>Vinyl, CD's, tapes, whatever: you had to collect them and physically go to stores to get music, video or any content.

Bigger difference - you didn't know what you were getting until after you'd gotten home, unwrapped and listened to it. Maybe you'd heard one song from the album on the radio, maybe you had heard other stuff by the band, or maybe you just bought it because the cover artwork looked cool or you'd heard the name of the band somewhere. $20 for a CD, and you just hoped it'd turn out to be something you liked because that would be the only new music you heard until you bought another one.

Movies were similar. On TV, there was a blurb in TV guide, at the rental store, a blurb on the back of the box, and at the theater, just a poster. That's all you knew about it until you watched it, which could be awhile. Now, you hear of a potentially interesting movie and you can instantly read cast, summary, reviews, and links to related movies. If you're still interested, you can be watching it inside of 5 minutes, with subtitles.

Also mobile connectivity consisted of your beeper going off, then you stopping whatever you were doing, going to find a payphone, calling the number and hoping whoever beeped you was still waiting for you to call in and that you could get through the call before you ran out of quarters.

We had internet then, but mostly used local BBSes, and it was still dialup at 1200 or 2400 bps, all text mode. You watched the text scroll onto your screen as it downloaded.

And big difference - no multitasking. If you were chatting on IRC, that's all you were doing. You didn't have other windows, so there was no chatting about something you were doing in another window. You weren't talking on the phone and couldn't get calls because the modem was using the line. You wouldn't get emails until you closed IRC and opened your email client.

But that leads into the negatives.

No anticipation. Hinted at above, you looked forward to getting a new CD on payday, or getting home to see that movie that you'd rented, or your favorite show that came on on Fridays, or hanging out with friends on the weekend. Now that you can access any of that any time, there's not much to look forward to.

Related, time has lost much of its flavor. Back then you could tell time by whatever theme song you'd heard most recently, or the type of show playing on the TV in the background. Different days had different lineups, so family sitcom night had a different flavor than back-to-back horror movie night. 24-hour on-demand makes all time equal and flavorless in that sense. Modern connectivity also means you can work from home in the middle of the night, find people to talk to online, shop online for anything, so even the difference between night and day has lost some flavor.

And most of all, we've lost downtime. It takes a conscious effort now to unplug, have nothing to do, and get bored. In the past, that was when we would hang out with friends, read long-form books, go for a walk and explore, observe the world around us, strike up a conversation with strangers, learn new things or try new hobbies, be creative and imaginative. But now that we're drinking from the firehose, it takes real effort to get bored, or to relax. We do a lot less of all those things now, and it has a psychological and social impact.