1. Paging a friend or family member and then having to wait around the phone for them to call you back.
2. Keeping up with your friends from summer camp through (usually handwritten) letters.
3. Ordering clothing and other products out of catalogs and literally having NO idea when they'd show up.
4. Ordering magazines and other products off a TV commercial and having to wait 6 to 8 weeks for it to arrive.
5. Taking photos and having NO idea what they looked like until you had them developed.
6. Having to have extra batteries on you whenever you were going anywhere in case you needed them for your camera, Game Boy, or Walkman.
7. Sending postcards to your friends and family while you were on vacation so that everyone could know how much of a good time you were having.
8. Looking up movie times in the newspaper if you didn't feel like calling the theater directly to hear the listings.
9. Becoming a member of a fan club through the mail.
10. If you wanted to know what was on TV, you needed to either look it up in the TV Guide or your newspaper…
11. …or watch the TV Guide Channel — which meant if something caught your eye, you also had to remember the channel number it was on.
12. Having to be home whenever you wanted to watch something on TV (or else you'd have to wait for it to air on reruns).
13. Or taping a TV show — if you wanted to watch it again.
14. Looking through the Sunday paper circulars to not only find out what movies and albums were being released that week, but also compare prices.
15. Having a very HIGH chance that your local video store would be out of a new release rental if you showed up too late on a Friday night.
16. Watching porn that looked like this (unless you knew someone who had a black box or your parents subscribed to the Playboy or Spice channel).
17. Actually having to leave voicemails (a "message" as they were called back then) if you wanted to have someone call you back or let them know something.
18. Watching a TV show that was dedicated entirely to movie trailers, 'cause there was really no other way to watch trailers outside of a movie theater.
19. Watching TV shows so that you could find out movie reviews.
20. Having to watch E!’s The Gossip Show if you wanted to be caught up on the newest celeb gossip and blind items.
21. Physically buying your tickets for concerts at a Ticketmaster located inside a music store.
22. Having a decent chance of your VCR destroying one of your favorite VHS movies or home movies. (Whomp whomp.)
23. Viral videos meant watching clips on America's Funniest Home Videos, Talk Soup...
24. ...or having someone share an underground video with you.
25. Having to carry around cash to pay for EVERYTHING since, basically, debit cards were for just pulling cash out of the ATM.
26. That big-screen TVs had terrible resolution (because they were actually projection TVs).
27. Having to sit close to your gaming console 'cause the controllers were connected to it.
28. Making collect calls from a public phone if you had no change.
29. Buy an entire album for ONE song 'cause there was no other way you could get that song.
30. If you wanted to make a copy of a CD you needed to copy it onto a cassette tape.
31. Having to memorize all of your friend's and family's phone numbers — unless you constantly wanted to look them up in your address book.
32. Having to look up phone numbers in the Yellow Pages.
33. Answering the phone and literally having NO idea who was calling (since caller ID was not a standard feature)…
34. …or "screening your phone calls" by waiting to see who was leaving a message on the answering machine and then deciding whether to answer or not.
35. And finally, not having the internet. Yup, it was still up-and-coming technology that was also pricey.
