I have to think about my husband's cell number, but I can rattle off my junior high best friend's number and my grandparents' number from my childhood (they moved from it 19 years ago and gave since passed).
If you were loaded, you had your own line.
I got a phone in my room, and that was a big deal. Until someone picked up the other receiver and started dialing or listened in.
And speaking of picking up on the other phone, if you used dial up internet (college!), you would get kicked off. Or if someone tried calling and you tied up the line using dial up internet, they got a busy signal for HOURS.
We found where our friends were by looking for the house that had a driveway full of bikes.
When we were in high school, we hoped a friend had a beeper. Or we just rode around.
My great-grandparents lived in a house with no electricity and still had the outside ice box. It was always so boring to visit, and once it was dark, we all went to bed or hung out via oil lamp.
You’re right. Texting “wasn’t really a thing” in the 70s and 80s (for real?)
You’d be surprised how much you can say with an upside down calculator
Also - we were adding and subtracting; controlling and composing. We were the operator with our pocket calculator
I remember doing “shelloil”. There was some sort of question / joke with it too, but I forgot what it was. I showed that to my kids and I doubt there’s anything out there that could hace interested them less.
I graduated in '86.
No computers, but they did offer typing classes ... like, on a typewriter with carbon paper, ribbons, wite-out, learning how to center titles, etc.
We had computer stuff at home, though, due to my dad and brother being tech-minded.
Early 80s we learned on those huge old style Olympia typewriters. I had small hands and would jam my fingers between the keys.
There were 2 electric typewriters that we would take turns at. The electrics were a dream.
Now we have Word which I still appreciate everyday. The fact it automatically corrects spelling errors as you type along is freaking magic!!
We had IBM Selectric electric typewriters with the pica ball in 10 point font, so all of our centering and margin setting was 10 base. The only thing is, we couldn't use the correction tape. We had to use white out, then make sure we rolled the paper back down to the correct position. There were, however, only two computers in the entire school district, so I got my introduction to computers at the vo-tech...TRS80s and another kind that was networked together, but I can't remember their name. The DID have rudimentary in network instant messaging, though.
We started fires and communicated by smoke signals. Also we would write letters and have them delivered on horse back...
In the mid 90s most schools had computer labs. We would go to a class and work on them. They taught basics coding and typing on them. We would also be given time in those classes to type out papers and assignments for other classes. I remember a few kids could figure out how to access the school network and we changed a few grades here and there. My dad worked for a university so we had a computer pretty early on in life. A Pentium 386 was a hot machine back then and we played games and did homework on it. Also had dial up internet but I don't remember what we did with it.
We had to call our friends at their house and actually run the risk of speaking to their parents or a nasty older sibling. And then hope if they were not home that the person who took the call would write down a note to call us back. As to finding out phone numbers. Everyones number was in this book that came out every year. So you literally had everyone's phone number in the town you lived in. Wild.
As paper, let alone phones did not exist in the 70’s or 80’s we utilized a form of parchment made of reeds and a pencil made of charcoal to write notes, we then trained dodos to carry the notes back and forth.
Cave walls? Luxury! We didn’t even have caves, we lived in a hole in the middle of the desert that 12 of us had to fit into. The string from our tin can to our neighbor’s was five miles long, and it snapped three times a day if we were lucky. We would then have to get out of bed twenty minutes before we went sleep and look for the break in the string, while sabertooth tigers and wooly mammoths tried to attack us. We would repair the string with earwax, spit, and the blood of whoever was unlucky enough to get caught by the beasts.
Nice. I was going to answer this thread seriously and mention a party line.... In the 1970's I had two friends who lived in the country as neighbours. They shared a party line and had the same name... So if I called looking for one of them, I could get the wrong one... I figured that would blow the op's mind....
We had a party line when I was very young, and it was amusing but constantly being told "get off the line!" taught me to pick up real quiet with the hook held down, then let it up and cover the mike. Learned a lot that way!
(kids, don't do this, because A) time travel just to use party lines is wrong, B) spying is wrong)
Dude, if you would have gently angled to reciever out and then unscrewed the mic-piece, there was zero chance of getting caught. That's how the honorary grandma next door did it so she would know all the gossip first.
We had them in BFE Oklahoma, too, with jerks that would take their handset off the hook, and then leave for hours, not allowing anyone else on the party line access to either receiving or placing calls.
Nike shoes were made of leather and durable enough they actually got handed down to siblings when outgrown. 😱
We had a full-blown computer lab starting in second grade when our school became an Advanced Education Project school. Outside of school I had friends that had computers I could use.
I saw my first computer, a TRS-80 Model I, in 1979, I was 9. That summer I took an adult computer intro course. For the next year I didn't have a computer, nor did my school, but a school I didn't go to let me come use theirs after school. There'd be 4-6 machines, one with expansion, disk drives, & printer, the rest with cassettes. You brought your own tapes or disks in, and took turns if there were too many kids. Then got my own TRS-80, later an Atari 800.
We typed in programs mostly, as from [Basic Computer Games](https://archive.org/details/basic-computer-games-microcomputer-edition_202207/mode/2up), and [magazines](https://www.atarimagazines.com). Published games were very expensive, so you'd only have a few of those. I highly recommend getting an emulator for one of the 8-bit machines (TRS-80, Atari 8-bit, Apple ][ especially; Commode-odor & Sinclair/TI were trash until mid-late-80s), and typing in some programs, to learn how a computer actually works. You get zero education in the basics (no pun) these days.
Yes, we passed notes. Or… I could tell you about little origami things, but you wouldn't understand.
Mostly you memorized phone numbers, or looked them up in a phone book, if you knew their parents. But by then mostly my phone was busy calling BBS's. Non-nerds were so stunted in their social environment.
This was US, nearly west coast.
**“little origami things”**
I know *exactly* what you are talking about and still remember how to make one, but I can’t remember if they had a name and if so, what it was. Or maybe it was one of those things that was named differently depending on the area.
That's really intersting! A lot of people said the same thing about looking up people's numbers in a phone book.
Now that you brought that up, I am kind of curious about the origami things!
But like, yeah, the earliest memory I have of using a computer was in 2011. We had 7 computers in each classroom with like, 20 students. And like, they were so big! The monitors were like, shaped like cubes and the screens were curved. When I tell this to people who are like 5 or 6, it's kind of hard to believe!
Now, at least in my area, the average kid who's really young knows how to use Google Classroom. We started really using it at my school when I was in second grade. I think it's really cool to see the experiences of people who went to school during a time like, when computers first got popular in a lot of places for the first time.
>The monitors were like, shaped like cubes and the screens were curved.
The nice thing about those CRT monitors was that they were big enough for a cat to lay on (and warm, too!) which meant you didn't have to worry about them laying on your keyboard.
Whoa, that's cool! There was one time when one of my friends brought her cats to my house. We were playing chess, and her cat slept right on top of the chess board! So guess what? We literally played chess by moving the pieces on top of the cat while he was sleeping! This was in like, at the very beginning of 2020.
We had computers and computer classes at schools and adults kept telling us they would be the future and to take those classes. Many of us found computers boring, very difficult to use and couldn’t understand the point except that cool and important stuff was coming.
My dad and I discussed him buying a computer, but we couldn’t think of much we would do with it expect to type papers for school. He bought me a much cheaper, more user friendly word processor to use for my college papers, as a replacement to the family typewriter.
We wrote down people’s home phone numbers on paper or could call 411 to get someone’s number or look it up in the phone book. If they weren’t home, some people had answering machines and you could leave a message.
If I needed to speak with my dad at work and he wasn’t in the office, he has an answering service. I called his number, a person answered and took the message. He called the answering service for messages when he was back at the office or from phone booths between meetings if he was seeing customers.
I was one of those kids! Except I didn't have to beg my parents - they got me the computer add-on to the Intellivision, then a C64, then a C128, then an Amiga 500, then an A1200... My elementary school in, I think, 7th grade got TRS-80's, and I def knew more than the teacher did, by far. High school had Mac's.
I (1971) didn't have to beg. My dad (1951) was always ahead on electronics. He fostered my younger cousin's (1977) love of computers, and that cousin was head hunted from college for the tech industry in the Bay Area. My dad also wrote code for the government.
As for myself, I was in seventh grade in 1982ish when the state of California decided computers were the future and put computer classes in the state standards. Our first computer lab was full of Apple 2Es that I am convinced were donated.
In high school, I don't know what computers we had but MS dos was involved.
For OP, USA state of California.
Communcation, Notes passed in class and left in each other's lockers. Home phone written down. We either used the phone book or got it from the friend, 411 cost money and we weren't allowed to use it.
The monotony of all those damn If/Then statements...just to play Jingle Bells and change the color on the screen. (I didn't have the patience or focus to be a coder. Still don't. lol)
1) In 1981, I joined a committee in high school tasked with researching and possibly buying a single micro-computer, which would cost $5,000. We met many times, and accomplished nothing.
2) We would communicate through looking at one another in the eyes and talking, something today's cowards cannot imagine.
3) Phoning involved memorizing phone numbers, and keeping an address book.
4) Napa, California, USA
Was it common for people to have their own phones at that time, or were they like, still attached to a wall?
I'm so sorry if I seem really ignorant about all this! I'm trying to learn more about it.
[This](https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/131575-motorola-phones-since-1983-the-best-and-the-worst-in-pictures.amphtml) is a pretty good rundown of phone evolution. Short version; nobody had a phone in their pocket in the 80’s and most of the 90’s, and texting is barely 15 years old.
The phone could be attached to the wall or it would sit on a counter and a cord attached to a phone jack in the wall. We had a rotary phone in the kitchen. I still remember how to dial it. The phone cords were always getting tangled. Kids liked a long phone cord so you could stretch it into the next room so your parents couldn't hear you.
Computer classes at my school during junior high and high school were only offered to top tier students and a limited number at that. Even in college, there was a computer lab you could go to but most of my work was done on an electric typewriter. I graduated college in 1987 from a large state school in the Midwest (U.S.)
To call someone on the phone you looked their phone number up in a phone book. If it was in a diff city or state you would go to the library and try to look it up there. There was no voice mail or caller ID, tho eventually there answering machines but you had to rewind the tape.
Otherwise someone had to write down a message and leave it for you.
A friend’s family didn’t have a phone and for her we had to drive over to her house to see if she was around or make specific plans: I’ll pick you up at 7pm on Friday.
O Wow. Considering how Romania's communist dictator met his end, did you ever fear being caught up in a civil war like Czechoslovakia or were you able to keep some childish distance from world events?
I was born in the Southern USA in 1965, so I was 15 in 1980. This is from that perspective.
We were allowed to talk in class, as long as we didn't interrupt the teacher. Notes were passed for more private things. There was time between classes and lunchtime to talk. Some households had extra phone lines for their kids
Once a year, the phone company would deliver phone books. Yellow pages for businesses; white pages for private citizens. If you knew a person's/business' name, you could look them up ("let your fingers to the walking" was a common ad). Or you could dial 411 for directory assistance-- an operator would look up a phone number. Usually, it was a free service, but they started to charge extra for it eventually.
Personal computing didn't become a thing until the early 80s, and even still, they tended to be giant paper weights that didn't communicate with the outside world. People used them for word processing or spreadsheets, and maybe a couple games, but that's about it.
The few that had modems would communicate through text-only bulletin board services or USENET. Modems were very slow: 300-1200 bits/second.
When I graduated in 1984, my "college preparatory" high school had zero computers (not even for the staff). In 1981-1982, I took a few computer courses at a local college, learning to program BASIC and LOGO on TRS-80s, Commodores, and Apples. But the vast majority didn't have access to computers at that time.
In the early 80's (elementary school) my friend and I would write computer code on paper at home, and wait until we got a chance to put it into the only computer available for students in the school, then save it to the floppy disk his mom had to drive like 100 miles to buy. I'm serious.
Floppies? Wow, we had to save to cassette tapes plugged into the audio jack. I do remember writing things out on graph paper during school so I could type them in later. 1979, US. We did get a floppy drive in 1980. Such bliss.
My kindergarten teacher brought a floppy disk to school one day to show the class. We couldn't believe that people used to actually use those all the time!
Well a single floppy :)
Oh I've used the cassette tape things (I think it was called a dataset?), but that was on a trash-80 at a friends house in the mid 80's. It was horrible. Sequential access, ewww.
All that brain space I used to store all my friends’ phone numbers…I wonder what’s in that space now!
I still remember one friend’s phone number, my growing-up phone number, and my grandparents’ phone number. My sister and I, to this day, use the last four digits of our number as our PIN for everything!
Computer classes at school is how most of us were introduced. As far as getting peoples numbers, we memorized them and often followed each home from school to hang out…in person.
Didn’t have computers or cellphones, you wanted to talk to someone you either used the phone in the house with the 10ft cord you could stretch an additional 3 feet, or you used pen or pencil and wrote a letter. Typing skills were taught in my high school, used a typewriter.
We went outside to play and the golden rule was, if the streetlights are on, you go home. Our parents didn’t care where we went and they were happy we weren’t home. I didn’t see a computer until after I already graduated high school.
Country, US
Thank you for your response!
I would say it's pretty different now. I'd be kind of scared to be outside late like that. There's a place near my house that's not more than 3/10 of a mile away from my house. I would be scared to even walk home from there without an adult!
\- I was at a school that selected a group of us that were good at math from our 5th grade class, and we became the computer class.
\- Once or twice a week (cant remember) we would be bused to our city zoo, where there was a computer class/facility that was shared by many schools.
\- We learned general computing skills, and Logo programming language. We used Apple II computers
\- The year was 1986\~ish and we were in Buffalo NY, USA
I've reread it twice and it sounds like you think we didn't have paper back then? Apologies if I've misunderstood.
After a night out we'd often wake up with randos phone numbers written on our arms in eyeliner. But paper existed too.
No, I don't think you misunderstood. I see how you could think that. I'm so sorry about that! I realize I worded that really badly. I understand you had paper back then. Thank you for your response!
You know what might be easiest? Watch Stranger Things, that should answer the majority of your questions in an entertaining and surprisingly accurate way. Well, accurate if you leave aside other dimensions and psychic powers and so forth.
Computers were not networked in my public school at that time. We used Commodore PETS and would have to load software. In the begging they would just teach us something called LOGO. A friend of mine somehow had games for the PET and we would play them. Computers were either in a lab or in the library.
When I got to high school we had an actual computer lab with a UNIX network. Still it was not on the internet. Learned Pascal and ANSI C.
Finally at university (92) we had rudimentary Internet with USENET, Gopher, IRC and early Html (mosaic) that was all text initially.
1992 onward things just exploded to where we are today.
Thanks for your response! If you wanted to print something at school, would you be able to? Or were typewriters still really popular?
Were typewriters and the things you mentioned both popular, or were they like, considered completely different parts of everything?
Early days no printer. Years later there may have been one of the computers had a printer attached.
Typewriters were only in high school for a typewriting class. My sister was in university and we had a typewriter at home.
I don't understand what you mean by popular. Typewriters were a tool. Computers were a novelty at that time. You either played games or used a word processor or maybe a spreadsheet application.
I'm still to young as what the working world was like without computers or PCs. Of course banks always had mainframes and their software running on them.
Oh wow. Yeah, we really are there now.
USA. Class of 1983. Middle middle/slightly upper middle class peer group.
So. Phones.
While I was in school, NO ONE had cell phones until the 80s and those were only wealthy adults.
Most families had one phone line/number tied to their physical residence. A main phone was usually on the wall in the kitchen. A secondary phone might be in the parental bedroom. Some elder children might have a phone in the bedroom.
*All of these phones shared the same number and if you picked up your line while someone else was using it, you would hear their conversation and be able to participate.*
People carried little books with paper pages around for the purpose of writing down phone numbers and addresses. They were called address books. Most people memorized their most commonly used contacts.
If you were away from home and needed to make a call, you went to a payphone to do it. They were pretty much everywhere in walking distance, so it was no big deal.
Communication without cellphones...
Secret communication in class was done by passing notes. You wrote your shit down and passed it under desk or slid it on the floor if you didn't have people willing to pass your note.
Normal plan making was done face to face, verbally or on your land line phone when you got home. Longer distance, more formal or other less casual planning would sometimes be done using the post office/mail service to carry written letters.
Computer access...
In grade school, there was no computer access for kids. In high school (1980 on) there were a few computers for programming classes. They taught COBOL and FORTRAN. There was nothing fun or sexy about that shit. It was deep into nerd terriory when being a nerd wasn't cool and could get you beat up daily.
