Did you not get webtexts, or was that after your time.
Could send out a couple hundred of them a month for free here, so long as you had an active number. Mostly used by teens with pre-pay sims. Free credit for porting your number to another network was huge too.
didn't get a cell phone until 2004, the first year pre pay was even a thing in the USA so that was a good ~5 years of ICQ/AIM/IRC being it for texting your friends
if i was away from home with my nokia shorty i'd have just made a voice call! its a phone! we were still used to using those then
where? looks like there was some scattered prepay services in bigger cities before 2004 but i remember Virgin Mobile USA being lauded as the first nationwide service, certainly the first one in rural Minnesota where i was at the time
Things like this will always remind me of when a group of 16 - 18 year olds called me (a 24 year old at the time which was only last year) middle-aged.
Still remember watching a T9 typing competition where this 14 yo just destroyed it as fast as I can do on a QWERTY and I was like kids these days and she's like 35 now.
Yeah, my dad was clueless with technology too. I would try to teach him and it was a lot of him staring into space while he made the mouse cursor go in circles. It’s interesting how people who were not introduced to electronic technology at a young enough age struggles to use it.
My dad actually managed to get half-decent with it, though he'd still need to ask me for help occasionally. He at least grew out of writing emails like telegrams, as though he were paying by the word.
there was a time when everyone in IT was worried the iPad kids would struggle with desktop computing, but they pick it up quick. the boomers though, they use a computer for 20 years and don't know what a file is.
There was some bias in those recounts to, implying all the millennials knew what IP addresses were and doing HTML and I can tell you that wasn't the case. Kids in my class thought I "knew computers" cause I spent all my time on a computer (reading Wikipedia articles)
They were TANKS, I dropped mine in a whole bucket of pine floor detergent and the only effect was that for the rest of the time I had the phone any calls were made in the fragrance of the forest.
I loved it and miss it because once you learned it you could type on it blind and only had to look for uncommon words that hadn't yet been embedded in your brain.
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Could send out a couple hundred of them a month for free here, so long as you had an active number. Mostly used by teens with pre-pay sims. Free credit for porting your number to another network was huge too.
if i was away from home with my nokia shorty i'd have just made a voice call! its a phone! we were still used to using those then
Verizon had recently bought another company, some three letter initialisms, and that was the brand on the box.
https://www.verizon.com/about/news/press-releases/verizon-wireless-unveils-prepay-version-its-popular-flatrate-calling-plans
Also, if I want my stepmom to laugh her ass off, I just start this story. Because it was the style at the time.
🥲
"On."
He got his first word processor in the 80s, never learned a damn thing on how it actually worked beyond how to type documents.
Memories.