What was it like before the internet?
 

I can only imagine what it was like running an offshore before the net. Before GPS.... Nobody really knew how fast they were going...... Seems like it would be more fun. Hearing about a fast boat few towns away ..... Loading up and going to find him. I can't imagine I would know 1/10 of the stuff I do without this site. The shootout must have been so much more fun....not knowing near as much about who was going to be there or what they were running under the hatches. Without the internet I highly doubt I would have made the trip down to KY to run at lake Cumberland. Heck now that I think about it I bet I would not have my boat... I found it in Iowa on Craigslist with some help from this site. I would prob be in a Baja because there is a dealer less than 15mi away and that's all I saw as a kid. So gramps... Sit all us youngsters down and tell us story's of what this sport was before this hot new "fad" they call the internet...... We should all thank Al Gore for inventing it.

lol, I hafta laugh. I remember when I had a pager not a cell phone and I could remember phone numbers. now forget it, I barely remember my own. gps I dont use much on the boat, grew up on lake Erie here and dont need it but for getting around on the road thats another thing like the phone numbers. Use to be able to drive to any place in the country with the vaguest of directions and road atlas (anyone still even have one of those?) I could memorize nearly an entire trip, all the route changes everything. nowadays? . . . . . recalculating . . . recalculating . . . . recalculating lol


in the 90's I swore I would never have a computer. I grew up in the 70's/80's and my brother was the Bill Gates Steve Jobs type and always had these nerdy things lol. Still not sure if they are the best thing or the worst :D I will say one thing I have met a lot of great people through this thing.

Tell me you had a bag phone on your boat. You would think that late 80's cigs would have phones built into them......nothing prob cooler in 1987 than calling all the girls from your 38 top gun or your "hook up". Then going to all the hot clubs in Miami.

oh yea. . . . I had the full three watt bag phone. jezsus who even remembers when phones came in different watt ranges and the bigger ones were an actual health risk lol. they use to have antennas to. Funny thing I picked up a cool barn find a couple years ago, a 92 Eddie Bauer Ford Bronco one owner truck that had not seen the light of day since about 02, it has a permantly mounted cell phone with the box under the seat. I drive the truck daily but left it in there just for the heck of it :D

thanks al gore!

I'm 32 so I can remember when people were sporting bag phones. I'm a little young for the Miami Vice thing...... The scarab that stole my heart was yellow had outboards and Pam Anderson hanging off the side of it....... Seemed like she was always cold.............

52 (so not yet a gramps) and grew up without any of it. The first game was pong on a commador 64, then pacman (do you youngsters even know what these are??).
Back then, we used to actually get out of the house and do things for fun. I still remember my first bill from my bag phone, i had to rip it out becuase I couldn't afford to pay it. Now all I do is sit at my computer and look at boat porn all day.

Oh yeah, those were the days. Throwing the the ole Panasonic phone over my shoulder and heading out to spend the day on the Formula during the work days making "business calls"!!

Miss that ole phone..

http://i.ebayimg.com/t/Panasonic-Mob...bP!~~60_57.JPG

Cheers,

Dave

I got one of them. I found it the other day while getting extensions cords for the Xmas lights.

Too funny!! I too think I may still have mine somewhere along with 2 "car kits"...

1987 was a good year, a shiny new Formula and new wife...1st of 3.. :-)

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-3...-18-47_417.jpg

https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-X...2511122105.jpg

Cheers,

Dave

-You had to have Nordskog speedo! Hot Boat & Powerboat magazines were the only connection to the world of performance boating. For years, read about Havasu and LOTO. - Remember how excited you were when the latest issue of Powerboat was in the mailbox? One month, my issue got lost in the mail, after a few days late, my wife and I drove over 100 miles (each way) to beg for a copy at Channel Marine in Laconia, NH. If you needed info, you spend hours on the phone. This guy was alway calling Mel Riggs as he was one of the very few who had answers and the parts. Dean Nickerson was another that I called all the time.

25 yrs ago, if you were playing with marine blower motors, you melted many pistons. (countless) Bob Endress @ B&M was the phone call that saved a lot of money.

Those were also the days when we had to research and order boat parts from those Powerboat Mag ads and ordering paper catalogs...could you imagine having to do that now?

