8 ms·

"Did you see [show] on TV last night? lol" was a common thing to hear when back at work the next day. For work if you got a call at home from work it was a sho

"Did you see [show] on TV last night? lol" was a common thing to hear when back at work the next day. For work if you got a call at home from work it was a shock. There was no way anyone from work would need to call you at home. As a teen in the mid 1980s I did have to carry a pager the size of a paperback book. But it was nowhere near as bad as now or when cellphones and mobile email got going. First it was Nokia 3310s, then BlackBerry, then later iPhones. For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really. Socially for me the Internet came around just in time. I wasn't a bar hopper or into sports or really anything social. Suddenly in 1993 I could talk to the world it was amazing if not expensive at 60 hours a month. But companies took another decade to catch on. Cellphones were still basic just a phone and expensive to use and only a few people had them.

treeman79 3y ago
Friend of mine held out longer than most on cell. Instead he had a pager. Once paged he would turn on his ham radio so we could go and find him.
piaste 3y ago
> For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really. I was in my early teens when cellphones became universal, and I remember thinking of how so many movie plots were going to become unusable or require an implausible amount of battery deaths to be added. Non-supernatural horrors or thrillers, comedies of errors, a lot of crime stories...

treeman79 3y ago

Friend of mine held out longer than most on cell. Instead he had a pager. Once paged he would turn on his ham radio so we could go and find him.

piaste 3y ago

> For phones I think some people now may find it amazing to be in the middle of nowhere and not have a phone. No voice or data just you in the middle of nowhere with a wallet and a few quarters in your pocket. You get lost or car breaks down? Too bad it's now your job to figure out a way to get back home or anywhere really. I was in my early teens when cellphones became universal, and I remember thinking of how so many movie plots were going to become unusable or require an implausible amount of battery deaths to be added. Non-supernatural horrors or thrillers, comedies of errors, a lot of crime stories...