What Did People Do Before Smartphones?
What Did People Do Before Smartphones?
Recently started using a LightPhone II when out of the house, and I found the article captured my current experience pretty well. It’s not so bad to be bored sometimes.
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If you were meeting up somewhere you'd arrange to have someone who was at home (and thus by a phone) to orchestrate any last minute changes of plan or notifications of late arrivals (via payphones, which were a thing, once).
You'd go into town regularly to pick up the new bus timetable.
You'd have a huge pile of maps in the back of the car, or one very big map book, often both. If you drove somewhere once, you'd remember the route the next time.
There was a set of encyclopedias at home to look up facts.
And a calendar on the wall. (That's probably still a thing?)
There were a lot more newspapers and magazines around.
Everyone had a little notebook with all their important phone numbers in it. Filofax was revolutionary.
And we still remember the most important phone numbers from that little notebook because we had to dial them so very often.
We played eye spy a lot.
I do miss magazines. Websites aren't the same as the excitement of your favorite magazine coming out after waiting for it a month. And there were ads, but they could flash or make sounds.
I still have a few phone numbers fully memorized and type them out when calling those specific people. More as an exercise to myself. Same thing with driving. I try not to use gps maps if Im going anywhere even when it's multiple states away