What was before smartphones

Yes, please. Do you all remember the times when you had to take a photo into your local photo development center, wait a couple of days, and then finally see how they turned out?! You would then stuff all of these photos into separate photobooks one for vacations, one for birthdays, and one for celebrations to share with friends and family in person. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. Now your friends and family can share in your precious moments every step of the way.

Is there anything better than that? You used them to spice up your supper life, and even to learn how to cook in general, after you thumbed through all of the appropriate pages. Except there is something better than cookbooks.

Finding any recipe possible online, submitted by people all across the world, just by searching for a keyword. Discover new recipes, save your favorites, and even create a shopping list of all the ingredients you need. Smartphones are such fantastic devices. They have helped to keep your loved ones easier to stay in contact with, make your job easier, make life more fun, and even make you smarter kind of , with all the answers right at your fingertips. Would you go back to the old days before the Internet and smartphones, or are you excited to see what is yet to come?

Here are 13 things you relied upon before the digital age, including smartphones and the Internet, which you can now use your smartphone for: 1. Landline and Basic Cell Phones Before smartphones, you relied on your landline phone more than anything. Address Books Speaking of landline phones, does anybody remember having an address and phone number book that became the most important document you had in your home.

Fax Machines Do you all remember those years where fax machines were relevant and necessary? Meeting Places This is probably one of the cooler things to happen before technology took over the world. We were free. From the time we walked out of our houses until we heard our mothers calling for us to come inside to eat or sleep.

Our attention was on each other and whatever we decided to do. Also, middle school for us, while it included awareness of the opposite sex, was still a ground closely linked to childhood. The eleven-year-olds now are consumed with the opposite sex, dating, cruel ratings of each other on instagram, etc.

Their world is the world of sixteen-year-olds. I adore my iphone. I was in line for the iPhone One and have had an iphone ever since. I love that I get to communicate daily with my eighty-six-year-old Great Aunt Jessie.

Instead of talking to her once a month, we talk multiple times a day. I do consciously set my iphone aside for hours a day now. I try to give full attention to moments. I insist on recreating freedom for part of each day. I worry about what things will be like when children, who have grown up too fast learning to revenge share and worship how many likes they have, grow up.

Now, with ride-sharing apps, it's much easier to call a car that will take you anywhere you need to go. Between Uber , Lyft , Via, and others, getting a ride has never been so simple.

Whereas we used to be limited to what we could find in an encyclopedia or at the library, now the entire world is just one Google search away.

World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Gabbi Shaw. Smartphones haven't been part of our daily lives for that long, but it's already impossible to imagine our lives without them. From getting from point a to point b to splitting the bill, these 15 tasks were way more difficult to do before we had smartphones.

If you veered off the turn-by-turn directions you had printed out, you were out of luck. Keeping in touch with your friends and family was more difficult.

Splitting checks at meals and bars was always a challenge. Getting food delivered meant speaking to someone on the phone, a physical copy of a delivery menu, and cash. Apps make all of that obsolete. Listening to an incredible array of music was much harder before smartphones.

Evening Standart Report. One of my favourite old school activities. My class was the best at this sort of entertainment. In the too big boots handed down from an older boy probably stuffed with wool or old newspaper to prevent slipping : lol.

Note: this post originally had images. Anyone can write on Bored Panda. Start writing! Follow Bored Panda on Google News! Follow us on Flipboard. Your image is too large, maximum file size is 8 MB. Not your original work? Add source. Error occurred when generating embed. Please check link and try again. Before Bored Panda, she worked as a freelance photographer and event planner. Started to work in Bored Panda as an image editor more than 5 years ago. Julija loves editing stories about social issues such as gender equality, LGBTQ awareness, racial equity, as well as mental health and environmental topics.

She's also a hardcore Harry Potter fan, has made over 30 hot-glue wands for one of her themed birthday parties. You can find her in Bored Panda office or reach here julija. It's not just that there are no smart phones.

It is also the fact that modern parents are way too overprotective, and too many of those activities would horrify most of them. All that climbing, jumping Oh, the horror and that's called sarcasm, in case you didn't get it! I once threw a small seventh birthday party for my daughter when we had an evergreen tree with very low branches. My kids and two of my daughter's friends were in the tree very low when their parents arrived to pick them up and both sets of parents just freaked out that I let them in a tree.

The parents didn't even have to reach up for them. They were literally low enough that a parent just reached over and plucked them like goofy fruit from the branch. I felt very sad for those children. Tell that to the rare set of parents who let their kids go to the park alone and get in trouble for doing so. We can't blame technology for kids not playing outside. Parents today are WAY to over protective. When I was a kid in the s they warned we'd all end up with "TV legs" from not getting enough exercise Bored Panda works better on our iPhone app.

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