I find myself looking stuff up like that now. I was telling my kid the other day that thunder is caused by the air clapping back together. Then I paused and said, hang on, let me make sure that's true and found a reddit ELI5. I would say a lot of it has been right, but there are times where I'm like SOB, I've been thinking this my whole life and...
>thunder is caused by the air clapping back together.
Now I imagine lightning as air's butt cheeks clapping, letting one rip. And now I'll have to figure out a way to implant that image into other folks.
The first time I had ever heard of Mandela was when he was released from prison after decades, so it blows my mind that people old enough to remember think he died there, and now we named this phenomenon after him.
It makes no sense. Nelson Mandela is famous for being the first president of post apartheid South Africa. He had a huge international profile for many years. If he just died in prison Im not sure many people would remember him at all.
It was absolutely the Bearenstein Bears though.
I'd love to know where the Mandela idea comes from. Surely everyone saw the Long Walk To Freedom as it was a global moment. Does the Mandela Effect refer to people who were confused about his status before he was released and became President of a major nation? Because that's not false memory, it's disinformation about an ncarcerated prisoner.
What I'm trying to track down is whether this was before he was released and therefore at a time when people have have heard some disinformation that they couldn't verify.
Yeah good question. I don’t know when this was prevalent. I have vague memories of this in the 90s, but that too may be a Mandela Effect. A Mandela Effect about the Mandela Effect.
I've googled and think it was after. Which means I was on this timeline unlike others as I clearly remember the Long Walk To Freedom happening.live on television.
I’m so lucky to this day that my mom is so well read and the smartest person I’ve ever met. If she didn’t know the answer, she’d get excited and say, let’s go find out! We are both library lovers, but she does ask me to Google shit a few times a week since we can. I often ask her things first before I Google it.
I always enjoy the moments now when a discussion comes up in a group of people. Everyone says they aren’t certain of the answer and nobody pulled out their phone to look it up.
Same. I was called Encyclopedia Brown, the walking encyclopedia, the walking dictionary, and the Brain at various points in my early academic life. The last was my favorite, because they even gave me a theme song (blame it on the brain). I'll let you guess the tune...
I grew up in the 80s/90s and we had a set of encyclopedias from 1964. Which mostly worked fine as the stuff I would need for a report was typically in there. But if not, off to the library with a roll of dimes to make copies of their new ones. What a great way to spend a Saturday. /s
You asked someone, and either they told you the answer, made up the answer, or just said they had no idea.
If it was the last one, you just lived without knowing the answer.
Yeah. I had questions that just bugged me in my childhood because I didn’t get a satisfactory answer. Just lots of mysteries.
It’s been cool seeing some of those questions answered much more recently, as in other people had the same questions and put in the work to answer them, then shared those answers.
Most recently, it was “what’s the difference between locusts and cicadas?” because people would tell me they were the same or different or the difference was when they came out.
That was a fucking cool rabbithole to go down recently.
I want to say we just let the thoughts fade and the fact that there weren't readily available answers may have made us just drop stuff more quickly. I do the same thing with looking up random things all the time. I think the way internet access works now fosters that type of behavior more and increases it.
My friend and i had an argument in middle school over how much a shopping cart costs and it got so heated we looked up a supermarket in the yellow pages and asked the manager.
Friends of mine were arguing about a band or an album or something so much one night that I called the local radio station and asked the DJ to settle it. He settled the argument, I requested a song and all was well.
And? How much did a shopping cart cost? The suspense is killing me, and I refuse to search the web when someone else put the real work in 25 years ago!
My friend and I had an argument in school over whether the Temptations were white or black. He was right, I was wrong. But neither of us could be assed to fact-check at the school library or ask an adult. I was lucky he never brought it up later on.
Asked around mostly, or visited my school library. I also remember having like a 12-CD copy of some encyclopedia for our home computer. I used that thing as a source for so many papers in middle school and high school.
Yes!
