How useful were computers before internet?

Hi,

Before the vast usefulness of the internet came in existence, people like myself had computers in their homes and others had it in their offices. What you could do with a computer back then was very limited without the internet, in my opinion.

I only used it for:
- Word Processing (I will give it credit there...considering it was the modern day type-writer)
- Encarta (very limited thinking about it now)
- Printing out pictures/charts (very rare)

Did anyone else use computers, without internet, for other things I have not mentioned?

I would watch early 90's movies and see businessmen carry around laptops. Really?! What could they possibly do with a laptop that you could not Google, send emails, online banking and so on. It could possibly be a pretentious way of carrying around a 4 kg machine to take down notes. The only quasi-useful things I can think of is carrying around their laptops to a meeting to illustrate PowerPoint slides on a projector or work on Excel spreadsheets where ever they went. Or is this an distorted reality presented by Hollywood?


Any thoughts?

We had computers at home from the mid-80s, and it was several years before we even had a dial-up connection.

My first computer was a Commodore 64, and the main thing it was used for was playing games. But it did inspire a love of computers, which was undoubtedly my parents' ulterior motive in buying me one! I learned to programme in BASIC and it has stood me in good stead. The language may change but the principles remain broadly the same.

We got our first PC (a 486) from my dad's work. Dad is an engineer (now retired), and was the lead designer as well as managing director. He did a bit of CAD design (his company actually had Macs in the office, although we had a PC at home for some reason). I learned to do CAD and worked in his company during my holidays, starting off on the shop floor sweeping up, but after a couple of years I moved into working in the offices and became a part time CAD draughtsman. This didn't require any kind of internet connection, but was extremely powerful. Radical even. 'Blueprints' come from the technology used to copy CAD drawings. You draw on white paper, and then put the original through a machine with a special, light sensitive paper to expose a negative image. This has to be cured with an ammonia based chemical (stinky!) and ends up blue with white lines. This is no longer needed once you get a computer and plotter - just press Print again!

The company was run on computers. Accounts, inventory, customer history. All these things were previously done with paper in a time consuming manner. They migrated over to computerised systems and massively increased efficiency.

So, the answer to your question is that people created data, held data and processed data in volumes and at speeds that were previously impractical. Connected computing is massively enabling, but unconnected computing is still pretty amazing in terms of what it can do!

I used a laptop back then for exactly that .... spreadsheets and presentations.
You had to carry around all the information you needed .... today, information is everywhere and you have access to it at anytime using multiple access mechanisms.
That was lacking in those days, but looking back, I was very proud to use a computer
For me the biggest improvement in those days was WiFi slowly becoming a commodity, although it was very expensive to build a WiFi infrastructure...only the " selected few " in the company would get a laptop with WiFi At home that was too expensive.

I always tell our daughters ( 26 & 23 ) what it was like growing up without a computer, and that my social network was all about jumping on my bike and cycling to the nearest football ground.
A lot of fun, but I can not imagine me being without a computer in today's world.

Cheers ... McBie

Thanks for clearing that up.

Those functions were for large businesses and would definitely be useful. Then where does that leave the 'average' computer user? I remember in 1997 my parents bought me my first computer (Pentium, 166 Mhz). It costed $3,000. Thinking about it now, it was such a waste of money for the tasks it could perform for a high school student. I typed my assignments on it. At rare times I would refer to Encarta. That was it. Oh and played Doom and Mech-Warrior.

Even before anybody knew anything about the internet, it was said that there would be 'a computer in every home'. It certainly makes complete sense now. However, that statement appears overly ambitious when all computers were for the average person was merely a modern day typewriter that you can play games on that cost 6 weeks of average salary.

The average computer user in the early days was the very definition of a geek before being a geek became cool! People had computers because they were interested in them or what you could do with them. And in earlier days it was much easier to start creating your own programs and the like since they were much simpler back then.

So I suspect computer users fell into two camps: people who played games on their machines and people who tinkered with their computers. Very few people ever use computers for anything beyond the basics in my experience, whatever that 'base' is made of.