I still recall calling (not emailing,LOL) Gil Marine to order a new set of their "Gil Coated" manifolds and stainless risers. When they called and told me they were ready to ship I said hold up, I will come and get them because I don't want them to get scratched during shipping..so... I hop a flight in Atlanta to LA, rented a convertible Mustang and drove up to the high desert to the Gil Factory ....drove back to LA airport, checked them as baggage and flew back to ATL the same day....those were the days!!

Cheers,

Dave

What was it like before the internet?
answer : They had this thing called the library.

I remember waiting for each issue. Powerboat, Motorboating & Yachting, etc and most of the content was cruiser stuff so when they did a performance issue it was gold and I knew the exact day each issue came out.

Ok, I'll give my synopsis of "Before the Internet:"

1. Fountains were longer than they appeared
2. Jim Darr was a legend, Chris Sunkin was becoming one
3. Cigarettes were #1
4. Apaches were the best wavecrushers ever built
5. Jayboat was hanging polaroids on his bedroom wall
6. BobtheBuilder was actually working, not boating in some exotic destination in yet another great boat
7. Cashbar was rockin' the mullet, talking about boats all night at the bar
8. Shooters was the place to go and yes you actually had to be there to see the action (no pics/videos online for everyone to see/share)
9. Everyone talked about running 75 in 8-10's and no one could contest it......today everyone wants to see the video!
10. When you described a boat, very few would know it but some would have heard about it. Today, something happens good or bad the story, pics, video links are all posted online in the same day.......(Beached MTI story comes to mind).

11. We could actually watch real Offshore Racing on TV, now we watch it streamed on the net with ONLY 1 camera......we have come a long way ---grrrrrr :-)

Dave

I kind of liked when I took off for a weekend on my bike and no one could call and bug me.

Unless you forgot to take this off of your belt....

http://20thcenturyman.com/wp-content...orolaPager.jpg

Growing up the only communication problem I ever had was caused by high winds.....
.
.
.
.... the smoke signals quickly dissipated....... :(


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There was this here thing called maggyzeenz. And you went down to the corner store to fetch a powerboat one and read all the latest about Seagareette and that Injun brand.

Power Shifts
 

Some clarification to post #15, item 5. This is the internet-- it's important to get it right.
And, I was thinking about this very thing last night. :cool-smiley-011:

Here's some of my story-
first, about the polaroids- bought my first in 1966- anyone else remember having to coat them with that nasty clearcoat?
second, nearly every major job in my life has involved a darkroom, or management of a darkroom (first hand developing in 1964).

Like Dave, I was a bit resistant to the internet, but had been using an Apple IIe to run proprietary software for a long time (90-98).
Never had any real issues with software or hardware- thanks to watfor and cobol software classes in college (70,71).
Watched with fascination as the entire graphics/publishing industry went from analog to digital in the blink of an eye in the late 80's thanks to desktop publishing.
Even in those days I felt one could get an education from corporate 800 #s- plenty to learn from a prospectus.
(easier than the library- they deliver to your door, kinda like ebay).
And in the late 70's, I was WOT in Atlanta. Had a small agency running out of a 2nd bdrm.
One of my wealthiest clients had the first bag phone I remember- 1979. Had it built into the console of one of his Mercedes.

Was thinking about time spent running around to typesetter, art supply store, color separator, printers...
Using waxers and PMT machines to prepare art... or pounce wheels for sign patterns.
all the while wishing for a 'graphics workstation' that sold for 150K and didn't have the power of a smartphone.

For someone who's been a part of the media for over 40 yrs, the cosmic changes we are witnessing are fascinating.
I remember using a laptop and downloading music from Napster, and watching the worldwide music industry have a collective freakout
until apple showed everyone how to monetize it.

the upheaval continues. out with the old, in with the new.

You hit it on the head with that sentence. I loved going boating with my father in the 70's, 80's, and 90's because we went out every Sunday and looked for races, and the thrill was you rolled up along side of another boater., you had no idea who they were, and most of the time, unless you had people talking about you/making a reputation they did not know about you, we raced so many boast through the years, and like Biggus said, we had a Nordskog speedometer, and a before that a Keller Speedometer, and I lived for day when Hotboat and Powerboat Magazine arrived in the mail.

