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Comment by raw_anon_1111 | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely no one said that.

There were a lot of people back in the early '90s who thought cell service would never be widely adopted because of the cost. It was clear you didn't need a mobile phone -- we'd all gotten long just fine without one.

I worked at Radio Shack in 1995 shortly after carriers started subsidizing phones aggressively and you could “buy one for penny”. They were selling like crazy.

Just some quick Googling says that cellphone penetration went from 1% in 1990 to 50% by 1999.

The Motorola Startec was introduced in 1996 and clones came quickly thereafter and were all the rage

Although it’s also the case that people like me owned cell phones for quite a while but didn’t use them to any material degree especially for personal uses for a while.

Per minute costs were expensive, roaming from your local city took a lot of work, they were bulky bag phones and you still had to pay separate long distance charges, I’m not surprised.

Sprint changed that in the late 90s where all calls were 10 cents a minute anywhere you were calling from and too and you stayed on their network.

Exactly. I eventually bought one and then an other and chose a calling area that was most likely to correspond with people I might communicate with on trips and the like but it was backup/emergency use. Not something you used personally day to day or even maybe week to week.

I think that's the point. Nobody in the 80s or early 90s understood how quickly it would grow by 1995.

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