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I still get Netflix DVD's in the mail. My family got our first VCR in 1984, so basically I live the same as 37 years ago. But you could flirt with girls at the video store - Those are nice neon bangles you got there! How many are there, 40?
shareNah, no problem. And we had dial-in internet in the late 80's.... not fast enough for streaming services, but sufficient if you were stuck in an adventure game to get a hint (I'd still play "Sam and Max" without help).
During the 80's, the ether was full anyway, stations from behind the Iron Curtain were totally overpowered. When picking up the phone, I've heard the mumbling of a deep Russian voice until I started to dial. The Czech sci-fi shows were memorable. Didn't understand a word, but they looked charmingly handcrafted and had catchy songs.
Then came the 90s, VHS and Video200(!) everywhere, private movie libraries growing and growing. Analogue encryption schemes on satellites were commonly broken (using a Commodore 64 and a bit of soldering).
No way you got dial up internet in the late 80s.
share2400 kbps acoustic coupler AND no special tariffs. Every minute was part of a far-distance call. I usually dialed in to a university BBS system and looked up their proxied/mirrored contents. Downloads were using the xlink or sealink protocol and regularly broken. E-Mail was a terminal application on the BBS host.
Some hardware vendors had special dial-in numbers for BIOS/EEPROM updates.
90's free news servers still had alt.bin indexed.
Oh wow you're very advanced back then. Outside of a research universities I had never seen people doing Internet in the late 80s. Not even businesses.
shareI had the acoustic coupler for business needs - mainly for sending fax from my Atari STe and for BTX. But if you knew the dial-in numbers, the only restriction was the expensive area code and that you couldn't receive phone calls while being online.
Some games supported directly calling each other via modem. I remember the phone bill caused by the DOOM Demo which ran on my first privately owned notebook, an IBM PS/2 Note I still own.
It was a monochrome screen, pretty lousy by today's standards. Didn't keep me from spending a lot of time with it.
The first ever Doom was from the end of 1993, not late 80s.
shareIt was the highest phone bill and still using direct phone connections instead of TCP or IPX. I don't remember an earlier addictive pvp online-game. But we already played the demo in late summer of 1993 (it was kind of a hype). The full version took another year to become practically available here.
The early times in the 80's were on my Atari with the same modem, but with less games - ST versions were really hard to come by. There was a DOOM clone later on in the 90's, but I've never got it.
So, I played it on an x86 notebook without colors.
I used to use a Commodore 64 to call several local BBS boards in the mid 80’s to dload games. Other than the games there were message boards too.
shareYes the quality of television and especially radio broadcasts was much better back in those days so I wouldn't be bored. The best thing about the internet is the instant access to all kinds of information, ' How To ' videos and such for example. Before the internet you were stuck with your ignorance about many things.
have been watching HotTub Time machine again ?
shareTHATS HOW I LIVE RIGHT NOW...EXCEPT MOVIECHAT.🤔
shareAt the time it was fine. Knowing what I know now might make it seem restricting, but as far as TV goes, we might have hundreds of channels now but there are really only six or seven that I use regularly (I find I spend a lot of time thinking 'So many channels, and there's still **** all on!'). So I think I'd cope on that front.
shareIn 1990 I was 15. I lived outside the US.
We had 4 TV channels, where there was very little to watch. My grandma had cable with about 20-30 channels, but also very little to watch for kids. MTV was what we watched the most when we visited.
I still had my Commodore 64 with quite a good number of games. Friends were getting their first PCs and they also had games.
We had around 100 VCR cassettes with movies that we'd recorded over the years. There was also the local video library.
As others have mentioned we went to the movies more than we do today (pre-Covid).
Um...yeah
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