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[–] 7 points 3 months ago* (2 children)

I mean, caller ID has been a thing for a while. I remember when I was a kid in the 90s knowing which phone numbers I could answer, like my grandma, and the ones I didn’t know were to go to “the machine”. (Answering machine is what we used to call voice mail.)

It was a separate box even, so on the end table we had the cordless phone with the giant antenna that would get staticky when I used my RC cars, the tiny box with a tiny screen that showed the number calling, and a separate answering machine.

I remember later when we upgraded to a cordless phone that had multiple receivers each with built in caller id and the base station had built in voice mail… and then we never used it because we all had cell phones by then.

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  • [–] 4 points 3 months ago (1 child)

    Caller ID wasn't super widespread in the UK until the 00s IIRC

    I definitely remember dialling 1471 to figure out who just rang in the 00s anyway (BT equivalent of *69 in America)

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago

    I had a classmate in Year 6 who would phone me, but pretend to be another classmate, I have no idea why, because we were friends and I gave her my number. I'd ask her in class the next day, and she'd deny it. So when 1471 came out, she got busted and I called her back. But still kept trying to deny it was her. It was so weird.

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