No, they weren’t particularly cheap. And they weren’t anywhere nearly as reliable connectionwise (functionwise they were way more reliable to be honest), and the expectation to always be near it wasn’t anywhere near it is today.
ok. i got the “hagenuk global” with my contract back then and it was working well all the time. that was before 1998. and i won a nokia communicator in 97. still have it. was mind blown as a kid. sms was free back then…
so i still dont get the meme really.
Devices were getting cheaper, not quite to mass adoption but getting there, however service wasn’t nearly universal like it is today. There were whole towns and even some suburbs that didn’t have coverage yet. It wasn’t until the introduction of 3G (around like 2006, if memory serves) that phones got cheap and service became blanket for most people.
Yea I didn’t get a cell phone until like 2004/5 and I only had coverage for like half the places I spent time at in my town. All my friends lived out in the country so I was unreachable most of the time until several years later.
In the US, not really. Even if the phone itself was cheap, the plans were high. We moved my last year of highschool and my mom got a phone for me to keep in the car. It was only to call 911 for emergencies because the cost per minute was crazy.
werent mobile phones pretty cheap in 98?
No, they weren’t particularly cheap. And they weren’t anywhere nearly as reliable connectionwise (functionwise they were way more reliable to be honest), and the expectation to always be near it wasn’t anywhere near it is today.
ok. i got the “hagenuk global” with my contract back then and it was working well all the time. that was before 1998. and i won a nokia communicator in 97. still have it. was mind blown as a kid. sms was free back then… so i still dont get the meme really.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plausible_deniability
Devices were getting cheaper, not quite to mass adoption but getting there, however service wasn’t nearly universal like it is today. There were whole towns and even some suburbs that didn’t have coverage yet. It wasn’t until the introduction of 3G (around like 2006, if memory serves) that phones got cheap and service became blanket for most people.
Yea I didn’t get a cell phone until like 2004/5 and I only had coverage for like half the places I spent time at in my town. All my friends lived out in the country so I was unreachable most of the time until several years later.
In the US, not really. Even if the phone itself was cheap, the plans were high. We moved my last year of highschool and my mom got a phone for me to keep in the car. It was only to call 911 for emergencies because the cost per minute was crazy.
in the EU short messages were still free of any charge at that time. nokia started booming. life was good in the EU and plans were affordable.
My phone didn’t even do text/SMS, heh.