I suppose it would be mostly practical skills, cooking, fixing things. Usually had to be done by people themselves.
Maybe also mental things like navigating (with or without paper map) and remembering their daily and weekly agendas.
What other things would be a big difference with the people today?
Memorizing phone numbers
We didn’t memorise numbers! We just remembered them after having to manually dial them a hundred times.
That’s memorization in action
I feel like it’s still important to remember the numbers of some important contacts, so you can actually call them using somebody elses phone if yours dies or breaks. But I suppose not many people would bother
That skill morphed into remembering user names and passwords.
Lol, not only do I memorize phone numbers of family members, I did my parents taxes so often, I can memorize the social security numbers of all my household members and all their birthdates.
Also I still remember addresses I used to live in.
Same here. I even still remember my phone number from 40 years ago, living as a child in Tehran, Iran. Numbers just stick in my brain.
Mmmm, interesting, can you list off that data along with your mother’s maiden name? It’s uh for a friend…
Eh even before the Internet people had other tools to help with this. Physical books with people’s addresses and phone numbers. Specialized holders for various business cards. Yellow pages and white pages. I suppose a lot of incidental memorization is lost but I don’t think it’s really a skill lost so much as the tool changed.
And those tools pre-date the invention of the telephone, so it’s not like people spent hundreds of years memorizing phone numbers before writing was invented.