Don’t you know the Dewey decimal system?

I’d askjeeves all sorts of things. Or hotbot. Or yahoo. I think MSN even had one. I think the term Google is the same as Bandaid at this point, and synonymous with Internet search.

I appreciate the sentiment though. Did many research papers in school where it was go to library, get books, quote them, place citation in bibliography. I enter high school in 2001 and Wikipedia is a thing, and that was that. We had been “allowed” to cite websites at that point, and while Wikipedia was off limits, some of us would just jump down the wiki article to it’s citations and use those.

But yeah, I remember the days of writing papers in a library, that or using Encarta. Encyclopedia Brittanica or Encarta.

And before that we had tiny wikipedia’s written on paper.

I think there used to be a kind of mystery about things though, you could debate in a pub for hours on a subject where now there’s a definitive answer available within seconds. That delay in accessing information was fun and led to all sorts of debates and wonder. I remember when the original Pokémon games came out on Gameboy and there were all sorts of rumours flying around about how to get certain Pokémon, missingno etc. you never knew what was real or not until you saw it with your own eyes. Now you go on Google/YouTube and someone’s already done an hour long deep dive to prove/debunk everything. I think having all of this information at our fingertips has actually stunted our curiosity and drive to explore and experiment

How about the misinformation from Uncle Mike who overheard your question and confidently spews you some bullshit? If it’s not in the encyclopedia upstairs, most of the questions that cross your mind went unanswered or you took everyone at their word.

Sure, you write down important questions and topics, but this post doesn’t seem to be about that.

Yes and no, it was always technically possible to drive thirty minutes a way go to a library, find a book that hopefully has what you want in it, drive back read it over a weekend, drive back to the library drop off the book, return and waist ~3hrs of your life to Learn a factoid but the barrier to entry was much higher and esoteric knowledge was simply unobtainable unless you went to university. Radio and TV both helped tremendously but you were more subject to the opinions of the studio and politicians than you are now and you would still have to wait and hope something was relevant to the thing you don’t understand, and even then most entertainment was not educational.

I mean, the bar to go get a reference book to look something up is significantly higher than “pull my smartphone out of my pocket and tap a few things in”.

Here’s an article from 1945 on what the future of information access might look like.

https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/computer/bushf.htm

The Atlantic Monthly | July 1945

“As We May Think”

by Vannevar Bush

Eighty years ago, the stuff that was science fiction to the people working on the cutting edge of technology looks pretty unremarkable, even absurdly conservative, to us in 2025:

Like dry photography, microphotography still has a long way to go. The basic scheme of reducing the size of the record, and examining it by projection rather than directly, has possibilities too great to be ignored. The combination of optical projection and photographic reduction is already producing some results in microfilm for scholarly purposes, and the potentialities are highly suggestive. Today, with microfilm, reductions by a linear factor of 20 can be employed and still produce full clarity when the material is re-enlarged for examination. The limits are set by the graininess of the film, the excellence of the optical system, and the efficiency of the light sources employed. All of these are rapidly improving.

Assume a linear ratio of 100 for future use. Consider film of the same thickness as paper, although thinner film will certainly be usable. Even under these conditions there would be a total factor of 10,000 between the bulk of the ordinary record on books, and its microfilm replica. The Encyclopoedia Britannica could be reduced to the volume of a matchbox. A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk. If the human race has produced since the invention of movable type a total record, in the form of magazines, newspapers, books, tracts, advertising blurbs, correspondence, having a volume corresponding to a billion books, the whole affair, assembled and compressed, could be lugged off in a moving van. Mere compression, of course, is not enough; one needs not only to make and store a record but also be able to consult it, and this aspect of the matter comes later. Even the modern great library is not generally consulted; it is nibbled at by a few.

Compression is important, however, when it comes to costs. The material for the microfilm Britannica would cost a nickel, and it could be mailed anywhere for a cent. What would it cost to print a million copies? To print a sheet of newspaper, in a large edition, costs a small fraction of a cent. The entire material of the Britannica in reduced microfilm form would go on a sheet eight and one-half by eleven inches. Once it is available, with the photographic reproduction methods of the future, duplicates in large quantities could probably be turned out for a cent apiece beyond the cost of materials.

If the user wishes to consult a certain book, he taps its code on the keyboard, and the title page of the book promptly appears before him, projected onto one of his viewing positions. Frequently-used codes are mnemonic, so that he seldom consults his code book; but when he does, a single tap of a key projects it for his use. Moreover, he has supplemental levers. On deflecting one of these levers to the right he runs through the book before him, each page in turn being projected at a speed which just allows a recognizing glance at each. If he deflects it further to the right, he steps through the book 10 pages at a time; still further at 100 pages at a time. Deflection to the left gives him the same control backwards.

A special button transfers him immediately to the first page of the index. Any given book of his library can thus be called up and consulted with far greater facility than if it were taken from a shelf. As he has several projection positions, he can leave one item in position while he calls up another. He can add marginal notes and comments, taking advantage of one possible type of dry photography, and it could even be arranged so that he can do this by a stylus scheme, such as is now employed in the telautograph seen in railroad waiting rooms, just as though he had the physical page before him.

Well, where would you download them? Or if you’re talking about printed books: where would you order them? See?

That’s true! I’m married to a librarian and she’d love to help you find information!

But in the 80’s she’d help you find the sentence about your topic in the World Book. And put your name on the list for the book they had about the topic that’s been overdue for a year and a half.

Yeah, but then you’ve got to go to a library, which is great and all, but you might not get to that during the commercial break.

Wikipedia is way better for learning shit than google anyway.

Or just “the internet”

Yeah, this has nothing to do with the internet. It is just about lazy vs. not lazy. The exact same scenario happens today, despite the internet.

Honestly though, you could never be certain how accurate it was. You could be certain it was probably several years out of date.

We’re back to the confident misinformation that someone gave when asked about something they didn’t know about. Only with more racism and less critical thinking/questioning

I think you mean

-User: Okay repeats this as if it’s now fact because the computer said so

Most people don’t seem to be even capable of questioning the shit answer the AI gives them

Thinking back on it, we had book stores back then, so people could have gotten encyclopedias from there, so how did encyclopedia salesmen make any sales??

If I recall correctly you couldn’t buy the big encyclopaedias in bookstores (dictionaries and single book encyclopedias, sure, but not the big multiple volume ones), only through their sellers or by phone.

And they often came with a subscription to get new update appendixes and the like.

(Also most of these door to door salespeople probably also carried other products, like subscriptions to magazines and whatnot; and, an average encyclopedia being at least ten volumes, going up to twenty or so, they weren’t cheap, so they didn’t need that many sales.)

My parents recently got rid of a set of encyclopedias that they’d had in the house since at least the '90s. I don’t actually remember where they came from or exactly when they were suddenly there, but recently they got rid of them (donated to charity) and I was a little offended - not that I said as much - that they didn’t offer them to me.

They weren’t even recent. They were printed in the early ‘50s, but in my parents’ (still) no-Internet house, those encyclopedias were a good pastime.

There are usually several sets of the same available on eBay, but 1) the good sets are a bit out of my price range, 2) I have internet here and 3) I’m already hoarding far too much stuff.