When my daughter wants to know what her friends are wearing to a party, she can find out within mere seconds. All she has to do is send out a group text on her cell phone, and she's almost immediately reading her friends' responses. It's a fast-paced, technology-driven world our children's generation is living in [1].
I'm in my mid-30s, and back in my day [2], we didn't have cell phones. If I wanted to know what my friends were going to wear to a school dance, for example, I had to call each of them on their family's landlines [3]. It was very time consuming, especially because I didn't have all of their phone numbers memorized, so I had to look up each one in my address book. While it's amazing to see how far we've come with communication and technology, there was such awesome simplicity in the precell phone time. Keep reading to take a trip down memory lane with some of the fun, weird, and pretty cool ways we communicated with our friends before cell phones.
Walkie-Talkies
If you were lucky enough to live close to your friend's house, communicating via walkie-talkies was the absolute best! You just had to make sure you had a good supply of batteries handy.
Home Phones
Consider yourself lucky if you were able to convince your parents to give you your own line, but most of us just had one home phone the family shared that was usually attached to the wall, so everyone in the house could hear your conversation. If someone was using the internet, anyone who called you got a busy signal, and you'd get kicked off the internet anytime someone accidentally picked up the phone. Fun times!
Secret Gestures
You and your friends could communicate without words by using secret hand gestures only you knew the real meaning of. Thank God your parents never realised your take on swear words!