Before the WWWeb- How did you cope?

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I've never not had internet. I'm fairly young(turning 15 in two weeks) so I shouldn't be posting here, but I frequently ask my dad "How the hell did you survive with no internet?!?"

I actually had a fair number of friends in my elementary school - after all, it was a small, new private school, and a lot of the kids who went there had mental issues or disabilities. However, after that all went to hell after puberty hit and all the social rules I'd finally learned changed on me without warning, and even among my group of friends I was behind, I was confused, angry and isolated, and I all but became the exact kind of kid that charities like Autism Speaks warns against. The internet probably saved me in a bunch of ways, making high school and part of college at least easier than they might have been otherwise. Now, though, I'm glad that I'm not completely reliant on it, and can start to live in the outside world as well.

Lost in the desert, science, and poetry. Old loves stick around.

I coped out of the fact I was much younger and with much more energy and with much more ideas. I was actually trying to live an NT life, beeing social and had a full paid job. All of this is gone now - but I dont "blame" it on internet of course. After all it was the internet that informed me about AS in the first place!

I remember the first day in my life when I entered the internet. It was the 6th january 1996!! I visited a by then quite new internet place in the center of the city. The connection was poor but I was emediately thrilled about it. Because I came to search about my by then extremely intense obsession. I remember I found so much fun stuff and I saved parts of it on a floppy disc, lol. But today I cant take part of that as my one year old computer cant read floppy discs!!

I sended my first email on christmas day 1998. It was from the office I worked on by then that was "just about to install the email function" and I was curious to try it out. It was a short message to my dad saying

"Im trying this out, does it work??!"

I am semi-geezer at 46 and well remember a life before the net and computers. As for naps...I startd posting on Wp at 3am this morning (no 9am.) my nap will happen later on.

They have USB floppy drives now.

Anyways, I think that I was more social, and spent alot more time with family before I got turned on to the internet, which was right around the time I graduated highschool. In some ways I think I would be better off if I didn't have it, but now that I have had it for so long, I would seriously go nuts if I didn't.

I do think it's a bad thing being on it all day, but what else are we supposed to do?

We've apparently had internet since I was in pre-school and a computer since before I was born, so I never had to deal with not having it.

Before I had access to the internet... books and books, and a lot of time spent wondering what the hell was wrong with me, and being frustrated because people and communicating with people were so difficult.

The proto-Internet, DARPANet, was the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's (DARPA) experiment in setting up a decentralized computing network that could potentially survive a small-scale nuclear attack. The first email exchanged across it was, IIRC, in 1968.

The early 1980s saw the rise of Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes), local systems connected by telephone modem (originally even acoustic modems, like WarGames) to any user who dialed in. Usually they could only connect one user at a time. The BBS systems also communicated across Usenet and Fidonet to exchange file packets, enabling data files and some threads to be available across the entire network of users of Fidonet.

In the late '80s, DARPANet was declassified and moved to the public sector, where it became popularized as the Internet (the International Network). In the early '90s, a Graphical User Interface (GUI), similar to that developed at Xerox's Palo Alto facility (and copied by both Apple and Microsoft), was overlaid over the Internet's Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) codes, using Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), thus creating what we know today as the World Wide Web (WWW, or just "the Web").

Before I first ran a BBS on my C-64 back in '86, I would drop fairly large sums of money at arcades; in college, I also played role-playing games (RPGs) like AD&D, Champions, Top Secret, and Twilight: 2000. Before that, I spent a lot of time in libraries, or out in the woods (one of the nice parts of growing up in rural western Washington)...

Well...considering I didn't know about my AS until long after I first had the internet, I can safely say that before it, I didn't...my life was pure hell back then.

I always had some "friends" when I was at school, and I only got the 'net in the latter years of such. It allowed me to keep in touch with some of them when I left, but as is the norm, we all drifted apart.

I played sport, I played computer games, I went to friends' houses, I went to school like everyone else (did ok till year 9, then went downhill fast academically, but I still played sport and had some friends in relation to such). Had my required "alone" time. Left school when I couldn't handle it. Tried school and college several times with failure.... Was never good with the whole opposite sex thingy, but that's to be expected.

My "problems" mainly started around the time I got the 'net. :)

This sounds like a fun thread. Time to think back on the "good ole days?"---I have to think about that one.

Well, I used to spend hours at a time in libraries researching intense interests. I often used the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. I filled a large binder full of photo-copied newspaper articles off of those microfilm machines that had photographed pages of newspaper print. Can some of you remember feeding those microfilms into those large machines with the illuminated viewing screen?---remember the hum of the fast forward and rewind mechanism on them as you advanced through the dates? I read more books and magazines than I do today. I used to have subscriptions to magazines such as: Sky&Telescope, Astronomy, Omni, etc.

I listened to more music on my stereo.

I used to call amusement parks and speak to the management about detailed information on their roller coasters. I also mailed requests to amusement parks for brochures. I can remember when I was in high school anxiously awaiting a brochure from Kennywood Amusement Park in Pittsburgh. On the day it arrived I went with my father to my aunt's house---he was painting some rooms for her. I spent a large amount of the day just looking/studying/analyzing that brochure (only 4 little pages to look at).

Wow...how times have changed.

