We're quickly running out of generations who can recall Pre-Internet Life(PIL). Don't waste your time googling PIL, you won't find it, at least not as it pertains to Pre-Internet Life. I had to come up with something, I type lazy. An acronym works fine. If there was an acronym for acronym, I'd use it.
I do remember PIL, but will confess that my view of PIL gets fuzzier and muddier with each passing month. My year of entry, my immersion into the waters of the worldwide web, was 1996, July of that year, during the Olympics.
Traditionally, among the worst times to be a teevee type are Olympics, and any and all play-offs/series, etc., if your network carries the coverage. I was affiliated with an affiliate of NBC that Summer. NBC had Olympic coverage. It meant late nights. Really late nights, with us oftentimes not getting on the air until close to 1:00 AM. Not getting home until almost 2:00 AM ain't fun. We all hated it. We all had ways of coping with it.
Mine, at least that Summer of 1996, was to do a free test-drive of AOL. Admittedly, I had zero idea of what this internet thing even looked like. I'd never so much as seen the on-ramp to The Information Superhighway. I was a virgin. I was a total greenhorn. I'd call myself a geek, but geeks knew about this thing. Not me.
My test-drive awaited...on a floppy. The CD was not yet in widespread use except for music, and I mean go-out-and-buy-a-recorded CD. Most computers didn't even have an optical drive. And in those that did, it was strictly for playback, not recording. Ripping and burning had yet to enter our vocabularies.
Next, find a computer.
You'd think that in 1996, in a television station, a place all about technology and electronics, you'd think computers would be abundant. Such was not the case in my place. Running a decade behind the times was typical there. Our news room didn't have one single computer. I went in search of another, finding one in our sales department on the third floor. It was in a corner. It was shared by all members of the sales department. Sales had gone hi-tech, news had not. Again, typical.
It's evening, the sales department is empty. In goes the floppy. I followed each command like Mary's Little Lamb. In short order, I was there.
For the first time ever I heard that sweet music, that ger-bangy-bangy of a modem dialing and pinging, followed by the shshshshshsh of it connecting.
It was love at first sound and sight. My life had changed. No sense over dramatizing the event; if it didn't happen that night in that place, it would have happened elsewhere, and it would have happened sooner than later. It was inevitable.
My very own PIL was now over, it ended the second I hit my first search on Lycos. Lycos was big then, so was Alta Vista, and WebCrawler. Does anyone still use them?
I strolled without hesitation through the gate and have really never looked back. I doubt there's a day since that I've been completely clean, completely internet-free.
And I don't much see that day coming any time soon, either.
So, what was it like? What did we do PIL?
Lots of things, really. Lots of things I don't do much at all these days. Things like tie flies, flies for fly fishing.
Down in a dark corner of our basement there hangs a shop lamp, beneath which sits a fly tying bench, built it myself. It was there where I'd spend hours whipping up my favorite patterns, then box them, stuff them in my vest, and take them out on the stream.
The bench looks like scene from a sci-fi movie, one where everyone inexplicably leaves the planet in a heartbeat, followed years later by one lone survivor stumbling around in search of shelter, or food...or flies. As I sit here typing, it occurs to me that it's really like a Twilight Zone.
The bench, and all on it, is covered with roughly eight or so years of dust. Everything is like I last left it, everything in the exact place I put it all those years ago. Yeah, I did tie for a time post PIL, but my heart wasn't in it.
I also fly fished a couple years post PIL, but that soon ended, too.
Next, let's come on up to the first floor of our modest home. Books. Books. Books. Bookcases full of books. Used to be I'd read three, oftentimes four books a week. A week. I'd read every night after snugging into bed alongside wifey. She'd drift off to the Land of Nod, and I'd read. Read for several hours sometimes, depending on the book and how it captivated me.
No book has captivated me in years and years, and only because I haven't opened one in years and years. I still read several newspapers a day, and a number of boards, newsgroups, blogs, etc. They're not books.
Books are magical.
I miss them a lot.
In fact, that's what this is all about; it's about what I miss.
And what I miss often is the life I had had before the internet. PIL was a good life. It was a productive and rich life.
I miss it. I'd like to go back. There are honest to God times when I honest to God ache for what it was like way back there.
Is going back possible? Barring a planet-wide loss of electricity, with no hope for restoration, my guess is, no, no it's not.
