Tell us about the olden days

The previous post talked in generalities about how the web and internet may or may not have changed how we communicate and live. To go along with that, I thought it might be interesting to consider some specific examples. Since these are drawn from personal experience, this post will show my age more than most do, but so be it. If you find it amusing to append old man to the questions here, well, I don't suppose I can stop you.

I'm going to answer these on the assumption that you have no memory of anything before, say, the 1990s, so please bear with me if some of this is already obvious. I'm honestly not sure how much of this will be "wow, I didn't know that" to a typical reader and how much will be "well, yeah, no kidding." Also, though I'll generally write in past tense, many of the things I'll mention are still true. I'll call that out here and there, but not necessarily everywhere, so if you find yourself thinking "but ... they still have those", you're probably right.

If nothing else, this post will probably serve as a reminder that as much as I grumble about kidstechnology these days, a lot of this stuff is nice to have.

What did you do before GPS and mapping apps?

I grew up in a midwestern town that was built on a grid. The north/south blocks were long (eight to a mile) and the east-west blocks were short (twelve to a mile), so most addresses were on the north/south streets. First street was at the south end, running east-west, then second street and so on. The north-south streets had names in alphabetical order from east to west.

The first digit or digits of an address on a north-south street were the number of the nearest numbered street to the south. The last two digits of the address were 00 for the northeast corner lot and 01 for the northwest corner and generally increased by 4 per house from there. If I lived at 1234 Elm street and I knew your address was 2133 Maple, I knew to go nine blocks north (just over a mile) and, um, several blocks west, and your house would be on the west side of the street, toward the north end.

The main thoroughfares were a mile apart, since they'd started out as section roads, so you knew you could take 3rd, 11th, 19th or (later, as things got built out) 27th to get across town from east to west, and Cedar, Oak or (again later) Agate to get from north to south. A lot of towns were laid out using some version of this kind of scheme, and for that matter so were a lot of cities. San Francisco is a notable example -- a lot of folks would have built streets to follow the contour of the hills (to be fair, some do).

I say "were" and "could", but of course they didn't rename or renumber anything just because GPS came along, though it does certainly seem to matter less now. I currently live in an area with a large-scale grid of section roads, and many of the towns are on small-scale grids, but I've never bothered to learn the exact numbering schemes, even in my own neighborhood, because GPS is just easier. I do know the section roads reasonably well.

My first answer, in other words, was "you just got to know your way around town" and "the addresses were set up to make that easier".

That worked fine until I moved to an area on the East Coast where nothing was on a grid. At that point MapQuest was around, but I didn't have a smartphone. I ended up doing a fair bit of printing out directions off the web, trying to mostly memorize the way before starting out, peeking at the directions while stopped at stoplights and keeping a weather eye out for street signs and house numbers.

And getting lost fairly often.

Gradually, I learned the main roads and how they connected together, and how the smaller connectors connected to those, and where the main places I wanted to get to related to all that, and things got easier. People would also give general directions like "It's near Chestnut and Amethyst where the main library is. Turn left on Locust Street after the light and Smith Court will be a few blocks down". If you already knew where the main library was, or even where Chestnut and Amethyst were, you had a pretty good shot.

There were also some clues like the common pattern of naming a main road after a city it was headed toward. For example, Richmond Road in Twickenham goes toward Richmond and Mortlake Road in Richmond goes toward Mortlake, and it's probably not a coincidence that in both cases you're heading toward London proper (there is no Twickenham Road in Richmond or Richmond Road in Mortlake, but on the other hand Chapel Hill Road in Durham goes toward Chapel Hill, where it becomes Durham Road in Chapel Hill ...).

Later, I realized that learning the main road/smaller road pattern was something I'd dealt with before before, traveling in Europe, except that instead of main streets it was usually the public transit system -- get on the subway at your stop, follow the subway maps to your destination stop, find your actual destination from there.

My main problem then was that I don't have a great sense of overall direction. If a road takes a bend here and a curve there, I might think I'm headed pretty much the same direction I was before, when in fact I've turned almost 90 degrees.