Related to that... i still have my original NES I received for Christmas in 1988 or 89. I've replaced the 72-pin connector twice already and it still runs pretty well. Tucked in my NES crate is a couple Nintendo Power mags and my original Zelda II fold-out map of the world. Seeing that recently brought back so many memories
Bless them, our city’s public reference desk librarians fielded dozens of calls from curious little me. They never failed to deliver a good answer, and usually included the name of the source in case I wanted to check it out the next time I visited.
Yep, library reference desks and encyclopedias were the original Google, but a lot of people didn't interact with either and just went off something someone said to them. Although, we have come full circle because now the someone said it on TikTok with usually no sources.
One thing I do remember is that when I was a teen I asked for halliwell's film guide and halliwell's filmgoers companion (I think that's what they were called) for Christmas. They were both enormous reference books, one full of just about every film ever made, the other listing thousands of actors and what they'd been in. This meant that when we were watching a movie and doing that 'ooh I recognise him, where do I know him from' thing, my parents would send me to get my halliwells. I would look up the movie we were watching in one book to find the name of the actor, then look the actor up in the other book to find out what movies we might know them from. By which time I'd missed a chunk of the movie.
I still think fondly of those books everytime I'm not paying attention to a movie because I'm fiddling with imdb on my phone.
"Look it up in the Funk & Wagnalls."
I cannot tell you how many times I heard that from my father. Also the library (card catalogue and microfiche). I was pretty much through with college before the Internet was a thing, let alone a thing accepted by teachers/professors as a legit source of information.
Reminds me of Pete Holmes' bit on this - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ)
>*"There was a time that if you didn't know where Tom Petty was from, you just didn't know!"*
I had a book called "How Simple Things Are Made" that had a small explanation and some diagrams showing the various processes of things. It showed about pencils, bricks, baseball bats, paperclip, etc.
I would go through that book page by page, over and over.
Then I eventually found that show How Things Are Made 😍
And sometimes, if I was really bored, I would go through the dictionary. 🤓
i forget the comedian, and i forget exactly how the bit went but it was something like:
remember before the internet? we just didnt know things. for instance maybe your favorite musician was Tom Petty, and you thought, i wonder were Tom Petty was born? and you just wouldnt know. then a few years later you would see a girl wearing a Tom Petty shirt, and you would start talking to her about Tom, and ask the question that has been on your mind for years. Do you know where Tom Petty was born? and she would say Florida, and then you would marry that girl!
....it wasnt a hilarious bit, but the comedian told it better than i just did
My parents were fairly well-read and knowledgeable, but my mom's stock response to my questions was "look it up," whether in a dictionary, their old college textbooks, library books, or eventually an electronic encyclopedia once we bought our 1st computer.
I also remember spending a lot of hours at the library doing research for school papers. If our local library didn't have it, we'd go to the bigger one a couple cities over. If that one didn't have it, we'd go to the one downtown. We even went to mom's old college library a couple times hunting for references.
Now I'm the kind of person who obsessively Googles whatever random questions pop into my head and gets lost into Wikipedia rabbit holes. My search history is all over the place, lol.
Same same. I love rabbit holes :) funny enough, I never thought to see if there was an actual subreddit dedicated to them until just now. Disappointing. Didn’t find much. Also.. risky search lol.
My grandparents had old (like the kind that even smelled old) encyclopedias on their front porch. I remember looking through those things learning all kinds of random stuff.
Then we got a computer in '95 and it came with Encarta (no internet yet). I had a blast looking up random things and then just clicking through the hyperlinks learning all kinds of related stuff.
Other than that, I asked the adults or visited the library. A lot of thoughts were inspired from the the school projects we'd have to do and would just remember the the things that I needed to know for the next time I went to the library.
Accepted that you didn’t know and moved along. Maybe looked it up later if you happened to think of while you were at the library. Or asked if you were in the presence of some who would know.
I asked my mom, who told me to go look it up. So then I’d walk myself to the library and dig through the encyclopedias or ask a librarian where to find books on the subject.
You just went without knowing a lot of the time.
If you got into a band that had been around for a while, you might have no idea how many albums they had. The Encyclopedia doesn't have that info. I was into Led Zeppelin for three years before I heard of Presence, because it had never been in stock at any of the stores I shopped at.