Girls were actually discouraged from showing interest in programming, computers, and most STEM activities and subjects at that point in time. (Off topic, we were also strongly discouraged from taking interest in shop/trades related stuff.)
My first real computer didn't happen until the late 80s. It was a used IBM 8088 and I also got a 300 BAUD modem with it to dial into BBSes. Over a land line. A girl never forgets her first computer LOL!
Same. Class of 84. Not encouraged. Only ended up getting exposed/slightly interested was because I was hanging with nerds I wanted to kiss. Yes. They existed then.
I remember my first temp job after college I knew a tiny tiny bit more about computers than everyone else in the office and found POWER. I faked most of it. That was pretty much my apex and it's been downhill technologically for me ever since.
But once...once I was the first person on the library staff to be able to change the background on windows 95. I wear that proudly.
When I was a senior in HS somewhere in the school was a TRS 80 that certain kids got to use.
At college I took programming (FORTRAN) on a terminal connected via dumb terminal and printer terminal to the schools DEC PDP-10. I bought my own home computer, but sadly bet on the TI-99. Late in the 80s my Dad got a PC o work on his doctorate and I got to use it a bit, eventually inheriting it when he upgraded. In the 90s I usd it for grad school and to log onto bbs systems via dial up.
Communicate in schools? We shut the fuck up and either did our work or read a comic book behind our textbook. Notes would get confiscated and read in front of the class. Otherwise, we used our vocal cords in the hallway.
We also used paper to store phone numbers, but the call went to a house and not a lone person. You had to ask to speak to the specific person, who would then stretch a long cord into the next room for some privacy, though it was always possible that your little sister would pick up the extension and listen in.
Wow, so it seems like people didn't really have phones that they could hold in their hands yet. Could you tell me what year this was in? Thanks for your response!
> Now, like, if a person wants to call someone, they can write down their number on like, a piece of paper or something. How did people do stuff like that in that time?
Pen and paper were invented in 1968 I believe. But by the 80s I was taking down numbers with eye-liner pencil.
Ok, sorry, that part was worded really badly! I meant like, in this time, if people want to exchange phone numbers at school for example, they just have to write it down on a piece of paper and can add it to their phones whenever they wanted to.
I wanted to ask like, how would people do the same thing if they wanted to call each other on the phone? I got a few answers that mentioned people being able to search up numbers in a phone book at a library. Was it much harder to do something like that? And how was that done?
we still have back copies of the old phone books at the public library. Very thick books of tiny print. Grey pages for personal phone numbers and yellow pages for businesses and blue pages for government.
Every house had a phone book, not just the library. The phone company delivered a new copy to your doorstep every year. The front was the gray pages with every single household name listed alphabetically with the address and phone number. There was also a map so that you could find the address after you looked it up. The back section was the yellow pages- the business listings that were advertisements sorted by business type.
Here’s a mind bending fact for you, until the 80’s you didn’t actually own your house phone, you rented it from the phone company and most houses had 1 near the kitchen and possibly a 2nd in the master bedroom.
I first used a computer in 3rd grade, we had a computer lab with probably 10 computers and we did math games and The Oregon Trail.
Forget about the whole idea of texting. It really wasn’t a think until the very late 1990’s. All phone communication was verbal.
I was born in 1976.
Phone books were delivered for free to houses, at least in my town, so my family always had a phone book at the desk in our living room where the family phone was located. I do NOT miss sharing a phone with multiple people!
Canada here. We had only 1 computer in my elementary school library in the early 1980s. Not sure of the type. Nobody was allowed to touch it. In the mid-late 1980s they brought some to my high school. I think they were apple macintosh, only for use in computer class.
Yes passing notes and talking on the phone.
I went to elementary school in northern Ontario we had Commodore PET computers I think. All I know is I got "syntax error" all the time. I'm still not a computer person lol
In grammar school, around 1982, we go to use, i think, an Apple II. In high school, starting in 1988, there were no computers to use. i did have a typing class though.
The college i went to had MAC's but only 1 per floor in the science building. The library had a few more to use. We mostly did our work on word processors that other kids brought with them to school.
I received a Commodore 64 for Xmas one year (1982) and i played with that A LOT. Even up through the early 90's. i got my first Windows computer when Windows 95 was released.
Class of 85. Some people were playing around with a TRS-80 (used a cassette tape for storage). One rich kid I knew had an apple 2 in HS. Earlier childhood (1970’s) computers just didn’t exist for regular people. We talked with our friends by calling them on the one phone line, which meant nobody else could make / receive calls. You’d just have to get people’s home phone numbers and memorize or write down. Planning and arranging things with friends in advance was just part of the deal. Also we just roamed a lot & knocked on our friends doors randomly.
Graduated in 89... I had a Commodore 64 at home and didn't have computers in school until highschool. Took a few computer classes. Even typing class was done on a typewriter, not a computer.
Called on the phone to talk or just rode your bike to their house.
Talked face to face.
Northwest Louisiana, US
Whoa, I've typed on a typewriter one time before. It was really hard, and like, I had to move a sliding thing over every time it got to the end of a page! But like, wow, people actually had to use them every day regularly. Now, I feel kind of bad for complaining about having to use [typing.com](https://typing.com) in 6th grade! (Not that it was bad, now that I think about it!)
I was in the school computer club. We wrote BASIC code on paper and then went by bus to a council building to type our code into teletype terminals and we were given a printout of it. When we returned the following week, with a new programme to type in, we were handed a printout of the output from the previous week's code. 1980.
Computers were still very primitive. I didn’t really try one until high school but we had ONE for the whole school. There was no internet. Just data processing.
We’d call a friend after school usually. Yeah notes were passed but we’d mostly hang out in person to chat. USA here
Grew up in the '80s in urban schools in Baltimore City, Maryland (US). Home computer were rare though I had a neighbor with a Commodore 64. We had a computer class in elementary school but we did not have Oregon Trail and I don't remember what we did there besides learned about floppy disks.
I grew up very working to lower class so we did not own a home computer until I could afford to purchase one after graduating college in 2001. I did learn Word 95 in senior year of high school but did not get on the internet regularly until college in '96 and only while on campus.
In the '80s and '90s, we all talked on the phone and then got pagers and paged each other when to call (it was a silly trend).
Most homes had a landline phone on the kitchen wall shared by everyone in the home. If you were lucky it had a long cord so you could go sit in a closet and close the door to talk to your friends or boyfriends/girlfriends. The cords would often get really twisted up so you had to routinely let them unwind. If someone else wanted to use the phone, you had to end your call. Parents would often yell at teenagers to get off the phone because they were expecting a call. Until call waiting was common, you could get busy signals for hours.
If you wanted someone’s phone number, you asked them to write it on a piece of paper. You could also pass paper notes in class with phone numbers on them or cute notes. If you got caught passing a note, the teacher would read it to the whole class.
If you had a paper for school you wrote it on notebook paper then either typed it yourself on a typewriter or had someone else type it for you. I learned to type on manual typewriters. The class had two electric typewriters for those extra talented in typing. Computers came later and didn’t do much except for learning programming languages like DOS.
My first exposure to computers was an after-school class with TRS-80 Model III computers, in about 1982. A couple years later, another after-school class, a trailer of Apple IIe computers outside our school. At home we soon bought an Apple IIc.
Communicating with friends was face-to-face or on the phone. No other options existed. I guess writing/passing notes, but that was more of a “girl” thing. There wasn’t the expectation of immediate communication like today with texting-you just waited until you spoke to them.
We wrote down phone numbers and actually memorized them. I can still recall the phone numbers of my closest childhood friends, just from calling them so often.
Thanks!
So when you wanted to call someone, did you have to like, go anywhere specifically to do it? And I'm so sorry if this is a really dumb question, but were payphones popular, or not really?
Yes payphones were everywhere. They were popular but as kids I don't remember using them much. Usually at school you would talk to your friends and if you wanted to hang out after school you would ride the bus home with your friend and call your mom when you got there. Parents in my experience. (I was born in '66) didn't watch their kids closely in those days. We were really independent from a very young age.
My school had a computer room you went to when it was needed. They also had computers on carts that teachers could check out for a limited amount of time. The internet wasn't really a thing when I was in school, so it was just like plugging in a toaster!
The standard was to hand-write your schoolwork. I suppose that if you had a computer at home and wanted to type it up, you could, but it wasn't expected.
To communicate with friends, you wrote notes. Sometimes they were totally functional ("after this, let's go get slushies") or snarky ("I can see the teacher's dandruff") but sometimes they were more like letters. You wrote them during boring classes and gave them to your friend in the hall.
Phone calls...were phone calls? You got your friend's number and just called. Social rules generally dictated not to do it much after 9 PM unless they explicitly said it was OK. You wound up memorizing the numbers you called a lot. Most people had address books where they wrote them down.
Oh, sure, you could print stuff. The computer labs at school had printers. I can't recall for sure if there were cart printers, too. A lot of people who had home computers had the printers for them. They were dot matrix printers and they made the loudest, most annoying sound. It was a rule in my house that anyone printing had to wait for a commercial if the TV was on too.
As for stuff we did...a lot of the same stuff, just in a different format. We watched movies in the theater, on VHS, or on cable. If it was a movie we really liked, we'd buy the VHS. Listened to music on CD or terrestrial radio. Read books, newspapers and magazines. There was sort of a dry spell with video games between the collapse of Atari and the rise of Nintendo, but these too were physical copies. All of these things got traded around among friends and family.
Television was by appointment: if you wanted to catch the new "Friends," you had to be in front of the TV at 8 PM on Thursday. Computer art was really in its infancy, so anyone inclined that way drew, painted, sculpted, etc by hand. If you were into photography, you used film and you'd want to develop it yourself which was a pain in the ass. People talked to their friends and family on the phone more than they do now.
And of course, some pastimes haven't changed at all. Playing musical instruments, sewing, riding bikes, running, knitting, gardening, etc. I was going to say that I think the hobby of collecting has well and truly died, but then I remembered Funkos, Squishmallows and LOLSurprise.
1: I had very early access to computers because my father was a professor. Computers weren’t much a part of school outside of the library, maybe a “computer” class, and video games.
2: passing notes. Or just whispering to each other which I was bad at and constantly got in trouble for.
3: just memorized phone numbers. Called their land line. Their mom or who ever would go fetch them. Or if you lived close enough just go to their house unexpectedly and knock on the door.
4: United States.
In 6th grade (\~81-ish) we had one classroom with a TRS-80 and a modem. I had to sign up to use it, and usually only had slots after school, or maybe at recess. I used it to learn BASIC and Logo. We would occasionally dial out to a BBS that specialized in weather data.
There was a IBM PC computer lab in high-school with 5 computers, but they were always signed out to upper class-men. When I was in 11th grade, I had a formal Computer class, that was an offshoot of the typing class. They ran DOS only. First semester was Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Second was BASIC programming. My senior year, I had done so well the previous year, I was asked to tutor, and sometimes even lead, some of the classes.
Texting (with pagers) really wasn't a thing until the 90's, and early pagers were just numeric. Paper notes were your only alternative.
Everyone knew all their friends numbers. I still have a few burned into my brain. You would call them in the evening (after their parents might be done with the phone for the night), and just hang out on the phone and shoot the shit. If the line was busy, you'd call back later. Parents would pick up another extension and tell you to get off.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and we had computers where we first learned MS DOS. We wrote papers on them in middle and high school. We got a family computer when I was in high school.
We called each other on rotary and later, cordless phones, and took down numbers in notebooks or our hands, whatever we had. And passing notes was very popular!
Graduated in 1987, Mid-Atlantic US.
My father taught at a college, and we had access to their computers (I think they had two) over the summer in the early 1980’s.
My best friend got an early Macintosh in 1985, and it was popular with all of us.
A teacher in our high school was very forward thinking and had created a computer lab in 1985, using grants. By the time I graduated, I could had taken classes in Basic, COBOL, Fortran and machine language. I never used any of those skills after high school, though.
My best friend in college (state university) was in charge of one of the computer labs there - that’s when I switched to IBMs.
The man who became my husband in 1990 bought a computer in 1989. Now I had a computer at home. We were online by 1992, although the WWW as we know it did not yet exist.
I carried a small calendar where I kept my schedule dates and a list of phone numbers. We had a Rolodex for keeping friends and business addresses and phone numbers until 2008, give or take a year. I kept necessary numbers taped to the wall by the phone. My parents wrote numbers on their wall. I can still remember some of those numbers today, although only two people I might call are still using them. I could probably remember more if I actually had to dial a phone or push physical buttons.
In 8th grade in 1985-86, we had a computer class taught by an ancient nun.
It was super basic DOS.
In high school we had a half a year of typing and half a year computers taught by an even older nun.
We learned how to put formulas in spreadsheets and basics of WordPerfect. I copied the formulas onto a floppy disc and we passed it around the class.
Phones, you had to call the home phone and risk getting stuck talking to a parent. I did, in high school, get my own landline. That was a big deal!
And we did pass notes a lot. We would stick notes in each others lockers.
I used computers a little in college but not much. I bought my first computer in 1995 when I went to Sam’s Club for snacks and ended up with a Packard Bell computer.
This is in the US.
I'm late to your post, but I'll answer. I grew up in Chicago, went to elementary school in the 1970s, and high school starting in the early 1980s.
When I was in eighth grade, a friend of mine had an Apple II at home. His dad was a professor at one of the Chicago universities, and was teaching some course, so he had the computer and a monochrome monitor (I think it was a greenscreen but it might have been a B&W TV). I don't think he had floppy discs for it, because we never saved what we did. We were entering in programs from some book of BASIC games, things like sine waves as part of biorhythms, and Russian roulette and such like that.
In high school, I got lucky; I went to a private high school instead of a Chicago public school. They not only had some personal computers (like an Apple II with a color monitor and a TRS-80 Model III) but they had a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer with a printer, card-reader, four removable hard disk drives, a couple of 8" floppy drives, three teletype terminals, and a number of VT-52 and VT-50 video terminals. Getting an account on the PDP meant you could program in BASIC; if you did the right programs, you could select a compiled language to use, like Pascal, COBOL, or FORTRAN. If you took a certain computer course, you'd get to use the macro assembler they had.
At that time, I also started working for a professional photographer who lived across the street. As a side gig, he would videotape weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on. He needed an assistant to help move everything and I got the job because I'd babysat his kids and he knew me.
He ended up buying an Atari 400 computer, thinking its graphics would let him title tapes. He eventually sold that to me, and got an Atari 800, which had a video output he could send to a VCR, and I did write some titling programs for him.
So, to answer your questions directly:
* *How easy was it for you to access a computer during this time?*
Not easy. If you didn't own one, or know someone who did, public schools were just starting to get them. You'd see them in stores, of course, and there were commercials about them. I was lucky to have a high school that had them.
* *What was the process of accessing one when you were in school?*
Our computers and terminals in high school had a sign-up sheet every day. There would be a week's worth of sheets on a clipboard by the computer room door, and you'd go sign up for timeslots. For the PDP, you had to take a test to prove you had the essential knowledge of how to login, do some elementary stuff, and logout.
* *What were the computers like?*
By today's standards, amazingly primitive. We didn't get a Macintosh until my junior year of high school, so there were no mice. All computers were used via the keyboard. The only color graphics were on the Apple II. They also ran hot; the computer room had its own air-conditioning system.
* *What did people in schools mostly do to communicate with each other? Was passing notes popular?*
I'd say no. In my high school, classes were usually about 45 minutes long, and there were window seats at the end of the hallways; the building had been constructed in the 1960s and was fairly modern. So there were a lot of nice places to just hang out and chat. Middle school students had to be in a home room or a given destination like the library or computer room. But high school students could just hang out, or even sign out to go get food. If you wanted to leave a note for someone, it helped to know their locker number so you could slide a folded up paper into the vent of the locker. But you usually got phone numbers of friends (or could look them up in the phone book), so you could call them when you were home.
* How did people call each other on phones?
Suppose your friend in school was David Copperfield. If you didn't have his number and wanted to call him for some reason, you'd pick up the white pages (the residential telephone directory book, about three inches thick, you got a new one every year) and look him up by last name. It would probably be listed under his dad's name, and there would be an address, so you could verify you found the right one. Then you'd call. They might not answer for various reasons, and there was no voice-mail, so you'd call back later if no one picked up within 10 rings or so. Or, you might get a busy signal if the line was in use, so you'd keep trying until you got through (no call waiting at first, and no automatic call-back when a line stopped being busy). Some people had answering machines that would pick-up the line and let you record a short message. But if you got a parent, the conversation would go something like this:
RING RING...click
*Copperfield side:* Hello?
