20 Years Ago

[garbon]

I'd like to choke them with a landline.  NO LANDLINE = TRANSIENT

Okay, gramps.

[CountDeMoney]

Bet you don't have a mailbox, either.

[garbon]

Bet you don't have a mailbox, either.

I've an apartment mailbox.

[Grallon]

I still have a land line - best way not to be disturbed.

-----

As for 1994...  Well I was 27, still hadn't met my last bf - was still fucking around... 

I still believed the future held things in store for me.

Now I know better of course. *wry grin*

Best of all I hadn't met any of you people!




G.

[Valmy]

Rather disturbingly it would not be too long before I met a lot of you.  Well ok it would be about six years.

[grumbler]

Rather disturbingly it would not be too long before I met a lot of you.  Well ok it would be about six years.

IIRC, at that point it would be about three years before I would first encounter Tamas, in the old PBEM The Great War and then the infinitely superior Thunder at Twilight.  In 1994 I was playing Pacific War with the mod to convert battles to Carrier Strike to resolve.  Fun times, but it took forever!

[Syt]

Not 20, but 22 years ago I worked at our small town book & stationery shop for two weeks.

The book selection was mainly geared towards bestsellers, and items the shop owner thought would have an audience in town. Ordering books at the time was tedious. The catalog was on microfilm where you had to search for author and title. If a customer came in and was generally looking for something in a genre, or something like [insert author], then you were helpless, unless you had a good knowledge of the market. Otherwise you'd point them to the small catalogs of the publishers that were available for free at the shop.

Once a day, around 5, the shop had a 30 minute time window to order their books from the central depot in Hamburg. There was a data entry pad hooked up to a phone line. You would give your identifier code, then the ISBNs of any books that had been ordered by customers during the day. Deliveries were always in the mornings around 9. Ordering back issues of magazines? Writing a postcard.

They received a computer with CD-ROM catalog shortly after my brief stint there.

[mongers]

Not 20, but 22 years ago I worked at our small town book & stationery shop for two weeks.

The book selection was mainly geared towards bestsellers, and items the shop owner thought would have an audience in town. Ordering books at the time was tedious. The catalog was on microfilm where you had to search for author and title. If a customer came in and was generally looking for something in a genre, or something like [insert author], then you were helpless, unless you had a good knowledge of the market. Otherwise you'd point them to the small catalogs of the publishers that were available for free at the shop.

Once a day, around 5, the shop had a 30 minute time window to order their books from the central depot in Hamburg. There was a data entry pad hooked up to a phone line. You would give your identifier code, then the ISBNs of any books that had been ordered by customers during the day. Deliveries were always in the mornings around 9. Ordering back issues of magazines? Writing a postcard.

They received a computer with CD-ROM catalog shortly after my brief stint there.

Thanks Syt, I'd totally forgot about that. Having been someone who ordered books from an early age, I now recall the bookseller browsing the reader looking for the book and showing me his pick, was this the one I was after?

Wow, different times, pre-interwebs.