Looking Back With Fond Memories

At Stuff

Telephone Operator — Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

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It’s amazing to me how we become accustomed to what was unheard of thirty years ago. The internet, for one thing. I can remember when hopping onto the internet required a telephone call to our library, putting the phone receiver into the cradle of a modem, and incurring toll charges for every minute you surfed the BBS. BBS stood for bulletin board services. Some of my favorites were the Meal Master Recipes. Somewhere, I’ve got recipes from those days.

There were no streaming services. Cable had not been invented, or at least, was not widely used. YouTube had not yet been invented. There was no Twitter, X, or Facebook. They weren’t there. We did eventually get AOL. Remember the “You’ve Got Mail!” movie with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan? I’m betting a lot of the folks now writing for Medium hadn’t even been born yet.

I had a job with AT&T in those days. I can remember that out of the 300-some people who worked in our building, there was only one person who knew how to do something mysterious called e-mail. Everybody else wrote letters and printed them on stationery.

In the three years I worked there as a data-entry operator, I never once had a desk. I carried my stuff around with me in a cardboard box and sat at empty desks, working…