Anyone here have an email account and a cell phone when they were in high school?

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

[NoJusticeNoPeace]

1. Hell, I had a horse and buggy in high school...or did I...LOL

I aint tellin

[Jamastiene]

65. And we walked to school in the snow, barefooted,

uphill, BOTH WAYS (that is actually possible).

I listed my childhood experiences with technology below. I just told on myself as far as how old I am. I can call dirt a youngster, lol.

[jberryhill]

81. Meh... we had two feet of snow INSIDE the school

All day long.

And we LIKED it!

[11 Bravo]

174. I had a telegraph and Passenger Pigeons.

[DeadLetterOffice]

2. I had call-waiting and a TRS-80 at school, do those count?

[ileus]

14. I had a trash 80 also.

[Aerows]

62. My first experience with a PC was a Commodore-64

I saw it at a friends house, and played Curse of the Azure Bonds on it. They pretty much had to throw me out, now that I think about it. Luckily, I already had a job (not that I really had a choice, but hey, at least I got paid, thanks, mom and dad) and got an 8086 so that I quit annoying the neighbors by lurking for far too long.

[Lurker Deluxe]

155. SSI Gold box

That was the stuff right there. Curse was a great one.

I played em all, and I miss them. That old C-128 is still in a box somewhere ....

[iwillalwayswonderwhy]

3. Nope

But, all my grandkids do.

[Nye Bevan]

4. No, but I had a slide rule (nt)

[earthside]

109. I still have mine.

A beautiful ivory engraved slide rule.

A marvelous invention -- the moon landing was designed with slide rules.
My kids just don't believe that, of course, but it's true.

[eridani]

137. Indeed--they look at you like you chipped it out of flint or something n/t

[Kingofalldems]

5. I think the school had a pay phone. One call was 10 cents.

[CTyankee]

175. Ha! I had one that was a nickel!

[loyalsister]

176. Ours was 20

The one in the hallway of my dorm was a quarter. In order to call home, I would call collect then they would call me back.

[PasadenaTrudy]

6. No. That was the 1970s n/t

[cwydro]

49. I even had a stamp collection! nt

[PasadenaTrudy]

64. I collected coins! n/t

[Jamastiene]

73. And Sea Monkeys

I had Sea Monkeys that I was able to get to the third generation in that tiny little tank. I also had this water frog that was a different species than the ones sold for aquariums today. It was an Xenopus something or the other. Mine lived about 5 years and go huge. I fed him earthworms every day. I had 2 hermit crabs too. Plus, I bought that plastic/vinyl race track and loop stunt thing for my Matchbox cars. I had a remote controlled Trans Am Firebird(like in Smokey and the Bandit) and it had headlights. I used to play Rock On by David Essex in the dark and "drive" it around. You had to drive those on hardwood or some other kind of non carpeted floors. There was no way to take one of those outside and drive it like the RC cars of today. My Tonka trucks built many small cities and hauled GI Joe around to check on the security in the various cities I build with the Tonka truck. I had the most fun doing that and "driving" my TransAm around.

[Agnosticsherbet]

7. We had a party line when I was in high school.

But that was nothing like a cell phone.

Back then, we actually wrote letters and mailed them in envelopes.

[Jamastiene]

78. We didn't have email back then.

A friend of mine from school and I used to make up codes and write letters to each other using those codes. That way, if the teacher found one of our notes, we could prolong the drill of the teacher demanding to know what the notes said. We never told. It was our way of practicing resistance to the conformity and harshness of our teachers in school, lol. I'll never forget using algebra to make a code for the alphabet. It blew one of our teacher's mind so bad that they held us after school every day demanding to know the code. Finally, they relented and said we only have to spend 45 minutes after school until they "broke" the code. Wouldn't you know, it was the one time I had called that teacher a nickname we used for her. She was always so hateful. She ended up laughing at the fact that we called her that and used algebra to code it. Our punishment was finally over then, lol.

[pinboy3niner]

8. No, but I had a car

[MineralMan]

9. Not in the early 60s.

[Chan790]

10. Yes.

Class of 1998. Required to have an email account by the school...they assigned them. Teachers were encouraged to email students regarding academic matters. Everything was logged too. I still remember mine...it's your initials and year of expected graduation (at) school's domain name.

