For those who don't know, 大哥大 was the term in my 1980 Chinese textbook for cellphones because they tended to be big. Few of my current Chinese friends have any clue about this part of history; we now use 手机 instead (this translates as "hand machine").

I never saw any BBs here during the 90s, but I probably should have included pagers in my list; these permitted us to send numeric (only) messages.

This reminds me of the night the Beijing Olympics were announced during 2001. We all had cell phones by then, but the network got to full capacity, so we couldn't use them; this forced us to resort to simply going to the spots we felt our friends might be at, and it worked.