I know my folks bought me my first computer because they saw it as the future. My grand father was a miner. My dad was an engineer. I am a software engineer. If ever there was a clear line of technological progress, that is it in my mind!

The other big change in computing is how cheap they are now - basic computers can be had for a couple of hundred quid so you don't need a compelling reason to buy one. In fact, I would say that this has driven the internet as much as the internet has driven computer adoption. One phone is useless. Two is a novelty. Three is a proposition. A million phones is a paradigm shift. It's the same with computers. Once they are out there, it's worth considering connecting them. I used the internet before the web, and it was difficult to use or find things. WWW was a radical shift in terms of making the internet easy to use for ordinary people. Things like Facebook and Google have made it so straight forward that zero technical capability is required.

dbm said:

The average computer user in the early days was the very definition of a geek before being a geek became cool! People had computers because they were interested in them or what you could do with them. And in earlier days it was much easier to start creating your own programs and the like since they were much simpler back then.

So I suspect computer users fell into two camps: people who played games on their machines and people who tinkered with their computers. Very few people ever use computers for anything beyond the basics in my experience, whatever that 'base' is made of.
.

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Yes, I have noticed a couple of those instances when early computer users bought computers just to 'tinker' with them. Those people turned out to be working in IT in their careers.

So why did these people needed to code programs? And particularly at such a young age. What were the programs used for? Isn't it already available on the market?

I remember coding a very simple " accounting " program, that did just what was expected .... no fancy things.
Full programs were commercially available but at a very high cost.
But what was most important with these commercial programs was that they were designed by an IT guy ( mostly the programmer ) and not by a business guy ( who had to use them and try to read the programmers mind )..... what was this guy thinking when he coded this stuff

Interesting times .

Cheers ... McBie

Are you kidding? Besides games being an obvious one, graphics design has always been a major use for a computer even pre-internet. I used to do a newsletter on my first computer... an Amstrad 80086 system with a CGA monitor and a pair of floppy drives for booting the OS. I've printed out long banners for birthdays and other events. There were dozens of other productivity uses. Spreadsheets... finance tracking... accounting applications... much much more.

simonvee said:

So why did these people needed to code programs? And particularly at such a young age. What were the programs used for? Isn't it already available on the market?

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I went from making stuff in Lego to writing very simple games (I wrote my own version of the snake / caterpillar game). I did because it was fun.

What more reason do you need?

Even though most people used the computer s a glorified calculator or typewriter that use was still imports. I am a horrible typist. Even using the electronic ones that put a line of type on screen before committing it to paper were horrible for me. The ability to spell check and cut/paste was a miracle.

The computer also opened up a level of creativity even within basic word processing not possible with typewriters. I know folks who spent tons of time on their Apple IIGS and Mac machines changing fonts in letters to get just the look they wanted.

When I was a kid (VIC 20/C64/TRS-80/Apple II/Atari 400-era machines) and later a teenager (PC-XT/AT and original Macitosh-era), they were used for education (Apple II primarily), games, BASIC programming and tinkering, and not really much else. Of course, in the business world at that time I have no idea - ICBM codes ? But form my perspective, that's about it.

Once I became a teenager, I saw them used in businesses for inventory control, word processing, database management and such (mid-late '80's). In fact, my first job was working for an old man inputting his inventory into his Tandy PC-compatible computer. The software was custom-programmed by a local company apparently, but he had no clue how to use it when the girl that did it for him moved away.

When I became an adult and joined the Army, I used a 386 laptop with Harvard Graphics 3.0 to produce charts and graphs for my commander to use in his training briefings, and I used other software to type up correspondence, create training schedules, duty schedules, etc. There was no internet at that time, but there were BBS's (Bulletin Board Systems). You connected using a modem on your phone line, at 14.4kbps (or 33.6kbps if you had a fast modem). You could download files, pictures (mostly porn!), and chat with other people. Then AOL came out, a pre-cursor to the WWW. That's really when things started to change for the "Average" user.

