this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2025
296 points (99.3% liked)
Lord Of The Rings Memes
289 readers
443 users here now
founded 1 month ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A local Telco had a plan they called "my 5" which was pretty simple: you get unlimited calls and texts to 5 numbers, and everything else costs money per minute/text.
I didn't have 5 people for my 5 so I just stuck to pay as you go on my PCS phone.
Shit I'm old enough to remember my dad paid 50 cent a minute to talk on his cellphone and there was no texting yet. We still had beepers too.
I never knew someone with an analog cellphone at the time, so that one isn't something I experienced. I was one of the first at my high school to have a PCS phone, and I remember that not all PCS phones could text.
Depending on what tech the carrier used, you either could text, or not. GSM phones came with the feature as standard, while CDMA and TDMA phones were distinctly lacking the feature for a long time. It's funny to me that the feature that made cellphones really explode with the younger generation (texting, aka SMS), wasn't even a universal feature when the PCS networks went live. Eventually we all switched to HSDPA, and eventually LTE which both had the feature.
Aah those were the days. Everything was slow and it was still great because the alternative was nothing.
Yeah I remember those days too. Hell my first phone was analog, but by then you could buy minutes. It was a flip phone and I buy the minutes as I needed them. My first phone that could text was the Nokia. You know one that couldn't ever break.
But my fondest memory was when I got my first phone that had some form of the web on it. That was still in the days when you paid for text messaging.