Life Before the Net

It's almost 7:00 p.m. and I'm just getting to my daily on-line reflections. Why? Well, the internet was down most of the day, so my normal routine came to a screeching halt. While I looked around the apartment thinking of what I could do until service was restored, I began to think about what life was like before the net - paper was king and librarians taught students how to conduct research using the Dewey decimal system.

One spectacular moment of my childhood occurred the day my World Book encyclopedia set arrived. I planned to read each book so I could be the world's smartest person. A few pages into "A", I decided that I would just refer to the entries as needed. At that moment I would never have imagined I could type a word into a machine and get all the information World Book provided for me. Now, I find myself confused and frustrated when I can't access unlimited web information 24 hours a day. How do I find phone numbers or directions without my trusty search engines?

My sophomore year of high school, I took "Introduction to Typing" with Mrs. Pace. She'd convinced everyone who planned to go to college that this was the most important class of the semester. Typing would be essential to quickly producing research papers. We made love to those keys every day after lunch, never believing in a few years time kids would laugh when someone pulled out a typewriter. The next year, I learned MS DOS in Mrs. Hagger's computer lab. When she wanted to give us a special treat, we'd get to print a banner on the dot matrix printer. I became quite proficient that year at making jewelry from the tear off sides of each sheet of paper.

For many people only a few years younger than me, several of the terms in the last paragraph might as well be alien speak. Technology has increased at such a unbelievable rate that it's hard to think back to a time when dial up was the only way. My sophomore or junior year of high school, I coaxed my mom into getting the internet. Because there was no local service in our rural community, our computer had to dial out on a 1-800 number. It was so slow you could take a nap while it loaded up each page. My friends and I didn't care, we had no idea there could be anything better or faster. A few select cronies would come over to work on papers at my house. Instead of picking up the World Book encyclopedias two feet from our fingertips, we'd sit and wait...and wait...and wait for the Mac LCD to connect.