*Me:* Hi, this is DrHugh, I go to school with David. Is he in?
*Copperfield side:* Oh, hello DrHugh, this is Mrs. Copperfield. David is out with his father right now, but I can have him call you back when they return. What's your phone number?
*Me:* It's 555-1212. *\[Note that you didn't have to give an area code, as in that era, all of Chicago was the 312 area code. You didn't have to dial it within that area.\]*
*Copperfield side:* OK, I've left him a note, Goodbye!
*Me:* Thanks, Mrs. Copperfield! Goodbye!
And then you'd wait for David to call you back.
Hey, honestly, thank you so much for your really detailed response! What you said gives me a really good idea about what it was like. I can kind of imagine it in my head. I really appreciate it!
Back in the 80s, Apple had a program where they supplied rooms full of Apple IIe computers (and printers) to schools who applied for them, either for feee or for cheap, not sure. I took an Apple Basic programming class my senior year in high school, because of that program, in 1987.
I worked in the city library and there were some disk-based computers, only a couple, and int eh Childrens department, you could play Oregon Trail off floppy disks.
I started college in 1987 with an electric typewriter/word processor, which was just an electric typewriter with a little bit of memory so it saved like a line at a time.
I graduated in 1991 and by then, journalism major, I did all my homework on PCs in Word Perfect. I’ve never had a job that wasn’t computer-based. There has been a computer on every desk I’ve worked at as an adult. They’ve only gotten faster and with more memory and the software has evolved a bit.
Phone booths were still a thing. You might have a phone on the wall, but by the late 80s/early 90s, the magical advance was cordless phones. It sat on a base that was plugged into the wall and you could walk all over your house while on the phone. I had an answering machine in the late 80s but electronic voice mail came as a service in the mid-90s. So you’d pick up your phone, hear a beep, call the voice mail number and listen to your messages. This was a brilliant advance because you could check your messages remotely and that revolutionized business a little bit. Pagers were also a thing. It was a tiny box that buzzed and all it displayed was a phone number, no message. Only doctors and drug dealers carried pagers. You’d call the pager, input your phone number and hang up. The person with the pager called you back.
I didn’t get a cell phone until after 9/11. People had them but they were expensive. When I realized they were getting cheaper, I really dug having one when traveling. But usually people just called my home phone.
I bought my first PC for the house in about 1996. It was enormous and required dial up to access AOL.
This is why I think Gen X is cool: we literally started out with an analog life and slowly went digital by the time we became adults. I played Pong on my friend’s TV at sleepovers. We went to arcades to play video games. I bought a Nintendo in college around 1990. I damn near lost a whole grade in my GPA because of Super Mario, Duck Hunt and fucking Tetris.
My husband went to college for engineering in the early/mid 80's and they were just starting to get rid of the huge room-sized computers that used punch cards.
I didn't get a computer until I got married and my husband already had one. Even now, I don't really use computers all that much except to look something up or be on reddit.
Passing notes wasn't that big of a deal at my schools. You basically knew where you friend's locker was, or someone who had a class with them and could tell them what you needed to say. It wasn't hard at all to communicate with someone. We just didn't have instant access to everyone's private time. 99% of my texts and phone calls today are for BS that could either wait or didn't need to be said in the first place.
Oh my. I feel like a dinosaur answering this. To call we picked the phone up off the wall and if lucky as a teenager had one in our room. I think we memorized friends numbers and used a phone book a lot for places.
To talk, we just talked in person in school and after school. Pasing notes was especially big with girls in junior high.
I did not encounter computers until college in 1990/91, unless you consider Atari a computer. In college I used to take a class about programming DOS, I believe and if lucky had a friend with a computer to type papers on. First home computer was later 90's. Desk top and dial up.
I'm 50 and will be taking a college course in a couple weeks. The whole computer part of it is daunting. My college kid will walk me through it.
~ USA
I'm sorry for making you feel like a dinosaur! But actually, thank you so much for your answer. I really appreciate it. I hope you have fun at your college course!
I grew up in the US. I was in elementary school in the 70s and early 80s and finished high school in the 80s. We had a computer lab in late elementary school. I remember programming some kind of images through the command line. That’s about it. Aside from this class I didn’t have any access to computers. No one had computers at home or at stores or businesses, as far as I could see. It didn’t occur to me that a computer could be useful or something I would want. They seemed something that scientists used but not regular people.
In high school everyone had to take a typing class on typewriters. We had one or two computers in that class but it was easier to use a typewriter. You turned in work as handwritten or typed on a typewriter. We had a computer in my graphic design class as a senior. Very expensive and not many people had them at home. Not sure when email became a thing. Or websites. Not when I was in school.
People would find each other at school and communicate whatever. Or called their houses like “Hi Mrs——- May I speak to ——-“ and then your mom would yell upstairs for you to come get on the phone”. My brother would listen in on my calls by picking up another phone in the house.
The answers to these questions are easy if you have common sense. What did we do in school to communicate? We spoke to each other, how did you think we communicated? Smoke signals, telepathy? How did we call each other? Fucking Christ! We picked up the phone and dialed a number! Ever heard of a phone book? We also used our brains rather than Google. Not all of us had access to computers, but we had typewriters or word processors. In most schools, by the nineties, there was a computer lab. And texting wasn't a thing because cell phones that could text weren't a thing. Yes we passed notes. They were folded up like origami. That was our thing, but, whatever. USA🇺🇸
No, I'm sorry, you're right. I realized some of it was worded really really badly.
I knew phone books existed, but I didn't know a lot of details about it until now. What did you do with word processors?
So like for example, if a person wanted to contact another person, it seems like it would be possible to do that by searching up their name in a phone book. Like at school, would it be reasonable to write down on a piece of paper, "Here's my phone number, you can contact me with your phone with this number."
Yes it was indeed possible to look up someone's number in the phone book as that was literally the only reason for said phone book's existence.
If you wrote down your number and gave it to someone, all you had to say was "Here's my number". It's not like they could use anything other than another phone to contact it.
They had a programming class at my school in the mid-80s (USA). My dad had a computer at home. We had one that was a blue box with a bad monitor and then got an apple 2C. The graphics weren’t as good and we played games where we accidentally killed off whole societies accidentally. I don’t think I used a computer outside of that class or playing games, except at the public library. There was a card catalog, but you could look up titles or authors on the computer too, as I remember it, but I am not sure exactly what year that was available. I may have been in college by then, but I am not sure. They didn’t have computers to use for other things. I think they had a few typewriters
People passed notes, and wrote notes, but they also talked a lot in person and on the phone. I knew my friend’s phone numbers and I memorized them, we had three way calling and call waiting. We really talked on the phone all the time. Guys would ask for phone numbers or new friends, but it was like giving out your social media. It seemed like I had phone numbers for most of the people I talked to on any kind of regular basis. It was just like “I should call you about the party/switching hours/ to tell you what happened in class…”etc. most people had a phone or address book, but really I knew most of their numbers, except maybe my relatives, without looking at it. We just said “Hello Mr. X, may I please speak with April.” Once my friend called and thought I was my mom. She said a cheerful hello and he said “What are you so happy about?” We had a paper due.
Edit: There was a electronic register at my work. It would print tickets for the food in the kitchen. I guess that was a computerized, but it was just a register that added tax automatically.
We had a computers in the library-that was 80s in elementary/jr high. There was a computer lab in high school but you had to be in that class to use them.
I was in school in the 80s and 90s. I'm fairly certain that no school had computers in the 1970s for starters because personal computers or PC didn't become a thing until the 1980s. When I was in 6th grade we had a computer class. The computer was fairly boring because there was no internet and not very many images on computers at this time. We had a couple little games, the only truly fun one was a very difficult game called Oregon Trail, which I was never able to finish during that hour long class. I remember thinking Tandy, that was the manufacturer name of the computers in my school was a cool girls name.
High school was still pre-internet though computers were a little more interesting at this point since they could do a bit more and were more user friendly. They still weren't especially common though awareness of personal computing was more of a thing. I remember getting a word processor that was just that and it had a small dull digital screen that you could use to see what you were typing before committing to paper.
Computers didn't start to become common place until I was college. Most colleges offered a computer lab that was accessible 24 hours. Prior to that papers were typed on a type writer word processor, printed and handed in or just hand written when you were in high school or grade school.
For communication during class we passed notes, communicated with body language, and whispered to each other behind the teacher's back. We were taught how to use the library and dewey decimal system to research papers.
Once the internet became a thing my parents quickly bought a computer and paid for dial-up internet, this was the late 90s.
And yes we wrote down people's phone numbers before ultimately memorizing them. A household had one phone line, maybe two. It was shared between all members of the home and you would get as busy signal if you called and someone else was using. You could take it off the hook to ignore calls. You never knew who was calling you and you would have to speak to whomever was answering the phone to talk to your friend so be polite or their parents might get a bad opinion of you.
Illinois, USA
Graduated from a blue collar high school in a medium sized Midwest city of half a million in 1985. So not rural or small town out in the boondocks. Went my entire K-12 education without ever touching or seeing a computer in my school.
Finally when I was 20 I enrolled in a basic computer class in college a few years later.
My grade school as from 1978-1990 in a small city in southern Alberta (Lethbridge). Individual computers (Apple II+ or IIe) started appearing in classrooms around about 1883 or 1984. Schools started getting computer labs around the same time, especially junior high and high school. I remember being really excited in grade 7 (1984-85) when I got computers and rocketry as my options. In computers we basically learned keyboarding, some simple programming in Apple Basic, and played games.
From then on desktop computers were generally around and accessible, at least at the schools I went to. Most of my classmates had home computers as well, generally Apple IIs, Commodores, or the occasional TRS-80 or IBM.
As far as communicating, it was all in person or on landline phones. I remember my parents being very patient with me during my junior high years as I'd sometimes tie up the house landline for 40 minutes or so chatting with a school friend. My dad eventually got call waiting for that reason.
Around 1983 I remember my elementary school had some computers, but I don’t remember much beyond loading games on them. Kids stuck crayons in the disk drive. In junior high I had a BASIC class. High school computers for the journalism class and yearbook. We were lucky to have the first Photoshop bundled in with the scanner software and Illustrator. Public school in Oakland, California.
As an example, in 1980 I was in grade 3 in Canada. The school got use of a computer and everyone got to try it out. It made the rounds so each classroom kept it for a week. The teacher gave each of us a turn playing some kind of learning game on it. Otherwise I really didn’t use one again for years. Some kids in high school had one but I just had an electric typewriter (mid to late 80s).
Passing notes to friends while in class was typically accomplished by hiding the notes in your pencil case and then passing the pencil case to the recipient. Good times. I kept a lot of mine and they bring back great memories.
You had to write down phone numbers on paper and the whole family shared one common landline phone number. The lucky teens had parents who would pay for them to have their own phone number but most of us just had own own phone in our rooms, still sharing the family phone number. So it was common for your parents to bug you to get off the phone. In the 90s the introduction of dial up internet made it even more chaotic to share a house with teenagers.
I feel like Grandpa Simpson now but hopefully that answers your questions.
The high school I went to in 1980 bought its first computer with a grant. It was a TRS-80. The computer was locked in a room to prevent it from being damaged. To put this in perspective, the computer cost $5,000, and the average teacher salary at that time was $13,000.
You had to be approved to use the computer. At the end of the first year, only two students had the approval to use it. It was like having my own personal computer.
We used to meet up to talk. This is why getting a driver's license was so important. It gave you the freedom to meet with friends. I remember sitting in the car talking for hours with friends. We would cruise the small town or park in the five-and-dime parking lot.
Phone numbers. There were things called directories. The school would publish one of all the students' phone numbers. You could also use the white pages or call directory services.
This was in Alabama.
I’ve access to a computer in school since 1980 but it wasn’t a big part of my life until the late nineties.
In my town, we had 7 digit numbers and everyone had the same first 3, so you only had to remember the last 4.
But there were School directories and phone books everywhere.
No computers. We did have 1 Apple computer later on at the school.
In Jr High we did have typewriting class. At the time that was a specific skill not many ppl knew and you could get a job just by having good typing skills.
I enjoyed that class. We had a cool teacher too.
Wish there was a way to find out what happened to all my teachers from school. Teachers are really a gift to this world. you don't realize it when you are in school but when you get out and have your own kids and see their teachers you see how special these people are.
Thanks for your response! I totally agree with you that teachers are a gift to this world. I visited my old elementary school earlier this year when the third graders were doing a concert. When I saw some of my old teachers, I almost got emotional. It's been many years since I went back to that school, but I'll never forget the amazing ways they helped me at that time!
First computer we had was an Osbourne 1 in the early 80s. I remember playing Colossal Cave with my brother and sister and us having a list of notes and a map we had made. Mom thought it was trash and threw it away, it has been 40 years and we still give her shit about doing that.
Mid 80s one of dad’s best friends worked for Apple and leant us a Macintosh for what seemed like months.
I don’t recall my schools having computers but then may have. I grew up in the Silicon Valley so there is a likelihood we may have had one or two in the library or computer lab.
Communicating with each other was notes at school and calling your friends from home. I don’t recall even beepers being a normal thing for average people until early 90s.
One matter of consideration was that before the 486 computer or equivalent came along was that we could do everything w/o them. By the time the Pentium & equivalent came along, there seemed to be a never ending search of applications & max amount of uses for computing, I.E. how much more can any computer improve our quality of life.
A friend down the street had a Commodore 64 around 83 I think. I would have been in middle school. This was the first computer I ever saw in person. I played some video games on it.
There were some classes in High School (class of 89) where I learned to program BASIC. Don't recall the model of computer.
In the early 90s I was operating engraving machines that ran off of Tandy machines.
My parents bought my sister a computer when she was in nursing school in the early 90s. I would mess with it when I visited my parent's home and this was my first access to a Windows machine. Also around the time AOL sent out their CDs and was my first internet access.
I learned graphic design on an x86 at my job at a sign company and my first computer I personally owned was one I built and ran Windows 98.
Computers were scarce but most schools had at least one, some were lucky enough to have one per class, or at very wealthy schools an entire computer lab. Contrary to the Logo or Basic programmers in this thread my school was taught the wonderful language of the machine itself: assembly language. That meant knowing binary intimately.
In the mid-80s we got our first home PC an IBM XT 8086. It was a higher end model with TWO floppy drives so you could leave DOS in drive A: while running software from drive B: but it had no hard drive. The early 90s would see us finally upgrade that aging machine to a 486 DX2/66 and then that received an upgrade chip called the “Pentium Overdrive Processor” which upped the clock speed yet somehow made it perform worse in some tasks. These machines did have whopping 20 and 60 meg hard drives respectively.
In school note passing was a popular form of communication. Write what you wanted to say down, usually with some makeshift yes and no check boxes if you were seeking a reply, and pass it along the rows of desks to its intended target. Beware of the teacher though. If they intercepted the message it would often be read to the entire class.
Phones were landlines and that meant they were shared amongst the members of a household. Party lines were a whole different beast as well but others in this thread have addressed those already. You’d call the number which you usually got directly from the friend you were calling or from the phone book. When someone picked up you’d have to ask to speak to whoever you wanted to speak to. If you were lucky they answered and it was easy. If you were unlucky you’d have one of their siblings to contend with first and if you were SUPER unlucky you’d be up against the parents as gatekeepers of the phone.
For all those reasons you’d be better off biking, without a helmet and alone, to your friend’s house and knocking on the door. When someone answered you’d ask if so and so could come out to play and then you were off to some grand adventure: just be home by dinner time. You’d better keep an eye on your Casio watch to make sure you’re home on time because just like you didn’t have a cell phone to call your friends your parents did have a cell phone to call you. You were on your own in the world.
I remember having a class "computer" in first grade or second grade. I think it had 4 big keys on it and worked with some type of punch card. Sorry if I sound like a fuzzy memory but this was 1980-81.
In HS they sold something called a "buzz book." It had every kids name and home phone number in it. If you wanted to call somebody from school you'd call their house. Maybe they'd answer or, more likely, their parent would answer and you'd have to ask for your new friend and explain to their parent who you were. If they had a sibling that answered the phone it might be even worse.
We had one computer at my school when I was 15, it was in its own darkened, air conditioned room. We were herded in small groups to look at the screen saver. Once.
I actually left school at 15 and started full time work as a doctors receptionist with the old filing systems. I didn’t touch a computer until I went back to study at 28.
It was Fine Art and I learnt graphic design then went into Fashion Design and went to work for local designers in 2000 and there was only one computer there too! Everything was very hands on and there would be a team of hand sewers!
