Imagine if this had happened in 2000?

[Echobelly]

I guess as a way of being thankful for some things, can you imagine if Covid had hit 20 years earlier?

• No wifi
• No video calls
• No way of doing most office jobs
• No way of setting kids school work

Everyone would have to be glued to telly or radio all day for updates

On the upside perhaps there'd be less panic buying as people wouldn't be sharing pictures everyone, and there would be much less misinformation as it couldn't be spread around by just about any idiot with a phone.

Please say thank you from me (and I'm sure everyone else on this thread) to your DH!

They’d be blaming the millennium bug!

Anyone enemies the fuel crisis in the early 2000’s. We had to work from home for a couple of weeks, maybe 3. Yep a bit tougher with dial up and phones but manageable

Yeah, that 'working from home' thing went really well for me. I had a baby 9 months later

We didn't have so much air traffic and fewer people were travelling, so it might have been contained more easily. NHS had more capacity too.

HoldMyLobster that has made me lol! Thanks! 😂

Google was founded in 1998. There wasn't much on the web before then though the internet had been in existence for much longer.

I am trying to remember when we got our first internet connection. It was sometime between 1995 and 1998 - if I recall correctly we used Demon and Ask Jeeves was our web search engine of choice. I just checked and I made my first Amazon order in July 2001.

Actually, that wasn't the first time I had an potential internet connection. Theoretically - my dad brought home a modem in about 1988/90 and we plugged it into the computer, but we then didn't know what to do with it as we didn't know anyone else with a modem or have and ISP.

Anyway- - digression.

I started working as a web designer in 1995 when the magazine publisher I worked for at the time started putting all of its magazines onto the internet.

No way of setting kids school work Huh? They'd have been sent home with worksheets or reading lists and sample questions stuck into notebooks - just as mine were last week.

Mine have been doing lessons and 1x1s via Google Hangouts, getting their daily schedules via email, receiving and submitting homework via Google Classroom, and checking their results on Google Classroom and/or Powerschool.

My DD will be taking her AP US History and AP English Language online from home.

Still waiting to find out what format SATs (US) will take and if they are going to be online.

The online world is quite amazing.

It is and offers many possibilities but that's not the same as it being impossible to set work for home without the internet.

They could set work for the short term, but I think it would have been extremely difficult to set it for months on end. Might have been a relief for the parents, though tbh I see the work as valuable way of distinguishing weekend from weekday - I'm expecting for the kids to keep doing work through the 'holidays' (maybe a bit less) as there's simply not going to be anything else to do!

I could work from home in 2000 though granted in a very limited way. We could remote access email and some network folders. Its was shockingly slow as we had good old fashioned dial up. I worked for a software company so we were probably a bit ahead of everyone else.

I remember we spent a huge amount on a video conferencing system to talk to people in our Asia office. If you managed to get it working, its wasn't that great, the picture was poor, you couldn't hear them, there was a delay so we'd be talking over each other and it would just stop working after about 5 minutes. Skype was a revolution!

We had textbooks then-teachers would have told them if the schools closed, to read their way through that and answer the questions at the bottom of the page!

Yes, I suppose textbooks might have been how they would deal with it. DD seems to have some textbooks, but I don't get much of a sense of if/how they use them