How did you learn to do something? Books, a teacher, and hands on trial and error. I think most people learned most things from somebody who taught them.

When something interested you, you’d go read about it. Learn more, see all the “documentation”. You’d also just do it and see what happens.

The easy access to knowledge today is great, and learning is easier. Its night and day to be able to look up information quickly.

The one benefit beforehand was that information was hard to produce. You couldn’t just record a video in 5 min and upload it to YouTube. You couldn’t just write a book in google docs then upload it to be sold as an eBook. Things took time and money. So if that much investment was needed, it weeded out a lot of bad information. Today, just because it’s online or in print doesn’t make it any more reliable.

Technology has definitely made life easier and more fun. But it’s also a tether people rely on. Maybe even a noose around their neck. I think the fact that people are glued to their phones all the time is very reminiscent of the humans in WallE. It’s sad.

I take the stance that I lived in a time where you couldn’t be reached 24/7 and weren’t expected to always be available. It was okay then so it should be okay now. My phone isn’t always on even though I carry it with me everywhere. If I’m hanging out with you I talk to you, and don’t need to be interrupted by messages or doom scrolling whatever app people like. My time is valuable, as is yours, and I give it the respect it deserves.

Somedays, I would spend 4-5 hours at the library, just to figure out one thing.

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How do you live with pain related to aging?

GenX here. Before computers… that’s a lie, my father always had computers, long before computers were cool. What we didn’t have was the Internet. Before the Internet, I read books. My father had a couple encyclopedia sets. One was more for kids and had colorful bindings. The other was the Encyclopedia Brittanica. So yeah, books were our Wikipedia. (Wikipedia is based on the encyclopedia concept. It’s right in the name!)

Before computers I was an ignorant little shit who read fiction books and fumble-fucked around until I could figure it out. All my education came from teachers in school literally talking to me in class, me reading the textbooks, me reading sci Fi, and me running around like a little feral goblin outside.

We had to use newspapers, books and encyclopedias - lots of print stuff. Or someone taught us. Sometimes we learned stuff from tv. Less efficient for sure. It seems like there was less misinformation. It was different, but I don’t think of it as bad.

What did it feel like before security cameras and personal surveillance became affordable and ubiquitous? Nowadays, I have to internally accept that a majority of my life will be recorded, auto-labeled, and probably marked in a digital vault for sale or future use by some organization. There’s very few ways for my generation to reclaim our privacy - everyone born after the 2000s is basically hosed.

Was it better back then? Did people actually trust one another?

From a teacher. You learned UNIX from the person sitting next to you.

Is mid-forties old enough?
I had a computer, just no internet.

how did you learn to do something?

You didn’t.
It was trial and error, ending up with a half-baked solution
and then thinking this was the best solution
or just giving up and no longer bothering.
I can see in older people’s other answers
some romanticized version of their past,
but this was the reality.

Sure, there were books in libraries,
but how many books would cover the exact thing that you were looking for of your particular situation?
Very little.

Did access to knowledge change your life, was a constraint lifted when you no longer depended on having found the right books or people to learn tips on how to cook a new dish, or how to fix a plumbing problem, or how to plant a garden?

The big constraint that has been lifted is when you asked a semi-stranger for help,
who were the only ones with that knowledge, you had a 5% chance that
they either thought it was hilarious to just lie to you and keep feeding you with new lies
when you came back and asked why it wasn’t working,
and a 50% chance they would just flat out refuse to tell you,
because “not caring is not sharing”.

Was life more simple, did you have fewer problems to solve without technology in your life, or did technology make life easier?

Yes. And it has forced people to be more honest to me and everyone else.

You over estimate the importance of computers. Computers primarily resulted in editable documents, and provides for faster less error prone and more precise computation. It meant these thing now take less manpower and are less costly. Not so much else.

Internet and telecom. This is separate. Communiction has gotten faster and cheaper. The mail service less used and less reliable though express services like Fedex faster. Frankly these changes are a mixed bag.

Do not forget too that compuserve, bullitin boards, usenet, and forums go much further back then most people think. Think 80s and some sruff before that. Computers go further back. I used them in the 70s and my dad in the 60s though the costs were a lot higher. Electronic computers go back to the 40s and before that there were mechanical computers and relay logic too.

As others said, tv, books and people. I learned from the newspaper too. They have a section where they talk about misc things other than news, like car, recipe, newest trends etc.

For people, there is quite a lot of misinformation, because they can’t fact check easily.

For tv, they ll have informative things sometimes, like national geographic, random documentary, random recipe etc. they ll have the schedule on the newspaper and we sit in front of tv to wait for the show. It is quite exciting. And weekends morning we ll have cartoon on tv too. It makes us wake up early.