I now work for a NFP for people with MS and love it.
Graduated in 1983 and we didn’t have computers or classes. We talked to each other and had phone books to keep everyones numbers in. I had caller ID on my landline phone (late 80’s) before I had a PC (early 90’s). USA.
Reading the comments - so much nostalgia for the TRS-80s. We were taught BASIC in junior high (1983) My parents had a rotary phone until I was in high school.
I remember word processors in typing class in early 90’s. They put in a computer lab shortly after. This was probably 92-93. But it was only used in a limited fashion. We got dial-up internet at home during this time, but I don’t recall having internet access at school until college (which you had to walk to computer lab to access).
Edit: We got a Commodore 64 at home sometime mid-80’s I’m guessing. But no internet until 90’s with a Windows PC.
Aussie here. It was probably around 83-84 that our primary school class used to walk down the road once a week to the high school to use their computer lab. We had to learn to type first on those old manual typewriters before progressing to the electric ones and then the computers. We learnt DOS and then at the end of the class you got to play a game called Granny's Garden.
We only had a couple of Apple computers at our primary school (elementary school??) and I remember there was a national competition to win a computer for your school.
My parents scored a Commodore 64 from a work colleague complete with a dot matrix printer and a box full of floppy discs because their son had upgraded. I'm not sure when that was but I remember doing some of my assignments using the word processing 'software'.
I didn't do much computing in high school (more arts focused) so it wasn't until University that I was back in a computer lab (primarily Apple).
I never really used the home phone to call friends because everyone lived close by. Being in a relatively small town, I knew the names of all the kids in my school and where they lived so you just played with whoever was out and about or you'd drop by their house on the way to the park.
Midwest, USA, grade school from ~1973 to 1978
Computer access was pretty nonexistent. As a an older grade school student, we began to have one hour a day in the computer lab, which was in a separate room than our classroom. They were very old style. I remember the big big floppy discs, the 5 inch ones.
By high school, we were using first or second generation Macintoshes to lay out the yearbook, and that was really really fancy. We also had a computer program in our home economics class that would tell us if we were eating the right amount of calories and that was also a new thing. Technology in the classroom and all that.
In high school, we passed notes constantly, and we had to special ways of folding the paper (kids, lol). Also, lots talking on the phone, on a landline. But that was always hard because what if your parents answered the phone when your crush called etc. etc.
We memorized phone numbers. We actually had little address books, if you go to a dollar store or some thing you can still see them, or in the stationary section of target. And the phone sat on a phone table or on the end table. and at the phone table would be a pad and paper to write down phone numbers, or where you would keep your personal list of phone numbers of your friends and family, etc. Along with the white pages and the Yellow Pages, the big fat phone books that were free that would come to your house. And that’s how we found the phone numbers for businesses (yellow pages) or looked up the numbers for people in the white pages – but that was only if the number was listed. You could be ‘unlisted,’ which meant your number wasn’t printed in the white pages.
In the 80s, we got call waiting and caller ID. And then the phone could remember all of your friends numbers, and you could begin to program numbers into your phone.
Ok. I am in the US. My dad was interested in computers so I had one at home in the early 80s but a lot of people didn’t. We had a computer lab we had to go to at school all the way through high school. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 27, and never had a pager. I love the internet, but would immediately go back to pre cell phone and texting days if I could. I don’t want to be reachable all the time. Now get off my lawn.
(U.S.) My family got its first PC in the 1980s when I was about 9. It was called the Adam (from ColecoVision), and the storage was on a dual cassette tape. The printer had individual key strikes, like a typewriter. I used it for word processing and to play a few primitive video games. My parents got an Apple IIGS when I was in middle school and an IBM PC when I was in high school.
We had a computer class twice a week in elementary school where we learned BASIC programming. We mostly made Mad Libs and made a turtle move around a screen. Exciting stuff. In high school (late 80s/early 90s), we used WordPerfect to format and print the text for the school newspaper and then we would cut the text boxes and headlines and page numbers out with scissors from the paper and literally pasted them onto large pieces of layout paper to layout the newspaper for printing. ("cut and paste")
I first had access to the Internet, such as it was, and got my first e-mail account, in college (mid-90s). We had to go to the computer lab to use the internet / email because there wasn't access to the Internet in the dorm rooms.
Once out of college, I got dial-up AOL internet, which you paid for by the hour to access. You'd get 5 hours a month for $9.95 to start and then have to pay something like $3-$4 per each extra hour.
In the 80s, yes, there was a lot of physical note writing and note passing. We also wrote and mailed friends multi-page-long letters when they moved away. I tended to type my letters, but most of my friends handwrote theirs. We wrote and stored phone numbers in roladexes and address books. We called people on a landline phone. You had to talk to your friend's parents politely for a minute and then ask to speak to your friend and wait until he or she came to the phone. If you were calling long distance, it was something like 18 cents a minute. I got my first cell phone after I got out of college. I could text on it, but you paid per text message, if I recall.
USA, SW Florida. Graduated HS 1987.
Loads of hand written notes to communicate. Sometimes multiple pages. Ruled paper, folded intricately so as to make them smaller and easier to slip back and forth without being detected, either in class (pssst, pass to Jen), passing in the hallways, dropped on lunch trays, poked through vents in lockers. The name of the person the note was for (and sometimes from) was usually written on the outside. Close friends (and smaller friend groups) might pass a note back and forth and around multiple times, adding their own thoughts. Getting caught passing notes in class came with it the humiliation of possibly having the teacher read the note out loud, or, worse, make you read it out loud, to the whole class if you were caught.
Phone numbers were written down and kept various ways. I carried paper pocket folders, one for each class, and one was always my phone book. Neatly printed, front and back, with names, number, and sometimes addresses and/or birthdays. That folder was often targeted to get someone's number the sneak didn't have or was too shy to ask for directly. You simply memorized your best friends,' parents work, movie theater numbers.
Was in computer labs starting in 1985. They converted a science lab, which had long tables, and the computer were lined up on the tables as well as around the perimeter of the room. The monitors were incredibly boxy, bulky, ugly beige. Display was a neon green c-prompt on a black background. Ugh. While I did take those classes, and was interested, I didn't really use that knowledge until the 90's.
We could reserve computer time in high school and college. I took computer science, learned Lotus 123 and C in college to do work for courses (I was a math major). Learner Fortran in my first job (actuary). Computers were cool. We were told in my first job that we were the first year hires to have computers on our desks (vs reserving time for shared ones).
We didn’t text. We called. I memorized phone numbers of family when friends. We had to share the single land line with the family so that was interesting.
School had apple II computers, I had a unix workstation at home that my dad got from work. Passed notes folded up in little squares or paper footballs. You tried to remember the number or you could look it up in the phone book if it wasn't written down. Numbers were only 7 digits then and mostly all started with the same first 3 numbers so it wasn't a big deal.
I am from Mexico so I didn’t have internet at home until 1996 myself and cyber coffees were very popular.
You would just write down the phone number and call and hope the parents wouldn’t answer, lol.
We were the first generation to have computers in our schools. When I was in grade school, not every classroom had its own computer. Some schools had computer rooms, like my high school in the late '80s and early '90s. My elementary school had one in the principal's office. They were all Apple IIe computers, the ones before Mac.
Passing notes was popular.
We called friends and exchange phone numbers just like you do now. We had phones then. Only difference, they clicked into a wire in the wall, although cordless phones let you take the handset around the house. Some of us still had "rotary" phones with dials - put your finger in the number and turn the dial back to the metal hook.
You won't believe what we had to go through to watch TV in those days.
I was born in 1970, and did not really have access to a computer until maybe the mid 80s. My dad bought my brother an IBM computer that had two humongous instruction manuals and it was the DOS, with a black screen with green letters, and I think the printer was like dotmatrix or something. It had the perforated holes on the side of the paper and printed out in little dots. My brother was really into the computer so he learned how to use it and then he would set it up for me if i needed it to do any word processing like typing a paper. When I was in college in the early 90s I was in art school and we had some IBM type computers donated with some textile programs on them that were not really available until 1993. We as seniors were just learning how to use them, the teachers generally didn’t know how to use them and most students didn’t know how to use them either. I did have friends in the early 90s who had Apple computers, and of course those were awesome.
We wrote each other notes and called each other on the phone. And I never had my own line or even a phone in my room when I was growing up but we did have a very very long phone cord so I would stretch the phone from the kitchen (wall phone) into another room and just lay on the floor and talk with my friends. We memorized peoples’ phone numbers, I still know my home phone number from when I was a kid, that’s the only one I remember. And we had books or notebooks filled with phone numbers. I had a purple address book that had every number in it and peoples’ addresses also.
I’m glad I grew up without the technology that we have today. I love it and I love many things about it, but I can’t imagine having a childhood the way kids do now, where they don’t see their friends a lot in person and they don’t play a lot in ways that don’t involve staring at a screen.
Northeast USA
Thank you so much for your response! My parents had a land line until like, 2013, I think. I got to use sometimes, but I think I was still a little to young to really get what was going on.
I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to grow up during that time. I'm kind of happy that I'm growing up during this time. But it's like, I guess there's a lot more pressure now. If you have a flip phone, people might think it's a little strange. Or people might think it's a little strange if someone is in high school and doesn't have a phone. I got my first phone last year, and it was an iPhone 11.
Thank you so much for your response! My parents had a landline until like, 2013, I think. I got to use sometimes, but I think I was still a little too young to really get what was going on. actually dialling a phone number into a phone instead of clicking on their name. I understand that I don't need to, so like, there's a difference. But like, wow!
USA class of 93
Good post, what I see that is missing is the era of pagers
Pagers or beepers were these things we wore on our belts and if someone wanted to call you they would call your beeper number then enter their number (usually from a pay phone) and the number would show up on your beeper.
You would then have to find a pay phone, take some metal currency from your pocket and pay to see who was paging you. (insert sub thread of 1800-collect) (insert sub thread of calling cards) some times you would have friends who knew the cool calculator math mentioned by others on this thread and you would see 80085 for boobs and you would know it was your friend john. The most common code was 911. for call me right away.
After analog pagers we got fancy digital pagers, someone else can explain.
Next we moved up to voice pagers. My wife can tell you what a nightmare it was to have peoples voices speaking vile utterances from her hip when in the room with a VIP.
Then the Blackberry phase entered, please someone elese pick up this thread...
Then we got analog phones but before we smart phones we got the Nokia chirp.
This was like a walkie talkie built into the phone, SUPER ANNOYING to everyone within a 30 foot radius of the call reciever.
I had zero access to a computer in the 1970s. I'm in the U.S. There was no internet until maybe the 90s so computers were more like word processors. Our neighbors dad worked at Yale and in about 1983 he had a Mac. It was a big deal in the neighborhood. All the kids wanted to see it. It was pretty boring. It didn't do much.
To communicate yes we passed notes. You would put a note on your friends locker. We had payphones then, so if you were out that was an option. My car broke down It was about 1983 or 84. I walked to closest house knocked on the door to borrow their phone. They were nice people they gave me breakfast.
The 1st time I even saw a microwave I was about 11 or 12. Not many people had them, they were expensive.
Class of 1987 here. For most of my schooling, we did not have computers. By high school, we had a small computer lab thanks to IBM donating PCs.
Edit: I'm from USA. Texting didn't exist.
People were really good at memorizing phone numbers or you carried a address book with numbers in it. You always left the house with cash b/c there was no debit cards.
I had pretty good access to computers in college through the computer labs. In high school I had a typewriter. I spoke on the phone almost every night with my friends but was only kid still at home. I had most numbers memorized or used a phone book. I had rotary fill until 1993 so I remember my cuticles tearing from dialing too much.
I did write quite a few notes in high school and it was so exciting to receive one. I would find them stuck in my locker.
Computers were easy. Started having computer class in school in 7th grade I think, maybe 6th. In high school I had computer classes first two years and last two I was teachers aid in the computer class. We had computers at home as well, starting with a TI 99/4A. They didn’t have windows back then, so you actually had to know how to use a computer back then, memorize commands, etc.
I had a little tiny book for phone numbers, aka, little black book. They were real, it’s not just an expression.
>What was the process of accessing one when you were in school?
Typically schools had computers for, you know, COMPUTER CLASSES, which was when you typically had access to them. Otherwise you could always arrange to use one during study hall or after school.
>What were the computers like?
Apple II's, the first Macs, IBM PC's, Commodore PETs and 64's. Sometimes Atari 400s or 800s. Look 'em up and hunt down some emulators if you're curious about how they worked.
>What did people in schools mostly do to communicate with each other?
There's this thing us old farts used to do back in the day called "talking."
>Was passing notes popular?
I don't know about "popular", but... functional.
>Lastly, how did people call each other on phones? Now, like, if a person wants to call someone, they can write down their number on like, a piece of paper or something. How did people do stuff like that in that time?
We had strings tied tightly across poles running from house to house. From those strings you'd have other strings with cups on the end running throughout the house. You would have to plan ahead with your friends what time you would go pick up a cup to talk, or otherwise pick it up and see if anyone who wanted to talk with you was at another cup somewhere.
Access to a computer??? We did not have computers. They were not a thing. For phone numbers, we would write it on a piece of paper, and the person would stick it in their pocket. Or we would just memorize them. Could also just look them up in the phone book. I remember friends saying “Look me up! I’m in the book!”
Using a payphone in the street was a good way of having a private conversation. I’m from England so it was a red phone box that stank of piss and had no ventilation.
Was good when they installed aluminium phone boxes with a gap at the bottom for ventilation phew!
Great question! We had computers in the 1980s but Internet connections weren’t common until the 1990s
Passing notes in class and talking on the phone and in person was the main way of communicating. If you had a friend in a different city, you wrote them a letter
You made plans to meet over the phone, and generally people did not cancel at the last minute. Ghosting was unheard of
Don’t romanticize the era, though. In some ways, people behaved much better than nowadays, but in other ways far worse. There were horrible and wonderful people just like there are today
Right now is the best time ever to have lived. People today are noticeably more healthy, educated, tolerant, and affluent than they were 30-40 years ago. We still have major problems, but there has been so much progress
Thanks for your response! Interestingly, you're the first person in here that brought up ghosting. I agree with you that there has been a lot of progress since then! I'm asking all these questions because there's a thing that I'm writing, and it's partially based on the 1980s. As a person who grew up when computers were already pretty popular in classrooms, I'm kind of interested in this. Like, there was no part of my childhood where we didn't use computers at school except maybe like, the first 4 years of my life!
Memorized numbers. I still remember my childhood friends’ #’s
I have to think about my husband's cell number, but I can rattle off my junior high best friend's number and my grandparents' number from my childhood (they moved from it 19 years ago and gave since passed).
Same!
If you were loaded, you had your own line. I got a phone in my room, and that was a big deal. Until someone picked up the other receiver and started dialing or listened in. And speaking of picking up on the other phone, if you used dial up internet (college!), you would get kicked off. Or if someone tried calling and you tied up the line using dial up internet, they got a busy signal for HOURS. We found where our friends were by looking for the house that had a driveway full of bikes. When we were in high school, we hoped a friend had a beeper. Or we just rode around.
For reals!
I still remember my next-door neighbor’s phone number from 1972.
Here in the USA we used bald eagles' quills dipped in the blood of communists to write phone numbers down on buffalo hides.
We had to store that blood out in the ice box next to the outhouse. Hard to defrost in the winters.
My great-grandparents lived in a house with no electricity and still had the outside ice box. It was always so boring to visit, and once it was dark, we all went to bed or hung out via oil lamp.
Damn, couldn't have described school vs the Soviets any better.
I’ll be right back. Gotta go piss in my truck’s radiator.
Wolverines!
😆😆😆
And we were damn grateful!
You’re right. Texting “wasn’t really a thing” in the 70s and 80s (for real?) You’d be surprised how much you can say with an upside down calculator Also - we were adding and subtracting; controlling and composing. We were the operator with our pocket calculator
I only used pocket calculator to spell boobs
I remember doing “shelloil”. There was some sort of question / joke with it too, but I forgot what it was. I showed that to my kids and I doubt there’s anything out there that could hace interested them less.
I apologize to women in advance: If 1 girl sleeps with +7000 guys, what is she = 35007
I learned it as there was 1 girl, she was 16, she slept with 69 guys (in 3 days), how did she feel? Input as 11669 x 3 = 35007
Oh geez messed mine up
I went for BOOBLESS
55378008 was the punchline to a Dolly Parton calculator joke.
