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Showing posts from August 11, 2013

Life before the Internet: The '80s are now the 'olden days'

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A version of this column first appeared in The Dallas Morning News and on DallasNews.com . ------------------ My 5-year-old son, who always seems to be collecting data on my life, wanted to know if I played games on my phone when I was a kid. “We didn’t have phones with games on them,” I told him. “Our phones only made calls.” “But … you did have phones?” he said. I was a little offended by the doubt in Nathan’s voice. Yes, we had phones. By the middle of the ’80s, we could even dial by touch-tone instead of that primitive rotary style. We also had cell phones that were large enough to be used as a weapon when attacked by a Tyrannosaurus. What we didn’t have, and this is amazing to all my kids, is the Internet as we know it. No online videos. No online shopping. No online updates about someone’s lunch (with photos). We had no idea, or little idea, of what was to come. Doc, we need to get back to 1985! What we did have in 1989 was the movie Back to the Future