God damn it... Just reading this feels like a gut punch!

"Before the dawn of the millennium, when the Earth was young."

Mid 80s for me, fuck, im old

Better than the mid 1900's.

I come from a time when our telephones were teathered to the wall and had no screens or apps at all. Later on, there were machines that would answer the phone and let someone record a message if no one was home.

If you wanted to watch something that wasn't a movie or recording, you had to pick one of the options someone else had picked, and if you missed the time, you just missed it until someone decided it was time to play it again (at a different specific time you could miss).

And if you did record something, you'd have to seek through the recording to find the start of it.

Movie rentals involved going to a physical store and grabbing physical media with the content on it. If too many people wanted to rent it at a time, there just wouldn't be enough and the later ones would have to pick something else to watch. Just going to one of these rental places was a borderline magical experience full of wonder and possibility. Oh and it was considered very rude if you rented a movie but didn't seek it back to the beginning for the next person (which you'd have to physically return to the place with the physical media or you'd get charged late fees).

And even though everyone's name, address, and phone number were published in regional "phone books", the closest thing to phone scams you'd (normally) see were prank phone calls, which were done for laughs rather than profit (albeit sometimes maliciously).

Christians actually cared about being good people rather than thinking they can somehow be victims of an apocalypse they are trying to make happen and teleport to heaven because they've said the required amount of hail Marys and took advantage of the "just confess the horrible shit before it die and you're forgiven" loophole (and probably not thinking about what happens if the rapture ends up happening too quickly for them to confess their latest batch of sins). Actually, the crazy ones might have been around then, too, they just weren't so fucking loud back then.

That second millennium was something else, I tell you what. You third millennium kids won't ever understand.