I suppose every participant on Hacker News must have Internet access to participate at all. But I'm aware that some of us in our community live right now in countries that have limited economic development, so you have a different perspective on issues from the majority (?) here. I was born and grew up in the United States, and live in the United States now, but thirty years ago I lived in one Third World country (Taiwan), and visited another (China, then much poorer than Taiwan), and that experience has stayed with me as a reality check on my usually American perspective on the world. I'm sure many people here have lived in more than one country, and it would be helpful to know if you have seen the Third World up close.
What has been your experience? Where have you lived that is part of the Third World, or was part of it when you lived there? What can other Hacker News participants learn from daily life in the Third World? What Third World problems are important for hackers to attempt to solve? I'd be delighted to hear what we can learn from your experiences.
Communication with family (all over the world) was via snail mail, and as a kid typically consisted of letters thanking for birthday/xmas presents. In person visits would be every 3 years or so. We were on a shared phone line (two longs, two shorts) until getting direct dial in the mid 80's. The shared phone line was a two digit number. The direct dial was five digits with no area codes. Contrast this with instantaneous Skype now.
Techie goods as in the rest of the world were available (eg Atari 2600, Walkman, VCRs, computers) but were considerably more expensive and harder to afford. I was somewhat fortunate in that an American benefactor donated 15 Apple II computers to my high school in 1983, providing we learned Logo. Later in the 80s my dad bought me a copy of Borland's Turbo C which was very expensive but worth it. We also had a Sinclair Spectrum, but could only afford the 16kb version. You would devour every bit of printed documentation, read magazines and books from cover to cover several times over etc to make sure you got maximum value.
In general the main difference to now and the UK/US was self reliance. You had to be able to solve issues because no one else could do it for you. For example you had to be able to fix your own vehicles (or at least limp them back). You would need to be able to fix anything that broke, possibly making replacement parts yourself. You'd need to improvise. Almost everyone was their own McGyver!
And a random story for you. A tropical storm went through the country and power was out for 3 days. A friend had a video tape he rented in a player when that happened. You can't eject video tapes unless you have power. The video store wanted to charge a late fee despite the fact that they wouldn't be able to rent the tape out to anyone else.