10 Ways We Communicated as Kids Before We Had Cell Phones

Updated on 7/24/2018 at 12:50 PM

When my daughter wants to know what her friends are wearing to a party, she can find out within mere seconds. All she has to do is send out a group text on her cell phone, and she's almost immediately reading her friends' responses. It's a fast-paced, technology-driven world our children's generation is living in.

I'm in my mid-30s, and back in my day, we didn't have cell phones. If I wanted to know what my friends were going to wear to a school dance, for example, I had to call each of them on their family's landlines. It was very time consuming, especially because I didn't have all of their phone numbers memorized, so I had to look up each one in my address book. While it's amazing to see how far we've come with communication and technology, there was such awesome simplicity in the precell phone time. Keep reading to take a trip down memory lane with some of the fun, weird, and pretty cool ways we communicated with our friends before cell phones.

Walkie-Talkies

If you were lucky enough to live close to your friend's house, communicating via walkie-talkies was the absolute best! You just had to make sure you had a good supply of batteries handy.

AIM

America Online Instant Messenger was the go-to instant messaging service teens used in the late '90s and early 2000s. You agonized about picking the perfect screen name and away message. Chatrooms were a big deal back then, too. A/S/L, anyone?

Pagers

What was once primarily associated with drug dealers ended up being a popular way to communicate for teens in the late '90s and early 2000s. You learned pager code (using numbers as letters), and your hearts went aflutter when that special someone paged you 823 and 143.

Passing Notes

When you were in class, you would have to keep a careful eye on the teacher in order to discretely pass a note to your friend. It was insanely intense if you had something juicy in that letter that would have gotten you sent to the principal's office. What a rush!

Riding Bikes

Instead of sending a group text asking where everyone is hanging for the day, you had to ride around the neighborhood and find the group of bikes parked in the yard to locate your friends.

Payphones

Before cell phones, you had to go out of our way to find a germ-infested payphone to make a phone call, and it would cost you a whopping 25-50 cents per call. If you didn't have any change, you'd have to go into the nearest store and ask the cashier.

Phone Books

If you didn't know your friend's phone number, you'd have to hope their family listed their phone number in the White Pages — and that was only if you knew their last name. If you didn't, you were out of luck.

Home Phones

Consider yourself lucky if you were able to convince your parents to give you your own line, but most of us just had one home phone the family shared that was usually attached to the wall, so everyone in the house could hear your conversation. If someone was using the internet, anyone who called you got a busy signal, and you'd get kicked off the internet anytime someone accidentally picked up the phone. Fun times!

Secret Language

When your friends were younger, you'd talk in pig Latin or try to make up a language of your own, which usually didn't last long once you realized how difficult developing a language was. You did have secret code words only you would understand though — and probably still use with that friend today.

Secret Gestures

You and your friends could communicate without words by using secret hand gestures only you knew the real meaning of. Thank God your parents never realized your take on swear words!