So I really like having GPS available as a backup, even if I wish there were an easy way to say "yeah, I know this part, start giving me directions when we get to this part and just let me listen to my music until then."

The other part, of course, particularly before MapQuest, was knowing how to read a street or road map, which seems to be something of a lost art, a clear sign that GPS is just plain easier (particularly if your brain doesn't deal well with maps).

For long trips you had the Rand McNally Road Atlas, which showed all the interstates, federal highways and main state roads, along with cities and towns, with mileage shown on each segment. The distance between one town or exit and the next was shown as a number halfway between in one color. Some of those waypoints had a special dot in a different color, and the distance between those with special dots was shown in that color, so you didn't have to add up all the segments in between. There was also a schematic depiction of the interstate system with mileage numbers.

In other words, the road atlas encoded exactly the same kind of edge-weighted graph that mapping software uses, and you could use that to figure out the shortest route from point A to point B along main roads. If you had time, you could look for cutoffs on secondary roads. If you were adventurous, you could try to find local shortcuts and hope that at least you could find your way back to something that was on the map.

You might also carry smaller-scale state or regional maps, which you could get at any gas station (maybe still can). If you were staying in a city for a while, you'd pick up a city map, too. The road atlas also included maps of the main roads in most cities, and you could usually get by with that if you were just passing through [re-reading, I realize I forgot to mention that you could also ... stop and ask directions].

Any of these maps would be overlaid with a square grid with numbers in one direction and letters in the other, and there would be an index, so you could find out that Springfield was in square 5A and quickly find exactly where it was and figure out how to get there.

When I lived in the LA area, the Thomas Brothers map worked basically the same way (as does London's A to Z, along with, I'm sure, many, many others), so you could figure out that to get to the Sherman Oaks Galleria you take Wilshire to the 405, get off at the Ventura exit, hang a left on Sepulveda and a right onto Ventura and there you are.

But what about traffic? To this day, many local radio stations will provide frequent updates on road conditions and traffic, and make money off this information by selling ads. Just sayin'

Summing this all up

• Many places were designed to be easy to get around
• Pretty much any city has a system of main roads, secondary roads and side streets that you can just learn if you need to
• There are maps available at several scales. Larger scale maps include distance information and pretty much all have grids and indexes.
• Getting around is easier now, but it wasn't really that hard before smartphones and GPS, because there was already quite a lot of infrastructure to make it easier, particularly if maps are friendly to your brain.

What did you do before cell phones and texting?

Cell phones may have had the most noticeable effect on day-to-day life of all the web/internet/telecommunications advances of the past few decades.

Besides the clothes and hairstyles, one sure-fire sign that a movie is old (or the screenwriter is a bit behind the times) is a plot device that depends on a phone call. Our hero needs to get in touch with someone urgently. Can they make it to a payphone? Will the person they're calling be at home or at their desk? Will the line be busy? Will the wrong person answer the phone? Or maybe the right person is at home but they're afraid to pick up the phone because it might be the villain calling? If the hero had to leave a message, will the other person get home to check their answering machine in time? Will the wrong person overhear them leaving the message on the machine?

None of these really works today because

• Phones are now associated with people, while they used to be associated with places
• Today's phones can do more. For most of the landline era there was no caller ID and most phones could only handle one call at a time
• Messages can now be stored in the cloud rather than locally on analog tape

Since a landline is associated with a place, the vast majority of households had a single phone line, though there might be multiple phones in the house connected to it. If you called the number for that phone, you were calling the house. Someone would answer ("Hello?"), you'd say who you were ("Hi, it's Dave") and, if you wanted to talk to someone else at the house, who you wanted to talk to ("Could I speak to Earl?"). If that person was somewhere else, you could ask the person you were talking to to leave a message.

You could also just hang out and chat with them -- if you know Earl, you probably know Chris, the housemate, or Chris's good friend Sam, who doesn't live there but hangs out enough that everyone's comfortable with them answering the phone. The chance of talking to someone other than the person you were calling for wasn't necessarily a bad thing, though of course it could be.

