Explain to Kids: Life Before the Internet
Do you remember living in a world where “Google it” wasn’t the answer to everything? It might be a challenge for Kids These Days® to imagine what life used to be when we were their age — what we played with, how we entertained ourselves, and how much simpler (and bigger) our electronic gadgets were!
In this Explain to Kids, we’re doing the ultimate #ThrowbackThursday to the pre-Internet age. We’re talking pagers; we’re talking film cameras; we’re talking cassette tapes — anything you can remember from the good ol’ days! (This throwback is for us to educate our millennial interns as much as it is for you to reminisce your childhood with your kids!)
Entertaining Ourselves
Television
Remember what it was like to see Mickey Mouse on TV before he was given his signature red pants, yellow shoes and iconic voice? We personally don’t. We doubt most of you recall colourless TV either (not counting our senior citizen readers)! It wasn’t until 1954 that colour broadcasting officially began!
Not only that — TVs back then were different in so many ways! They were bulky, they had antennas (that had to be placed just right so that the image won’t be grainy), and there were fixed TV schedules!
That last one was a bit of a pain. TV shows would come on at a certain time each day — and if we missed it, the Internet wasn’t there to catch us up! I think all of us can relate to running home after school to catch our favourite TV shows!
Activity: Pasta Box TV
In this fun craft activity, the kids are going to create and design their very own TV! Encourage your little ones to come up with a mini TV show and narrate it for the class or family!
Food for Thought: Back to the Future
From large and bulky to flat and sleek, technological advancements have taken a huge leap with TVs. What do your kids think TVs will look like 50 years from now? Walls being completely replaced with giant screens? Holographic TVs?Get the little ones to exercise their creativity and sketch out what they think TVs will look like in the future!
Music
We didn’t always have large music libraries at our disposal like Spotify or SoundCloud. Just decades ago, music couldn’t be confined to a mobile phone app! Songs and audio clips were stored vinyl records, CDs (compact discs), and cassette tapes.
Audio cassette tapes rose to popularity in the 1970s. Before we had the iPods or iPhones, we had the Walkman. Don’t know what a Walkman is? Let our favourite superhero break it down for you!
Picture Perfect
Before we had digital photography, we had film! Pictured below, is a strip of film. It is a thin flexible strip of plastic that, when exposed to light, captures a picture (that we can develop later to obtain printed photographs).
Developing film requires time and the wait can be days, weeks or sometimes months (since you have to finish the roll before developing) till you see how the photos turn out! This is a stark contrast to how quickly and easily we take pictures today! Instant photo-sharing platforms like Instagram and Snapchat make it so convenient for us to snap photos and share them with our friends in the blink of an eye!
When was the last time you picked up a photo album? Flipping through old photos and reminiscing with our family and friends always brings about a warm, homey feeling for me!
Activity: Make DIY frames with your children for all your photos with a little bit of yarn and some cardboard!
Activity: Design an old-timey looking photo frame! Draw out the film strip pictured below colour in the cardboard frame. Paste the photograph of your choice into the centre and there you have it!
Back to School
With an endless amount of information so readily available at our fingertips, it’s hard to remember what learning was like before Google! Everything used to be paper-based and the world’s knowledge was kept on bookshelves. Our greatest resources were public libraries — and librarians were essentially book wizards!
You can, of course, still go to your local library to carry out research. Libraries are still filled from end to end with books, magazines, and newspaper articles!
Print Media
Old newspaper articles were kept in physical microfilm archives (pictured above). A projector was used to enhance the small microfilm for easy reading. Nowadays, resources like newspapers and research papers are consolidated on online databases that can be accessed worldwide!
Encyclopaedias
An encyclopedia is a book, or set of books, arranged topically. This made reading and researching a lot easier since related concepts were condensed. It’s a great source of knowledge for children as it expands their general knowledge beyond school.
Britannica’s line of encyclopedia for kids is highly renowned and recognised, check out their website below. They have tons of great topics that cover almost everything under the sun!
Communication Station
The way people are connected through the Internet makes the world feel a lot smaller. A lack of instant communication meant that if you arranged meetings in advance either over the phone or face-to-face, you’d have to stick with it. Without cellphones, we couldn’t conveniently text or call to rearrange plans at the last minute! And we definitely couldn’t text a white lie about being “On the way!” when really, we’re still at home putting our shoes on.
