Smartphone Apps by Description

i only got 12 but I got venmo, whatsapp, words with friends, clash of clans, minecraft, zoom, tik tok, spotify,angry birds, snapchat, instagram and twitter

I now own a smartphone but very few apps. Mostly the ones the grandkids want to use when they are here visiting.

^ The phone I had at that time wasn't a smartphone.

I had Nokia N95. Though early, definitely a smartphone with keys

@hbking there was a time eons ago, phones didnt have touchscreens. And can you imagine no apps or camera either!

(there is even a rumour that once upon a time phones were stuck to the wall... now that makes absolutely no sense! I am pretty sure that was made up. You would have to go home and stare at the wall to talk to your friends, haha)

I barely remember when phones had no dials or buttons. We picked up the receiver and waited for the operator to ask, "Number please?" Then we got a phone with a dial and we could dial the number ourselves - that is, we could when we found the line open which wasn't often because we were on a party line with seven other families and had to share. I still remember our ring was two longs and a short. We heard everyone's ring but only picked up when it was ours. The phone rang all hours. We had a card next to the phone which gave everyone else's ring and if we wanted to phone someone on our line we had to dial their party line number (it would be a single number, 1-8) then we'd hang up and their ring would sound repeatedly. When it stopped we knew they had answered and we picked up the receiver and said hello. If it just kept ringing then they weren't home. We didn't get a private line until the 1970s when I was married with children, but by then we only shared with three families.

The trouble with the party line was that anyone who shared the line could pick up their phone and listen in. We could hear when someone picked up and usually knew who the nosy people were on the line. Occasionally someone would break in and ask to have the line if it was an emergency or something important. (Calls were supposed to be limited to three minutes but that rule was seldom followed.) While on the nostalgia train, I also remember that the early phones were always black. When colors became available in the 1970s my mom was really excited to have an avocado green phone. (My grandkids love playing with it.) Also, the phone numbers had words in front of them. Some in my area were Locust 8, Madison 4, Edgewater 5, Granite 1, Avenue 3, etc. The first two letters of the word were dialed as part of the number and later became the present prefixes. For example, Locust 8 became the prefix 568. There were no area codes then, only the 3-number prefixes and 4-digit numbers.

Reading your stories feels like being a child sitting by the fireside and listening to grandma with big eyes.

@ander that was fascinating reading, thanks for sharing.

Thanks for your kind words. I figured everyone would be rolling their eyes thinking, "That old lady is rambling on again about the 'good ol' days'," but it is amazing to me how far we have come since I was young. I live in a rural area, so it might have been more modern in the cities in the 1950s and '60s.

I've met a fair amount of people who play Farmville, or at least did at one time. I never got into it myself.

We can it's just that some of us use Venmo.