I had a cell phone because I was unable to drive...still am...and my parents wanted me to have some autonomy but be reachable.

Edit: I didn't read the rest of the thread until after I posted...Fsck! You're all very old.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

17. Chan! Chan! Chan! Chan!!!!

Glad someone younger than me is here!!!

[giftedgirl77]

42. Lolololol, your last line is fuckin priceless....

Class of 96 here

[prayin4rain]

116. Me too! n/t

[MohRokTah]

119. BTW, my first email account was created by me on my employer's equipment.

I've been an IT professional for almost 35 years now.

[snooper2]

142. Well, I'm class of 1993, just turned forty so don't worry

You'll be fucking old soon too


I was driving on the farm when I was 11 though LOL

[Chan790]

173. Oh, snoop. :)

You know what they say? "You're only as old as the person you feel...up."

Currently, that makes me 22...23 on Friday.

[Initech]

11. I had a shared family account with a local ISP but that's it.

That's of course back in the days of dialogue up internet when you had to have a second phone line.

[Jamastiene]

79. Or you used your one phone line and

all your friends and family fussed at you because your phone number always had a busy signal. I did it that way, at least.

[scarletwoman]

12. When I was in high school, we had to chisel messages on stone tablets.

It's a damn shame that schools don't teach hieroglyphs anymore.

Now get off my lawn!

[Sherman A1]

21. Early Text Messaging

I remember it very well.

[Jamastiene]

80. This should be a DUzy!

The Now get off my lawn! part made me

[ileus]

13. Nope...we did have monochrome monitors.

[Chan790]

24. Ironically...so did we.

They were a tax write-off donation from a major Hartford insurance corporation.

Never let it be said that CT prep school kids get the best of everything...because if you've never tried to write a 40 page capstone project on a monochrome monitor, you have not experienced hell. The damned words were seared into my retinas for a week past graduation.

[herding cats]

15. How about a Myspace account?

Maybe something like, "Back in the day we had to use HTML to design our own social media pages!"

How quickly things change.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

40. How about, YES!!!

5 millennials!

You're already getting blamed for everything, but you didn't do it. The Baby-boomers did it.


Thanks for being here

[Jamastiene]

84. I always hated that.

The Boomers blamed Gen X too. Every generation blames the one coming up behind them for some reason. It should be the other way around. Whoever has been on this planet longer should have had time to fix some things, not the other way around.

I'll never forget the father of that son of a Bush who was president saying that Gen X were slackers. He sealed his own fate, because we got out and voted en masse to get rid of him.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

87. Yeah, strange how old people blame generations that have yet to be born

I can't believe the post count some of you youngins have. Wow!

For the record, I'm 48 (Gen-X) and have been at DU since 2005...and barely have 3000 posts lol

[Jamastiene]

92. Thank you for this thread, btw.

My memories of all the hours of building "cities" in my yard with my Tonka truck then having GI Joe go around to each "city" are so much fun to relive. I'm 44.

[Alittleliberal]

70. Best thing about Myspace

Page songs

[rogerashton]

16. We had an 8-party landline when I was in high school.

Of course, about 5 of the 8 families on the party line were relatives. Which meant that the relatives could listen in as I was being turned down for dates.

[csziggy]

25. The only reason we had a private line was it was also Dad's business phone

Which meant we were not allowed to talk on the phone much at all. With four daughters, it was an iron clad rule - otherwise the line would have been busy all the time and there was no call waiting in those days to let you know someone was trying to ring through.

We were not allowed to answer the phone until we could take accurate and complete messages, either.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

18. 1 person is 1 person more than I expected

It's Chan!

[TorchTheWitch]

19. when I was in high school we didn't even have word processing yet

I was in high school when that new fangled thing the electric typewriter with the correct button came out. All through high school we felt so privileged to have even two electric typewriters with all the rest manual ones.

[LWolf]

57. My first typing class,

in 8th grade, used a manual typewriter. By high school we had electric machines.

I inherited my first typewriter from my mother upon entering college: an IBM selectric.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

165. wrote all my college papers on a Selectric II

i can still hear it humming away... stirring my thoughts.

sP

[Jamastiene]

85. When I was first learning how to type,

the keys would stick and I had to have more White Out every time I turned around. I'll never forget when the White Out strips came along. I was so thrilled. They worked so much better than turning me loose with the liquid form of White Out. It looked better with just the same keystroke in white then the correct character over that, than the painted on mess I always made.

