Random Weird Things People Used To Do Before Wi-Fi Existed (12 items)

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  (#1) They Sat Around Waiting For The Dial-Up To Connect

  Once a pre-Wi-Fi computer user got home from school or work, the first thing they wanted to do was jump online. But jumping required a lot more hoops back then than it does today. In most homes, you had to plug your landline phone cord into the back of your computer, click a few things on your desktop, and… wait. Wait to hear the dial tone, wait for the touch-tone dialing, wait for the telltale song of the modem making contact with the World Wide Web. It was both thrilling anticipation and maddening frustration rolled into one.
• (#2) They Unplugged The Landline To Avoid Getting Disconnected

  90s Internet #nostalgia #dialup #waitforit #technology before #socialmedia https://t.co/c8GJY8QMNG pic.twitter.com/8MBlZ83RcH

  — tatianaplatt (@tatianaplatt) June 3, 2017

  Folks in the pre-Wi-Fi world had to depend on dial-up modems connecting their computers to the Internet. And once you got logged on, you wanted to stay logged on. You couldn't risk someone else in the house picking up and dialing out on the landline, which was your computer's mainline to the internet. If they did, the connection would be lost, and you would have to start the dial-up process all over again. This was especially frustrating for those playing MUD games or chatting on AOL Instant Messenger (RIP). A lost connection meant a lost game or a lost conversation. Grr. The solution? Unplug all the landline phones to avoid anyone calling out.
• (#3) They Watched TV Shows On TV…One Episode Per Week

  It's true. TV shows were not once-yearly events in which all episodes were dropped at one time, allowing viewers the luxury of binge-watching or moving through the show at their own pace. Back before Wi-Fi let us watch our favorite shows any time of the day or night, we had to wait with bated breath for a new episode to air each week. Then, agonizingly, we had to wait until the next week to see how things resolved. But all in all, there was something satisfying about sticking with a show, having the week to mull it over, getting to know the characters over the long haul. Also, there have been studies showing that binge-watching makes television less enjoyable. Just sayin'.
• (#4) They Sat Around Waiting For Images To Load

  With slow dial-up speeds came slow page-loading. This was simply a fact of pre-Wi-Fi life, something you accepted if you wanted to visit all those AOL chat rooms and porn sites. And speaking of porn sites, didn't it always seem like the connection was worse when you were looking at dirty pictures? TThe images - loading line by excruciating line -took forever with saucy stuff.
• (#5) They Saved Files On Floppy Disks

  Few images are more reminiscent of a bygone era than the legendary floppy disk. You could even call it an icon. Those who lived through the Floppy Disk Years knew what it was like to have to manually save your data to the large, pliable disk, which you could then take with you and store away securely or give to others to share what you'd created. Also, they came in flimsy paper sleeves, ostensibly to keep them safe, but the soft sleeve paired with the soft disk saved approximately zero disks from destruction. Ask anyone who tried to get their floppy disk from Point A to Point B intact.
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  (#6) They Went To A Special Computer Room In School To Play Educational Games

  Before computers were on all of our desks, in our homes, and in our pockets, entire throngs of schoolchildren used to assemble around their school's one or two computers and marvel at its wonders. If they were really lucky, they'd get to sign up for a half-hour slot to use that computer, upon which they'd most likely play educational games. The most popular, of course, was The Oregon Trail, in which you'd attempt to travel west as an old-timey frontiers-person. Most people got cholera or died of dysentery along the way. Also popular was Where In the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, wherein users would try to find the elusive thief as she left sneaky clues all over the world.
• (#7) They Initiated IM Conversations With A/S/L

  Instant messaging conversations always started out with one greeting: A/S/L. No, not American Sign Language. A/S/L stood for Age/Sex/Location. This was usually in lieu of a hello and was presumably intended to see if the person with whom you were chatting was a good fit. Regarding the A/S/L phenomenon, Lifewire recommended the following: "Using full word spellings shows professionalism and courtesy. It is much easier to err on the side of being too professional and then relax your communications over time than doing the inverse." WTF?
• (#8) They Spent Hours In Chat Rooms

  Back in the 1990s, there was no better way to wile away the hours than popping into an internet chatroom and engaging in conversation with total, anonymous strangers. Chat rooms were often arranged by subject, and those subjects ran the gamut from the general (teen chat, music fans, book lovers) to the incredibly specific (Toyota Corolla drivers! Icelandic hip-hop! Any bizarre sexual fetish you can imagine!). It was shockingly easy to get sucked in and spend whole days chatting with people you'd never met. AOL was considered the cream of the chat room crop, and many a computer user wasted good portions of their young lives lost in aimless interwebs conversation. Incidentally, chat rooms are still around today, populated mostly by old people and trolls.
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  (#9) Before Wikipedia And Facebook, There Was GeoCities

  Before Wikipedia became the information hub for anything and everything, there was a site called GeoCities. But GeoCities was far more than just an information storehouse. It was social media before social media existed, "an organization of like-minded user-created homepages in different topical communities like sports, entertainment, and tech." It was a way to connect, but also a way to share knowledge on things you knew a lot about, or were just particularly passionate about. GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo, and about ten years later in 2009, Yahoo shut down at least 38 million GeoCities sites in the United States.
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  (#10) Netscape Navigator Was THE Browser To Use

  If you were fortunate enough to be able to surf the net with any regularity in the days before Wi-Fi, you probably used Netscape Navigator as your browser of choice. When Netscape first launched, there was practically no other product on the market that could do what it did, making web browsing smooth and effortless. And so, it eventually became the standard browser for many early web surfers. Of course, Microsoft was increasing in productivity and popularity around the same time, causing everything to change dramatically. The rise and fall of Netscape reads like a Shakespearean drama.
• (#11) They Believed In Y2K

  January @TIME covers:
  
  1950 —supercomputer
  1964 — MLK man of the year
  1989 — @realDonaldTrump
  1999 — Y2K pic.twitter.com/S3cHS9yfX3

  — Darshan H Sheth ✨ (@darshan_h_sheth) January 2, 2016

  Once upon a time, computer timestamps were coded with a two-digit year instead of a four-digit year. This raised concerns about computers developing bugs and glitches come the year 2000, when the timestamp would recognize the year as "00," making 2000 essentially indistinguishable from 1900 and thereby causing our computers to go haywire. There were all sorts of what-if horror stories, nightmare scenarios, and premillennial hand-wringing as the year 2000 approached. Would nuclear bombs spontaneously detonate? Would the world's banking system collapse? Would all modes of mass communication suddenly shut down? These were all very real fears, producing very real paranoia over what would happen come midnight on January 1; a 1999 cover of TIME read, "The End of the World!?!."
• (#12) They Trusted Shady-Looking Websites

  Comparing today's websites to websites of yore is like comparing Game of Thrones to Bewitched. Old-school website looked downright shady, but no one really cared. They trusted whatever came across their screens, because if it made it onto the net, it must be trustworthy, right? Oh, how naïve we all were. Google was especially basic in its early incarnations, and if such a site appeared on our screens today, we'd click out of it in a heartbeat.

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