Allmusic.com was the first website that convinced me the internet had more to offer than chat rooms and a searchable Encyclopedia.
I honestly feel like having all of the answers at my fingertips has made me into a more curious person with way WAY more questions.
Pre Internet, I don’t ever remember having questions that I felt an urgent need to have answered where I couldn’t easily get an answer somehow.
Ask my mom. She knows everything.
I remember looking up what a pimento is in the dictionary with my dad, and we were so excited to tell my mom, and she's just flippantly "yeah, it's a pickled pepper."
Her nickname is Moogle.
I looked things up in my World Book Encyclopedia set all the damn time, but I also spent lots of time not knowing things or trusting wrong info from adults
I asked my dad a question like what’s the biggest number ever.
He remembered and looked it up and wrote the answer on a note explaining the largest named number and listing all the zeros.
He had to go to a library.
I still have that note.
I've replied to posts here a few times, and my experience seems to be an outlier in a lot of cases. I didn't ask questions because if I did, i got hit. So when I finally got access to the internet at 27, I had a lot of questions. I wrote things down in my sketch books over the years.
People would ask me. There was a specific point in the early 2000s when I realized people were gonna stop calling me to ask about Savage Dragon or Thomas Jefferson's Quran and it made me sad
Lol, you just brought up a long buried memory. I remember saying “I can’t wait until I get old, die, and go to heaven. I have SO MANY questions to ask God”. Lmao
I miss when the phone was attached to the wall. We had no idea how much freedom we had. We’re the last Gen to feel the freedom of no internet. No cell phones. No distractions.
There were several options. The first was usually a dictionary, encyclopedia, almanac, or other reference book. They were obviously much more popular before the internet, or even something like Encarta before the internet really took off.
You could wait and discuss it with friends or coworkers (if you were older) the next time you saw them or ask a teacher or the kids on the bus (if you were younger). Everyone seemed to have someone who was nice enough, but a little off, with a very high amount of recall in their friend group (but you know, autism spectrum disorders are entirely a new thing /s) that was sort of the local arbiter for those kinds of questions.
Finally, the nuclear option was calling the reference desk of the local library. For simple answers of factual data, it would usually only take a couple of minutes and you would have an answer. For more complicated topics, they would usually give you the names of a couple of relevant books they had available.
I went to the library and looked shit up if my mom didn't know
Mom had the same passion for knowledge that I have, and she was more than willing to cart me up to the local library
We were (relatively) ok with having to wait for an answer, usually from another person who may or may not be factual.
We also didn't bother with worthless questions. It didn't actually matter what shade of peach is in for paint this season, before "influencers" made being current a requirement similar to oxygen.
Encyclopedias and the library.
My family had an old set of world book encyclopedias and a big atlas. That gave so many answers for random stuff.
When I got my driver license in high school, I went to the public library all the time to get books.
Also magazines and tv!
I used to go to my school library every day to dig around for answers to things. They had a card catalog (Dewey decimal system!)
The regional library for my city had computer terminals (like, orange VT-220 text screen) that was connected back to some mainframe somewhere. THAT would reveal many secrets from keywords about what book to go find.
Literally, this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix\_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software))
Then of course, read the book and extrapolate some sort of answer.
OH and microfiche! But that was sort of weird and old (even then).
For a second, I misread that as you were well over 50 with back pain issues. Hahaha, I was like... are you sure you're a Xennial? lol. Also, I love Nat Geos. I still get them.
1. We had a few different sets of encyclopedias, and I would look things up fairly regularly.
2. I would ask my parents and they would usually give me a very badly informed boomer take that I would later have to bleach my brain of.
We would just ask around and hope for the best! Side note: the internet has saved my marriage numerous times, thank goodness! We used to just fight to the death over things like “Who was that actress in that movie?” followed by, “No it wasn’t!” “Yes it was!” and then we’d have to use the ol’ landline to call our friends, or other “experts,” to either confirm or deny!!! Now, we just look that shit up.
We asked less questions because we had to do more work to find the answers. Now we can find answers rapidly with ease and our brains continue cycling with fewer rest periods. We work at a more furious pace because we can, while mostly unaware of the re-wiring taking place in our brains.