Telephones
Endearingly nicknamed the brick phone, the first ever cell phones were pretty bulky, weighing almost 1kg! For comparison, the iPhone is approximately 200g; that’s 5 times lighter!
The first commercial mobile phone released by Motorola offered only 30 minutes of talk-time and 6 hours standby, making it both heavy and inconvenient. If we didn’t have cell phones, how did we arrange meet-ups and contact our friends?
We used pagers! They work like a text message, but only with numerical digits. Originally used by doctors and businesspersons to notify them of urgent calls, pagers rose to popularity in the 1990s with over 61 million users worldwide.
So, this is how it worked: Person A would call Person B’s pager. Person A would hear a beep or a customised message. Then, Person A would leave a message for Person B through the pager — this message consisted entirely of numbers! This number can either be the contact number Person A wants person B to call, or a code that both persons had agreed on ahead of time.
Sounds like a really roundabout way to reach someone, doesn’t it? Thank goodness for smartphones!
Activity: Even in the 21st century, plenty of fun can come from an old-fashioned tin can phone; but how exactly does sound work?
Talking causes vibrations in the air around our mouth (you can feel the vibration in your speech by speaking into your hand). When we speak into the can, vibrations are passed along the string to the other can. When that can receives the vibrations in the air once again — the voice can be heard! Science!
Snail Mail
Letter writing is truly special. It’s always exciting (at least for me) to open up a mail box and find a hand-written letter!
Activity: The art of snail mailing has been on a decline ever since the widespread use of instant communication. How about reviving it by encouraging your kids try it out with their friends? Get them to exchange addresses and let their creativity run wild!
Provide your little ones with a stamp and some stationery, and let the DIY fun begin!
If your child is looking for inspiration on what he can write to his pen pal, you can find many helpful writing prompts on this other blog we found!
At Your Service
In the past, when a business opened up a new storefront, they would advertise it in newspapers or billboards and hoped that the locals in their area would be interested in their services. Well, these practices still exist with the Internet. It has brought a whole new platform that business owners could only have dreamed of! We see online ads practically everywhere, from YouTube videos to news feeds to online shops!
Yellow Pages
Since most of modern advertising has migrated to the Internet, finding services has become effortless! Before the birth of the Internet, when we needed a plumber or electrician for help, how did we contact them? We used the yellow pages, of course! Not just any yellow page, though! These yellow pages refer to a directory for services that are listed alphabetically — and they weigh a ton.
This giant yellow book is what you’d be flipping through if you needed a service way back before Google (or Bing, ha) was a thing! For example, if you needed a plumber, you’d flip to ‘P’ and listed there would be the ads of all the plumbers in your area. In the digital age, this book has become obsolete.
If you still have the yellow pages lying around the house collecting dust, why not let your kids have a look-see? Challenge them by requesting for a type of service and see how long it takes for them to look it up. They’ll never take a quick Google search for granted again!
Food delivery
What an absolute dream it is to stay in the comfort of your home while someone delivers yummy foods of your choice right to your doorstep just by tapping on a screen!
First to get the ball rolling was Pizza Hut. This restaurant chain invented ‘PizzaNet’, its very own digital ordering hub. As services like UberEATS and Deliveroo continue to offer delivery services across multiple eateries, online food delivery will only continue growing from here. Hopefully, the next step up will allow us to download food straight from our computers!
Paperless Schools
When schools start utilising digital platforms, doors start opening for our students!
Students these days are commonly asked to upload their assignments or complete quizzes online. In countries like Singapore, it is common for teachers and professors to upload digital versions of their lectures to encourage self-driven learning.
The Internet shrinks the world and in the setting of a school, it brings teachers and parents closer together. In pre-schools, the Internet fosters connectivity between the school and home. Working parents can be kept in the loop as schools keep them digitally updated about their kids’ wellbeing.
Learn more about how Internet services can influence your pre-school:
Sometimes, it’s nice to kickback and reminisce the old days. We hope reading this didn’t make you miss the pre-Internet epoch too much! If you enjoyed this throwback, share this article with your fellow 90s, 80s, and 70s kids!
Any complex topic can be tailored to suit a child’s mind, so head on to our LittleLives Blog for more from our Explain to Kids series!
