Oh gosh, I know which one you're talking about. It looked like a small dark gray block. Extension antenna and it looked like a kid's toy at first glance. I never had one of those, but someone in my immediate family did get that and I laughed at them. I thought cell phones would be a fad. That thing was built well. It didn't help that kids toys came out around the same time and looked like it.
Yeah, my nephew was junior high long before smartphones were even being considered apart from Palm and Blackberries. I honestly thought it was the dumbest thing to give a kid a cell phone at that time and at that age. At the end of that year, I went to pick him up and I saw a sea of students using their phone. It was weird to see that at the time. I think the typical phone price was 180-500 at the time. The top end being without contract, otherwise it got knocked down a couple hundred. But still, it was a haven for any thief. Pretty sure it was before GPS was being used in phones and before providers began blacklisting serials from networks.
I had a beeper because at the time I wasn't working for myself but for someone else. It was having to be at one of three locations when needed, and payphones were huge at the time. Cell phones were still way too expensive for the average person. And as
@A.Goldberg mentioned in the 4G thread, beepers work regardless. Even got assigned a beeper when working in gov. The last one I had was pretty damn fancy, too. Had an alarm, some kind of note system (I might be wrong), 5 different alarm tones, and about 8 different notice/beep tones.
Beepers were kind of like the Casio digital watches from the 80s. The really fancy ones that cost a ton then, like the Data Bank. Those got dorky really fast in the early 90s. I used a Casio digital before getting more into watches. My other nephew, who's younger, was and still is heavily into Casio G-Shock watches. I think he had about 300 varieties at one time buying, being gifted and trading them. I don't get it...