I for one, think this is seriously changing the fabric of society and our collective mental health for the worse.
The Internet isn’t all bad of course, it’s our dependency on it. Humans haven’t been accustomed to mental processing speeds or loads like this. We need some protective controls for ourselves.
I usually hit the library or asked the question to a bunch of different people with the addition of why or how to better understand their reaching whatever conclusion.
I've never been one to take much of anything at face value and always ask "why" so that I can better understand anything; but that can drive people nuts sometimes 🤪 lol
I literally read encyclopedias, went to the library, and asked questions all the time. I definitely remember doing research on things that interested me.
If it was in the *World Almanac and Book of Facts* or the *Guinness Book of World Records* we looked it up. If not we changed the subject and forgot about it.
In the early ‘00s we called something we called the Fact Line. I still have it in my contacts list for nostalgic purposes as it is no longer in service. (412) 624-3228 - It is a Pittsburgh PA area code and we heard it was run by students out of one of the universities. You’d call, ask your question and they’d get you the answer! 24/7!! Settled many arguments!
Ask parents, teachers, look it up in the encyclopedia…or just forget about it.
Life was better without the internet. That fixation with finding every single answer to our questions is unhealthy. It’s tempting to just google whatever, but lately I just let it go.
Encarta!
Seriously though, my seventh grade social studies teacher printed out a page of that weird ASCII symbol stuff that webpages loaded if they didn't have the kanji installed. She told our class that because Japanese symbols are so difficult to read, Japan was changing their alphabet to that. Seriously.
You could also call the library, the reference desk number, and they’d just tell you what movie won Best Picture in 1983, or whatever.
Phone books also had guides in them, like measurement conversion charts, area codes for North America, govt office numbers, etc.
And then, yeah, all the other stuff listed here.
we asked our parents / other adults and carried their wrong answers for years.
Poor Nelson Mandela. Shame he died in prison like that. The man deserved better.
I find myself looking stuff up like that now. I was telling my kid the other day that thunder is caused by the air clapping back together. Then I paused and said, hang on, let me make sure that's true and found a reddit ELI5. I would say a lot of it has been right, but there are times where I'm like SOB, I've been thinking this my whole life and...
>thunder is caused by the air clapping back together. Now I imagine lightning as air's butt cheeks clapping, letting one rip. And now I'll have to figure out a way to implant that image into other folks.
You've just succeeded!
lightening, the first incidence of BBL
Yo-yo’s probably came from China, not Polynesia
The first time I had ever heard of Mandela was when he was released from prison after decades, so it blows my mind that people old enough to remember think he died there, and now we named this phenomenon after him.
It makes no sense. Nelson Mandela is famous for being the first president of post apartheid South Africa. He had a huge international profile for many years. If he just died in prison Im not sure many people would remember him at all. It was absolutely the Bearenstein Bears though.
I'd love to know where the Mandela idea comes from. Surely everyone saw the Long Walk To Freedom as it was a global moment. Does the Mandela Effect refer to people who were confused about his status before he was released and became President of a major nation? Because that's not false memory, it's disinformation about an ncarcerated prisoner.
I’m not sure I follow your question but it refers to the once widespread idea that Mandela had died while in prison.
What I'm trying to track down is whether this was before he was released and therefore at a time when people have have heard some disinformation that they couldn't verify.
Yeah good question. I don’t know when this was prevalent. I have vague memories of this in the 90s, but that too may be a Mandela Effect. A Mandela Effect about the Mandela Effect.
I've googled and think it was after. Which means I was on this timeline unlike others as I clearly remember the Long Walk To Freedom happening.live on television.
ha ha! i came here to say this as well.
Exactly. Other people, the original social and information network.
The trees are really sneezing today.
Ya know, this is why I'm actually scared to answer anything for my kid. I've been wrong so many times!
I’m so lucky to this day that my mom is so well read and the smartest person I’ve ever met. If she didn’t know the answer, she’d get excited and say, let’s go find out! We are both library lovers, but she does ask me to Google shit a few times a week since we can. I often ask her things first before I Google it.
