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Comment by dark-star | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how people checked in on their kids in the 90s, before smartphones were a thing?

I grew up in the 90s. If plans deviated from what we decided before I left the house, it was a huge chore to communicate with parents. It involved finding a pay phone, then calling a list of different numbers to try to catch parents at the office or home or wherever they might be. And it sucked.

It’s weird to think that anyone would hold this up as an example of the good old days. Rose colored glasses in effect.

Notably, pay phones don’t exist anymore, so you couldn’t actually replicate the 90s era communication if you wanted to.

Pay phones are not prevalent in the USA, but they do exist. https://www.payphone-project.com/numbers/usa/

Some countries actually support pay phones. They're amazingly useful during disasters when mobile networks may not be functioning.

Example: Japan, but they're contemplating reduction. "city areas are required to have a public pay phone installed every 500 square meters, with non-city areas every kilometer. " https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/the-end-o...

If your local region doesn't have a lot of pay phones perhaps it is time to consult the local government. Change can start at the bottom.

OP was almost certainly saying "don’t exist anymore" to indicate that you can't rely on them to be at every corner gas station (or similar) anymore, thus making them obsolete for such a purpose as checking in with relatives. Their obscurity means you'll be unlikely to find them unless you're close enough to something like a full-service truck stop, which I've observed tend to still have payphones.

also grew up in the 90s and plans usually didn't deviate from the plan because there was no way to communicate.

ppl just showed up, or didn't

Tried it, alas, without success -Two big factors: 1. the infrastructure that made this possible in the 90s isn’t there anymore (at least in my part of the world). 2. The surrounding world requires information exchange at physical boundaries. These too have now been “digitized”.

Where might we turn to?

The family could all get their amateur radio certification/license and communicate over great distances, for free, without any subscription fees, tracking, etc. :) Sounds like I'm joking but honestly with the presence of repeaters everywhere around any metropolitan area, establishing communication would be trivially easy (especially with agreed-upon "time windows" during which to listen for each other and/or to check in).

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