Mobiles Old and New

[maltrab]

I was in the telecoms business when mobiles first came out, they cost a fortune back then not just for the phone but the airtime rental and call cost, if my memory serves me correctly £25 a month for airtime and up to 50p a minute for calls

These days the phones are cheap, unless you queue up every six month for the new Apple product, one thing that was much better in the early days was if someone called your phone it would ring until you either answered or they hung up, which gave you the chance to answer, unlike these days where is whips off to voicemail, which I know you can opt out of, but that defeats the object, yet network providers will only allow 30 seconds to answer the phone before it heads of to voicemail

 

[captain clutterbuck]

I was lucky I suppose started on pager so if any issues had to run around looking for a working payphone initially cash then card but eventually got an early Nokia phone as I was on call for initially mainframe operating system support and then network Company covered the costs so I never ever saw a bill so no idea how much it cost . As the usage spread it became a millstone around your neck because when issues arose they would just try and get anyone to help .

 

[theatrically_inclined]

I worked for BT from 1989 for 25 years. We all had pagers, but our job meant were were often on sites with no phone line. We had one mobile between six in the office. Similar to this Motorola - but bigger! When BT was promoting more private use of mobiles they offered a free phone to all staff, when phones were simple and expensive. The airtime was also subsidised, I only paid £15 a month until I left BT!

 

[Marianna]

I worked for four or five years as process control programmer (but mostly computer hardware specialist) in a factory making glass tubing. Because the PDP-8 computers were old and prone to failure, I was on call 24/7/365. Back then phone service was all land-lines, so if I wasn't at home when the shift supervisor called, they were out of luck. I didn't even have an answering machine, so they were really out of luck. The production line didn't stop, but the gaffer had to pay close attention to all the gauges in the control room, rather than relying on the computer to monitor and control a couple of critical ones.

I had left that job before mobile phones came into common use, thank goodness!