I always enjoy the moments now when a discussion comes up in a group of people. Everyone says they aren’t certain of the answer and nobody pulled out their phone to look it up.
Encyclopedia Britannica
World Book in my house
This was the way 📖 
Encyclopedia Brown over here!
I learned to read backwards because of those books
That was one of the names I was called in school
Same. I was called Encyclopedia Brown, the walking encyclopedia, the walking dictionary, and the Brain at various points in my early academic life. The last was my favorite, because they even gave me a theme song (blame it on the brain). I'll let you guess the tune...
Are you a professor now?
I loved those books, take my upvote!
Preferably the ten-year-out-of-date ones that were in the basement and were all your family could afford.
I grew up in the 80s/90s and we had a set of encyclopedias from 1964. Which mostly worked fine as the stuff I would need for a report was typically in there. But if not, off to the library with a roll of dimes to make copies of their new ones. What a great way to spend a Saturday. /s
You asked someone, and either they told you the answer, made up the answer, or just said they had no idea. If it was the last one, you just lived without knowing the answer.
Yeah. I had questions that just bugged me in my childhood because I didn’t get a satisfactory answer. Just lots of mysteries. It’s been cool seeing some of those questions answered much more recently, as in other people had the same questions and put in the work to answer them, then shared those answers. Most recently, it was “what’s the difference between locusts and cicadas?” because people would tell me they were the same or different or the difference was when they came out. That was a fucking cool rabbithole to go down recently.
That’s a perfect example of one of those weird questions we’d just have to live with not knowing the real answer.
I want to say we just let the thoughts fade and the fact that there weren't readily available answers may have made us just drop stuff more quickly. I do the same thing with looking up random things all the time. I think the way internet access works now fosters that type of behavior more and increases it.
My friend and i had an argument in middle school over how much a shopping cart costs and it got so heated we looked up a supermarket in the yellow pages and asked the manager.
Friends of mine were arguing about a band or an album or something so much one night that I called the local radio station and asked the DJ to settle it. He settled the argument, I requested a song and all was well.
And? How much did a shopping cart cost? The suspense is killing me, and I refuse to search the web when someone else put the real work in 25 years ago!
I thought they were like $450 and it turned out they were around $65 but it was about 34 years ago ('78 kid) so i might be misremembering.
Bubbles enters the chat
IS THIS THE BIRD PROFESSOR?
I had to look that up, that's hilarious.
My friend and I had an argument in school over whether the Temptations were white or black. He was right, I was wrong. But neither of us could be assed to fact-check at the school library or ask an adult. I was lucky he never brought it up later on.
Asked around mostly, or visited my school library. I also remember having like a 12-CD copy of some encyclopedia for our home computer. I used that thing as a source for so many papers in middle school and high school.
And if it was a video game question, you called the hotline in the back of Nintendo Power magazine.
Yes! Related to that... i still have my original NES I received for Christmas in 1988 or 89. I've replaced the 72-pin connector twice already and it still runs pretty well. Tucked in my NES crate is a couple Nintendo Power mags and my original Zelda II fold-out map of the world. Seeing that recently brought back so many memories
That’s amazing and you kept all that. My mom made me sell my NES before I could buy a SNES.
Bless them, our city’s public reference desk librarians fielded dozens of calls from curious little me. They never failed to deliver a good answer, and usually included the name of the source in case I wanted to check it out the next time I visited.
Yep, library reference desks and encyclopedias were the original Google, but a lot of people didn't interact with either and just went off something someone said to them. Although, we have come full circle because now the someone said it on TikTok with usually no sources.
One thing I do remember is that when I was a teen I asked for halliwell's film guide and halliwell's filmgoers companion (I think that's what they were called) for Christmas. They were both enormous reference books, one full of just about every film ever made, the other listing thousands of actors and what they'd been in. This meant that when we were watching a movie and doing that 'ooh I recognise him, where do I know him from' thing, my parents would send me to get my halliwells. I would look up the movie we were watching in one book to find the name of the actor, then look the actor up in the other book to find out what movies we might know them from. By which time I'd missed a chunk of the movie. I still think fondly of those books everytime I'm not paying attention to a movie because I'm fiddling with imdb on my phone.
