Indeed. I sometimes remember how living was before the Internet, before a computer in every house and in every pocket.
Paper maps, incandescent lighbulbs with less lumen output than any smartphone, CRT displays, LCD panels as thick as a MacBook Air (a modern OLED is as thin as paper!), libraries with actual books (that never had enough information), payphones... I'd say things got a lot better :D
One of the things that periodically strikes me as someone who was a product manager from the mid-80s through the 90s is how hard it was to get information. For example, I remember we paid one company a fair bit of money to fax us any data sheets they had on specific competitive products when we were about to do a product announcement. (Oh, and we paid them for each category of computer systems we wanted access to information on.) Basically, everyone sent this firm their data sheets because we couldn't really ask each other directly. That was how one did competitive analysis.
I think if I were to go back in time, I'd quit after a week because I would feel I simply didn't have access to the information I needed to do my job.
Paper maps, incandescent lighbulbs with less lumen output than any smartphone, CRT displays, LCD panels as thick as a MacBook Air (a modern OLED is as thin as paper!), libraries with actual books (that never had enough information), payphones... I'd say things got a lot better :D