Yes I do. The upside was that things moved slower and I believe most people were less stressed. You had to be home or in the office to get a phone call. This was before pagers and answering machines. Initially, pagers were thought to be a good idea, but soon people relized what they really were—invasive, 24/7 electronic dog leashes. And If you called a government office, you usually got a live person right away. I don’t ever remember being put on hold and forced to listen to crappy Muzak.
Long distance calls outside of your immediate area—later defined by area codes—were very expensive. Four dollars for the first three minutes from Sacramento to Chicago—at a time when minimum wage was $0.90 per hour and $20k per year was a fortune. A person-to-person call was much more expensive. I remember paying $15 for the first three minutes to accept a non-person-to-person call from my brother in Vietnam in 1970 when I was making $1 per hour in a high school restaurant job.
You were accustomed to waiting for postal replies. It took from 4 to 7 days to get a letter across the US by Airmail, if it didn’t get lost on the way. There was Special Delivery which sped things up a bit, but the person on the other end had to be home too accept it—otherwise it would arrive about the same time as Airmail. There was Overnight Mail, but this was expensive and usually only big big businesses used it.
It was common to wait 4 to 6 weeks for something you ordered from a domestic company like Sears or Monkey Ward. You could wait forever if you ordered something foreign. There was always a notice at the bottom of every order sheet, “Expect 4 to 6 weeks for delivery.” Nobody but kids felt inconvenienced. It was like waiting for Christmas to come. You had to just put it out of your mind. We knew nothing different. During our grandparent’s time, it took 90 days to get a letter to California from New York—and they were quick to remind us whippersnappers of it— so we thought we were in high cotton.
Another downside was that people only had newspapers and magazines for information. If you wanted to do in-depth research, you had to go to a library with a good reference section and, even then, you might have to order a specific book—and wait the customary 4 to 6 weeks. Or you could go and dig through the local newspaper’s morgue. In this respect, it really paid to live in a University town.
Being able to access the world’s libraries in English from my home is still an incredible thing for me. It is absolutely amazing. Being able to download instantaneously any movie or film to watch or read in my own study is incredible. Communicating with family and people thousands of miles away in real time for free is just—really, I have no words for this. This one area of modern life is a great thing, an amazing thing! You whippersnappers have no idea!
TJBM remembers when you had to call an operator to order a long distance call, then when the operator was able to put the call through they would ring you back and make the connection.