[TorchTheWitch]

114. remember those eraser pencils with the brush at the other end?

to get rid of the eraser crumbs after scrubbing a hole in the paper when you made a typo?

My dad always had to buy the latest new technology... got the first calculator when I was a kid that was as big as a tablet, only added, subtracted, multiplied and divided yet cost $75. But we were amazed by it. A machine that could do basic math! I remember my mom was so skeptical over whether or not it was accurate that even today (before the dementia anyway) sometimes she checks the accuracy of a calculator result by doing the math herself with a pencil.

We also, of course, got that new fangled typewriter with the correcter button. We ooohed and ahhhed over that thing for years. Even the high school didn't have one yet! Well, they did get ONE in my senior year.

And here I am today still a keyboard pounder because for years I typed on a manual typewriter. I still kind of miss the little bell ringing when I get to the end of a line. But at least I've long since stopped shooting my left hand up to smack the manual carriage return arm.

Remember carbon paper? I hated the smell and the mess, but now I kind of miss it.

[Jamastiene]

131. Yes, and you did have to scrub a hole in the paper to get it to erase, lol.

I cannot, for the life of me, type quietly. I still type like I am typing on a manual typewriter. I just never could adjust. I have to replace keyboards often because of it. I will never forget when the carriage return would malfunction and only roll the paper about halfway. You had to either scrap what you were typing and start over or break out the White Out or that eraser. Then, you had to hope you fixed the carriage return so it wouldn't do it to you again. It never happened on the first half of what you were typing. It was almost always close to the end of the page.

[pinboy3niner]

118. You mean you don't use Wite Out anymore?

[Lifelong Protester]

108. Ditto. We all fought

for the IBM Selectric!!

[Cleita]

20. Buwahahaha!

I had a public coin telephone by the Principal's office that I shared with everyone in the school when I needed to make a call. We didn't even have electric typewriters in business classes and our calculator or "computer" was a slide rule let alone having an email

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

22. Cell phones didn't exist back then.

I think I got an Apple II+ and Novation Applecat modem maybe my senior year of high school, can't recall. But I was on BBSes and MUDs back then. Never did the 'AOL' thing.

(Edit: Hmm, actually, I think I didn't hit my first MUD until my first or second year of college, come to think of it. So only BBSes before that.)

[Jamastiene]

86. Remember when modems required a telephone

to be physically placed onto the component? I will never forget later when we thought 28.8 kbps was amazing. When 33.6 came out, I thought I had died and gone to heaven. A 32 mb video game demo download seemed to take an eternity and was such a HUGE file size. Having a 100mb hard drive was considered huge.

[Erich Bloodaxe BSN]

95. The Applecat Novation was a 300 baud modem.

(Baud being bits per second, iirc.) You had to then plunk down $700 to 'duplex' it and double the speed from 37.5 bytes a second to 65 bytes a second. And I don't think the Apple II+ had a hard disk, just 16k ram. It came with a 5.25 inch floppy drive though, if you needed to actually store data. I gave mine away a couple of years ago to my old boss, who collects old computer equipment. But tech moved fast, and I was astonished at how incredible the 'Amiga' was only a couple of years later by comparison to the Apple II+.

[Gman]

23. We passed notes

And used the pay phone.

[pinboy3niner]

129. We tied notes to pterodactyls, aka Express Mail

[pipi_k]

149. We couldn't afford pterodactyls so

we had to use Ground Service


Unfortunately, service wasn't all that dependable at times.

[RoverSuswade]

151. Yes, we passed notes.

The carrier service was student-to-student (which was free). Occasionally a spied note would be confiscated by the teacher. I remember because I had to go to the principal's office for a paddling.

[lpbk2713]

26. Cell phone?

CB radios weren't even available to the general public until after I graduated HS.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

27. 200,000:1

Good ratio!

Diversity

[NaturalHigh]

28. I don't think we had an answering machine yet.

[Arkansas Granny]

29. When I was in high school these were the things of science fiction.

[bravenak]

30. I had email and a pager. The alpha numeric ones where you could leave messages.

Then a couple of years later I got a cell phone, probably a year after HS. But I did have to lug my stepdad's phone around in high school if I was staying late or going sonewhere afterwards. Huge ass phone! Embarassing.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

39. That's four 30-somethings

Thank you for being here!!!!