I was perfectly happily aloof/passive before I was 11/12 and before I got internet access.

For some time after that, I was aloof/passive afterwards still and didn't socialise on the Internet until some time later.

I also didn't use Internet for intense information gathering until five to four years ago or so.

I think this is a recent change that's only indirectly to do with having internet access.

i got my first computer when i was 10. it was a tandy trs-80 running "color basic" as the OS.
i programmed that all the time with assembly language tasks (using an "edtasm" rom cartridge)
before that, i just played piano and did experiments and played by myself as i still do now, but now i do it with a computer as a tool.

anyway, i will talk about how society has changed in my impression now the internet is everywhere.

there are 2 stages to my internet experience. the first stage was when only computer literate people were on there, and all the material was free and very informative.
then advertising came along, and advances in user friendliness let average people tune in like switching on a tv.

suddenly it became a reflection of the wider society, with gimmicks and glitz, and the majority of articles and opinions are posted by the general throng of society.

there are now laws and censorship, and anything that is worth a nickel is marketed rather than shared.
in the early days of the net, geeks liked to show off their wonderful programs which i would download and play with and use. (i contributed many open source programs i wrote too)
now, anything that is remotely useful has a price tag on it.
there are all sorts of villains out to exploit the web and it is just a reflection of general society now.
that is a shame.

but before i ever had any access to the web, if i ever talked to anyone, it was usually face to face. i used to also eat at a pub in my earlier life, and i had many people who all discussed things with me. we had excellent conversations based upon what we knew, and what we could calculate naturally.

i do not wish to sound narcissistic, but in those days of real life conversations, i was seen as a very knowledgeable person. i know lots of data about lots of things.
i was able to rattle out facts and figures from my memory because i had taken an interest in those things and remembered what i learned.

nowadays (what an old word that the spell checker allows), i speak mainly online. it is impossible to have the same credibility on line as you can have in real life.

on forums, anyone can secretly trawl the internet (in the background) for information about what the topic is. then they hastily learn it and post their response as if they are an authority on the matter. sometimes they just reword another article and do not bother to really read and understand it.

in the old days, the people that know nothing... would have had nowhere to go get any ideas. they would have remained frustratedly silent.
egocentrically crushed in their ignorance and torpor. heh.


but now, from behind their anonymity, and the immense internet knowledge base they have access to, they seem to prevail.

an example was on another asperger site i used to post to (i was xb-70 there) and someone started talking about old propeller aircraft like the dc-3 and dc-4 etc.

i was very keen to join the discussion and wrote a lot of stuff including the specifications of the engines, and how i felt they made me feel listening to them etc.

then some smart alec (who always wanted to be one step better because he was conceited) comes along and posts a 3 page reply which was a complete breakdown of the history of the douglas family and also the detailed specs and workshop procedures for the planes. he was condescending to me in his post. he ended his post with a wink icon.
grrrrr.

i googled some of the unimportant phrases in his response and found them in an official website for douglas airplanes. then i read the articles and realized he had just transplanted words with the same meanings into places he could in those articles.

i did not google important bits of his post because i knew his IQ was probably 130 or so, and he would be careful to obliterate the obvious lines of inquiry into his authenticity.

so he had no real interest in old prop liners but he prevailed as the authority on that night due to his ease of feigning authority.

i consider the internet sites i post to as being receptacles of my thoughts that people in thousands of years to come may discover and translate and listen to. ("hi" to you people if you are a thousand years ahead of my time reading this).

ramble-ectomy|||||||

Before the Big Connect topic

Like others wrote: books, lectures, extra courses, a brief pen pal relationship with another girl in Canada in the 60's, file drawer research, living at the library, PBS, lots of writing on the typewriter (manual one from the 40s ), those ubiquitous walks and bike explorations, employment (lucky me then), special interests, museum/science centre trips, daily reading of newspapers, etc.

Now I do all the above plus the internet, even the file drawer research!!

I was not much on socialization, either on the phone or in person.

I used to like to watch TV, listen to the radio and music, play with action figures when I was younger, anything to keep my sanity. Since my parents severely restricted us from the outside, we did what we could inside. Around 5th grade or so, my parents got into taking away TV, radio, and the like from me, saying they were causing me school problems, which I know they were not. The would have loved having the internet to take away from me too.

It got harder when they denied me these things later in the name of forcing me to swim 7 days a week, sometimes multiple times a day, when my sister did. One summer they took it all away and all I was allowed to do was wait to be told it was time to go swimming, and then go, no choices, no arguments, nothing. They were basically trying to brainwash me to love swimming, which of course didn't work.

I also liked to try and build things, and sometimes liked to try to write short stories, but to them that was doing nothing, since it wasn't swimming. Why they couldn't recognize my right to pick my own activities, have my own likes and dislikes, and not force me to drop what I was doing for others I'll never understand since my 4 older siblings were allowed their freedom.

During my adulthood when I finally got out of their prison(it was a prison for me, but of course, my siblings were free and they laughed at me when I was treated that way), I spent time on BBSes on the Commodore computer, and later a DOS based 386. I then graduated to AOL, and later to the 'net. Since I lived on my own, I as free to use them all I wanted, without the parents trying to take it away from me, like they did everything else I enjoyed that gave me peace.