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Comment by medi8r | Hacker News Reader

1993. No phone. No expectation of being contactable. If you are out you are out.

No SSDs though :(

Well, people showed up randomly at your door completely unannounced. And for the expectation of being available: At least where I grew up mobility was much lower, transportation difficult. You bet there was an expectation of availability. Was it better or worse? I could not say, it was surely different.

There were SSDs since the '80s, both flash (rare) and DRAM-with-battery (more common). You just didn't have the $$$ for them.

CF cards were introduced in '94 and use a PATA interface. Before them there were memory cards in PCMCIA (ISA bus) format.

Yeah...it was pretty good except that last part...

Actually the GSM spec existed in 1993 :)

The GSM spec is some years older, because you need time to built networks and phones based on it. In Germany GSM started 1992, and we already had a decent state-wide analog mobile phone network (mostly car phones because of the hardware requirements), called "C net" This was popular since the 80ies and only shutdown in 2000, when GSM was widely established with three private networks (and also cheaper then).

Gotta love the German creativity in naming. It's called "C Net" because that came after "B Net", which came after "A Net". While "A" apparently stood for "Autotelefon" (car phone).

And when D-Net came, T-Mobile called their service D1, and Vodafone called theirs... D2.

This naming scheme made things very obvious. While it wasn't the most creative, it was objectively the best ;-)

They should have named it C++.Net

In UK first affordable phone plans I remember were 96. I think T Mobile did free evening calls.

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