[giftedgirl77]

44. Oooh the pagers, that we had first learned to text on...

Do you remember what 143 stands for?

[bravenak]

46. I love you!!!

Lol! I had a little boyfriend at the time.

[giftedgirl77]

104. Ha! Yes.

[madamvlb]

31. I wish...

But the guy next to me in my yearbook made multimillions on computers, I know he just had the president at his home a few months ago for a big fundraiser....should have paid more attention to the nerds!!

[Half-Century Man]

32. The closest thing we had to facebook was scribbling on the stall walls in the bathroom.

We had wireless messaging though, we called it "shouting".
Our cell phone was Kirk and Spock holding the prototype wrong.
Our "E-mail" ran through the server "Post Office".


On the other hand we had platform shoes; I still don't know why, but we had them.

[Jamastiene]

88. I still cannot get over bell bottoms.

I hated those. My mother made all my clothes and made every single pair of pants I wore bell bottoms. I would trip over those things when I ran. I had no idea how Travolta was able to dance in those things.

[Half-Century Man]

96. I joined the Navy after High School

My dress uniform had bell bottoms. 1st year for the return of the "Cracker Jack" uniform.

[Terra Alta]

33. got my first e-mail account(AOL) in 1997 when I was a sophomore.

didn't get a cell phone until about 2001 or so.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

37. You're young, too!!!

Go young people!!!!



You didn't fuck up the planet, you're just already getting blamed for it because you're "out of touch" and "disinterested."

Yep, young people, it's all your fault!

[bravenak]

45. Class of 99?

Me too!

[Terra Alta]

47. yep!

[Munificence]

168. Hahaha

I got my 1st (aol) in 1996. You had to actually contact the local library to sign up for internet service at the time. I was 26 years old.

Oh and I paid around $1800 back then for a DX2 - ah the computing power!

I had a cell in 1992. It was mounted in the car. Can't say I remember many cell phone bills that were under $160 a month because everyone that seen it thought it was "cool" and just had to call someone to let them know they were calling from a cell!

[LeftyMom]

34. I had an email account and a pager.

I didn't get a cell phone until I got a job after graduation.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

36. That makes you a 30-something

Yea!!!

Another member younger than me.

[LeftyMom]

93. 33.

[MillennialDem]

123. Email yes, pre high school IIRC. Cell phone, no unless my mother's counted. Class of '98

[cyberswede]

35. We didn't even have a "teen line"

...like the cool kids did.

[alcibiades_mystery]

38. Is this another Adnan thread?

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

41. Five 30-something members!!

You guys ROCK!

Thanks for being here

[tabbycat31]

68. add one more to the list

[giftedgirl77]

43. Email & a pager...

There may not be many of us but we're out here...

[cwydro]

48. I had a 71 Vega

and a cassette player.

[LWolf]

56. My good friend

had a Vega when I was in high school.

My boyfriend had a Pinto.

[cwydro]

58. Lol! I was jealous of the Pinto owners!

But really what I wanted was a Gremlin! Can you imagine?

[LWolf]

132. Imagine...

[kwassa]

99. I had a Vega, too. I really liked that car.

no cassettes, though.

[Brigid]

50. Not in the '70's.

Class of '76.

[a la izquierda]

51. No. I graduated in 1995. nt

[onecaliberal]

52. Neither existed.

[cwydro]

60. Exactly.

I had neither until later after college and into my working life lol!

[onecaliberal]

125. There were no computers in high school, only electric typewriters.

I didn't get a cell phone until I was 24. My husband had one before me because of what he does for a living.

[markpkessinger]

53. They didn't exist when I graduated high school in 1979! . . .

. . . But I was an early adopter of e-mail, obtaining my first e-mail account (a Compuserve account) in 1985! Wasn't cheap, either -- $12/hr for 2400 baud (remember 'baud' anyone?) service! I would get monthly bills approaching $200!

[LWolf]

54. Nobody did.

PCs and cell phones...they didn't exist, as far as I know, when I was in high school. My first introduction to a pc was almost a decade after high school. Cell phones? A couple of decades after high school, if I recall correctly, and I didn't get one for another decade after that.

