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The answers to all of these questions, happily provided by people old enough to remember them, are a good demonstration that the fairly recent past was actually radically worse than the present. https://t.co/AEDNNtMMvr
People sometimes lament the decline of e.g. travel agents, likely because they have a distinct memory of the pleasant young lady and forgot about the fee charged or hour spent on logistics for something which now takes a non-specialist less than five minutes from home.
(Partly due to Japan still having a fairly vibrant travel agent industry and partially due to fun int’l issues I used to spend 1hr/yr and a bit less than $100 paying someone to proxy requests into Delta for me. Same itinerary now trivially bookable on mobile, thank goodness.)
Other things rising generations would be befuddled by: How did you get a W-2 reissued if you lost the original paper copy? Same question, if org issuing it no longer exists? How did you deposit paychecks from your job as an unbanked 17 year old with no Cash App or similar?
How did you check when StarCraft had actually arrived at the local Best Buy, which was of course several weeks after the game launch? Oh you called 30 times? Did that annoy anyone whose most useful recordkeeping system was “walk to shelf to see if we have it”?
How did you subscribe for updates to e.g. new bankruptcy filings in your city, like your father did for real estate purposes? What do you mean those got mailed to you weekly? What do you mean he spent thousands of dollars on this? It is a SQL query on public records?!
Say Patrick how did you sign contracts for credit card processing with U.S. firms prior to Docusign being a thing? Oh you faxed it? And an international fax cost you >25% of the launch budget? ($17 but for personal and professional reasons this one sticks with me.)
When you bought the first piece of software you ever bought, from an independent software developer, how did you find out about it and how did you pay for it? What was an “AOL forum” and what do you mean “you asked your parents to mail them a check”?!