In my suburban California high-school circa 1990, there were multiple kids carrying "digital" pagers and a few with cell phones. They didn't seem like time travelers. Others would gossip as to whether they were rich, spoiled brats or maybe selling drugs.
It is true that pocket information was either printed material or something more specialized like an electronic dictionary. The newest information-delivery fad was multimedia CD-ROM applications. On the TV front, product infomercials were already a familiar cliche and CNN had already debuted live-streaming war coverage with the first Gulf War.
The local libraries had a mix of physical card catalogs and digital catalogs. There were still banks of microfiche readers to view archived newspapers. The digital catalogs were a mix of green-screen terminals to some centralized computer and some starting to be based on regular PCs running a library kiosk application. The libraries still had more space dedicated to the stacks of books than contemporary ones which seem to have more lounges and meeting spaces.
The equivalent of internet-based shopping was ordering from printed catalogs either by mail-order or phone-order. Most products would ship in 2-4 weeks instead of a few days unless you paid silly money for expedited service. There was still the lingering concept of cash-on-delivery, where you would give the UPS driver money or a cashier's check when they delivered your package rather than paying the sender in advance. You were more likely to buy clothes locally unless ordering from a company like Columbia or LL Bean.
It is true that pocket information was either printed material or something more specialized like an electronic dictionary. The newest information-delivery fad was multimedia CD-ROM applications. On the TV front, product infomercials were already a familiar cliche and CNN had already debuted live-streaming war coverage with the first Gulf War.
The local libraries had a mix of physical card catalogs and digital catalogs. There were still banks of microfiche readers to view archived newspapers. The digital catalogs were a mix of green-screen terminals to some centralized computer and some starting to be based on regular PCs running a library kiosk application. The libraries still had more space dedicated to the stacks of books than contemporary ones which seem to have more lounges and meeting spaces.
The equivalent of internet-based shopping was ordering from printed catalogs either by mail-order or phone-order. Most products would ship in 2-4 weeks instead of a few days unless you paid silly money for expedited service. There was still the lingering concept of cash-on-delivery, where you would give the UPS driver money or a cashier's check when they delivered your package rather than paying the sender in advance. You were more likely to buy clothes locally unless ordering from a company like Columbia or LL Bean.