[Aerows]

55. Yes, senior year

I had a GEnie account and a bag phone in my car. Note that this was the time when I had rather miraculous technology because I could connect to a VAX system AND GEnie via a 1200 baud modem. It was a celebration when I got a 2400 baud modem, and we won't get into the near orgasmic joy when I got a 14,400 baud modem a 2, count 'em two, MBs of RAM. I was cutting freaking edge.

It looked like this:



My phone looked like this:



I had the bag phone because I worked every day after school as the office manager at one of my parent's shops (close out the daily sales) and all day on Saturday from start to close to close out the week, but occasionally had to go pick up some type of part before school started and my parents didn't want me on the road without being able to communicate at 5:30am. I'd go pick it up, and then dad would bring it to the relevant store when it opened and I'd already be at school.

I had the computer hardware simply because it fascinated me, and bought it with the money I made from work.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

71. 1st Gen! You're probably 40!!

Nothing ruins a movie more than a cordless phone the size of a shoe box. And that was cutting edge at the time.

[Aerows]

75. Got it in 1

LOL. 42, actually.

I was the only person I knew at the time with a car phone.

[Lifelong Protester]

110. Had one of those!!

Hardwired into my car!!

[F4lconF16]

59. Two years ago? Yeah.

Buncha old farts up in here

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

66. Ain't that the truth!

hahaha

Can't believe you're here! We are lucky!!!

[Skittles]

115. I WILL KICK WHIPPERSNAPPER F4lconF16 ASS

YES INDEED

giving WhaTHellsgoingonhere a pass only because he is a Bears fan

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

167. hahaha

[3catwoman3]

61. High school class...

...of '69 (lots of jokes). I had a pale blue transistor radio and there was a princess style extension phone in my bedroom.

When I was in grad school in 1980-81, what I wouldn't have given for a word processor and Google. It would have made doing what felt like a million papers sooooooooo much easier.

When I first started taking after hours call for the private pediatric office I worked for in the mid 1980s, there were no cell phones, so when I was on call I would either have to stay home or lug around a bag of quarters and find the nearest pay phone when the pager went off. Major pain in the ass, especailly when I would be on call from Friday evening until Monday morning.

[Jamastiene]

63. Uh, no.

When I was in high school, a "cell phone" was a huge, ginormous corded thing some people were able to hook up in their cars if they were rich enough to be able to afford them. I'm not sure what those phones were even called, but I certainly had never heard of a cell phone or email at that time. I remember when my family got its first cordless phone. I was already an adult by then. Some of that stuff probably existed, at least later on, but I never even heard of cell phones or email until much much later.

My "latest greatest" computer was an Atari 800XL. It was like a console you hooked up to the TV. I had one game cartridge for it. It was called Joust. I had a subscription to the Atari magazine and one other magazine for computers. I can't remember the name of that one, because most of the codes in it did not work on my computer. They would publish game codes in the magazines. It was about 3000 lines of code that you had to type into the computer each time you wanted to play the game, unless you had a disk drive or cassette recorder. I did not have a disk drive. I had a cassette recorder to store the games. You were supposed to use Chrome only cassettes for it. I could barely afford 2 of those types of cassettes. I used one for my most favorite music, as opposed to stuff I didn't like as much and one for that computer.

Thing was, you could type in that 3000 lines of code and save it, then try to play the game and find out you either made a mistake somewhere or typed in the code for some other version of BASIC. When I did play games, the only one I was able to get to work was Roulette and one other one. I can't remember the other one. I never did get The Witching Hour to work. I REALLY wanted to get that game to work, but never could find either my mistakes typing out the code for it or whether or not I had typed in code for the wrong computer.

There was one computer brand back then, made by Radio Shack, called Tandy. It was the Apple of its day. The rest of us either had an Atari 800XL or a Commodore 64. The Tandy people were snobby toward the rest of us because their computers were so much more expensive and supposedly superior and supposedly would outlast our little Ataris and Commodores.

I spent more time trying to debug code back then than I did playing games. Finally, I gave up and messed around with that square headed stick man we could code into the machine. I finally got him to move up and down and left and right. I never could get him to fire a missile at anything or even move his arms up and down. I just got his whole body and square head to move.