The other half of a phone being associated with a place was that if you wanted to make a call, you had to get to a phone. That's why there were payphones (still are, here and there, I'm pretty sure). Or you could stop by a friend's house and ask to borrow their phone. In a pinch, you might be able to drop into a nearby business and ask to use their phone, but it had better be an emergency.

You could also call to a payphone, since they each had their own number, but that was pretty rare, to the point that a lot of people weren't aware that you could even do that. You'd mostly see it done in a movie, where the villain tells the hero to wait for a call at the payphone at 12th and Main, and some innocent bystander steps in to make a call at just the wrong moment.

But that also meant that if you were away from a phone, no one could call you and no one expected to be able to. Earl's not home? Cool, I'll try later, or maybe I'll run into him. Likewise, no one expected you to be able to call them. The most likely answer to "Why haven't they called me back??" was "They're not home yet."

Honestly, this was kinda nice. I still miss it from time to time. Sure, you can unplug today, but it's not the default.

Voicemail today is mostly the same as it was fifty years ago. You could record whatever outgoing message you liked. When someone called your phone and the answering machine was turned on, it would play your outgoing message, beep and start recording whatever was on the line until the connection ended or (I'm pretty sure) until you picked up the phone on your end.

Depending on how a switch was set, it would also play what it was recording on its speaker, so you could hear the message that was being left. People who were at home could and did screen calls that way, so leaving a message might look like:

... Please leave your message at the beep

Hey, it's me ...

[picking up phone] Oh hey! I was hoping you'd call

but it might also look like:

... Please leave your message at the beep

Hey, it's me ...

[muttering to self and not picking up phone] Yeah well you can just take that phone and ...

... and I just wanted to say ... again ... I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry

Sure, you can still screen calls and now even block people (which you couldn't do), but there's something special about listening in in real time.

Again, the main difference is that the answering machine is tied to a landline, which is tied to a place, so typically you'd check your answering machine for messages when you got home and either turn it off, or leave it on and screen calls. If you turned it off, you had to remember to turn it back on the next time you left ("Oh no, I'm sorry you couldn't leave a message. I forgot to turn my machine on."). It was also possible to access your voicemail by calling in and using a Touch-Tone™ keypad to put in a PIN, but to do that ... you'd have to get to a phone (and even late in the game, a lot of phones still had rotary dials, so not just any phone).

But of course, and this is the part that surprised me enough I remember discussing it in at least one post here, nobody leaves voicemail any more. I mean, you can still do it, but I'm not sure when I last left a voicemail for a person, as opposed to a business or doctor's office.

It took me a while to understand why. If you call someone and it goes to voicemail, surely it's easier to just say a message than to hang up and type out a text. Fair enough, but it's even easier to just type out the text without calling and waiting for an answer or voicemail. The setup for a voice connection is heavier weight than one might expect.

It's also a lot easier for the receiver to glance at a text than to access voicemail and then listen through. After hearing "Why didn't you just text me?" over and over, voicemail starts to look less and less attractive. With smart keyboards and speech-to-text, texting isn't that hard anyway, at least in my experience. And so came the return of telegram style and enough abbreviations, slang and conventions to (arguably) constitute a new dialect.

So the main differences here are that it's harder to unplug and ... text.

I was going to emphasize how utterly disruptive it is to always be connected but ... maybe not. Yes, I'm reachable by phone most of my waking hours, but I don't actually get that many phone calls. In particular, I don't get a lot of cold calls. Most of the time if someone calls me it's an actual person that's either a friend/family member or someone I'd asked to call me. I don't get a lot of spam calls to begin with, and if I do, I can either decline and let it go to voicemail, to check (and delete) at my leisure, or use a screening feature to ask them to leave a voicemail (which they never do).

I think some of this is regulatory, but spammers/scammers don't generally let regulation get in their way too much, so this must mostly be a matter of there being cheaper and more effective ways to spam and scam.