The internet and OSO have taken away some of the mystery surrounding a performance boat if there is any information on a boat out there, especially if the boat has a name on the side or on the transom , other than being that all-white Cigarette type boat. For 19 years my father and I raced as many boats as we could in the yellow Magnum pictured below, when I was just a toddler to four years of age he used to race the flat bottom V-drive crowd with this Carlson tunnel boat. When you own a yellow boat named "the Hairy Canary" people tend to remember, when you have an outboard tunnel boat running close to 80 mph people remember, and word does get around, but more people knew about my father's Phantom than the other two boats combined, due to internet....no mystery about the Phantom.

One more thing, the older race boats, and the Magnum had high-speed compasses built-in, if you did decided to run offshore, the offshore held in Pt. Pleasant in the 1970's and 1980's a race boat could be seen just idling or stationary going in one direction then the next direction, almost a circle, as a kid I wondered what the hell they were doing, my father explained to me they were setting the compass/making sure their compass was true. Many a race was won or lost due to missing the way offshore/outsight from land check-point, so an accurate compass was a must.

There used to be a radar shoot-out on Barnegat Bay (NJ) in the 1990's and that was the last time there seemed to any mystery how fast boats really went, because the radar gun humbled the best speedometers available to boats, the allegedly 88 mph boat may only have radared at 80 mph, the boats that had the Faria gauges, well they were really humbled. Lots of hurt feelings once that radar gun was used, everyone knew, and everyone ran slower than they thought, and or wanted to believe. Good thread. I do enjoy all the information and pistures of boats and hardware that OSO and the internet provides, I am on here multiple time a day everyday, always waiting to be amazed and impressed with who has what, how fast it goes, or how much it costs.

The Jones boats from 1966 to the present...

life was good,,more peaceful,,did not have everyone crawling up your ass,,wish they would go back to dos..its now a police nation and it will be soon be ilegal to say the word pig..

......let alone....
.
.
..... phucking, low life, pond scum sucking, ....pig


:)

Technology is nice but consider it a step backwards when it comes people skills. Internet is great for resources.
My #1 gripe, trying to have a conversation with someone and all I'm doing is talking to the top of their head cause they are f$%cking with their phone texting or whatever. Have a buddy that you can't get more than a couple minutes of his time before he's responding to texts. I'd be better off and should just sit next to him and text him. At least he'd be concentrated on the text's.

I work in a University and find humor just walking thru a crowd of students and see that over half are in head down mode with phone in hand. Everyday task most of us grew up with is a challenge to the younger crowds. Had a student a while back that couldn't figure out how to open the drawer on a toolbox. I had to open the lid for him. Maybe he shoulda googled the answer for that task! But in all fairness, they know the ins/outs of PC's and phones. It's a techno world out there now

boat trader and trading times mag. I had the south fla boat trader (and a couple of others) delivered to me in ill. and actually received them before they went on sale locally

I had an employee that was great from 7-11am.......then the texting would start (from his girlfriend, she got up around 11 everyday). Nonsense texts, like What R U Doin?, Im sooooo hungover, etc......Finally I told the kid if he couldn't leave the phone in his car then don't come to work......he never came back!

Awesome.

Life before the net...lots of chitty VCR porn.

I feel like sucker punching those types and then stomping on their phone........and then tell them to wake the F up!

Where would you find boats for sale? I can't imagine keeping an eye on the classifieds in the local paper till a nice Donzi popped up

Wow that's a lot of anger........are you sure that's what you are bad at?

Dislike

I could give a **** less if they walk and talk text Wtf ever. What pisses me off is texting and driving. Think drunk driving is dangerous?

Man....Can't anybody take a joke around here these days?:rolleyes:

We used to cruise the local marinas. As for parts, just dumb luck in most cases and ordering out of magazines by using a phone.

lol
 

we had a newsprint magazine type thing that came out each week called the Trading Post. They were geographic but I think were all over and eventually became Traderonline (I think) you just had to scour them each week tney had boats, cars and parts sections along with all kinds of other stuff for sale.

I was playn...... Guess it's hard to get sarcasm threw in a form. :lolhit:

Lived and died with Boat Trader. I remember looking at the ads for the 24' Jaws for $14,990 and thinking how long I had to work bagging groceries at Publix. Decided I need a job upgrade quickly.