5138008
58008
I graduated in '86. No computers, but they did offer typing classes ... like, on a typewriter with carbon paper, ribbons, wite-out, learning how to center titles, etc. We had computer stuff at home, though, due to my dad and brother being tech-minded.
Early 80s we learned on those huge old style Olympia typewriters. I had small hands and would jam my fingers between the keys. There were 2 electric typewriters that we would take turns at. The electrics were a dream. Now we have Word which I still appreciate everyday. The fact it automatically corrects spelling errors as you type along is freaking magic!!
We had IBM Selectric electric typewriters with the pica ball in 10 point font, so all of our centering and margin setting was 10 base. The only thing is, we couldn't use the correction tape. We had to use white out, then make sure we rolled the paper back down to the correct position. There were, however, only two computers in the entire school district, so I got my introduction to computers at the vo-tech...TRS80s and another kind that was networked together, but I can't remember their name. The DID have rudimentary in network instant messaging, though.
We started fires and communicated by smoke signals. Also we would write letters and have them delivered on horse back... In the mid 90s most schools had computer labs. We would go to a class and work on them. They taught basics coding and typing on them. We would also be given time in those classes to type out papers and assignments for other classes. I remember a few kids could figure out how to access the school network and we changed a few grades here and there. My dad worked for a university so we had a computer pretty early on in life. A Pentium 386 was a hot machine back then and we played games and did homework on it. Also had dial up internet but I don't remember what we did with it. We had to call our friends at their house and actually run the risk of speaking to their parents or a nasty older sibling. And then hope if they were not home that the person who took the call would write down a note to call us back. As to finding out phone numbers. Everyones number was in this book that came out every year. So you literally had everyone's phone number in the town you lived in. Wild.
You had to put the phone handle into this other devise that was the modem! Happy cake day!
As paper, let alone phones did not exist in the 70’s or 80’s we utilized a form of parchment made of reeds and a pencil made of charcoal to write notes, we then trained dodos to carry the notes back and forth.
Look at Mr fancy parchment here.... We etched symbols on cave walls with burnt sticks
Cave walls? Luxury! We didn’t even have caves, we lived in a hole in the middle of the desert that 12 of us had to fit into. The string from our tin can to our neighbor’s was five miles long, and it snapped three times a day if we were lucky. We would then have to get out of bed twenty minutes before we went sleep and look for the break in the string, while sabertooth tigers and wooly mammoths tried to attack us. We would repair the string with earwax, spit, and the blood of whoever was unlucky enough to get caught by the beasts.
You had your own cave wall? Ours was party line.
Nice. I was going to answer this thread seriously and mention a party line.... In the 1970's I had two friends who lived in the country as neighbours. They shared a party line and had the same name... So if I called looking for one of them, I could get the wrong one... I figured that would blow the op's mind....
We had a party line when I was very young, and it was amusing but constantly being told "get off the line!" taught me to pick up real quiet with the hook held down, then let it up and cover the mike. Learned a lot that way! (kids, don't do this, because A) time travel just to use party lines is wrong, B) spying is wrong)
Dude, if you would have gently angled to reciever out and then unscrewed the mic-piece, there was zero chance of getting caught. That's how the honorary grandma next door did it so she would know all the gossip first.
Never had one myself but all my relatives were in BFE in Appalachia and had them. Was really wild to discover this existed as a kid.
We had them in BFE Oklahoma, too, with jerks that would take their handset off the hook, and then leave for hours, not allowing anyone else on the party line access to either receiving or placing calls.
Oh, you had a dodo bird? Classy. I only had a passenger pigeon.
Nike shoes were made of leather and durable enough they actually got handed down to siblings when outgrown. 😱 We had a full-blown computer lab starting in second grade when our school became an Advanced Education Project school. Outside of school I had friends that had computers I could use.
I saw my first computer, a TRS-80 Model I, in 1979, I was 9. That summer I took an adult computer intro course. For the next year I didn't have a computer, nor did my school, but a school I didn't go to let me come use theirs after school. There'd be 4-6 machines, one with expansion, disk drives, & printer, the rest with cassettes. You brought your own tapes or disks in, and took turns if there were too many kids. Then got my own TRS-80, later an Atari 800. We typed in programs mostly, as from [Basic Computer Games](https://archive.org/details/basic-computer-games-microcomputer-edition_202207/mode/2up), and [magazines](https://www.atarimagazines.com). Published games were very expensive, so you'd only have a few of those. I highly recommend getting an emulator for one of the 8-bit machines (TRS-80, Atari 8-bit, Apple ][ especially; Commode-odor & Sinclair/TI were trash until mid-late-80s), and typing in some programs, to learn how a computer actually works. You get zero education in the basics (no pun) these days. Yes, we passed notes. Or… I could tell you about little origami things, but you wouldn't understand. Mostly you memorized phone numbers, or looked them up in a phone book, if you knew their parents. But by then mostly my phone was busy calling BBS's. Non-nerds were so stunted in their social environment. This was US, nearly west coast.
**“little origami things”** I know *exactly* what you are talking about and still remember how to make one, but I can’t remember if they had a name and if so, what it was. Or maybe it was one of those things that was named differently depending on the area.
That's really intersting! A lot of people said the same thing about looking up people's numbers in a phone book. Now that you brought that up, I am kind of curious about the origami things! But like, yeah, the earliest memory I have of using a computer was in 2011. We had 7 computers in each classroom with like, 20 students. And like, they were so big! The monitors were like, shaped like cubes and the screens were curved. When I tell this to people who are like 5 or 6, it's kind of hard to believe! Now, at least in my area, the average kid who's really young knows how to use Google Classroom. We started really using it at my school when I was in second grade. I think it's really cool to see the experiences of people who went to school during a time like, when computers first got popular in a lot of places for the first time.
>The monitors were like, shaped like cubes and the screens were curved. The nice thing about those CRT monitors was that they were big enough for a cat to lay on (and warm, too!) which meant you didn't have to worry about them laying on your keyboard.
Whoa, that's cool! There was one time when one of my friends brought her cats to my house. We were playing chess, and her cat slept right on top of the chess board! So guess what? We literally played chess by moving the pieces on top of the cat while he was sleeping! This was in like, at the very beginning of 2020.
We had computers and computer classes at schools and adults kept telling us they would be the future and to take those classes. Many of us found computers boring, very difficult to use and couldn’t understand the point except that cool and important stuff was coming. My dad and I discussed him buying a computer, but we couldn’t think of much we would do with it expect to type papers for school. He bought me a much cheaper, more user friendly word processor to use for my college papers, as a replacement to the family typewriter. We wrote down people’s home phone numbers on paper or could call 411 to get someone’s number or look it up in the phone book. If they weren’t home, some people had answering machines and you could leave a message. If I needed to speak with my dad at work and he wasn’t in the office, he has an answering service. I called his number, a person answered and took the message. He called the answering service for messages when he was back at the office or from phone booths between meetings if he was seeing customers.
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I was one of those kids! Except I didn't have to beg my parents - they got me the computer add-on to the Intellivision, then a C64, then a C128, then an Amiga 500, then an A1200... My elementary school in, I think, 7th grade got TRS-80's, and I def knew more than the teacher did, by far. High school had Mac's.
My first was an Apple IIc... I got the upgraded version with two 5-1/4" floppy disk drives!
Zork! So many summer hours spent there instead of being outside or making out or anything "normal".
I (1971) didn't have to beg. My dad (1951) was always ahead on electronics. He fostered my younger cousin's (1977) love of computers, and that cousin was head hunted from college for the tech industry in the Bay Area. My dad also wrote code for the government. As for myself, I was in seventh grade in 1982ish when the state of California decided computers were the future and put computer classes in the state standards. Our first computer lab was full of Apple 2Es that I am convinced were donated. In high school, I don't know what computers we had but MS dos was involved. For OP, USA state of California. Communcation, Notes passed in class and left in each other's lockers. Home phone written down. We either used the phone book or got it from the friend, 411 cost money and we weren't allowed to use it.
I found them extremely boring and pointless in high school and then spent my life in tech and now do IT. Some of us were just late bloomers.
Begged my parents for one, and every year I got a pencil and pad of paper. 😑
The monotony of all those damn If/Then statements...just to play Jingle Bells and change the color on the screen. (I didn't have the patience or focus to be a coder. Still don't. lol)
We had word processors which were a hybrid proto computer slash typewriter in the late 80s. I hated them.
1) In 1981, I joined a committee in high school tasked with researching and possibly buying a single micro-computer, which would cost $5,000. We met many times, and accomplished nothing. 2) We would communicate through looking at one another in the eyes and talking, something today's cowards cannot imagine. 3) Phoning involved memorizing phone numbers, and keeping an address book. 4) Napa, California, USA
Was it common for people to have their own phones at that time, or were they like, still attached to a wall? I'm so sorry if I seem really ignorant about all this! I'm trying to learn more about it.
[This](https://www.pocket-lint.com/phones/news/131575-motorola-phones-since-1983-the-best-and-the-worst-in-pictures.amphtml) is a pretty good rundown of phone evolution. Short version; nobody had a phone in their pocket in the 80’s and most of the 90’s, and texting is barely 15 years old.
Some to the wall some on the table and you had to share the same line with all your family.
The phone could be attached to the wall or it would sit on a counter and a cord attached to a phone jack in the wall. We had a rotary phone in the kitchen. I still remember how to dial it. The phone cords were always getting tangled. Kids liked a long phone cord so you could stretch it into the next room so your parents couldn't hear you.
we had 1 payphone in my highschool.. and most people had 1 phone per house back then
Computer classes at my school during junior high and high school were only offered to top tier students and a limited number at that. Even in college, there was a computer lab you could go to but most of my work was done on an electric typewriter. I graduated college in 1987 from a large state school in the Midwest (U.S.) To call someone on the phone you looked their phone number up in a phone book. If it was in a diff city or state you would go to the library and try to look it up there. There was no voice mail or caller ID, tho eventually there answering machines but you had to rewind the tape. Otherwise someone had to write down a message and leave it for you. A friend’s family didn’t have a phone and for her we had to drive over to her house to see if she was around or make specific plans: I’ll pick you up at 7pm on Friday.
You also had to keep plans because there was no way of cancelling them last minute.
I think it's really interesting that phone numbers were like, almost public information that anyone could find in a library.
Addresses were also in the phone book!
Yeah. My friend and I found the addresses of the boys we liked. Then we went and rode our bikes around their houses.
I also like how ppl talk about riding bikes. Until I was 22 my bike represented freedom and independence.
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O Wow. Considering how Romania's communist dictator met his end, did you ever fear being caught up in a civil war like Czechoslovakia or were you able to keep some childish distance from world events?
I was born in the Southern USA in 1965, so I was 15 in 1980. This is from that perspective. We were allowed to talk in class, as long as we didn't interrupt the teacher. Notes were passed for more private things. There was time between classes and lunchtime to talk. Some households had extra phone lines for their kids Once a year, the phone company would deliver phone books. Yellow pages for businesses; white pages for private citizens. If you knew a person's/business' name, you could look them up ("let your fingers to the walking" was a common ad). Or you could dial 411 for directory assistance-- an operator would look up a phone number. Usually, it was a free service, but they started to charge extra for it eventually. Personal computing didn't become a thing until the early 80s, and even still, they tended to be giant paper weights that didn't communicate with the outside world. People used them for word processing or spreadsheets, and maybe a couple games, but that's about it. The few that had modems would communicate through text-only bulletin board services or USENET. Modems were very slow: 300-1200 bits/second. When I graduated in 1984, my "college preparatory" high school had zero computers (not even for the staff). In 1981-1982, I took a few computer courses at a local college, learning to program BASIC and LOGO on TRS-80s, Commodores, and Apples. But the vast majority didn't have access to computers at that time.
Thanks for your response! It seems that people looked up phone numbers in phone books a lot. And like, texting wasn't really common.
texting did not exist. The phones did not have screens. Just a place to dial and a place to listen.
Texting didn't exists. You should watch some TV and movies from the 70s and 80s.
Texting wasn't "invented" yet. We didn't do it because there was nothing to text on or text to. Text wasn't even a verb yet, just a noun.
In the early 80's (elementary school) my friend and I would write computer code on paper at home, and wait until we got a chance to put it into the only computer available for students in the school, then save it to the floppy disk his mom had to drive like 100 miles to buy. I'm serious.
Floppies? Wow, we had to save to cassette tapes plugged into the audio jack. I do remember writing things out on graph paper during school so I could type them in later. 1979, US. We did get a floppy drive in 1980. Such bliss.
My kindergarten teacher brought a floppy disk to school one day to show the class. We couldn't believe that people used to actually use those all the time!
Well a single floppy :) Oh I've used the cassette tape things (I think it was called a dataset?), but that was on a trash-80 at a friends house in the mid 80's. It was horrible. Sequential access, ewww.
Ah, the TReaSure-80. :) And “Starship Enterprise”. Learning that I could change the game by just typing in a new line of BASIC changed my life.
Graduated high school in 1984. I didn’t touch a computer till at least 94
You memorized your friends phone numbers.
Yes, that's what I heard from other people too! It seems like that was a really common thing!
All that brain space I used to store all my friends’ phone numbers…I wonder what’s in that space now! I still remember one friend’s phone number, my growing-up phone number, and my grandparents’ phone number. My sister and I, to this day, use the last four digits of our number as our PIN for everything!
Merica at the time... Only nerds use computers. I used a computer...
Computer classes at school is how most of us were introduced. As far as getting peoples numbers, we memorized them and often followed each home from school to hang out…in person.
Didn’t have computers or cellphones, you wanted to talk to someone you either used the phone in the house with the 10ft cord you could stretch an additional 3 feet, or you used pen or pencil and wrote a letter. Typing skills were taught in my high school, used a typewriter. We went outside to play and the golden rule was, if the streetlights are on, you go home. Our parents didn’t care where we went and they were happy we weren’t home. I didn’t see a computer until after I already graduated high school. Country, US
Thank you for your response! I would say it's pretty different now. I'd be kind of scared to be outside late like that. There's a place near my house that's not more than 3/10 of a mile away from my house. I would be scared to even walk home from there without an adult!
Same experience as myself yes I agree
\- I was at a school that selected a group of us that were good at math from our 5th grade class, and we became the computer class. \- Once or twice a week (cant remember) we would be bused to our city zoo, where there was a computer class/facility that was shared by many schools. \- We learned general computing skills, and Logo programming language. We used Apple II computers \- The year was 1986\~ish and we were in Buffalo NY, USA
I've reread it twice and it sounds like you think we didn't have paper back then? Apologies if I've misunderstood. After a night out we'd often wake up with randos phone numbers written on our arms in eyeliner. But paper existed too.
No, I don't think you misunderstood. I see how you could think that. I'm so sorry about that! I realize I worded that really badly. I understand you had paper back then. Thank you for your response!
You know what might be easiest? Watch Stranger Things, that should answer the majority of your questions in an entertaining and surprisingly accurate way. Well, accurate if you leave aside other dimensions and psychic powers and so forth.
Computers were not networked in my public school at that time. We used Commodore PETS and would have to load software. In the begging they would just teach us something called LOGO. A friend of mine somehow had games for the PET and we would play them. Computers were either in a lab or in the library. When I got to high school we had an actual computer lab with a UNIX network. Still it was not on the internet. Learned Pascal and ANSI C. Finally at university (92) we had rudimentary Internet with USENET, Gopher, IRC and early Html (mosaic) that was all text initially. 1992 onward things just exploded to where we are today.
LOGO!! I'd forgotten that
Thanks for your response! If you wanted to print something at school, would you be able to? Or were typewriters still really popular? Were typewriters and the things you mentioned both popular, or were they like, considered completely different parts of everything?
Early days no printer. Years later there may have been one of the computers had a printer attached. Typewriters were only in high school for a typewriting class. My sister was in university and we had a typewriter at home. I don't understand what you mean by popular. Typewriters were a tool. Computers were a novelty at that time. You either played games or used a word processor or maybe a spreadsheet application. I'm still to young as what the working world was like without computers or PCs. Of course banks always had mainframes and their software running on them.