Most of the interruptions I get, by far, are notifications from apps which I chose to get. Or at least, I didn't diligently ask not to get. Many of these are email notifications. I don't get a ton of email, but I do get a steady stream through the day, just almost enough to want to Do Something About It.  I also get notifications for texts, which are generally from people I know, so I tend to look at them right away, and from a couple of news sources, which are pretty selective about only sending out alerts for major news. The main thing that's bugging me right now is the stream of "hey this movie just came out" notifications that I don't recall asking for, but that seems to have tapered off (or I turned them off?).

In other words, being "always on" doesn't seem to require being very "on", and there are a few things I could do to make it less disruptive yet. On the flip side, I can call or text pretty much any time I want, as long as I'm not driving, and even then it's usually not that hard to pull over. If I'm at the grocery store and I want to double-check what a household member wanted, that's easy. If I'm in an accident, I can call 911 (or if I can't, I have bigger problems). And so forth.

It's also easier to meet up, which is nice. I remember arranging to meet friends in Berlin not long after the Wall came down. After a few phone calls (and maybe even letters and postcards?), we arrived at a plan: meet on such-and-such date at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche at high noon. If not everyone was there, come back at 1:00 and so forth, so that whoever was already there would have to sit around waiting. I don't think we set a time to give up waiting, but it was understood that if it got to be too late, whoever was there would just go on and see the city and whoever couldn't make it couldn't make it.

As it turned out, most of us were there at noon and the others showed up at 1:00 and off we went. During the visit, we'd occasionally arrange a rendezvous point to meet up at if we got separated, which may or may not have actually happened. This was pretty normal and it tended to work pretty well, but again, I'm not sure when was the last time I've made a plan like that, because why bother when you can just text or call? It's still a good trick to keep in mind, though, I think.

So staying connected is disruptive, but not really all that disruptive. Being more connected also has some conveniences, but is it really all that much more convenient? 

What did you do before search?

For the purposes of this post, let's assume that search Just Works: you can easily find any particular bit of information you need, assuming it's on the web somewhere (and "the web" basically means "whatever your search engine can find").

Sometimes, you'd end up just not finding something out. But there were options.

If you wanted a phone number or address, you could look someone up in the phone book. Since phone books were physical things, and fairly hefty ones in many cases, you could really only access them locally, though many libraries had phone books for major cities. In other words, there was an element of privacy protection built in, which tended to be enough for most purposes, though people did get unlisted numbers for various reasons.

Adding on to my claim that changes in how phones work have been among the most disruptive, that whole paragraph is from another age. If I want to call a business, their number is on their web page. If I want to call a person, we'll have exchanged phone numbers (likely by text, of course). My phone will remember my contacts, but that's actually not such a big deal. It doesn't take a lot of space to write down names and addresses of people, and you could get a miniature notebook for just such a purpose (I still have one somewhere).

The main convenience is being able to tap on an icon and have the phone place the call without even having to know the number -- there are only a few numbers I have memorized now, but mostly because I use them for supermarket loyalty programs and such, not because I dial them.

But what would one actually search for?

There are two main categories, I think. One is day-to-day information: Where is there a good restaurant that serves X kind of food? When is the DMV open? Does the local hardware store carry left-handed socket wrenches? (No, that's not a thing).

This is largely a matter of advertising (which, for the purposes of this post, at least, is distinct from search).  Businesses have an incentive to let as many people as possible know that they're around, so there's probably a local restaurant guide that will tell you who serves what, and there are probably multiple copies of it in various drawers in the house, or under the couch, because they just seem to keep turning up and, yikes, maybe they can reproduce?

You probably got something in the mail telling you when local government offices like the DMV are open, and they're probably listed in the yellow pages as well (back to phones ... there were actually two kinds of phone books: the white pages had residential listings for anyone with a phone who didn't opt out, and the yellow pages had paid listings for various businesses and similar entities. It's been so long since I've used one that I almost forgot that DMV would be in there).

