The old textbook I found at my dad's house had me laughing

I was clearing out my parents' basement last weekend and found my old high school history textbook from 1995. The thing is huge and has this section on "the future of the internet" that's maybe two paragraphs long. It talks about email and basically says the internet is mostly for researchers and the military. I sat there flipping through it and realized how much the whole way we learn has flipped upside down since then. My kids use YouTube and online forums for half their school projects now and never touch physical books. It made me wonder if we're losing something by ditching printed resources entirely or if this is just how it goes. Has anyone else dug up old school materials and felt weird about how fast things changed?

2 comments

2 Comments

parker54318d ago

My buddy found his old 1997 computer textbook last week and it had a whole chapter on "surfing the web" with instructions on how to use Netscape Navigator. He showed me a photo of it and I couldn't stop laughing at the screenshots of websites that looked like someone made them in Microsoft Paint. The wild part is his teenage daughter saw it and asked why the internet used to be so empty, like it was a black and white TV or something. She could not wrap her head around the idea that you couldn't just watch any movie or game you wanted instantly. Made me feel ancient but also like we had to work a little harder to find anything good online back then.

mila39518d ago

God, that feeling of showing kids old internet stuff is brutal. My nephew saw a Geocities page I made in 1999 with a guestbook and a midi file of "Tubthumping" on loop and he asked why it looked like a ransom note. The part about working harder to find stuff is so true, I remember spending hours on Altavista just to find a single decent fan site for a band I liked. Kids today have no clue what it was like to wait for a single image to load line by line, and they definitely don't appreciate the thrill of finally finding that one obscure webpage that had exactly what you needed.