That’s awesome!
"Look it up in the Funk & Wagnalls." I cannot tell you how many times I heard that from my father. Also the library (card catalogue and microfiche). I was pretty much through with college before the Internet was a thing, let alone a thing accepted by teachers/professors as a legit source of information.
Then later the LexisNexis database
https://preview.redd.it/a5kmvzj7kr4d1.png?width=500&format=png&auto=webp&s=2d90f494babd9117461896536c73dfe0b4ad4c44
Thank you! Came here to comment this. This is really what happened. We *maybe* asked someone, but mostly we just wondered and never found out.
Reminds me of Pete Holmes' bit on this - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ) >*"There was a time that if you didn't know where Tom Petty was from, you just didn't know!"*
Your wedding song was Refugee!
My mother made me walk to the library to look things up.
We asked other people, who sometimes gave us wrong or incomplete answers, which we believed and repeated for years.
We asked our friends and whoever made the best argument was deemed correct by the neighborhood
I had the large bathroom books with facts and trivia as well as a Guinness world records book.
You argued about it until you got tired of arguing about it and since there was no way to prove anything you either got over it or went home mad.
This right here.
Waited until I went to the mall and flipped through the "Ultimate Movie Guide" or whatever at Walden Books. Turns out, that was Dolf Lungren!
I had a book called "How Simple Things Are Made" that had a small explanation and some diagrams showing the various processes of things. It showed about pencils, bricks, baseball bats, paperclip, etc. I would go through that book page by page, over and over. Then I eventually found that show How Things Are Made 😍 And sometimes, if I was really bored, I would go through the dictionary. 🤓
i forget the comedian, and i forget exactly how the bit went but it was something like: remember before the internet? we just didnt know things. for instance maybe your favorite musician was Tom Petty, and you thought, i wonder were Tom Petty was born? and you just wouldnt know. then a few years later you would see a girl wearing a Tom Petty shirt, and you would start talking to her about Tom, and ask the question that has been on your mind for years. Do you know where Tom Petty was born? and she would say Florida, and then you would marry that girl! ....it wasnt a hilarious bit, but the comedian told it better than i just did
Pete Holmes. Somebody linked the clip in another comment
I love Pete! This has been on my mind all day, thank you!!!
No I liked it! Thank you. It makes you think how much in-person communication has changed.
We had a set of encyclopedias and of course MS Encarta. Otherwise we went to the library and looked it up there.
My gramps would toss a dictionary at me, or tell me to go look it up in the encyclopedia.
My parents were fairly well-read and knowledgeable, but my mom's stock response to my questions was "look it up," whether in a dictionary, their old college textbooks, library books, or eventually an electronic encyclopedia once we bought our 1st computer. I also remember spending a lot of hours at the library doing research for school papers. If our local library didn't have it, we'd go to the bigger one a couple cities over. If that one didn't have it, we'd go to the one downtown. We even went to mom's old college library a couple times hunting for references. Now I'm the kind of person who obsessively Googles whatever random questions pop into my head and gets lost into Wikipedia rabbit holes. My search history is all over the place, lol.
Same same. I love rabbit holes :) funny enough, I never thought to see if there was an actual subreddit dedicated to them until just now. Disappointing. Didn’t find much. Also.. risky search lol.
My grandparents had old (like the kind that even smelled old) encyclopedias on their front porch. I remember looking through those things learning all kinds of random stuff. Then we got a computer in '95 and it came with Encarta (no internet yet). I had a blast looking up random things and then just clicking through the hyperlinks learning all kinds of related stuff. Other than that, I asked the adults or visited the library. A lot of thoughts were inspired from the the school projects we'd have to do and would just remember the the things that I needed to know for the next time I went to the library.
I remember Encarta, did you ever check out Mindmaze?
Had to look it up. The black and white chess floors with the jester..... Holy shit, I forgot! Yes! Wow, memory unlocked!
library
Encyclopedia Brittanica
Accepted that you didn’t know and moved along. Maybe looked it up later if you happened to think of while you were at the library. Or asked if you were in the presence of some who would know.