Tennis balls and Pac Man dots were rectangles on the Atari 2600 and if you were lucky enough to learn enough BASIC, you could make the square headed stick guy and get him to do some basic stuff on the Atari 800XL, but he always had a square head. There was just no way to give him any details or round his head off in any reasonable way. I began to despise him, because I didn't have any training in BASIC and did not know how to make him shoot a gun or jump or go fishing or do anything besides run back and forth on the screen. His head was so damn square. It irritated me. I never would have imagined something like HD or actual pictures on a screen of any kind (at least at home).

If you had Pac Man in any way, shape, or form, at home, you were the most popular kid on your street. If you had Asteroids too, kids would just camp out at your house every day to get to play those two games. Pac Man had rectangles instead of dots. My Atari 2600 version of games (including a "tennis" game that was a square ball and some lines) was hard as hell to play. Something was wrong with my joysticks and you had to press the fire button really hard to get it to fire or anything else that was controlled by the fire button.


We had machines called Beta. They were the Apple to the VCR's PC. I had one of those. I was able to buy a couple movies for it then it went obsolete. You would press this hard ass button on the machine and a huge ass section of the machine would pop up with sharp metal pieces for you to insert the Beta tape into. You would push the thing down and hope it stayed down, then play the movie.

I also had a Video Disc player. Imagine records that play video. The video discs came in these huge plastic containers. You would pull the rounded lever part down and it would open a slot on the front of the machine. You would slide the big huge plastic container into the machine, then pull the plastic back out. It would leave the video disc inside the machine. For longer movies or more content, you had to pull the lever down at the end of side 1 and slide the plastic thing back in, then turn it over, and slide it back in again to turn the video disc over. Then you would play Side 2. If you watched a video too many times, the disc inside the plastic container thingy would turn white and the video would start messing up on you, like records do when they are worn out from being played a lot. I watched Blondie's Eat To The Beat video disc until it did just that. I got a second one and did the same to it too. I still have both of them, but not a player. Most of the videos you see on Youtube that claim to be the Blondie Eat To the Beat video disc have the wrong version of Atomic. The original Atomic video did not have clips from Shayla and other Blondie videos back then. It was mostly the band playing in some abandoned warehouse looking place with a lot of different people dancing. A lot of the videos you see of songs from Eat To The Beat online were made much later and were not the original videos. Those original videos were MUCH better.

[tabbycat31]

67. email, yes cell no

I got my first cell phone at 20. I got my first email (AOL) at 15.

[treestar]

69. No way. I had a calculator.

that was scandalous enough.

[tammywammy]

72. Yes, graduated 1999. n/t

[GummyBearz]

74. Stone tablets?

Bunch of old fogies in here. When I was in high school we were advanced enough to have smoke signals and were on a huge break through creating something called the "cloud" with them. I think some other company followed our work and stole the idea though.

[LibDemAlways]

76. i had snail mail and a landline at home. I'm a

substitute teacher and was telling a 7th grade class about the concept of a pay phone recently and even that was an alien concept.

Now every kid has a smart phone and a huge presence on social media. I feel like a dinosaur.

[IDemo]

77. That would have been about when the "Television Typewriter" was invented:

Note the "For men with ideas in electronics".

[MannyGoldstein]

130. Don Lancaster is a god.

TV Typewriter Cookbook, TTL Cookbook, etc.

[IDemo]

145. I read my share of Don Lancaster and Radio Electronics way back

The Guru's Lair is looking a bit dated but still chock full of great resources. Is he still trying to convince the audiophile set that the human ear can't distinguish between digital and turntable audio quality?

[madfloridian]

82. Ha. We didn't even have a computer.

[jberryhill]

83. No. And marijuana had seeds in it

[eridani]

139. And stems!! n/t

[Munificence]

169. and

was ditch grown compared to today.

[Historic NY]

89. Hell I didn't even have a calculator....

but I did have a Remington manual word processor.

[Luminous Animal]

90. Yes. I did. In 1975. I was an early adapter.

[tularetom]

91. I had two tin cans tied together with a string

and an abacus.

Oh, I did have a "portable" radio. It weighed 20 lbs and took like 16 D batteries to power the thing. I hauled hay a whole summer to save up the money to buy it. My brother glommed onto it after I went in the Army and ran over it with his motorcycle.

It wasn't until 10 years later that I bought my first 4 function calculator.