I also like going to the local library to find books I am interested in. Because the books are limited, you can focus easier without information overload.

With the internet, knowledge is so easily available now, and causing information and sensory overload. It is a blessing and curse.

It is convenient. Too convinent.

We don’t appreciate or feel excited anymore on new information or new things, the negative news bombarded us everyday, younger people brainwashed by social media. We over consume and things are lower quality now.

ignorance is bliss.

Old person here.

before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Books! and People! And while they wouldn’t give you endless answers to every trivial thing you wanted to know, you could call the library to ask a question for them to look up for you.

was a constraint lifted

Maybe, but not really. I think people talked and shared more. If you were in the midwest, you’d never eaten Thai, Japanese, Ethiopian, or even Lebanese food, and it wasn’t available. The ingredients weren’t available, either, so you weren’t going to learn to cook it from scratch. Even if you had a cook book. By the 1990s, I had an Americanized Thai cook book with substitutions for some things. Now I can get everything from fish sauce to harrissa paste at local stores. That was more important than access to recipes. Also, there were strange recipes in the 70s – like Watergate Cake and Chex Mix (which you had to make at home and always had nuts), and all kinds of jello ‘salads’.

Was life more simple

Yes. I gather this was true prior to the 70s/80s I remember, but simplicity came from vetted curators. If you bought name brand things, they would work and last a long time. “No one was ever fired for buying IBM.” – because their stuff worked. Same for GE, Kodak, Pyrex, Whirlpool, and so on. Not anymore. I’m pretty sure everyone is working to make the cheapest possible version of everything now, so figuring out what version of a thing to get is much harder, and you can’t trust that online reviews aren’t paid advertising.

We believed experts, and called out liars. We knew people who’d had polio harm their families, so we got vaccines because they obviously worked better than ‘healthy living’. For things like music, you knew which critics had your tastes, and could trust their suggestions for what to hear were spot-on. They got a decent salary for their dedication and you supported that by buying their publications. Enjoy rock? Maybe Robert Christgau was your guy, or maybe Lester Bangs, but both would give you an entertaining read with solid recommendations. It was WAY better than algorithms.

Further: while there is much wrong with the studio system, the cost of getting a record pressed meant we were not flooded with the volume of bad, under produced junk that litters the music world today. There would be no “Sgt. Pepper’s” without a LOT of studio work. Also, there was a glorious heyday of FM radio before it got the same commercialization as AM where you DJs (especially the late night ones) would make interesting set lists that we all heard together over the airwaves.

All that said, moving to internet searches was easy, but the results feel fractured. We all read the same newspapers, and generally believed them, knowing each had some biases and we never had every detail. We might have different opinions, but we had the same facts. I remember reading a book on raising ducks and accidentally learned that their chromosomes are not X/Y, but Z/w (boys are ZZ and girls Zw). I did not expect to learn that. A search for ‘raising ducks’ generally doesn’t mention that, and a search for duck sex traits doesn’t bring up raising them. Knowledge ran deeper, if more slow.

To sum up: Yeah, the internet is nice, but I miss feeling like we all share the same world.

I’d ask if things get better, but I don’t know if I want to know the answer.

I guess my question for those older than me is: before computers, how did you learn to do something?

Books, radio, and TV. Also, learning from others.

Before the Internet (because computers didn’t really replace any other information mechanisms before the Internet), if you wanted to learn something you might start by talking to someone more knowledgeable than yourself.

If there wasn’t someone who knew more than you, or you needed to learn more than the people around you knew, then you’d go to the library or the bookstore. Where other teenage guys would fumble around in sex unable to find the clitoris, I’m enough of a nerd that I went to the library and found a book that gave me the info I needed.

There were also TV shows that would actually impart knowledge. Before the rise of cable channels in the U.S., Public Broadcasting would have shows that shared knowledge. News and history, of course. Science too. Back then, broadcasters took their responsibility to educate the public much more seriously.

I probably learned more about math and grammar from School House Rock during Saturday morning cartoons in the 70’s than I was learning from school (Interjections [hey!] show excitement [yow!] or emotion [ouch!]. They are generally set aside from a sentence by an exclamation point or by a comma if the feeling’s not as strong… Conjunction Junction… Number Nine… Three Is a Magic Number…)

On TV you had shows like Nova which would report on science topics. There were, of course, cooking shows where the host would make recipes, not to win a contest, but to show the audience how to cook them.

I learned an enormous amount of what I know about home repairs from obsessively watching shows like This Old House and Home Time, and I picked up a lot about woodworking from a show called The Woodwright’s Shop. I also watched [Nahm!] The New Yankee workshop.

I watched a lot of the original version of This Old House where they would spend a season renovating and rehabilitating one house. It’s probably a big reason why my wife and I bought an old Victorian house.