Nostalgia is a basic human emotion. It’s an experience that’s practically universal, whether you’re a baby boomer, or you were conceived during Woodstock.
The YouTube channel SquirrelMonkeyCom takes a love for the 1980s to a whole new level, and re-imagines what many of today’s most popular Internet destinations would have looked like back then. If you grew up around then, you’ll definitely appreciate these hypothetical blasts to the past.
So, put down that iPad, take off your Bluetooth headset, and hit pause on Netflix. It’s time to travel back to when DOS (or Disk Operating System, for you kids out there) was the king of operating systems, and the closest thing to a tablet was this.
For anyone under the age of 16, the sound you’ll hear in this clip is the modem as it’s connecting to the Internet.
Up until the early 2000s or so, most of us had to deal with that scream every time we logged on. On top of that, when you finally did connect, the one phone line you had in your house was tied up. Plus, if when your mom or dad eventually picked up the receiver while you were on the net, they would be greeted with similar shrieks, which were then followed up with shrieks of their own, directed at you.
Ahh, fun times.
As for hypothetical 1980s Google, it’s incredibly slow, not pretty to look at, and features about eight colors. Get a good look at computing in the 80s, because that’s what we had to deal with. Think about that the next time you complain about your smartphone locking up.
No, that’s not a coaster. Floppy disks were the portable PC storage staple back in the 1980s. Enter Instagram on floppy disk.
Cloud storage? Instant sharing? Pfft, yeah right. At least back then, there was no chance of any iCloud hack-like embarrassments.
LinkedIn in its current form may look outdated to some, but this clip takes its aesthetics back to a time when the Cold War was still being waged.
We almost wish Twitter worked and looked the way it does in the video below. If so, we might not have to hear about embarrassing tweets from uninformed celebrities as often as we do today (salty language warning for that last link).
Angry Birds
Maybe the harsh sounds and colors in this 1982-ified version of Angry Birds explains why heavy metal got so huge in the 1980s. We’d get really angry too if we had to look at and listen to this all day.
Skype
Though most of us here at DT grew up in the 1980s and 1990s, watching this makes us thank every deity known to man that the current year is 2014.
Spotify
Ditto.
Wikipedia
Honestly, SquirrelMonkey’s vision of Wikipedia circa 1983 doesn’t look all that different from the way it does today. The current model works a heck of a lot better though.