[Lifelong Protester]

111. Ok, that nearly made me spew!

[NuclearDem]

94. I did.

An ancient Motorola brick phone and a hotmail account, but still.

[TheCowsCameHome]

97. High school? Are you series?!?!?!

Crops needed pickin' and my 12 siblings had no paw.

High school was for the Vanderbilt and Carnegie folk.

[Hekate]

98. I had a bunch of pen pals, and Mom made me buy my own stamps

It was fun, though. One girl was in West Germany, another was in Scotland. I decided to have a go at family genealogy and ended up corresponding with a bunch of great-aunts and great-uncles I had never met. They were really nice to me.

The school used those punch-cards to record our information for the state or something. One of my parents' friends told me and my boyfriend that we should really get into computers because it was the coming thing, and all I could think of was Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. Bleah.

My boyfriend (and my Dad) had slide rules.

One rotary phone in the house; no privacy whatsoever. Couldn't take pictures with that phone either -- for that I had a Brownie box camera and a roll of b/w film.

What else? Oh, the maximum speed limit on Oahu back then was 35 mph.

This thread makes me laugh. I'm glad there's something about this world my generation helped to create that you like.

[greendog]

100. No, but I had a 8-track tape player and a copy of "Blood on the Tracks"...

[notadmblnd]

101. hell when I was in high school, they were still teaching shorthand

I know, I know.. some of you are asking- WTF is shorthand?

[MohRokTah]

102. We had a single rotary dial phone and used snail mail, AND WE LIKED IT!

Now get the fuck off my grass.

[Lifelong Protester]

103. No, and a lot of college kids

were happy there was only one phone in our dorm, down the hall, mostly for ordering pizzas.

[titaniumsalute]

105. I had a rotary dial phone and we passed love letters in class

[Munificence]

170. Hahaha

Will you "go" with me?

[titaniumsalute]

179. Oh my..yes.

Circle YES NO MAYBE

I hated to be denied so I always stuck MAYBE in there just in case. It was better than a NO outright LOL.

I'm in sales now. Maybe I should send proposals that say will you buy a my X. YES NO MAYBE?

[snappyturtle]

106. We were finally lucky to get off the party phone line and have

a private number! And we passed notes.....worked unless a teacher saw us do it! Different world.

[Lint Head]

107. No but I did have a Famous Monster Magazine collection.

[MohRokTah]

117. That was such an AWESOME magazine.

It got me interested in doing makeup and for years I did special getups for Halloween.

[Lint Head]

120. Me too. I had the very first issue and kept buying them for

years. When I moved out on my own my Mom threw them away. Needless to say I was not happy.

[MohRokTah]

121. That collection would be worth a fortune today.

The runs were never very large.

[Lint Head]

144. Yes. That's why I was so upset.

[chillfactor]

112. my grandfather drove a Model-T....

did not have a black-and-white tv until I was 12

telephone numbers still had letters in them and only party lines available

girls had to wear skirts to school....no pants

need I go on?

[Munificence]

172. NO NEED TO GO ON!

Take it easy there ol' timer - catch your breath. I've got some oxygen here right next to me that you can "huff" if ya need it.

[cloudbase]

113. No.

My slide rule was pretty high tech, though. I've still got the one I used in college.

[olddots]

122. we didn't have fire yet in high school

There was no atmoshere even just cheese .

[MillennialDem]

124. Email yes, pre high school IIRC. Cell phone, no unless my mother's counted. Class of '98

Also depends on your definition of email... as "we" (me and one my friends) had various aol and prodigy accounts back in middle school... in fact initially they only checked some basic tests on credit cards so you get a card generator and get an account. It would last like 3 months. LOL. Nothing ever came of this fraud, but hey we were dumb 12 year olds. Don't remember if you could actually send email to the entire internet back then or not

I also had various BBSes I would go to in middle school as well.

I think a true ISP besides AOL/prodigy might have been in high school though. I don't remember exactly. I definitely had one by '96 at the latest though, when I was 16.

[marlakay]

126. I had a pink princess phone!

[gopiscrap]

127. We were lucky to have a tv and a telephone

[LadyHawkAZ]

128. Phone was on the kitchen wall. Commodore 64 was in the den.

Any questions?

[meaculpa2011]

133. We had a black phone on a table...

in the hallway.

We got dressed up to call my grandparents.

