Oski, LOL. I am actually eating dinner out and talking to you, LOL.  Hubby is in FB too.

the funny thing is while on vacation, we don't even miss it.  We don't have our phones in Europe and only check emails to check up on the cats (with my friends; they don't type).

I really am only without internet for a couple of days when I visit my parents or grandparents, and then only if I stay with them rather than a hotel. From a leisure standpoint, it would be a little annoying, but from a work standpoint, the idea of not having it is frightening because I work from home and entirely with clients in other locations, constantly emailing documents back and forth and using the internet for research.

Just curious, but did any of you remember computer cards for bookmarks and notes before Post-its?

(more of a timeline question than an internet question - sounds like the internet existed before many of you were born?)

I haven't been completely without internet in decades (including having access at work, school etc).  

I believe it was '97 when I loaded that stupid AOL CD on my home computer, and I am not sure I have gone a single day without logging on since.

In the days before Al's invention (), I read two newspapers a day. In fact reading the Sunday paper while eating breakfast was a ritual, and was something I did going back to my early youth with the comic section. That continued through my teen years and young adulthood to where at one point I read the paper from front to back.

Eventually though, the grim reality of the front page and section A with all its senseless crime and tragedy wore on me, I now (and have for years) avoid that section like the plague.

I was always reading though be it the paper or one of an assortment of magazines and I always had my nose in the dictionary (which might be one of my all time favorite books). Now I do all of that online.

A friend once asked if I could go a week without logging on and my response was a quizzical, "Why in the hell would I do that?". She was one who routinely went days at a time without the internet to "Keep her mind free", but I have never felt the need to detach or get away from it like that.

Checking work emails while on vacation bothers some people but it does not bother me. Now answering them (depending on the subject matter) on the other hand, is another thing altogether. I would just rather not come back from vacation to a mountain of work and emails when some of it could have been handled while I was away, but to each his own.

I am not sure at what point the internet would become such a problem for me that I would need intervention lol, but I am sure it is one of the greatest resources of my time.

I graduated high school in 1993. I had friends who got to school   early every day so they could go on-line. No clue what they were using. One actually met her DH on-line. I think my college got email addresses for all my sophomore or junior year. I remember emailing a guy I was dating about lunch plans (he went to a different school 15 minutes up the road but lived in the town where my college was).

Hey, we had the internet when I started college in 1982. Sort of. Kind of an early proto-internet system they called "Plato", with terminals scattered around campus where you could go check your grades and access various other kind of school-related information. They were even touch-screen; seemed pretty space age at the time.

My college programming class was on terminals (Fortran), but there were still classes using punch cards (Cobol?). My roommate took one of those, and I remember piles of them. I also remember an engineering class project where we had to build a 1-foot-long bridge strong enough to support a gallon of milk, constructed exclusively out of punch cards.

I have always had work email, starting with my first job after college in 1988 had an intra-company email system called All-in-One, I forget who made it. It seemed pretty wild at the time that you could actually send messages to our division in Europe.

I had a work laptop starting mid-90's (Apple PowerBook). First home computer was late-90's through a company called PeoplePC, which supplied the computer + internet service for a monthly fee. First web-based email was a yahoo account in the late 90's that remains my main personal email account to this day.

Like LRB I have always been a big newspaper guy, especially the Sunday ritual. Long before smartphones, DW & I would go out to Sunday breakfast & divvy up the newspaper sections to avoid conversations. I used to get the local paper & Wall Street Journal every day, but gave up on the local some time ago, as it is a complete waste. I converted the WSJ to the iPad version as soon as I got one of those, and still read at least some of it every day. I can't remember the last time I read a dead-tree paper, I do not miss the newsprint-stained hands.

I live & die with my iPhone & iPad. I can go without email for a few days, but cannot imagine being without internet access for other things for even a full day. We don't go camping, always have wifi in hotels, and the couple times in recent years we stayed with my parents, who have a home wifi network but didn't know their password () was torture for the whole family.

I had to take a programming class in college as well, so I also took Fortran.  It was just ten years after it was actually useful to know Fortran.  lol   I programmed a phone/address look up system and that took me two weeks.  

I never did any programming after that class. I have zero recollection of what programs we wrote. I had a class in HS in BASIC on Apple II's.

 

I never did any programming after that class. I have zero recollection of what programs we wrote. I had a class in HS in BASIC on Apple II's.

I made a balloon go across the computer screen in BASIC, I think.