Unless you lived in a major city, there probably weren't that many restaurants in town anyway, and it didn't take long to get to know them. As to hours, it was a good bet that anything that was open for business would at least be open between 10:00 and 4:00 on a weekday, and anything retail was at least open on Saturday (though maybe not Sunday, depending on where you were).  Again I say "was" and "would", but as far as I can tell, that's still mostly true.

In other words, if you search for "X restaurant near me", you're not asking something that could only be answered, or only be conveniently answered, once search engines came along. You're asking something that used to be reasonably easy to answer and is now somewhat easier, in principle.

As to what's available for sale where, some outlets would put out catalogs (the Sears Catalog is a famous example -- I hope that when you chase that link it says more about the cultural significance of that catalog) and many stores would put out flyers in the local newspaper saying what they had on sale that week.

Or (once more back to phones) you could call the hardware store and ask whether they had left-handed socket wrenches, and most likely someone would actually pick up the phone on the other end and tell you (and try not to giggle too loudly).

Long story short, most of the "Where can I find this in the physical world right now?" questions could be answered pretty easily, because people had an interest in making them easy to answer, just as they do now. The main difference is that there were more people involved. For example, there were more people working at a typical retail store to help customers and also to answer the phone if someone called. And that was kinda nice. I still miss it from time to time.

The other main thing I use search for is research, for example looking up material to put in a blog post. Having so much material online and searchable changes things considerably, but despite what the cartoon might suggest, it wasn't impossible to find things out.

To be sure, this wasn't something most people could do at home, if it wasn't in the dictionary or encyclopedia that were much more commonplace or in some book or magazine that you happened to have on hand, and it helped, a lot, to have a university library or similar institution in your area. If you could get to one of those, though, there were definitely resources:

• There were probably microfilm copies of major newspapers and magazines plus local and regional publications
• Reference books like The Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature would tell you what was in those publications
• There would be copies of major scientific journals
• There would be a large reference section full of reference books on a wide variety of subjects
• And, of course, there would be a large collection of fiction, and non-fiction history, science, art, music and many other subjects
• Along with a card catalog to tell you where to find all of the above
• Your local school library would be a miniature of this, so you could practice finding books in the catalog and maybe even reading a microfilm copy of a news article you found in the Reader's Guide.

The main problem, besides not having access if you didn't live near such a library, is that it's harder to keep a collection of physical texts up to date. Even so, the library would have subscriptions to many major publications, and the Reader's Guide published updates biweekly, so you still could get a pretty good idea of the latest developments.

All this depended on your library carrying the type of information you were interested in and the major reference publishers indexing it. These being human endeavors and resources being limited, there was plenty of room for conscious bias, unconscious bias and plain old budgetary constraints to skew the picture.

Today, of course, you can search anything the major search engines index, major news sources update their pages continuously, preprints are up on ArXiv as soon as the authors want them to be, and information is generally available more widely and more quickly than it used to be. I'm going to steer well clear of how the current web-centric view of the world of information may be biased, and why, but I'll certainly acknowledge that it's a worthy topic of discussion.

But then, how many people are in the business of serious research? For us amateurs, how much does it really matter whether I find out about a new development right away, or in a month or a year when it finds its way into the library system, or a friend mails me a photocopy of someone's lecture notes, or whatever else. For the pros, even a good search engine will only get you so far.

Beyond that, as far as I can tell, you still need a good network of sources, whether primary sources or people who can point you to them or pull together, assess and summarize the information from primary sources. It remains to be seen what role LLMs will end up playing in that, particularly in professional-level research.

Search engines make day-to-day questions more convenient to answer, and they make the amateur researcher's job quite a bit easier, but were those all that hard to begin with?

What did you do before streaming?

Bought CDs, bought/rented DVDs or videotapes, watched TV, went out to movies, not to mention quite a few live shows.

Sometimes even talked to people.

What did you do before LLMs?

Dunno ... what did you do? It hasn't been that long!