My children do not remember a time when there wasn't the internet - they were too young really and by the time they were old enough to understand the technology around them, the internet was widely available and easy to use. They don't know what Windows 3.1 is, and never used dial-up or AOL, and a floppy disc - what is THAT?!.

You know what I'm interested in? What kind of computer do you have; what do you primarily use it for; what other devices do you use and for what (tablet, smartphone, etc.); and could those tasks be accomplished with a machine of much less powerful specs? Not just you specifically, but anyone reading this (I should start a new thread on that topic!).

I'm interested in those things because it seems to me that, with the exception of business-related tasks or things like CAD, video editing, etc., that what the general computer user or "consumer" uses a computer (or tablet, or smartphone) for does not require the level of hardware technology that we seem to think we "need" - it could be done with much less (of course, the code would have to be more efficiently written, like it was "back in the day"). I'm sure others will disagree with me on that, but that's what I think.

Anyway, it IS hard to imagine a world without Wifi, cellular, and internet.....how DID we get things done back then??? ;D

I started in personal computing with a home-brew, built from components machine that was basically an adding machine. This was before TI came out with the first four-function calculator. I then moved to the Radio Shack TRS-80 and did word processing on it with Word Perfect and a dot-matrix printer. At work we got a dedicated word processor machine that came with a CP/M boot disk that let me get to the system and program it in interpreted BASIC. I wrote a program to track pilot readiness for our squadron, something that we had track manually back then. Later I built a Heathkit H-100 for me and used it for word processing and Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets. By then I was in a small company that did IT consulting for small businesses and we built an S-100 based system for a 6-store appliance chain to track inventory at all the stores and to allow each store to see what was at the others when a customer wanted something not in the local store. We also computed the truck load and route to get that inventory moved efficiently from store-to-store. The connection was a dial-up, 300baud line with S-100 terminals in each store that connected to the Z-80 based processor card in the S-100 card cage located in the main store. We put all six processors in the one card cage along with a seventh card to drive the hard drive that held the database. CP/M was very easy to work with!

So, all of that came before Internet. In fact, the internet started when I had moved to a major university data center. We were a major node of Bitnet (Because It's There NETwork). Bitnet was a store and forward network between universities world-wide. The connections were 56K dedicated lines between universities. We had a connection to GulfNet, in the Arabian gulf. It turned out we had one of the first indications of the invasion of Kuwait when the University of Kuwait dropped out of the Bitnet when Iraq invaded!

At that time the Internet was non-gui. To navigate and use the internet, you used ftp, rsh and other terminal commands. What made the internet useful for the average user was the creation of the World Wide Web and HTML. By getting away from having to know the IP number to connect and being able to just use a name, and by using a graphic interface instead of the command line, the web became usable to mom and pop, not just the IT guys. The rest, as they say, is history.

Very interesting!

So you've been around this stuff for quite some time then. I never really dedicated the time to become more proficient and learn as much as I'd like because work and family life left little time to pursue my "hobby". My employment after the Army was as a Diesel Technician, not IT. But, I used what I did know and my desire to learn more to do things like take instrument clusters apart and re-solder cracked solder joints around connector pins, saving my fleet (or the customer) money on replacing components, and at the same time reducing electronic waste. I always felt good about that type of stuff. Of course, I was the top guy for anything electrical, and later, anything with ECU's, programming, and driveability diagnostics or multiplex CAN network stuff.

Now I'm in Operations Management, which to me is not really "technical". Frankly, boring and not that difficult. That's why I'm excited that my employer has this opportunity to get into computer network defense and pen testing-type stuff, and if I meet their criteria, they'll train me!

MX372 said:

CLIP... Then AOL came out, a pre-cursor to the WWW. That's really when things started to change for the "Average" user.

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No, AOL was not a pre-cursor to the WWW. It started as a portal to the Internet, providing a hub of modems into which an AOL user could dial to gain access. Later on it started to add content of its own creation. When the cable companies got into providing connectivity, AOL tried to shift to being a content provider, but didn't do very well and went into a major decline.

