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.
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.
No one in my family had caller ID in the 90’s because it cost extra.
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)