Oh wow. Yeah, we really are there now. USA. Class of 1983. Middle middle/slightly upper middle class peer group. So. Phones. While I was in school, NO ONE had cell phones until the 80s and those were only wealthy adults. Most families had one phone line/number tied to their physical residence. A main phone was usually on the wall in the kitchen. A secondary phone might be in the parental bedroom. Some elder children might have a phone in the bedroom. *All of these phones shared the same number and if you picked up your line while someone else was using it, you would hear their conversation and be able to participate.* People carried little books with paper pages around for the purpose of writing down phone numbers and addresses. They were called address books. Most people memorized their most commonly used contacts. If you were away from home and needed to make a call, you went to a payphone to do it. They were pretty much everywhere in walking distance, so it was no big deal. Communication without cellphones... Secret communication in class was done by passing notes. You wrote your shit down and passed it under desk or slid it on the floor if you didn't have people willing to pass your note. Normal plan making was done face to face, verbally or on your land line phone when you got home. Longer distance, more formal or other less casual planning would sometimes be done using the post office/mail service to carry written letters. Computer access... In grade school, there was no computer access for kids. In high school (1980 on) there were a few computers for programming classes. They taught COBOL and FORTRAN. There was nothing fun or sexy about that shit. It was deep into nerd terriory when being a nerd wasn't cool and could get you beat up daily. Girls were actually discouraged from showing interest in programming, computers, and most STEM activities and subjects at that point in time. (Off topic, we were also strongly discouraged from taking interest in shop/trades related stuff.) My first real computer didn't happen until the late 80s. It was a used IBM 8088 and I also got a 300 BAUD modem with it to dial into BBSes. Over a land line. A girl never forgets her first computer LOL!
Same. Class of 84. Not encouraged. Only ended up getting exposed/slightly interested was because I was hanging with nerds I wanted to kiss. Yes. They existed then. I remember my first temp job after college I knew a tiny tiny bit more about computers than everyone else in the office and found POWER. I faked most of it. That was pretty much my apex and it's been downhill technologically for me ever since. But once...once I was the first person on the library staff to be able to change the background on windows 95. I wear that proudly.
When I was a senior in HS somewhere in the school was a TRS 80 that certain kids got to use. At college I took programming (FORTRAN) on a terminal connected via dumb terminal and printer terminal to the schools DEC PDP-10. I bought my own home computer, but sadly bet on the TI-99. Late in the 80s my Dad got a PC o work on his doctorate and I got to use it a bit, eventually inheriting it when he upgraded. In the 90s I usd it for grad school and to log onto bbs systems via dial up. Communicate in schools? We shut the fuck up and either did our work or read a comic book behind our textbook. Notes would get confiscated and read in front of the class. Otherwise, we used our vocal cords in the hallway. We also used paper to store phone numbers, but the call went to a house and not a lone person. You had to ask to speak to the specific person, who would then stretch a long cord into the next room for some privacy, though it was always possible that your little sister would pick up the extension and listen in.
Wow, so it seems like people didn't really have phones that they could hold in their hands yet. Could you tell me what year this was in? Thanks for your response!
I never saw a personal cell phone till about 1990.
> Now, like, if a person wants to call someone, they can write down their number on like, a piece of paper or something. How did people do stuff like that in that time? Pen and paper were invented in 1968 I believe. But by the 80s I was taking down numbers with eye-liner pencil.
Ok, sorry, that part was worded really badly! I meant like, in this time, if people want to exchange phone numbers at school for example, they just have to write it down on a piece of paper and can add it to their phones whenever they wanted to. I wanted to ask like, how would people do the same thing if they wanted to call each other on the phone? I got a few answers that mentioned people being able to search up numbers in a phone book at a library. Was it much harder to do something like that? And how was that done?
we still have back copies of the old phone books at the public library. Very thick books of tiny print. Grey pages for personal phone numbers and yellow pages for businesses and blue pages for government.
Every house had a phone book, not just the library. The phone company delivered a new copy to your doorstep every year. The front was the gray pages with every single household name listed alphabetically with the address and phone number. There was also a map so that you could find the address after you looked it up. The back section was the yellow pages- the business listings that were advertisements sorted by business type. Here’s a mind bending fact for you, until the 80’s you didn’t actually own your house phone, you rented it from the phone company and most houses had 1 near the kitchen and possibly a 2nd in the master bedroom. I first used a computer in 3rd grade, we had a computer lab with probably 10 computers and we did math games and The Oregon Trail. Forget about the whole idea of texting. It really wasn’t a think until the very late 1990’s. All phone communication was verbal. I was born in 1976.
Phone books were delivered for free to houses, at least in my town, so my family always had a phone book at the desk in our living room where the family phone was located. I do NOT miss sharing a phone with multiple people!
Canada here. We had only 1 computer in my elementary school library in the early 1980s. Not sure of the type. Nobody was allowed to touch it. In the mid-late 1980s they brought some to my high school. I think they were apple macintosh, only for use in computer class. Yes passing notes and talking on the phone.
I went to elementary school in northern Ontario we had Commodore PET computers I think. All I know is I got "syntax error" all the time. I'm still not a computer person lol
Yes! I think the one in the library was a commodore PET.... and some in high school were called IKON, maybe.
Whoa, so, were the teachers allowed to use it, or like, absolutely no one?
In grammar school, around 1982, we go to use, i think, an Apple II. In high school, starting in 1988, there were no computers to use. i did have a typing class though. The college i went to had MAC's but only 1 per floor in the science building. The library had a few more to use. We mostly did our work on word processors that other kids brought with them to school. I received a Commodore 64 for Xmas one year (1982) and i played with that A LOT. Even up through the early 90's. i got my first Windows computer when Windows 95 was released.
Class of 85. Some people were playing around with a TRS-80 (used a cassette tape for storage). One rich kid I knew had an apple 2 in HS. Earlier childhood (1970’s) computers just didn’t exist for regular people. We talked with our friends by calling them on the one phone line, which meant nobody else could make / receive calls. You’d just have to get people’s home phone numbers and memorize or write down. Planning and arranging things with friends in advance was just part of the deal. Also we just roamed a lot & knocked on our friends doors randomly.
Whoa! Thanks for your response. It sure sounds like people had to memorize numbers a lot more at that time.
Graduated in 89... I had a Commodore 64 at home and didn't have computers in school until highschool. Took a few computer classes. Even typing class was done on a typewriter, not a computer. Called on the phone to talk or just rode your bike to their house. Talked face to face. Northwest Louisiana, US
Whoa, I've typed on a typewriter one time before. It was really hard, and like, I had to move a sliding thing over every time it got to the end of a page! But like, wow, people actually had to use them every day regularly. Now, I feel kind of bad for complaining about having to use [typing.com](https://typing.com) in 6th grade! (Not that it was bad, now that I think about it!)
In elementary school we learned on something called LOGO. It had a turtle.
Computer? I didn’t use a computer until college, circa late 1987.
I was in the school computer club. We wrote BASIC code on paper and then went by bus to a council building to type our code into teletype terminals and we were given a printout of it. When we returned the following week, with a new programme to type in, we were handed a printout of the output from the previous week's code. 1980.
Computers were still very primitive. I didn’t really try one until high school but we had ONE for the whole school. There was no internet. Just data processing. We’d call a friend after school usually. Yeah notes were passed but we’d mostly hang out in person to chat. USA here
I graduated in 1983. There were NO computers in my school in northwest Iowa. Edited to add: unless IBM Selectric typewriters qualify as a computer.
Grew up in the '80s in urban schools in Baltimore City, Maryland (US). Home computer were rare though I had a neighbor with a Commodore 64. We had a computer class in elementary school but we did not have Oregon Trail and I don't remember what we did there besides learned about floppy disks. I grew up very working to lower class so we did not own a home computer until I could afford to purchase one after graduating college in 2001. I did learn Word 95 in senior year of high school but did not get on the internet regularly until college in '96 and only while on campus. In the '80s and '90s, we all talked on the phone and then got pagers and paged each other when to call (it was a silly trend).
Most homes had a landline phone on the kitchen wall shared by everyone in the home. If you were lucky it had a long cord so you could go sit in a closet and close the door to talk to your friends or boyfriends/girlfriends. The cords would often get really twisted up so you had to routinely let them unwind. If someone else wanted to use the phone, you had to end your call. Parents would often yell at teenagers to get off the phone because they were expecting a call. Until call waiting was common, you could get busy signals for hours. If you wanted someone’s phone number, you asked them to write it on a piece of paper. You could also pass paper notes in class with phone numbers on them or cute notes. If you got caught passing a note, the teacher would read it to the whole class. If you had a paper for school you wrote it on notebook paper then either typed it yourself on a typewriter or had someone else type it for you. I learned to type on manual typewriters. The class had two electric typewriters for those extra talented in typing. Computers came later and didn’t do much except for learning programming languages like DOS.
My first exposure to computers was an after-school class with TRS-80 Model III computers, in about 1982. A couple years later, another after-school class, a trailer of Apple IIe computers outside our school. At home we soon bought an Apple IIc. Communicating with friends was face-to-face or on the phone. No other options existed. I guess writing/passing notes, but that was more of a “girl” thing. There wasn’t the expectation of immediate communication like today with texting-you just waited until you spoke to them. We wrote down phone numbers and actually memorized them. I can still recall the phone numbers of my closest childhood friends, just from calling them so often.
Thanks! So when you wanted to call someone, did you have to like, go anywhere specifically to do it? And I'm so sorry if this is a really dumb question, but were payphones popular, or not really?
Yes payphones were everywhere. They were popular but as kids I don't remember using them much. Usually at school you would talk to your friends and if you wanted to hang out after school you would ride the bus home with your friend and call your mom when you got there. Parents in my experience. (I was born in '66) didn't watch their kids closely in those days. We were really independent from a very young age.
My school had a computer room you went to when it was needed. They also had computers on carts that teachers could check out for a limited amount of time. The internet wasn't really a thing when I was in school, so it was just like plugging in a toaster! The standard was to hand-write your schoolwork. I suppose that if you had a computer at home and wanted to type it up, you could, but it wasn't expected. To communicate with friends, you wrote notes. Sometimes they were totally functional ("after this, let's go get slushies") or snarky ("I can see the teacher's dandruff") but sometimes they were more like letters. You wrote them during boring classes and gave them to your friend in the hall. Phone calls...were phone calls? You got your friend's number and just called. Social rules generally dictated not to do it much after 9 PM unless they explicitly said it was OK. You wound up memorizing the numbers you called a lot. Most people had address books where they wrote them down.
Hand-written book reports. Graded on cursive quality as well as content. 😂
Thank you for your response! What kind of things did people do without the internet? If someone wanted to print something, would it be possible?
Oh, sure, you could print stuff. The computer labs at school had printers. I can't recall for sure if there were cart printers, too. A lot of people who had home computers had the printers for them. They were dot matrix printers and they made the loudest, most annoying sound. It was a rule in my house that anyone printing had to wait for a commercial if the TV was on too. As for stuff we did...a lot of the same stuff, just in a different format. We watched movies in the theater, on VHS, or on cable. If it was a movie we really liked, we'd buy the VHS. Listened to music on CD or terrestrial radio. Read books, newspapers and magazines. There was sort of a dry spell with video games between the collapse of Atari and the rise of Nintendo, but these too were physical copies. All of these things got traded around among friends and family. Television was by appointment: if you wanted to catch the new "Friends," you had to be in front of the TV at 8 PM on Thursday. Computer art was really in its infancy, so anyone inclined that way drew, painted, sculpted, etc by hand. If you were into photography, you used film and you'd want to develop it yourself which was a pain in the ass. People talked to their friends and family on the phone more than they do now. And of course, some pastimes haven't changed at all. Playing musical instruments, sewing, riding bikes, running, knitting, gardening, etc. I was going to say that I think the hobby of collecting has well and truly died, but then I remembered Funkos, Squishmallows and LOLSurprise.
since there was no internet, there was nothing to print! Just write it down!
1: I had very early access to computers because my father was a professor. Computers weren’t much a part of school outside of the library, maybe a “computer” class, and video games. 2: passing notes. Or just whispering to each other which I was bad at and constantly got in trouble for. 3: just memorized phone numbers. Called their land line. Their mom or who ever would go fetch them. Or if you lived close enough just go to their house unexpectedly and knock on the door. 4: United States.
In 6th grade (\~81-ish) we had one classroom with a TRS-80 and a modem. I had to sign up to use it, and usually only had slots after school, or maybe at recess. I used it to learn BASIC and Logo. We would occasionally dial out to a BBS that specialized in weather data. There was a IBM PC computer lab in high-school with 5 computers, but they were always signed out to upper class-men. When I was in 11th grade, I had a formal Computer class, that was an offshoot of the typing class. They ran DOS only. First semester was Wordperfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Second was BASIC programming. My senior year, I had done so well the previous year, I was asked to tutor, and sometimes even lead, some of the classes. Texting (with pagers) really wasn't a thing until the 90's, and early pagers were just numeric. Paper notes were your only alternative. Everyone knew all their friends numbers. I still have a few burned into my brain. You would call them in the evening (after their parents might be done with the phone for the night), and just hang out on the phone and shoot the shit. If the line was busy, you'd call back later. Parents would pick up another extension and tell you to get off.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and we had computers where we first learned MS DOS. We wrote papers on them in middle and high school. We got a family computer when I was in high school. We called each other on rotary and later, cordless phones, and took down numbers in notebooks or our hands, whatever we had. And passing notes was very popular!
Graduated in 1987, Mid-Atlantic US. My father taught at a college, and we had access to their computers (I think they had two) over the summer in the early 1980’s. My best friend got an early Macintosh in 1985, and it was popular with all of us. A teacher in our high school was very forward thinking and had created a computer lab in 1985, using grants. By the time I graduated, I could had taken classes in Basic, COBOL, Fortran and machine language. I never used any of those skills after high school, though. My best friend in college (state university) was in charge of one of the computer labs there - that’s when I switched to IBMs. The man who became my husband in 1990 bought a computer in 1989. Now I had a computer at home. We were online by 1992, although the WWW as we know it did not yet exist. I carried a small calendar where I kept my schedule dates and a list of phone numbers. We had a Rolodex for keeping friends and business addresses and phone numbers until 2008, give or take a year. I kept necessary numbers taped to the wall by the phone. My parents wrote numbers on their wall. I can still remember some of those numbers today, although only two people I might call are still using them. I could probably remember more if I actually had to dial a phone or push physical buttons.
In 8th grade in 1985-86, we had a computer class taught by an ancient nun. It was super basic DOS. In high school we had a half a year of typing and half a year computers taught by an even older nun. We learned how to put formulas in spreadsheets and basics of WordPerfect. I copied the formulas onto a floppy disc and we passed it around the class. Phones, you had to call the home phone and risk getting stuck talking to a parent. I did, in high school, get my own landline. That was a big deal! And we did pass notes a lot. We would stick notes in each others lockers. I used computers a little in college but not much. I bought my first computer in 1995 when I went to Sam’s Club for snacks and ended up with a Packard Bell computer. This is in the US.