CLIP...

I'm interested in those things because it seems to me that, with the exception of business-related tasks or things like CAD, video editing, etc., that what the general computer user or "consumer" uses a computer (or tablet, or smartphone) for does not require the level of hardware technology that we seem to think we "need" - it could be done with much less (of course, the code would have to be more efficiently written, like it was "back in the day"). I'm sure others will disagree with me on that, but that's what I think.

Click to expand...

I started coding when it really was coding--entering the binary code one byte at a time into memory in hex digits. You had to code both the commands and the data that way. It would take lots of inputs to set up a program to run one simple program to add two numbers. If you got clever, you could have the program run to allow you to enter the numbers you wanted operated on (in hex, of course) and then trigger the operation with another hex code. Input and output was, on my machine, an eight-hex digit display and switches to flip to set the bits to get the hex number to show. There was no storage of the "program" at that time, you had to reenter it each time you wanted to run it. Later on we could store the program on cassette tapes and use audio processing to turn the 1's and 0's into sound, then the sound back to 1's and 0's to load the registers. Very nice.

Later I programmed in assembler, which let us get away from hex. You moved data through registers and to/from storage with commands. In those days code was pretty efficient because you had to create the process each time. So if I needed to add two numbers, I'd retrieve the first from a location in storage and put it into a register, then retrieve the other from a different location in storage and put it into a second register and then trigger the add command to combine the two registers and put the results in a third register. Then I would put the results from that storage into a different location in storage. Each time I needed an add function, I'd repeat that same code. Sometimes the location of the numbers in storage was also stored in storage, so you'd have to move that number to a register and then use that register to retrieve the real number from storage, etc. Bottom line, coders did this repetition of code a lot! Once the assembler program was working, you stored it on tape, sometimes paper tape, sometimes recording tape, and fed it to a compiler that built up the binary code for you from the various commands you had entered.

Then along came higher level compilers. Magic tools that let you NOT have to worry about register and storage addresses and codes. You could use sort-of English to just say what you wanted and the compiler would use a pre-stored set of assembler code. BASIC was one such. How magic that you could simply define A and B as having some value then "X=A+B"and it would give you X! Amazing! I din't have to worry about where A and B were stored, or retrieve them before adding! But the increase in programmer productivity came with a tradeoff--the resulting binary code was much, much larger than it would have been if you used Assembler, and that was much larger than if you just entered the 1's and 0's in hex. The reason is that compilers have to accomodate multiple uses and have code in them that I may not need but YOU do, or checking code that has to make sure the operation completes properly, which I don't need to worry about if I'm looking at the register moves, etc. So, in being more "efficient" in being able to slam code faster, I pay a price of inefficient size and some extra overhead in execution. No problem, the faster machines can take care of that, and after all, the big cost in programming is labor, so we're good, right?

So, if we wanted, for example, Word to be as "efficient" as something written in binary and input in hex, it would cost a fortune to buy and maintain, but it would run in a lot less powerful machine than it takes now. But that's not progress, is it?

Anyway, it IS hard to imagine a world without Wifi, cellular, and internet.....how DID we get things done back then??? ;D

Click to expand...

Landlines, secretaries, libraries, encyclopedias, paper phone message forms. Been there, done that.

@ MacInWin - Thanks for the background on programming languages. I'm no programmer, for sure. As a kid/teenager, I, like many I'm sure, programmed a few things in BASIC and had some fun, but that's not the career track I went into - and not really by choice per se - sometimes you have to do what makes you money and maybe isn't really what you are interested in. And I wasn't trying to give a 100% chronological account of the internet, I apologize. I guess AOL was after the internet then. Never used it myself, but it sure was advertised ALOT back then. I guess I'm just more of "use what's free" type of guy? BBS's were free......