[CTyankee]

177. They were called telephone tables. We have one from my husband's parents

house. It has a helpful little shelf for the telephone book.

[eridani]

134. 1960-1964? Not hardly!! n/t

[meaculpa2011]

135. And I got my first cell phone in 1986.

It came in a briefcase. $29.95 per month and 25 cents per minute.

I had a pager and no one had my cell number.

When the pager buzzed I could decide to call... or not.

Being able to respond to clients immediately paid huge dividends.

[Codeine]

136. We had a rotary phone that weighed like five pounds

and a big grey TRS-80 with a cassette drive into which I had to painstakingly type programs from the pages of Compute! Magazine if I wanted to actually use the damned thing.

[deutsey]

138. The closest thing I had to a cell phone back then was this:

[Bettie]

140. Neither existed when I was in high school

We had a phone with a cord and mail that came via the post office.

[Tom Ripley]

141. No, but I had a bong just as long as my arm

[closeupready]

143. I had an Atari game unit and a Rubik's cube.

[MADem]

146. I had a stone tablet and a chisel and a mallet--and I was lucky to have 'em!!!! nt

[mmonk]

147. Post Office box and a rotary phone.

[ProfessorGAC]

148. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!

I wouldn't have known what those were when in was in high school. The net wasn't public and i think the only people who used the analog version of cell technology was NASA.

(Houboldt, the pioneer of long range, low wattage microwave communications) was from the town i grew up in. So was Goeken who was the tech guy to McGowan's business side at the start of MCI. Little factoid there.)

[TheKentuckian]

150. I'm trying to remember if Compuserve at 300 baud had email, I don't think so and I had a pager

which ran like 8 bucks a month (I did get some weirdo discount).

Not even the richest kids had a cell phone and most didn't have a pager either but I wanted a way to communicate without being at home so I got one. I'm not sure why more people didn't have one, they were super cheap and all but bullet proof. I think my mother liked that I had it as well.

I got email for sure in the mid 90's, I guess, but had to change each time I switched ISP's so I was excited when I could get a Hotmail in the late 90's.
The 1st cell phone was like 2000ish and it was nearly 100 bucks a month for like 200 minutes and texts were like a dime or a quarter a piece to send or receive.

Yes, my first Internet connection was really 300 baud, that was not an error and it was bad ass crazy hi tech shit.

[DonViejo]

152. The Army was still using rocks when I was in high school so,...

nope, didn't have an email account or a cell phone. My four sons had email accounts but, we didn't allow them to have cell phones. We were assisted with the cell phone ban by the fact we live in an area that doesn't have cell phone reception.

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

153. I graduated in 1961 when phones still had dials on them.

[RKP5637]

154. No, but my car had power steering, big deal way back then!!! n/t

[Butterbean]

156. Good God no.

I didn't get my first email addy until college, and didn't get my first cell phone until I was married. Shooooooooooot.

[northoftheborder]

157. are you kidding???

I was in high school before even the "Princess" phone! Black rotary dial. Long distance too expensive for us teens to call out of town friends. Pay phones every where, and it only cost a nickle for three minutes.

[Douglas Carpenter]

158. I was already out of the USAF when the pong game was first invented - I was past 40 first time I saw

the Internet

[Populist_Prole]

159. No. Went online in 1999. 1st cell phone in 2004

I'm not exactly Mr Leading Edge. Plus, I graduated in 1980, so that pretty much kills it right there.

[applegrove]

160. Ottawa was a test city for interact in the early to mid 1980s.

That is as far as technology went back then.

[Xithras]

161. I had a slot in my locker door.

If my friends wanted to communicate with me, they dropped their notes into locker 449!

[Vinca]

162. ROFL - we had DIAL telephones. I swear it's true.

[RebelOne]

163. Are you kidding?

I went to high school in the '50s when personal computers or the internet were not even in existence.

[tenderfoot]

164. Your gadgets show your age and illustrate the effects of growing up under the Reagan Revolution.

It's actually kind of frightening.

[Blue_In_AK]

166. They didn't exist back then.

[PowerToThePeople]

171. No, neither really existed. Well, there were cell phones but they were the briefcase kind. n/t

[CTyankee]

178. I do remember the phones that folks put in a shoebox in their cars.

But that was in the 80s IIRC...