Communcation and Organization Part 1

There was a time that there were only a few who has landline phone in their homes. Even you have a phone in the house, you would be sharing the line with another family, which were called partylines.  It's like having an extension phone but with a different number and in a different house, which is usually your neighbor.  That must have been hard when you have an emergency or when you have teen-agers in the house. The line would always be busy.  Eventually, more line became available and the partyline became obsolete.


Then cellular phones came.  They used to call it car phones.  It was so heavy, it was like carrying a cement block. To call a car phone during those days you have to call National operator to call that car phone. The call cost was so expensive, not to mention, the unit itself was outrageously expensive.  Battery life was bad.  I can't remember how long the battery last until you charge it again, but I can remember that it won't last even a half day. So it's always in the car plugged in the cigar lighter plug.

 The 2nd generation of cellphones was no different from the car phones. Battery life is still bad but it's not like carrying a block of cement. It was like carrying a brick. 

In fact, the battery was so bad that you have to get a pager.  I think I got more than 2 pagers aka beepers. But I can only recall 2. My first one was from EasyCall. My unit was colored purple.  It was easy to call yet the message came very late. 

EasyCall Unit but in purple

My brother-in-law wasn't using his beeper during that time, so I got rid of my EasyCall and borrowed his Beeper 150.  It was better. I got the message on time and they also have a service where you don't need to talk to an operator and just send numbers. There were so many prank pages when that service came out so they have a caller id when these number pages were sent.  I remember that because one of my classmate is college paged me at 3 am. I noticed the number was in his vicinity.  You would know the vicinity by the first 3 numbers of the phone number, it's like an area code.

Beeper 150 unit

I named this blog communication and organization because I though I could get to write up to the PDA's since now Cellphones have organizers a.k.a. filo-fax built in. But I think I would write those to the next blog so I won't run out of topics in the coming days.

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