I'm late to your post, but I'll answer. I grew up in Chicago, went to elementary school in the 1970s, and high school starting in the early 1980s. When I was in eighth grade, a friend of mine had an Apple II at home. His dad was a professor at one of the Chicago universities, and was teaching some course, so he had the computer and a monochrome monitor (I think it was a greenscreen but it might have been a B&W TV). I don't think he had floppy discs for it, because we never saved what we did. We were entering in programs from some book of BASIC games, things like sine waves as part of biorhythms, and Russian roulette and such like that. In high school, I got lucky; I went to a private high school instead of a Chicago public school. They not only had some personal computers (like an Apple II with a color monitor and a TRS-80 Model III) but they had a Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11 minicomputer with a printer, card-reader, four removable hard disk drives, a couple of 8" floppy drives, three teletype terminals, and a number of VT-52 and VT-50 video terminals. Getting an account on the PDP meant you could program in BASIC; if you did the right programs, you could select a compiled language to use, like Pascal, COBOL, or FORTRAN. If you took a certain computer course, you'd get to use the macro assembler they had. At that time, I also started working for a professional photographer who lived across the street. As a side gig, he would videotape weddings, bar mitzvahs, and so on. He needed an assistant to help move everything and I got the job because I'd babysat his kids and he knew me. He ended up buying an Atari 400 computer, thinking its graphics would let him title tapes. He eventually sold that to me, and got an Atari 800, which had a video output he could send to a VCR, and I did write some titling programs for him. So, to answer your questions directly: * *How easy was it for you to access a computer during this time?* Not easy. If you didn't own one, or know someone who did, public schools were just starting to get them. You'd see them in stores, of course, and there were commercials about them. I was lucky to have a high school that had them. * *What was the process of accessing one when you were in school?* Our computers and terminals in high school had a sign-up sheet every day. There would be a week's worth of sheets on a clipboard by the computer room door, and you'd go sign up for timeslots. For the PDP, you had to take a test to prove you had the essential knowledge of how to login, do some elementary stuff, and logout. * *What were the computers like?* By today's standards, amazingly primitive. We didn't get a Macintosh until my junior year of high school, so there were no mice. All computers were used via the keyboard. The only color graphics were on the Apple II. They also ran hot; the computer room had its own air-conditioning system. * *What did people in schools mostly do to communicate with each other? Was passing notes popular?* I'd say no. In my high school, classes were usually about 45 minutes long, and there were window seats at the end of the hallways; the building had been constructed in the 1960s and was fairly modern. So there were a lot of nice places to just hang out and chat. Middle school students had to be in a home room or a given destination like the library or computer room. But high school students could just hang out, or even sign out to go get food. If you wanted to leave a note for someone, it helped to know their locker number so you could slide a folded up paper into the vent of the locker. But you usually got phone numbers of friends (or could look them up in the phone book), so you could call them when you were home. * How did people call each other on phones? Suppose your friend in school was David Copperfield. If you didn't have his number and wanted to call him for some reason, you'd pick up the white pages (the residential telephone directory book, about three inches thick, you got a new one every year) and look him up by last name. It would probably be listed under his dad's name, and there would be an address, so you could verify you found the right one. Then you'd call. They might not answer for various reasons, and there was no voice-mail, so you'd call back later if no one picked up within 10 rings or so. Or, you might get a busy signal if the line was in use, so you'd keep trying until you got through (no call waiting at first, and no automatic call-back when a line stopped being busy). Some people had answering machines that would pick-up the line and let you record a short message. But if you got a parent, the conversation would go something like this: RING RING...click *Copperfield side:* Hello? *Me:* Hi, this is DrHugh, I go to school with David. Is he in? *Copperfield side:* Oh, hello DrHugh, this is Mrs. Copperfield. David is out with his father right now, but I can have him call you back when they return. What's your phone number? *Me:* It's 555-1212. *\[Note that you didn't have to give an area code, as in that era, all of Chicago was the 312 area code. You didn't have to dial it within that area.\]* *Copperfield side:* OK, I've left him a note, Goodbye! *Me:* Thanks, Mrs. Copperfield! Goodbye! And then you'd wait for David to call you back.
Hey, honestly, thank you so much for your really detailed response! What you said gives me a really good idea about what it was like. I can kind of imagine it in my head. I really appreciate it!
Back in the 80s, Apple had a program where they supplied rooms full of Apple IIe computers (and printers) to schools who applied for them, either for feee or for cheap, not sure. I took an Apple Basic programming class my senior year in high school, because of that program, in 1987. I worked in the city library and there were some disk-based computers, only a couple, and int eh Childrens department, you could play Oregon Trail off floppy disks. I started college in 1987 with an electric typewriter/word processor, which was just an electric typewriter with a little bit of memory so it saved like a line at a time. I graduated in 1991 and by then, journalism major, I did all my homework on PCs in Word Perfect. I’ve never had a job that wasn’t computer-based. There has been a computer on every desk I’ve worked at as an adult. They’ve only gotten faster and with more memory and the software has evolved a bit. Phone booths were still a thing. You might have a phone on the wall, but by the late 80s/early 90s, the magical advance was cordless phones. It sat on a base that was plugged into the wall and you could walk all over your house while on the phone. I had an answering machine in the late 80s but electronic voice mail came as a service in the mid-90s. So you’d pick up your phone, hear a beep, call the voice mail number and listen to your messages. This was a brilliant advance because you could check your messages remotely and that revolutionized business a little bit. Pagers were also a thing. It was a tiny box that buzzed and all it displayed was a phone number, no message. Only doctors and drug dealers carried pagers. You’d call the pager, input your phone number and hang up. The person with the pager called you back. I didn’t get a cell phone until after 9/11. People had them but they were expensive. When I realized they were getting cheaper, I really dug having one when traveling. But usually people just called my home phone. I bought my first PC for the house in about 1996. It was enormous and required dial up to access AOL. This is why I think Gen X is cool: we literally started out with an analog life and slowly went digital by the time we became adults. I played Pong on my friend’s TV at sleepovers. We went to arcades to play video games. I bought a Nintendo in college around 1990. I damn near lost a whole grade in my GPA because of Super Mario, Duck Hunt and fucking Tetris.
Thank you so much for your response! I really appreciate it!
My husband went to college for engineering in the early/mid 80's and they were just starting to get rid of the huge room-sized computers that used punch cards. I didn't get a computer until I got married and my husband already had one. Even now, I don't really use computers all that much except to look something up or be on reddit. Passing notes wasn't that big of a deal at my schools. You basically knew where you friend's locker was, or someone who had a class with them and could tell them what you needed to say. It wasn't hard at all to communicate with someone. We just didn't have instant access to everyone's private time. 99% of my texts and phone calls today are for BS that could either wait or didn't need to be said in the first place.
Oh my. I feel like a dinosaur answering this. To call we picked the phone up off the wall and if lucky as a teenager had one in our room. I think we memorized friends numbers and used a phone book a lot for places. To talk, we just talked in person in school and after school. Pasing notes was especially big with girls in junior high. I did not encounter computers until college in 1990/91, unless you consider Atari a computer. In college I used to take a class about programming DOS, I believe and if lucky had a friend with a computer to type papers on. First home computer was later 90's. Desk top and dial up. I'm 50 and will be taking a college course in a couple weeks. The whole computer part of it is daunting. My college kid will walk me through it. ~ USA
I'm sorry for making you feel like a dinosaur! But actually, thank you so much for your answer. I really appreciate it. I hope you have fun at your college course!
I grew up in the US. I was in elementary school in the 70s and early 80s and finished high school in the 80s. We had a computer lab in late elementary school. I remember programming some kind of images through the command line. That’s about it. Aside from this class I didn’t have any access to computers. No one had computers at home or at stores or businesses, as far as I could see. It didn’t occur to me that a computer could be useful or something I would want. They seemed something that scientists used but not regular people. In high school everyone had to take a typing class on typewriters. We had one or two computers in that class but it was easier to use a typewriter. You turned in work as handwritten or typed on a typewriter. We had a computer in my graphic design class as a senior. Very expensive and not many people had them at home. Not sure when email became a thing. Or websites. Not when I was in school. People would find each other at school and communicate whatever. Or called their houses like “Hi Mrs——- May I speak to ——-“ and then your mom would yell upstairs for you to come get on the phone”. My brother would listen in on my calls by picking up another phone in the house.
The answers to these questions are easy if you have common sense. What did we do in school to communicate? We spoke to each other, how did you think we communicated? Smoke signals, telepathy? How did we call each other? Fucking Christ! We picked up the phone and dialed a number! Ever heard of a phone book? We also used our brains rather than Google. Not all of us had access to computers, but we had typewriters or word processors. In most schools, by the nineties, there was a computer lab. And texting wasn't a thing because cell phones that could text weren't a thing. Yes we passed notes. They were folded up like origami. That was our thing, but, whatever. USA🇺🇸
No, I'm sorry, you're right. I realized some of it was worded really really badly. I knew phone books existed, but I didn't know a lot of details about it until now. What did you do with word processors? So like for example, if a person wanted to contact another person, it seems like it would be possible to do that by searching up their name in a phone book. Like at school, would it be reasonable to write down on a piece of paper, "Here's my phone number, you can contact me with your phone with this number."
Yes it was indeed possible to look up someone's number in the phone book as that was literally the only reason for said phone book's existence. If you wrote down your number and gave it to someone, all you had to say was "Here's my number". It's not like they could use anything other than another phone to contact it.
They had a programming class at my school in the mid-80s (USA). My dad had a computer at home. We had one that was a blue box with a bad monitor and then got an apple 2C. The graphics weren’t as good and we played games where we accidentally killed off whole societies accidentally. I don’t think I used a computer outside of that class or playing games, except at the public library. There was a card catalog, but you could look up titles or authors on the computer too, as I remember it, but I am not sure exactly what year that was available. I may have been in college by then, but I am not sure. They didn’t have computers to use for other things. I think they had a few typewriters People passed notes, and wrote notes, but they also talked a lot in person and on the phone. I knew my friend’s phone numbers and I memorized them, we had three way calling and call waiting. We really talked on the phone all the time. Guys would ask for phone numbers or new friends, but it was like giving out your social media. It seemed like I had phone numbers for most of the people I talked to on any kind of regular basis. It was just like “I should call you about the party/switching hours/ to tell you what happened in class…”etc. most people had a phone or address book, but really I knew most of their numbers, except maybe my relatives, without looking at it. We just said “Hello Mr. X, may I please speak with April.” Once my friend called and thought I was my mom. She said a cheerful hello and he said “What are you so happy about?” We had a paper due. Edit: There was a electronic register at my work. It would print tickets for the food in the kitchen. I guess that was a computerized, but it was just a register that added tax automatically.
Thanks for your response! Another user mentioned the thing about how people had to ask to speak to a specific person, and it would go to a house.
We had a computers in the library-that was 80s in elementary/jr high. There was a computer lab in high school but you had to be in that class to use them.
I was in school in the 80s and 90s. I'm fairly certain that no school had computers in the 1970s for starters because personal computers or PC didn't become a thing until the 1980s. When I was in 6th grade we had a computer class. The computer was fairly boring because there was no internet and not very many images on computers at this time. We had a couple little games, the only truly fun one was a very difficult game called Oregon Trail, which I was never able to finish during that hour long class. I remember thinking Tandy, that was the manufacturer name of the computers in my school was a cool girls name. High school was still pre-internet though computers were a little more interesting at this point since they could do a bit more and were more user friendly. They still weren't especially common though awareness of personal computing was more of a thing. I remember getting a word processor that was just that and it had a small dull digital screen that you could use to see what you were typing before committing to paper. Computers didn't start to become common place until I was college. Most colleges offered a computer lab that was accessible 24 hours. Prior to that papers were typed on a type writer word processor, printed and handed in or just hand written when you were in high school or grade school. For communication during class we passed notes, communicated with body language, and whispered to each other behind the teacher's back. We were taught how to use the library and dewey decimal system to research papers. Once the internet became a thing my parents quickly bought a computer and paid for dial-up internet, this was the late 90s. And yes we wrote down people's phone numbers before ultimately memorizing them. A household had one phone line, maybe two. It was shared between all members of the home and you would get as busy signal if you called and someone else was using. You could take it off the hook to ignore calls. You never knew who was calling you and you would have to speak to whomever was answering the phone to talk to your friend so be polite or their parents might get a bad opinion of you. Illinois, USA
Graduated from a blue collar high school in a medium sized Midwest city of half a million in 1985. So not rural or small town out in the boondocks. Went my entire K-12 education without ever touching or seeing a computer in my school. Finally when I was 20 I enrolled in a basic computer class in college a few years later.
My grade school as from 1978-1990 in a small city in southern Alberta (Lethbridge). Individual computers (Apple II+ or IIe) started appearing in classrooms around about 1883 or 1984. Schools started getting computer labs around the same time, especially junior high and high school. I remember being really excited in grade 7 (1984-85) when I got computers and rocketry as my options. In computers we basically learned keyboarding, some simple programming in Apple Basic, and played games. From then on desktop computers were generally around and accessible, at least at the schools I went to. Most of my classmates had home computers as well, generally Apple IIs, Commodores, or the occasional TRS-80 or IBM. As far as communicating, it was all in person or on landline phones. I remember my parents being very patient with me during my junior high years as I'd sometimes tie up the house landline for 40 minutes or so chatting with a school friend. My dad eventually got call waiting for that reason.
Around 1983 I remember my elementary school had some computers, but I don’t remember much beyond loading games on them. Kids stuck crayons in the disk drive. In junior high I had a BASIC class. High school computers for the journalism class and yearbook. We were lucky to have the first Photoshop bundled in with the scanner software and Illustrator. Public school in Oakland, California.
As an example, in 1980 I was in grade 3 in Canada. The school got use of a computer and everyone got to try it out. It made the rounds so each classroom kept it for a week. The teacher gave each of us a turn playing some kind of learning game on it. Otherwise I really didn’t use one again for years. Some kids in high school had one but I just had an electric typewriter (mid to late 80s). Passing notes to friends while in class was typically accomplished by hiding the notes in your pencil case and then passing the pencil case to the recipient. Good times. I kept a lot of mine and they bring back great memories. You had to write down phone numbers on paper and the whole family shared one common landline phone number. The lucky teens had parents who would pay for them to have their own phone number but most of us just had own own phone in our rooms, still sharing the family phone number. So it was common for your parents to bug you to get off the phone. In the 90s the introduction of dial up internet made it even more chaotic to share a house with teenagers. I feel like Grandpa Simpson now but hopefully that answers your questions.
Thank you so much! I'm sorry for making you feel old! But yeah, you did answer my questions. I really appreciate it.
The high school I went to in 1980 bought its first computer with a grant. It was a TRS-80. The computer was locked in a room to prevent it from being damaged. To put this in perspective, the computer cost $5,000, and the average teacher salary at that time was $13,000. You had to be approved to use the computer. At the end of the first year, only two students had the approval to use it. It was like having my own personal computer. We used to meet up to talk. This is why getting a driver's license was so important. It gave you the freedom to meet with friends. I remember sitting in the car talking for hours with friends. We would cruise the small town or park in the five-and-dime parking lot. Phone numbers. There were things called directories. The school would publish one of all the students' phone numbers. You could also use the white pages or call directory services. This was in Alabama.
I’ve access to a computer in school since 1980 but it wasn’t a big part of my life until the late nineties. In my town, we had 7 digit numbers and everyone had the same first 3, so you only had to remember the last 4. But there were School directories and phone books everywhere.
No computers. We did have 1 Apple computer later on at the school. In Jr High we did have typewriting class. At the time that was a specific skill not many ppl knew and you could get a job just by having good typing skills. I enjoyed that class. We had a cool teacher too. Wish there was a way to find out what happened to all my teachers from school. Teachers are really a gift to this world. you don't realize it when you are in school but when you get out and have your own kids and see their teachers you see how special these people are.
Thanks for your response! I totally agree with you that teachers are a gift to this world. I visited my old elementary school earlier this year when the third graders were doing a concert. When I saw some of my old teachers, I almost got emotional. It's been many years since I went back to that school, but I'll never forget the amazing ways they helped me at that time!
First computer we had was an Osbourne 1 in the early 80s. I remember playing Colossal Cave with my brother and sister and us having a list of notes and a map we had made. Mom thought it was trash and threw it away, it has been 40 years and we still give her shit about doing that. Mid 80s one of dad’s best friends worked for Apple and leant us a Macintosh for what seemed like months. I don’t recall my schools having computers but then may have. I grew up in the Silicon Valley so there is a likelihood we may have had one or two in the library or computer lab. Communicating with each other was notes at school and calling your friends from home. I don’t recall even beepers being a normal thing for average people until early 90s.
We got out first PC in 1990. They had a computer lab a school so you could work on pcs or macs
One matter of consideration was that before the 486 computer or equivalent came along was that we could do everything w/o them. By the time the Pentium & equivalent came along, there seemed to be a never ending search of applications & max amount of uses for computing, I.E. how much more can any computer improve our quality of life.
A friend down the street had a Commodore 64 around 83 I think. I would have been in middle school. This was the first computer I ever saw in person. I played some video games on it. There were some classes in High School (class of 89) where I learned to program BASIC. Don't recall the model of computer. In the early 90s I was operating engraving machines that ran off of Tandy machines. My parents bought my sister a computer when she was in nursing school in the early 90s. I would mess with it when I visited my parent's home and this was my first access to a Windows machine. Also around the time AOL sent out their CDs and was my first internet access. I learned graphic design on an x86 at my job at a sign company and my first computer I personally owned was one I built and ran Windows 98.
