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It's 1997...

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Member 1919122

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It's 1997.
Before cell phones.
What type of computer / software / email services are you using?
I'm using a Hewlett Packard computer running Windows CE 2.0!
Using dial-up to get online!
With a floppy disk!
Using Internet Explorer!
Using Hotmail for my new email account!
Using Dogpile as my search engine!
This was my employee work computer.
My, how technology has changed...
 
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Dannydet said:
It's 1997.
Before cell phones.
Click to expand...

Actually mobile phones ("cell phones") were a fairly common sight by 1997. I had a Nokia 2110 with Vodafone pre-paid.
Dannydet said:
What type of computer / software / email services are you using?
I'm using a Hewlett Packard computer running Windows CE 2.0!
Using dial-up to get online!
With a floppy disk!
Using Internet Explorer!
Using Hotmail for my new email account!
Using Dogpile as my search engine!
My, how technology has changed...
Click to expand...

My computer at that time was a home assembled Pentium system with CD-ROM running Windows 95. Was using IE and Hotmail on dial-up.
 
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Sorry I didn't get on the cell phone kick until 2005
 
I have no solid recollection of what PC I had in 97. Now 87 or so I had a 386/20 with a 2400 baud modem. It had two megs of ram and a 100mb hard drive. 5.25 floppy drive and a CRT monitor that weighed as much as a modern Buick. :) I even had a 24 pin dot matrix printer. I had it made back then. I was a sysop for the local college BBS and I had access to the internet through their .edu address. My first mobile phone was a 2meter radio that could access a phone line through the local repeater. I had that setup in 1978. The first real mobile phone that I carried on my belt was a Motorola Ultra Classic brick.
images
 
I had a pager. We had a home computer, but I just wasn't really interested in learning about it. I was still in college then and didn't really need to learn about them as it was all still so new. I still remember go to The University of Memphis library and looking stuff up on the microfilm.
 
I used a pager when I had the 2meter radio. It was mounted in my car. Had to go to the car to return the calls. At first, I hooked up the radio so it would honk my horn with every ring of the phone. Being poor I worked when I had work no matter the day or time. One very early Sunday morning I was working in a very upscale neighborhood when I got a call. By the time I got to my car I had an irate neighbor there to greet me. :)
 
A buddy of mine had a carphone in high school, the one like mounted in the car with the squiggly antenna on the top of his roof. His dad was a doctor so he got car phones put in all their cars. Was pretty cool back in the day as opposed to carrying around the Zack Morris phone.

Saved By The Bell 80S GIF
 
The best was my grandfather got the CB radio package, yes apparently there was a package for that, in his 1984 Cadillac Sedan DeVille. I had to drive that car after my grandparents passed away and my sister borrowed, well basically stole my Honda Accord. My sister wasn't real interested in driving at 16, but I was. I got a car the day I turned 16. She cried about it, so my parents gave her my car for a semester when she was in college at the University of Alabama. At first I was so pissed about it, but my buddy's and I have a lot of great memories in that Cadillac. We went on alot of road trips and would talk all kinds of 💩 on that CB radio, truckers would get so pissed and would try to hunt us down 🤣

I remember when my grandmother was alive and would say be careful driving her car because it was a "high powered machine.":rolleyes:On paper it was ( 4.1L V8 ), but in reality not so much. The car was just too heavy for that engine at the time. I went to visit my sister in Alabama and on the way back the engine just gave out. I got towed home by AAA and my dad just sold it in the newspaper. About a month after the sale the people can back and wanted their money back. When we sell anything we make the buyer sign an "as is where is statement with no guarantees." Basically when you buy it, it's yours no matter what happens. Here is a picture of the car and color they had, it's not the actual one, just one I found on the Google.

Screenshot_20250602_130644_Google.jpg
 
I'll say one thing for the Motorola brick. The holster I used simply had a turnbuckle on the back of the phone and a receiver on the belt. Turn the phone upside down and it came out of the receiver to use. I was working in a stairwell up two stories and stepped over the railing to straddle it and it turned that phone upside down and it fell two flights and landed on the concrete floor. Scuffed the leather holster on one corner. No phone damage. I believe it could double as a hammer.
 
I still have that phone and it's charging cradle. The rubber around the antenna has deteriorated and crumbled away. It will still charge and I'm pretty certain it can call 911 even though it's not associated with a provider.
 
I thought the only people really using computers back then were all the weird-o's buying beanie babies. Man, what a scam those things were. Dude who came out with those was playing all those crazy house moms like a f..King fiddle. According to the Google he's currently worth $6.4 Billion and you can hardly give those things away at this point.
 
treb1797 said:
I thought the only people really using computers back then were all the weird-o's buying beanie babies. Man, what a scam those things were. Dude who came out with those was playing all those crazy house moms like a f..King fiddle. According to the Google he's currently worth $6.4 Billion and you can hardly give those things away at this point.
Click to expand...
Speaking of-
www.usatoday.com

Violent break-in at home of Beanie Babies tycoon leaves woman in a coma

Local law enforcement said there is no indication the suspect, 43-year-old Russell Maxwell Phay, and the victim knew each other.
www.usatoday.com
 
I'll bet it was some gray-haired crazy cat lady, looking for Royal the blue elephant to complete her collection...

BTW in 1997 two things happened: I started my ebay account (which is still active to this day); and opened an account with a tech startup named Hotmail. While virtually every email account was tied to a person's internet service at the time (AOL, Yahoo, MSN, etc), Hotmail was its own entity and could be used with ANY internet service provider. Of course, Microsoft later bought the company. While we're moving away from it to my own personal domain, our Hotmail account remains active nearly 30 years later.
 
1997: my cellphone looked like this
1749670716148.png

(except, despite being an Orange handset, mine didn't have the badge). It was the only phone I ever owned whose battery life exceeded specification: specs said it could do 18 hours standby but it could actually manage 24!

For computing I think I was still mainly using Unix workstations (a mix of HP-UX and Solaris), though Linux farms were about to start supplanting them (the mainframe had been turned off the year before). Occasionally used a Mac for basic office tasks at work, though mostly stuck with the workstation. At home had a Gateway PC running Windows 95.

Did most of my email using the Elm email client (text-based), mainly over the JANET service (Joint Academic NETwork), though we had a dial-up service at home - not thought about it for years, but I think we might have been using Pipex as the provider. Had several work email accounts but had redirected them to all go to one mailbox (I'd been using email as my main work communication medium for 13 years by this point. I was using Netscape Navigator as my web browser back then (the ancestor of the Firefox I still use now).

And my camera still used photographic film - it would be another 3 years before I bought my first digital camera.
 
Dannydet said:
I didn't get my first home computer until 1998.
Dell Dimension XPS-D
Bought for $3000
300mhz CPU
64mb ram
8.4 GB hard drive
Windows 95View attachment 178120
Click to expand...
Same here. I was pretty much on Juno's old email, then setting as many up emails as I could nab, I was in different chats at the time too.. Dial up and everything. Ah I still have that keyboard, "Quiet keyboard" too..
 
I also had Netscape for browsing, I think I switched out to firefox too.. (Yeah too bad it is all the wicked set up of moving the annoying pull down tools and getting into the massive flags et all..)
 
When my Aunt was at the cottage she showed me this:

1749901890747.jpeg


Me in 1996 Era.. Yeah the horror hahaaa...
 
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