Remember card catalogs? Before computers, if you wanted a library book you went to a library and hoped for the best. You found a cabinet of varnished wooden drawers in the library's main room and pulled out one that would have either your topic, or an author or book's name, all in alphabetical order. The card--or lack thereof--would tell you if the library had the book you wanted, and give you the Dewey Decimal Number so you could go retrieve it.

The cards were hand-typed, meaning someone fed them (or a sheet of labels) into a typewriter. If the typist made a mistake typing the label, they had to use correction tape or white-out to correct it.

Somewhere between 1979 and the mid-1980s, card catalogs went the way of sewing boxes, rotary phones, and macrame plant hangers. Some academic libraries hang onto them, but I suspect that as retirement claims their respected directors, the card catalogs will quickly and quietly be moved into storage. Or even used for tinder.

Card catalogs sucked. They could be filled with mistakes, or torn, or out of order. Students had a nasty tendency to just yank the card out of the drawer if no one was looking, rather than copying down the information on scrap paper. Try doing that with a computer!

David Shedden of the Poynter Institute wrote an article, musing about the ways journalism has changed since 1968 (when he watched Walter Cronkite, in black and white, describe the election between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey). Shedden tracks the beginnings of the Arpanet, and describes how computers changed his life at school, the library, the radio station where he first worked, and his subsequent jobs. It seems like a slow process, but when you look from now back to the 1970s, it's kinda like comparing a horse and buggy to a Prius.

The Poynter Institute traces the development of online journalism in a timeline, starting with the year 1969 and continuing up to the present.

As a former typewriter user, I remember very well trying to get my mind around the concept that I could type, but no physical paper contained the imprint of my words. The idea that mistakes were wiped away without correction tape was secondary to the fact that--in those early days--computer screens showed all characters in small letters and there was no way to know what your copy looked like until you printed it. Early convert? Not me!

Even if you're much younger (you probably are), you may recall figuring out what file sharing was, or wondering how many floppies it would take to hold all your documents. Our world changes in the blink of an eye, and it doesn't always take a cataclysm along the lines of 9/11 to accomplish this. A flash drive is as miraculous as Spock's tricorder.

If you've got the time, here's a 30 minute video about the beginnings of computers and the Internet.