And it was effectively free to implement for the companies.
But more to the point, did they get off your lawn?
I remember a time when texting was first introduced, you could only text people who used the same phone company as you.
When they made it interoperable they made a big deal out of it. They mailed a sheet of stickers with my cell number on them. They wanted you to give them out to friends to encourage them to text you.
Shit, I got charged to read text messages. I’d get annoyed with people for replying “OK.”
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.
I think the 3310 had the biggest reputation for being impossible to break.
Most of the Nokia phones were pretty durable.
Early Web on the feature phones was generally useless. It took forever to load anything and most of the content wouldn’t render correctly if at all.
It was a wild time
I prepped a comparison of two phone plans where one had a higher base fee and lower per minute fee than the other to teach linear functions and systems of equations. It took way too long to explain what I was on about. Mistakes were made. They also didn’t believe how much time we used to spend talking on the phone.
Swap it with a comparison of Uber and Lyft base rate+mile charges and I bet they’d understand.
Swap talk minutes with data plan.
Most people have unlimited data here
We’re on the internet. Where is “here”?
Where I’m at, where this story occurred
Lol, how long ago was that? Kids these days talk just as much, just not via a phone call. Discord is just how it happens. I figure if you put it into the context of a cellular data plan it might work out better, but even then a lot of those are “unlimited” now
That was two weeks ago lmao
I guess these kids just didn’t? They text instead.
Wait until they find out that you had to type the message out on a number pad with physical buttons.
I could type without looking with T9 but can’t type for shit on touchscreens.
Swype keyboards are a godsend.
When they work.
Sometimes they decide there’s no word in the English language that begins with a K, so you get a long pause, the word “thus,” and no alternate guesses.
Sometimes they decide this five or six times in a row and you give up and tap it out letter by letter like some kind of neanderthal.
Never had that issue. Which keyboard are you using, if you don’t mind me asking? Personally I’m still on Swype & Dragon. Pioneer and still best of class, even though it was officially discontinued years ago.
Right? I used to send text messages while driving without taking my eyes off the road. Of course now voice to text improved that further, but for a while the touchscreen phones were impossible to send messages with without giving them your undivided attention.
Nights and weekends free, too.
The rest cost extra.
When I was their age, to send a text message we would write it on paper, tie it around a rock and throw it through their window.
Or, prop it next to their door, depending on feelings.
Edit: typos, in the old days we would throw another rock
Where did all the bathroom graffiti poets go.
They sit all broken hearted; thought they’d shit but only farted.
I think they make memes now
And mobile websites were only accessible via WAP, if the site even had a WAP version.
Narrator: they never had
Google did. And I once loaded it in my Nokia just to see. Cost a few bucks maybe?
Yeah you had some, like just to test this new wap thing. It never took on like at all.
Only 10 cents?! I was paying 20 cents per text message a few years ago.
