Seventy-seven percent of middle-age Americans (35-54 years old) say they want to return to a time before society was “plugged in,” meaning a time before there was widespread internet and cell phone usage. As told by a new Harris Poll (via Fast Company), 63% of younger folks (18-34 years old) were also keen on returning to a pre-plugged-in world, despite that being a world they largely never had a chance to occupy.

  • Digital Mark
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    In the '80s & '90s you could get anything from a <$100 home computer (with enormous libraries of software), to <$1000 PCs, to tens of thousands for great workstations like NeXT, SUN, and SGI (I used SGI, had a SparcStation late '90s-'00s, lusted for a NeXT but then Apple bought them and we use NeXTstep every day now). You shopped by buying a Computer Shopper - Jason’s scanning in later issues too, look around the collection. Those computers were amazing. You turned on an Atari or other home computer, it beeped and said “READY” and you could program. Not many hours of screwing around with IDEs later, instantly.

    Albums on tape were cheap, you could just copy one off for <$1. CD cost the same as now, $5-20, which is artificial pricing bullshit by studios. By mid-90s you could leech or burn a CDROM of MP3s from Napster or at a LAN party. Because you see, we had friends. Uh, those were people you saw with shared interests? Spotify is shit, you should own your own (legal or not) copies of music and then when the service goes down, you don’t lose everything.