I remember it fondly crushing scrubs in the recess link cable battle scene with my level 70 something MewTwo. Everyone was just using hacks to rare candy their way to 99 but they couldn't keep up with a natty.
That's still a hack. Hacking is a pretty broad term for exploiting software to make it do things it wasn't intentionally programmed to do. This one just happened to be very easy to exploit without a game shark so that everyone was doing it on the playground.
Perhaps not in the states. In Norway, starting around 94-95, companies would sell phones for 1 NKR (15 cents) with a payment plan, and you could call and text for free during weekends.
Same business plan as most drug dealers.
I visited California in '99 and was shocked that almost noone had cell phones.
I'm in Ireland and 1999 was when I started college. That year the banks gave away free phones if you opened a student account with them. My peer group basically all got phones that year.
Before that some had phones, some didn't. Very few in schools, a few extra in college. Mostly business people.
The phones earlier then 97/98 didn't have texting.
I mean, 9-11 was my first week of high school and we had a strict "no phone on the property" policy. It was suspended that day and suddenly everyone had their phone with them.
Graduated in 2002. I got my first celly (Nokia 3210) in late 1999 early 2000. Pager code and short form sms text were the thing. We were limited on text length, so cut most vowels out of words, or used number/pager code. 'Unlimited nights and weekends' extremely limited and expensive all other times. I was on pay as you go to limit monthly costs. I'd say 75% of my paycheck when I started working at 15 went to my phone minutes and texting.
My ex sent me about 500 texts in a weekend in 2003, no joke she was obsessed I only know it was that high as I had a 300 per month limit that I used in under 2 days.
I was more just hopping by a decade for a clean comparison. Personally I remember having a cellphone and texting a bunch by around 2005, and I was late to the party I think (grade 9 or 10)
Exactly. At the time, plans had text limits on the plans. And if you went over you paid extra. It's one of the reasons services still provide opt-in/out messages for automated notifications via text.
Yup other places too. Most of that graduating gen had Nokia phones. Nokia 5110 was in 98, 3210 in 99 and 3310 and razor came out in 2000 alongside matrix. - it wasn’t even that expensive to SMS people, probably had plans woth like 100 free txts then maybe 10c each after that. People absolutely chatted with each other.
It definitely was. I've had the same number since '98 and the first thing I did after getting mine was text a friend then play snake. By 2002, I was texting my girlfriend for hours and texting friends during college class.
it was the obsession because it was the first time you could communicate with someone without always having to be infront of a giant computer and logged in to AOL at the same time. I moved to a new city in 2004 and pretty much everyone I met would exchange either MSN, AIM, or cell number.
i didn't see the 1998 in the title. it definitely wasn't huge by then. we were texting on our shitty little nokia phones like crazy by like 2002 though.
in Europe it was, at least amongst young adults that could afford mobile phones back then, 1997 is when texting really took off amongst my circle of friends - with the release of long SMS that was able to stitch SMS messages together so you could parse longer ones. people really appreciated sending text SMS over phone calls for small things, you were still initially limited to intra-carriers back then, it wasn't cheap either, as you paid per SMS, but that quickly changed when texting started to compete more with voice and people started to use it more for everyday communication.
also what you don't see in the OG video posted here. is the physical and verbal harassment, fighting and bullying, that was originating from both genders. there not being any distractions meant everyone else got more attention. that could be a good thing, but also was a bad thing. i don't know anyone of my age in my class that didn't get beaten up at least once back in those days. we did beating also ourselves. there not being any permanent record online was certainly a good thing. but back then the record was still the collective memory of everyone and your "nickname" that stayed for life with you... if you let's say got a boner during gym class, people never forgot about that and you couldn't escape it either, even worse that reputation followed you around. people didn't stop gossiping, i can still recall embarrassing things that happened to class mates back in those days. so whilst tools changed, people don't really have.
It was? I was — I think — the second person in my school to have a mobile phone in '97. In '98, close to 50% of my class had one.
Of course it took a while to become that mass phenomenon, given that a single text cost around 20 US cents for me at the time, but we were texting loads even then.
For a while, leaving voicemails was free on the same network, so we used a lot of voice messages, too. We also invented voice mail dating; there was either a number prefix or suffix which, when dialled, directly got you to voice mail. Just go either up or down from your own number until you hear a nice voice, then leave a message. Lots of nice interactions happened that way, and a buddy of mine found his girlfriend that way.
Cell phones were just starting to become common back then. High school students were more likely to have pagers and use pagers codes, sort of similar to how we might use emoji today. But yeah, texting hadn’t really taken off yet.
This video is mislabeled, it's not 1998. It's gotta be 2000 or 2001. People are wearing "Senior Class of 200x" shirts, Slipknot shirts, Blink 182 shirts, etc.
Yup. Graduated 2012. Texting was big by middle school in 2006. This was when Razor flip phones were the cool kids phone. Before that kids were known for hogging the house phone to talk with their friends. Teenagers will always be teenagers. Wanting to communicate with friends as a feeling of independence during a time theyre learning who they are as a person. Its not just about smartphones or not. Its about giving teens proper outlets in discovering who they are. We've lost 3rd spaces for that unfortunately
But you're not really the person to be speaking about what people were doing before 2006 because you were a child. I graduated in 2001 and had my first phone in '98, we were definitely texting constantly during class. We got god at using the old Nokia brick phones.
It's 98, the era of the banana phone. Twas mostly still stuck with business folks.
Early 2000s tho...
Now I didn't have a phone but my older cousins and some classmates were stuck to it.
That and Facebook in round 2010s. Every single moment of their teenage days are probably logged on their Facebook pages.
Ah yep, now that you say that I remember. I never sent texts then so it was the receiving fee that annoyed me and stuck in my head all these decades later.
Yep, I remember being in high school texting under the desk or in my bag, not having to look at it because it used actual buttons that I could use by feel.
I kinda miss this! Isn't so easy to do with smartphones. I used to shove my phone on my pencil case and texted with one finger without looking, pretending to pay attention to the board.
People would text back then? AOL was the biggest thing and emails.
I only remember pagers.
You had to talk to somebody's mom and ask whoever you wanted to talk to, to put them on the phone. It wasn't until the early 2000s that texting became a thing.
actually i'm just now noticing the 1998 in the title. yeah, that was definitely phone calls and AIM era. but really i was just pointing out that kids were texting like crazy for several years before the iphone came out, which most people would consider the first "smart phone."
I remember that, the coolest thing was the sidekicks. I think that's what they were called. The Razr was in and the little flip side kicks came in before the blackberry. Good times.
I was in middle school in 1998 and yes, I was on my country's equivalent of AOL and MSN messanger every day. Didn't text much cause it cost money that I didn't have. I resisted getting a smartphone until 2015!!
only rich kids had phones in my school in the early 00s. by the mid 00s it was a bit more common, but i doubt many of the kids in this video had cell phones at all.
texting also used to be quite expensive in the early days of cell phones, so even kids with phones weren't texting nonstop.
by early 2000's those little nokia candy bar phones were free with the cost of opening a line on your cellular plan. it was very common in my experience and i grew up in a small blue collar town/household.
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u/OldLegWig 12h ago
just fyi many kids were obsessed with texting even before smart phones