90s he was doing Internet banking and online shopping - he lived through enormous change.

There was no internet when I was at uni 1991-94

I'm guessing that some universities adopted it earlier than others. Mine had it (available to students) during that period and I can think of people at at least 5 other universities who I used to keep in touch with online.

YTALK anyone?

I was 29 when I got my first email address.
I remember loads of search engines, like Ask Jeeves, before google became ubiquitous

I think TTNS, the Times Network System was one of the first c1988?

Someone mentioned Palm Pilot- that’s a real blast from the past! And Blackberries have gone the same way, even though they were standard issue at work until only 3 years or so ago.
From an employer’s perspective, personal device use is interesting because for a while it was all about blocking desktop access to time-wasting/dodgy sites and then people just started using their phones instead, so you are back to having to keep a physical eye on people who sit at their desks glued to their phones instead of their work.

It has changed the world of law as well- when I started out, working on a case involved trawling through boxes upon boxes of paper files retrieved from a filing cabinet, then there was a really bad period where you’d have to ask your client to print out all its electronic files and emails and you’d go through them physically. The volume of paper and work got out of control. Now thank God we have e-disclosure, AI doc review and courts limiting the amount of material that has to be disclosed. The extent of data/information generated by the average person in their job now is staggering.

I was relatively young when I first came across the Internet (12) but my family were relatively early adopters in terms of home internet - we had it from around 1999/2000, whereas a lot of my friends didn't get it for another five years or so.
TBH I wasn't that interested in it. I had an email address and I occasionally used chat rooms. Now a large part of my job is dependent on it. Changed times indeed.

I remember reading an interview with Eddie Izzard in about 1993ish. He was asked what he thought the future would be like. He said that in the future, everyone would carry their own phone and nobody would bother phoning the house when they wanted to speak to someone, they'd just 'phone the person'. I was like

@Binforky no I totally agree. I remember having a photographic memory when I was younger before smart phones.

Now I find I struggle to retain information and I honestly think it's because I don't have to retain anything! The answer to literally anything is in your hand within seconds.

A friend of mine worked for a big national well known company and won an internal competition for a holiday. He invited me along and we sat chatting to his co-workers most evenings. They endlessly talked about emails and I had never heard the word before! I didn't want to show my ignorance so just nodded along. This would have been 1993 I think?

I don’t feel particularly unique, but yes, born early 80’s. Didn’t have the internet until 18 and then it was dial up.

I can remember when we didn't have plastic everything .

Learning msdos at college only for windows to appear the next year ?1994, and selecting the code for your email so it arrived readable and not gobbledygook. And if you didn't remember to save your word doc each time you'd finished working on it it lost all the changes.
It does feel a bit 1984 with everyone wandering around with their eyes on their phones. I am trying to pluck up courage to remove some apps so I have less contact with the outside world, mainly because there is so much angering stuff about.
What we used to find out in a day via a newspaper was a pretty limited amount of bad news, and as it might have taken a few days to reach us, eg if reporter was abroad, there would also be what is being done about it, now it's everywhere and accessible to every media outlet now so it feels like bad or distressing news constantly.

I think you mean last generation to grow up without the internet^^ so we remember a childhood with no internet and will be the last. That would me, I'm 33.

Did you remember when the internet was praised for being all about communication and knowledge. Unfortunately, no one envisaged that it would also be sued for porn, gambling, buying and selling of illegal goods, not to mention over made people on Instagram selling a bizarre lifestyle.

Mixed benefits. Ultimately it will fail because of hacking bank accounts, shutting down power stations, interfering with the military etc

I read somewhere that one of the guys most involved with developing the internet said that if he knew then, about what he knows now about how it is used more negatively, then he wouldn't have invented it.

Don't know how true that is but very thought provoking.

Yy. I'm born c 1980. We had painfully slow dial-up at home when I was in sixth form. I didn't have a mobile phone (oh yeah, you used to have to add the prefix mobile because a phone was a landline). If you were meeting someone you had to be there at roughly the agreed time. I got a Nokia brick that made texts and calls when I went to uni. I typed up college and uni essays from handwritten notes on the word processor. Would use the Internet in the uni library to research and print out what I found, but mainly it was good old-fashioned books and journals. I had a computer but it was a word-processor and occasionally used for spreadsheets. I handwrote and posted my first job applications. Was a temp and did a lot of filing and data entry. You got bank statements and bills in the post, and results of job and uni applications, exams etc...you went into school to get your GCSE and A-level results...there was a notice board at uni that the keen ones would stand at watching a harried assistant pinning up exam results.
I remember cassette and video tapes. My youngest sister probably doesn't. My nieces and nephew won't remember CDs and DVDs, and can use YouTube aged 4 - 8.
Things have changed so fast. I totally agree it feels we are unique.

I’m 62 and totally embrace all new stuff as did my dad who died two years ago aged 87. New stuff included first tv in 1966 for the World Cup ( apparently someone said when TVs were invented “ it won’t last”!)
We had the “internet” in the house with dialup and clunky tower and monitor when my boys were teens in the 90’s. So they have grown up analogue/digital. My grandchildren have never known anything other than digital everything!
Booking a holiday in the 60’s, dad would choose a seaside town, write a letter to the town hall and get a brochure back. Mum and dad would look through it, write to a couple enquiring about rates, availability etc
Wait for replies
Choose one and write again
Wait for reply
Write again with a cheque for a deposit
Whole thing took about 6 weeks!
My husband and I still do often marvel at our ability to find anything at click of button on a mobile device and say do you remember having to get the encyclopaedia out to learn about that?
My great grandparents born around 1900’s would have been the generation who never knew about the internet