popisdead wrote:Who would have thought as an adult I couldn't afford something I got as a kid with paper route money.
For the younger members, what popisdead means by "paper" is something that is called a "newspaper". This was sort of like a PDF that contained social media information such as local residents that had recently gotten married, had died, had gone to some exotic land for vacation, had become a debutant, had committed armed robbery, fraud, or other criminal activities, and other such topical information.
It was also a news aggregator combining local, regional, and nationwide news as well as providing sports, weather, and static cartoons. Contained within it was an app to find out what was playing at the movie theaters. I am talking about both kinds, the indoor and outdoor movie theaters.
Newspapers also had a section that you could buy, sell, or trade, very similar to Craig's List.
Now the odd thing about newspaper is that even though it was paywall, you still had to look at the ads. You would try to avoid looking at ads but it would be so hard to avoid them if there was a car in the ad. Even harder to avoid were the ones with women models. Ads with cars and women were absolutely the most difficult to ignore.
To scroll from one page to the next, you would simply swipe across the page. I know; you've been doing that for years with your iPad, but, well, you might think I'm a liar but this is the absolute truth. If you wanted to make it easier to swipe, you would dampen your fingertip with your tongue. Crazy, huh?
If you paid in advance, the newspaper would be downloaded everyday to your front lawn, usually in the deepest part of the shrubbery, or more than likely, in the mud puddle that hasn't dried out yet. Now if you preferred obtaining the newspaper less frequently, you could jack into a rectangular box by using round discs called "coins".
Newspapers had a share function also. The most popular app for that was named "shoulder". And with this function you could share your newspaper with all your friends, sometimes up to five of them all at the same time.
Now for those of you that are slightly older and vaguely remember newspapers, what popisdead means by "kid with paper route money" is that at one time before adult men and women were the newspaper ISPs that slung the newspapers from car windows, it was children from about the age of ten and up to about the age of fifteen that were the ISPs responsible for delivering newspaper. They were also responsible for collecting money from customers and paying their suppliers. Money left over went to buying soda, candy, comics, and prophylactics, because one day, maybe, just maybe...