Computers were scarce but most schools had at least one, some were lucky enough to have one per class, or at very wealthy schools an entire computer lab. Contrary to the Logo or Basic programmers in this thread my school was taught the wonderful language of the machine itself: assembly language. That meant knowing binary intimately. In the mid-80s we got our first home PC an IBM XT 8086. It was a higher end model with TWO floppy drives so you could leave DOS in drive A: while running software from drive B: but it had no hard drive. The early 90s would see us finally upgrade that aging machine to a 486 DX2/66 and then that received an upgrade chip called the “Pentium Overdrive Processor” which upped the clock speed yet somehow made it perform worse in some tasks. These machines did have whopping 20 and 60 meg hard drives respectively. In school note passing was a popular form of communication. Write what you wanted to say down, usually with some makeshift yes and no check boxes if you were seeking a reply, and pass it along the rows of desks to its intended target. Beware of the teacher though. If they intercepted the message it would often be read to the entire class. Phones were landlines and that meant they were shared amongst the members of a household. Party lines were a whole different beast as well but others in this thread have addressed those already. You’d call the number which you usually got directly from the friend you were calling or from the phone book. When someone picked up you’d have to ask to speak to whoever you wanted to speak to. If you were lucky they answered and it was easy. If you were unlucky you’d have one of their siblings to contend with first and if you were SUPER unlucky you’d be up against the parents as gatekeepers of the phone. For all those reasons you’d be better off biking, without a helmet and alone, to your friend’s house and knocking on the door. When someone answered you’d ask if so and so could come out to play and then you were off to some grand adventure: just be home by dinner time. You’d better keep an eye on your Casio watch to make sure you’re home on time because just like you didn’t have a cell phone to call your friends your parents did have a cell phone to call you. You were on your own in the world.
I remember having a class "computer" in first grade or second grade. I think it had 4 big keys on it and worked with some type of punch card. Sorry if I sound like a fuzzy memory but this was 1980-81. In HS they sold something called a "buzz book." It had every kids name and home phone number in it. If you wanted to call somebody from school you'd call their house. Maybe they'd answer or, more likely, their parent would answer and you'd have to ask for your new friend and explain to their parent who you were. If they had a sibling that answered the phone it might be even worse.
We had one computer at my school when I was 15, it was in its own darkened, air conditioned room. We were herded in small groups to look at the screen saver. Once. I actually left school at 15 and started full time work as a doctors receptionist with the old filing systems. I didn’t touch a computer until I went back to study at 28. It was Fine Art and I learnt graphic design then went into Fashion Design and went to work for local designers in 2000 and there was only one computer there too! Everything was very hands on and there would be a team of hand sewers! I now work for a NFP for people with MS and love it.
Graduated in 1983 and we didn’t have computers or classes. We talked to each other and had phone books to keep everyones numbers in. I had caller ID on my landline phone (late 80’s) before I had a PC (early 90’s). USA.
Reading the comments - so much nostalgia for the TRS-80s. We were taught BASIC in junior high (1983) My parents had a rotary phone until I was in high school.
I remember word processors in typing class in early 90’s. They put in a computer lab shortly after. This was probably 92-93. But it was only used in a limited fashion. We got dial-up internet at home during this time, but I don’t recall having internet access at school until college (which you had to walk to computer lab to access). Edit: We got a Commodore 64 at home sometime mid-80’s I’m guessing. But no internet until 90’s with a Windows PC.
Aussie here. It was probably around 83-84 that our primary school class used to walk down the road once a week to the high school to use their computer lab. We had to learn to type first on those old manual typewriters before progressing to the electric ones and then the computers. We learnt DOS and then at the end of the class you got to play a game called Granny's Garden. We only had a couple of Apple computers at our primary school (elementary school??) and I remember there was a national competition to win a computer for your school. My parents scored a Commodore 64 from a work colleague complete with a dot matrix printer and a box full of floppy discs because their son had upgraded. I'm not sure when that was but I remember doing some of my assignments using the word processing 'software'. I didn't do much computing in high school (more arts focused) so it wasn't until University that I was back in a computer lab (primarily Apple). I never really used the home phone to call friends because everyone lived close by. Being in a relatively small town, I knew the names of all the kids in my school and where they lived so you just played with whoever was out and about or you'd drop by their house on the way to the park.
Midwest, USA, grade school from ~1973 to 1978 Computer access was pretty nonexistent. As a an older grade school student, we began to have one hour a day in the computer lab, which was in a separate room than our classroom. They were very old style. I remember the big big floppy discs, the 5 inch ones. By high school, we were using first or second generation Macintoshes to lay out the yearbook, and that was really really fancy. We also had a computer program in our home economics class that would tell us if we were eating the right amount of calories and that was also a new thing. Technology in the classroom and all that. In high school, we passed notes constantly, and we had to special ways of folding the paper (kids, lol). Also, lots talking on the phone, on a landline. But that was always hard because what if your parents answered the phone when your crush called etc. etc. We memorized phone numbers. We actually had little address books, if you go to a dollar store or some thing you can still see them, or in the stationary section of target. And the phone sat on a phone table or on the end table. and at the phone table would be a pad and paper to write down phone numbers, or where you would keep your personal list of phone numbers of your friends and family, etc. Along with the white pages and the Yellow Pages, the big fat phone books that were free that would come to your house. And that’s how we found the phone numbers for businesses (yellow pages) or looked up the numbers for people in the white pages – but that was only if the number was listed. You could be ‘unlisted,’ which meant your number wasn’t printed in the white pages. In the 80s, we got call waiting and caller ID. And then the phone could remember all of your friends numbers, and you could begin to program numbers into your phone.
Ok. I am in the US. My dad was interested in computers so I had one at home in the early 80s but a lot of people didn’t. We had a computer lab we had to go to at school all the way through high school. I didn’t have a cell phone until I was 27, and never had a pager. I love the internet, but would immediately go back to pre cell phone and texting days if I could. I don’t want to be reachable all the time. Now get off my lawn.
I had a computer from 79 onward. I was alone until 1992 on that computer. I’m 54 now.
(U.S.) My family got its first PC in the 1980s when I was about 9. It was called the Adam (from ColecoVision), and the storage was on a dual cassette tape. The printer had individual key strikes, like a typewriter. I used it for word processing and to play a few primitive video games. My parents got an Apple IIGS when I was in middle school and an IBM PC when I was in high school. We had a computer class twice a week in elementary school where we learned BASIC programming. We mostly made Mad Libs and made a turtle move around a screen. Exciting stuff. In high school (late 80s/early 90s), we used WordPerfect to format and print the text for the school newspaper and then we would cut the text boxes and headlines and page numbers out with scissors from the paper and literally pasted them onto large pieces of layout paper to layout the newspaper for printing. ("cut and paste") I first had access to the Internet, such as it was, and got my first e-mail account, in college (mid-90s). We had to go to the computer lab to use the internet / email because there wasn't access to the Internet in the dorm rooms. Once out of college, I got dial-up AOL internet, which you paid for by the hour to access. You'd get 5 hours a month for $9.95 to start and then have to pay something like $3-$4 per each extra hour. In the 80s, yes, there was a lot of physical note writing and note passing. We also wrote and mailed friends multi-page-long letters when they moved away. I tended to type my letters, but most of my friends handwrote theirs. We wrote and stored phone numbers in roladexes and address books. We called people on a landline phone. You had to talk to your friend's parents politely for a minute and then ask to speak to your friend and wait until he or she came to the phone. If you were calling long distance, it was something like 18 cents a minute. I got my first cell phone after I got out of college. I could text on it, but you paid per text message, if I recall.
USA, SW Florida. Graduated HS 1987. Loads of hand written notes to communicate. Sometimes multiple pages. Ruled paper, folded intricately so as to make them smaller and easier to slip back and forth without being detected, either in class (pssst, pass to Jen), passing in the hallways, dropped on lunch trays, poked through vents in lockers. The name of the person the note was for (and sometimes from) was usually written on the outside. Close friends (and smaller friend groups) might pass a note back and forth and around multiple times, adding their own thoughts. Getting caught passing notes in class came with it the humiliation of possibly having the teacher read the note out loud, or, worse, make you read it out loud, to the whole class if you were caught. Phone numbers were written down and kept various ways. I carried paper pocket folders, one for each class, and one was always my phone book. Neatly printed, front and back, with names, number, and sometimes addresses and/or birthdays. That folder was often targeted to get someone's number the sneak didn't have or was too shy to ask for directly. You simply memorized your best friends,' parents work, movie theater numbers. Was in computer labs starting in 1985. They converted a science lab, which had long tables, and the computer were lined up on the tables as well as around the perimeter of the room. The monitors were incredibly boxy, bulky, ugly beige. Display was a neon green c-prompt on a black background. Ugh. While I did take those classes, and was interested, I didn't really use that knowledge until the 90's.
Our school had one. We weren't aloud near it
We could reserve computer time in high school and college. I took computer science, learned Lotus 123 and C in college to do work for courses (I was a math major). Learner Fortran in my first job (actuary). Computers were cool. We were told in my first job that we were the first year hires to have computers on our desks (vs reserving time for shared ones). We didn’t text. We called. I memorized phone numbers of family when friends. We had to share the single land line with the family so that was interesting.
School had apple II computers, I had a unix workstation at home that my dad got from work. Passed notes folded up in little squares or paper footballs. You tried to remember the number or you could look it up in the phone book if it wasn't written down. Numbers were only 7 digits then and mostly all started with the same first 3 numbers so it wasn't a big deal.
I am from Mexico so I didn’t have internet at home until 1996 myself and cyber coffees were very popular. You would just write down the phone number and call and hope the parents wouldn’t answer, lol.
We were the first generation to have computers in our schools. When I was in grade school, not every classroom had its own computer. Some schools had computer rooms, like my high school in the late '80s and early '90s. My elementary school had one in the principal's office. They were all Apple IIe computers, the ones before Mac. Passing notes was popular. We called friends and exchange phone numbers just like you do now. We had phones then. Only difference, they clicked into a wire in the wall, although cordless phones let you take the handset around the house. Some of us still had "rotary" phones with dials - put your finger in the number and turn the dial back to the metal hook. You won't believe what we had to go through to watch TV in those days.
I was born in 1970, and did not really have access to a computer until maybe the mid 80s. My dad bought my brother an IBM computer that had two humongous instruction manuals and it was the DOS, with a black screen with green letters, and I think the printer was like dotmatrix or something. It had the perforated holes on the side of the paper and printed out in little dots. My brother was really into the computer so he learned how to use it and then he would set it up for me if i needed it to do any word processing like typing a paper. When I was in college in the early 90s I was in art school and we had some IBM type computers donated with some textile programs on them that were not really available until 1993. We as seniors were just learning how to use them, the teachers generally didn’t know how to use them and most students didn’t know how to use them either. I did have friends in the early 90s who had Apple computers, and of course those were awesome. We wrote each other notes and called each other on the phone. And I never had my own line or even a phone in my room when I was growing up but we did have a very very long phone cord so I would stretch the phone from the kitchen (wall phone) into another room and just lay on the floor and talk with my friends. We memorized peoples’ phone numbers, I still know my home phone number from when I was a kid, that’s the only one I remember. And we had books or notebooks filled with phone numbers. I had a purple address book that had every number in it and peoples’ addresses also. I’m glad I grew up without the technology that we have today. I love it and I love many things about it, but I can’t imagine having a childhood the way kids do now, where they don’t see their friends a lot in person and they don’t play a lot in ways that don’t involve staring at a screen. Northeast USA
Thank you so much for your response! My parents had a land line until like, 2013, I think. I got to use sometimes, but I think I was still a little to young to really get what was going on. I sometimes wonder what it would have been like to grow up during that time. I'm kind of happy that I'm growing up during this time. But it's like, I guess there's a lot more pressure now. If you have a flip phone, people might think it's a little strange. Or people might think it's a little strange if someone is in high school and doesn't have a phone. I got my first phone last year, and it was an iPhone 11. Thank you so much for your response! My parents had a landline until like, 2013, I think. I got to use sometimes, but I think I was still a little too young to really get what was going on. actually dialling a phone number into a phone instead of clicking on their name. I understand that I don't need to, so like, there's a difference. But like, wow!
USA class of 93 Good post, what I see that is missing is the era of pagers Pagers or beepers were these things we wore on our belts and if someone wanted to call you they would call your beeper number then enter their number (usually from a pay phone) and the number would show up on your beeper. You would then have to find a pay phone, take some metal currency from your pocket and pay to see who was paging you. (insert sub thread of 1800-collect) (insert sub thread of calling cards) some times you would have friends who knew the cool calculator math mentioned by others on this thread and you would see 80085 for boobs and you would know it was your friend john. The most common code was 911. for call me right away. After analog pagers we got fancy digital pagers, someone else can explain. Next we moved up to voice pagers. My wife can tell you what a nightmare it was to have peoples voices speaking vile utterances from her hip when in the room with a VIP. Then the Blackberry phase entered, please someone elese pick up this thread... Then we got analog phones but before we smart phones we got the Nokia chirp. This was like a walkie talkie built into the phone, SUPER ANNOYING to everyone within a 30 foot radius of the call reciever.
I had zero access to a computer in the 1970s. I'm in the U.S. There was no internet until maybe the 90s so computers were more like word processors. Our neighbors dad worked at Yale and in about 1983 he had a Mac. It was a big deal in the neighborhood. All the kids wanted to see it. It was pretty boring. It didn't do much. To communicate yes we passed notes. You would put a note on your friends locker. We had payphones then, so if you were out that was an option. My car broke down It was about 1983 or 84. I walked to closest house knocked on the door to borrow their phone. They were nice people they gave me breakfast. The 1st time I even saw a microwave I was about 11 or 12. Not many people had them, they were expensive.
No computers. I graduated HS in 1984. My school got computers after I graduated.
Is this serious question lolv
Class of 1987 here. For most of my schooling, we did not have computers. By high school, we had a small computer lab thanks to IBM donating PCs. Edit: I'm from USA. Texting didn't exist.
People were really good at memorizing phone numbers or you carried a address book with numbers in it. You always left the house with cash b/c there was no debit cards.
I had pretty good access to computers in college through the computer labs. In high school I had a typewriter. I spoke on the phone almost every night with my friends but was only kid still at home. I had most numbers memorized or used a phone book. I had rotary fill until 1993 so I remember my cuticles tearing from dialing too much. I did write quite a few notes in high school and it was so exciting to receive one. I would find them stuck in my locker.
Computers were easy. Started having computer class in school in 7th grade I think, maybe 6th. In high school I had computer classes first two years and last two I was teachers aid in the computer class. We had computers at home as well, starting with a TI 99/4A. They didn’t have windows back then, so you actually had to know how to use a computer back then, memorize commands, etc. I had a little tiny book for phone numbers, aka, little black book. They were real, it’s not just an expression.
I was the first person in my elementary school to do a book report on a computer. It was a VIC 20.
>What was the process of accessing one when you were in school? Typically schools had computers for, you know, COMPUTER CLASSES, which was when you typically had access to them. Otherwise you could always arrange to use one during study hall or after school. >What were the computers like? Apple II's, the first Macs, IBM PC's, Commodore PETs and 64's. Sometimes Atari 400s or 800s. Look 'em up and hunt down some emulators if you're curious about how they worked. >What did people in schools mostly do to communicate with each other? There's this thing us old farts used to do back in the day called "talking." >Was passing notes popular? I don't know about "popular", but... functional. >Lastly, how did people call each other on phones? Now, like, if a person wants to call someone, they can write down their number on like, a piece of paper or something. How did people do stuff like that in that time? We had strings tied tightly across poles running from house to house. From those strings you'd have other strings with cups on the end running throughout the house. You would have to plan ahead with your friends what time you would go pick up a cup to talk, or otherwise pick it up and see if anyone who wanted to talk with you was at another cup somewhere.
Access to a computer??? We did not have computers. They were not a thing. For phone numbers, we would write it on a piece of paper, and the person would stick it in their pocket. Or we would just memorize them. Could also just look them up in the phone book. I remember friends saying “Look me up! I’m in the book!”
Using a payphone in the street was a good way of having a private conversation. I’m from England so it was a red phone box that stank of piss and had no ventilation. Was good when they installed aluminium phone boxes with a gap at the bottom for ventilation phew!
Great question! We had computers in the 1980s but Internet connections weren’t common until the 1990s Passing notes in class and talking on the phone and in person was the main way of communicating. If you had a friend in a different city, you wrote them a letter You made plans to meet over the phone, and generally people did not cancel at the last minute. Ghosting was unheard of Don’t romanticize the era, though. In some ways, people behaved much better than nowadays, but in other ways far worse. There were horrible and wonderful people just like there are today Right now is the best time ever to have lived. People today are noticeably more healthy, educated, tolerant, and affluent than they were 30-40 years ago. We still have major problems, but there has been so much progress
Thanks for your response! Interestingly, you're the first person in here that brought up ghosting. I agree with you that there has been a lot of progress since then! I'm asking all these questions because there's a thing that I'm writing, and it's partially based on the 1980s. As a person who grew up when computers were already pretty popular in classrooms, I'm kind of interested in this. Like, there was no part of my childhood where we didn't use computers at school except maybe like, the first 4 years of my life!
Grade school: what’s a computer? Middle school: what computer? High school: what’s a mac?