The Shifted Librarian quotes from a New Yorker essay, The 1992 house:

I learned that one of the biggest hardships endured by people back in 1992 was not being able to use cell phones. I had thought that maybe I could just cut back on the number of calls I made, thinking that usage plans were more limited. However, my research (at the library!) unearthed the fact that cell phones really were only humongous car-phone versions, prevalent among early executives in the hip-hop industry….

Not having the use of a cell phone piqued my curiosity regarding how schoolchildren communicated all those years ago. Since my mother was not speaking to me and Larry wasn’t around (he did end up going to Myrtle Beach), I turned to primary sources (in the form of classic cinema) for answers. I found ‘The Breakfast Club’ and ‘Pretty in Pink’ in the library – on videotape. I learned that back in the eighties and nineties students would hand-write things on little pieces of paper called ‘notes’ and try to pass them to each other in class without getting caught….