We transferred our website www.brightermarketing.com to a new home at the weekend. We needed a more robust server that would give us more options to develop our online presence. However, it all went horribly wrong and our website was nowhere to be seen and what’s more we lost our emails as well. Obviously it is all resolved now, as you are reading this blog post, but the nervousness and anxiety I felt about not having a web or email presence got me thinking…

…What on earth did we do before the Internet, how on earth did we stay in touch with people?

I remember being a student in the late 1980’s with no mobile phones, and a house phone that only accepted incoming calls because we couldn’t afford the bill. I went to the library to do all my research and got books out that were in demand on short term loan for a few hours and read company reports to get information on businesses. I used to have a phone card and queued at the local phone box to call home and I also spent time writing letters to my friends and family. I had a word processor that had a daisy wheel printer and could only print in one font and one colour and at work, my 286 computer would take an age to upload a document.

Having the Internet has made it so easy for us to connect with people and get access to information that would have meant a trip to the local library or book store in the past. In fact I remember reading somewhere that we get more information in our Sunday newspapers than a person living in a village in the sixteenth century would have had in their entire lifetime. So it is no wonder that we have come to expect quick results and start to feel worried if we don’t have access to emails, texts and everything else we have come to rely on.

So what do you remember about life before the internet? Would be interesting to find out if you can remember what it was like?

Here is how one girl definitley took advantage of the the Internet to take her from checkout girl to best selling author How a checkout girl called Anna Sam bagged a bestseller