My wife and I were thinking back trying to remember what it was like when we were teens in the early 90's trying to get information before the web was available. To look at it in hindsight is like looking at individuals that appear so cut off and isolated.
Sitting there thumbing through phone books and yellow pages, or having to go through actual library card catalogs and write down the call numbers. Even television did not provide much info with the 14 channels we got, just stupid local commercials of fat guys cutting car prices with a ninja sword, or local lawyers with neck braces.
The other two main media I could get at age 13 were the two magazines I received; boys life and Nintendo power. Boys life was included with the scout dues the other I had to do household chores to pay for, but oh was it so worth it.
That was probably my first exposure to a mass community of like minded people. We traded those at school and let our friends borrow them and copy them like a scribe with #2 pencil and notebook paper. My favorite thing I remember about the old Nintendo power mags was the high score page in the back. Its were people took actual photographs of the TV screen, developed them, then manually mailed them in.
The funniest thing was that it included an instructive segment on how to place a camera on a stack of books to photograph your record breaking score.
Even getting directions then was a word of mouth thing, you had big unusable for the car atlases or you could look up a stores phone number and call and have them tell you directions.
I only hope my two year old can understand the value of so much ready info available today, but I doubt it and anyway she will probably be telling her kids how the Internet was once a paid for product that used wires and electricity before it went free and was able to teleport objects and synthesize food or something.
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