100% valid point about cost of labor vs. efficiency, and progress, but what I said was true: code today is much less efficient, no? I understand that is the way it is, and part of why we need ever-more computing power. It's the same with automobiles. 20 years ago if you got 20mpg that was real good. Now? They have full size trucks that can get that. Of course, they cost $40k+ and have more computing power on them than the Apollo 18 mission did.....

MacInWin said:

No, AOL was not a pre-cursor to the WWW. It started as a portal to the Internet, providing a hub of modems into which an AOL user could dial to gain access. Later on it started to add content of its own creation.

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Eh, no not really. According to Wikipedia, they didn't start offering an internet portal until 1993. This matches my understanding since this is about when I first started hearing about "the internet" and had long known of online services already, including AOL, though I wasn't a user of any until I joined AOL in 1995. Distilled as best as I can from Wikipedia, they started out in 1985 by the name of Quantum Computer Services as an online service along the lines of CompuServe, but geared towards novice users, and changed their name to America Online in 1989. I was an AOL user myself from 1995 till about 1997 and they self-hosted all their content that you accessed by dialing into their servers, and they provided a web browser that let you get to "the internet". At some point, 1996 or so, they allowed for an option to access their service via an ISP for a reduced rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL

EDIT: I should add that they weren't exactly a pre-cursor to the internet either since the "internet" has been around since, what, the early 70's? But to academics only, until it was opened up to the public in the early 90's.

@simonvee

Before the vast usefulness of the internet came in existence, people like myself had computers in their homes and others had it in their offices. What you could do with a computer back then was very limited without the internet, in my opinion.

Click to expand...

Just curious and a question for you.... (and don't take this the wrong way) But are you working on some kind of dissertation or thesis? The only time you post in our forums is to ask or inquire about some subject that stirs up a lot of replies. And I notice that you post only here in the Lounge. Nothing wrong with what you're doing but it does seem a bit odd that the only time we see you is with this type of post.

Haha. No thesis for me. This is for personal knowledge. Good observation though.

I switched over from Windows to Mac in late 2013. I've learnt many of the 'technical' skills to operate a Mac than an average user. On rare occasions now I might post a technical question if I do not know how to perform something.

Every now and then a 'general' question that the general public might take for granted will make me curious. I have pondered on this question when I got my 1st computer in 1997 but have not got around to asking it. At the time, how my friends, relatives and myself used a computer was no more than a game machine and glorified typewriter which cost 3+ weeks of average salary. It was a minor troubling thought. Now days, you would not question that since it costs just half a week of work to buy a decent computer that does a tonne of things for your everyday life.

My previous general question was why doesn't Real Player on OS X play MPEG or such? Why doesn't Apple create their own universal media player that could play everything. I think that's a really good question but has troubled me for some time. However, now I know the answer to it and accepted why things are the way it is.

Hope this makes sense

Back in the mid-90's. The word was out-

"Kids need a computer for school and education"
"Every house will eventually have a computer in the future"

I urged my parents to spend their hard earned money to buy me a computer for....."education" and that all other kids had one. Education was...ahem...Encarta 97. A downgrade from the free public library.

I think at the time, it was marketers making us want what we do not need. As they always do...

Heck, I only used the $3,000 computer as a game machine, media player and typewriter. With the phrase of 'every home will have one'- I asked what will my blue-collar parents use it for? It seemed overly ambitious and whack that every house will and should have one.

I could write a book on this subject, but the short form comes down to two things:

1. It's important to bear in mind that expectations were quite different then. For example, look at how popular Facebook is for keeping in touch with people. Back in the 80s and 90s, we didn't have need of such service because we had telephones, post stamps, and of course we didn't know nearly as many people! Speaking for myself, I always thought of a computer has a huge improvement on a typewriter right from day one. Later on, as they got more capable, we did more things with them. And that opened up new doors.

2. As for practical uses, starting with the TRS-80 model III, my primary use of computers was to typeset and send to a Varitype machine text for newspapers, which was then turned into strips of processed photopaper that was waxed and stuck to boards representing pages.