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Get off the internet, I need the phone

Adrian Lobe

Strange tales from the digital Stone Age

Adrian Lobe takes a satirical look at the digital world of the nineties and the early noughties when a home office was dubbed tele-working, when a much-loved personality fronted the campaign to get the nation buying telecoms shares, and when every sitting room acquired a chocolate-box sized object that was to open the door to a new world: the modem. Back then the internet cost more than telephone sex and the screen offered little more than souped up videotext but what a feast for the first digital natives!

Youngsters would excitedly dial in to access the strident world of the World Wide Web, waiting in suspense as the line hissed and rattled into life – and then they were ‘in’! As was Boris Becker in his advertising for AOL. Let the fun begin – surfing, chatting, illegal downloads of music and more. Parental displeasure in spades! Their phone lines were perpetually in use! And what was this internet thing all about, anyway? Just a ‘hype’, as Bill Gates thought in the very beginning?

Helmut Kohl didn’t want to hear from journalists asking him about his plans for the creation of the information superhighway. Might this be like road building? Something for each federal state? Shot through with Lobe’s deliciously sharp humour, this book transports us back to the Digital Stone Age and paints a colourful picture of the generation for whom the internet became a huge adventure playground.

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Published 2022-09-15 by C.H.Beck , ISBN: 9783406791161

Main content page count: 192 Pages

ISBN: 9783406791161