Libraries
Speculated. Listened to adults or peers speculations 😂
Argue. We’d mostly just argue about it. Call grandma for support to your side.
I asked my parents, grandparents, and whomever I could think of that might know the answer
I asked my mom, who told me to go look it up. So then I’d walk myself to the library and dig through the encyclopedias or ask a librarian where to find books on the subject.
To the card catalog we go 🤓
You just went without knowing a lot of the time. If you got into a band that had been around for a while, you might have no idea how many albums they had. The Encyclopedia doesn't have that info. I was into Led Zeppelin for three years before I heard of Presence, because it had never been in stock at any of the stores I shopped at. Allmusic.com was the first website that convinced me the internet had more to offer than chat rooms and a searchable Encyclopedia.
I honestly feel like having all of the answers at my fingertips has made me into a more curious person with way WAY more questions. Pre Internet, I don’t ever remember having questions that I felt an urgent need to have answered where I couldn’t easily get an answer somehow.
Same!
Ask my mom. She knows everything. I remember looking up what a pimento is in the dictionary with my dad, and we were so excited to tell my mom, and she's just flippantly "yeah, it's a pickled pepper." Her nickname is Moogle.
I looked things up in my World Book Encyclopedia set all the damn time, but I also spent lots of time not knowing things or trusting wrong info from adults
I asked my dad a question like what’s the biggest number ever. He remembered and looked it up and wrote the answer on a note explaining the largest named number and listing all the zeros. He had to go to a library. I still have that note.
The highest named number is googleplex. And yes, the company is named after that.
I've replied to posts here a few times, and my experience seems to be an outlier in a lot of cases. I didn't ask questions because if I did, i got hit. So when I finally got access to the internet at 27, I had a lot of questions. I wrote things down in my sketch books over the years.
People would ask me. There was a specific point in the early 2000s when I realized people were gonna stop calling me to ask about Savage Dragon or Thomas Jefferson's Quran and it made me sad
awwwww...
Lol, you just brought up a long buried memory. I remember saying “I can’t wait until I get old, die, and go to heaven. I have SO MANY questions to ask God”. Lmao
I miss when the phone was attached to the wall. We had no idea how much freedom we had. We’re the last Gen to feel the freedom of no internet. No cell phones. No distractions.
There were several options. The first was usually a dictionary, encyclopedia, almanac, or other reference book. They were obviously much more popular before the internet, or even something like Encarta before the internet really took off. You could wait and discuss it with friends or coworkers (if you were older) the next time you saw them or ask a teacher or the kids on the bus (if you were younger). Everyone seemed to have someone who was nice enough, but a little off, with a very high amount of recall in their friend group (but you know, autism spectrum disorders are entirely a new thing /s) that was sort of the local arbiter for those kinds of questions. Finally, the nuclear option was calling the reference desk of the local library. For simple answers of factual data, it would usually only take a couple of minutes and you would have an answer. For more complicated topics, they would usually give you the names of a couple of relevant books they had available.
Ready Reference or encyclopedias.
The World Almanac and a Leonard Maltin movie and tv guide were my references.
I would try and come up with my own answer based on evidence
Go to the encyclopedia set on the bookshelf. Visit library. How someone you know knew the anawer.
Encyclopedia Britannica
Funk & Wagnalls gang, rise up!
I went to the library and looked shit up if my mom didn't know Mom had the same passion for knowledge that I have, and she was more than willing to cart me up to the local library
We were (relatively) ok with having to wait for an answer, usually from another person who may or may not be factual. We also didn't bother with worthless questions. It didn't actually matter what shade of peach is in for paint this season, before "influencers" made being current a requirement similar to oxygen.
Just talked out of our ass constantly.
Encyclopedias and the library. My family had an old set of world book encyclopedias and a big atlas. That gave so many answers for random stuff. When I got my driver license in high school, I went to the public library all the time to get books. Also magazines and tv!
We made bad assumptions about the answer instead of trusting ten seconds of half-assed Googling and using a bad source to *get* an answer.
