Did anyone use Teletext? I booked a holiday from an advert on there once. Of course you had to just phone them when you wanted to book. It was also good for a laugh playing Bamboozle [1]. It was like a mini internet.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle_(quiz)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bamboozle_(quiz)</a>
Slightly off topic, but I've had a print subscription to The New Yorker for many years and I always read the Shouts & Murmurs satire pieces and the absolute most riotously funny one I've read is "Sunday Routine" by Jen Spyra:<p><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/sunday-routine" rel="nofollow">https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/07/sunday-routine</a>
I loved reading this!<p>'Before the internet' pretty much coincides with 'when I was a kid' for me. I would love to hear 'before the internet' memories from people who were adults before the internet too.
Before the internet, high school reunions had a lot of suspense to them, because you didn't have Facebook and already know nearly everything about people you hadn't seen in N number of decades.
Catalogues. Toy shops. Newspapers. Libraries. The visual and structural meaning of these would be highly more enveloping of the imagination and the only source for curiosity. Definitely different times.
<i>And there would be no way to look it up, no way to prove who was right, except if someone had a little booklet. “Anyone got a little booklet?” you’d ask, looking around. “Is there a booklet on this shit?”</i><p>Wow! I actually had 'the booklet' when I was a kid. Carried it around with me. If you want to brighten a youngster's day, get it,<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rocks-Minerals-Golden-Nature-Guides/dp/B0006AUWR0/" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Rocks-Minerals-Golden-Nature-Guides/d...</a>
Before the internet, parents of children with rare diseases watched them die without a doctor ever believing them.<p>Before the internet, gay kids committed suicide, never even knowing how they felt was normal for some other people far away from their small town.<p>Before the internet, if your county library didn't have it, it didn't exist.<p>Before the internet, you had 3 TV channels, and you watched what the advertisers would pay for, not what you were curious about.