I got lucky on the 2000 crash, checked! Account shortly after market open, my stock was fine, sold it bought qcom it was down 60% but starting to recover, made 50% in no time then got out, 2k area. No internet in 87, guess ring broker or check the paper the next day before realising you've lost a lot of money.
I don't remember that but I do remember Aug 17, 2017. Aug 16, SPX had closed at 2468 and change. No one had a clue of the blood bath the next day, down over 30 pts!!!!! I remember curling up in a ball and sobbing thinking about all of the money I was losing on my naked SPX puts and short VXX calls. I told my wife we were going have to cut back on the Starbucks and our traditional upsizing at Wendys. Fortunately, I remembered a little known technique called "buying the dips" and doubled up. It took almost a week to recover the losses but it still haunts me. Thinking that a market move like that could even happen scares me to this day. One day I will share with my kids the story of the "big one" in 2017.
I honestly don't know whether to laugh or cry at this, but I do honestly know... I'll leave it to you to puzzle out why, in your land of lies and illusion you project to make yourself seem smart, wise, and seasoned.
In 1987 there was an internet of sorts, with very limited resources, mostly for universities and military. I believe CompuServe was the first U.S. company that gave the general public access to the internet, and that was in 1989. So I have to make a declaration of shenanigans. To access my broker I had a telephone dial up modem at 14.4k {WRONG SEE EDIT} . I dialed a telephone number that was for my broker's service and was able to connect to limited access data. They operated what amounted to a BBS or bulletin board service, that was the extent of online services then. I could not trade that way only get limited data. I still had to make a telephone call and speak with a human to get an order placed. There were BBS's for all sorts of topics and you dialed into them. Some had fees, some were free, and of course long distance telephone charges applied. The backbone of the internet at that time was 56.6k nothing close to the gigabit service a home user has today. As far as learning anything. Nope, no good story. I was just a dumb deer in the headlights. I learned that bad things happen with no warning, they are fast, and with massive effect, find ways to protect myself for that. A good lesson to learn, but not a good story. EDIT: I must have had a 1200bps modem in 1987 not 14.4k. My memory of technical spec's from 30 years ago is not the best. But I do remember whether or not I had internet. EDIT #2: a clip from 1983 movie War Games - audio coupler for connecting a computer to a modem.
Ahh, CompuServ SIGs. Revel in their time. But there was no "internet backbone" to speak of during those times. The TCP/IP standard was still being hashed out in the 1980s IIRC. So there really was no "public internet" as we know it today. It was just a dial-up into private companies charging outrageous hourly fees to connect to them, and providing some users with a UNIX shell to connect to the "net". Remember those AoL mailers providing 1000 hours free access? Lol! Very silly. Here's some nostalgia for you... And even further back...(Might not work on Internet Explorer. Try Chrome.)
I wasn't trading, but I knew an older gentleman that came in the store and was pounding the counter saying he was on his way to his broker to buy stocks. The one I remember was AT&T. Don't remember if he mentioned any others but he was dumbfounded that no one else saw it the way he did. This was a day or two after the crash. Which reminds me of a passage I read in an biography of Bernard Baruch. In the book he talks about the "panics" they would have in the market. There was one in the late 1800's where as a small boy he saw all of these old Confederate veterans going down to the brokers to buy stocks after one of these "panics".