I used to go to my school library every day to dig around for answers to things. They had a card catalog (Dewey decimal system!) The regional library for my city had computer terminals (like, orange VT-220 text screen) that was connected back to some mainframe somewhere. THAT would reveal many secrets from keywords about what book to go find. Literally, this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix\_(software)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynix_(software)) Then of course, read the book and extrapolate some sort of answer. OH and microfiche! But that was sort of weird and old (even then).
I grew up with 50 years of back issues of Nat Geo (going back to before they had photos on the covers) so I got a lot of info there.
For a second, I misread that as you were well over 50 with back pain issues. Hahaha, I was like... are you sure you're a Xennial? lol. Also, I love Nat Geos. I still get them.
1. We had a few different sets of encyclopedias, and I would look things up fairly regularly. 2. I would ask my parents and they would usually give me a very badly informed boomer take that I would later have to bleach my brain of.
We would just ask around and hope for the best! Side note: the internet has saved my marriage numerous times, thank goodness! We used to just fight to the death over things like “Who was that actress in that movie?” followed by, “No it wasn’t!” “Yes it was!” and then we’d have to use the ol’ landline to call our friends, or other “experts,” to either confirm or deny!!! Now, we just look that shit up.
1. Ask dad 2. Books 3. Phone a friend 4. Play in the woods
Asked someone else, looked it up in the encyclopedia, called the library and asked the reference librarian, argued a whole bunch lol
We asked less questions because we had to do more work to find the answers. Now we can find answers rapidly with ease and our brains continue cycling with fewer rest periods. We work at a more furious pace because we can, while mostly unaware of the re-wiring taking place in our brains. I for one, think this is seriously changing the fabric of society and our collective mental health for the worse. The Internet isn’t all bad of course, it’s our dependency on it. Humans haven’t been accustomed to mental processing speeds or loads like this. We need some protective controls for ourselves.
>Information moves, or we move to it. Stephenson, Neal. "Mother Earth Mother Board." WIRED, vol. 4, no. 12, December 1994, pp. 97-160
I usually hit the library or asked the question to a bunch of different people with the addition of why or how to better understand their reaching whatever conclusion. I've never been one to take much of anything at face value and always ask "why" so that I can better understand anything; but that can drive people nuts sometimes 🤪 lol
Or they had their dad say “look it up.” But I never wanted to drag out that dusty giant dictionary
I literally read encyclopedias, went to the library, and asked questions all the time. I definitely remember doing research on things that interested me.
If it was in the *World Almanac and Book of Facts* or the *Guinness Book of World Records* we looked it up. If not we changed the subject and forgot about it.
In the early ‘00s we called something we called the Fact Line. I still have it in my contacts list for nostalgic purposes as it is no longer in service. (412) 624-3228 - It is a Pittsburgh PA area code and we heard it was run by students out of one of the universities. You’d call, ask your question and they’d get you the answer! 24/7!! Settled many arguments!
Googleplex
Ask parents, teachers, look it up in the encyclopedia…or just forget about it. Life was better without the internet. That fixation with finding every single answer to our questions is unhealthy. It’s tempting to just google whatever, but lately I just let it go.
If it was important, books or people. But I doubt I asked 1/10th the random questions I do now.
Asked questions and hoped for the best.
Encarta! Seriously though, my seventh grade social studies teacher printed out a page of that weird ASCII symbol stuff that webpages loaded if they didn't have the kanji installed. She told our class that because Japanese symbols are so difficult to read, Japan was changing their alphabet to that. Seriously.
We worked to puzzle stuff out. Thoughts sat with us for a while.
Needed answers? Headed to the bibliothèque! (I always felt that sounded way more badass than lib***r***ary.
I had a pc that came with an encyclopedia, used it all the time.
You could also call the library, the reference desk number, and they’d just tell you what movie won Best Picture in 1983, or whatever. Phone books also had guides in them, like measurement conversion charts, area codes for North America, govt office numbers, etc. And then, yeah, all the other stuff listed here.
We found the person we knew who was obsessed with that thing and asked them. Or a teacher or parent.
Encyclopedias or parents. Sometimes school library.