When I first used networked computers, you paid someone to do searches for you and got a reply in 3 to 7 days. It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was

When I first used networked computers, you paid someone to do searches for you and got a reply in 3 to 7 days. It pretty much sucked, honestly. Translation was obscenely expensive and not much better than Google can do today. You paid by the minute or, in my case, the university did. It was pretty terrible. Then, this fancy world wide web came about, only it had been world wide before that, albeit at a different scale. It was pretty great. Now? It's much better in that it is much more useful. I can still make discoveries of novel content, but I seldom do. I search, rather than browse, when I seek information on a subject. It's not nostalgia, I don't think. It's much more useful today. It was pretty terrible the first times I used it. In fact, it wouldn't improve for like a decade, maybe longer. If it helps, I also hated computers back then. They were slow, unintuitive, and I had to learn to program to actually have a functional (well, useful to me) device. They clanged, beeped, and whirled. They made dreadful noises and did exactly what you told them to do, even if what you told them to do was stupid. They didn't have things like a recycle bin. Hell, they didn't even have internal storage. One computer was so horrible that I had to buy 'memory chips' (RAM) just so I could use lowercase letters. All told, it cost me more than a brand new car. You know what I did with it? I played Zork. Edit: that translation was done by a human, by the way. It could take a week, or more, to get something translated.