Nostalgia: Cordless landline phones were so hot

You must have been somebody to have had a landline phone in your house back in the day. Most likely, you worked for Kenya Posts & Telecommunications Corporation, knew someone who worked for the corporation or you were a civil servant proper with connections. Others who had fixed lines were successful business people and those who were affiliated to churches as priests or pastors.

The rest of the word were condemned to using the ubiquitous red telephone booths and the ‘suffering’ few who were doing ‘well’ had card phones, meaning they didn’t have to work around with coins to make calls. Then out of the blues came the cordless phone!

This type of phone replaced the landline and those seeking privacy simply stepped out to the furthest corner or room with the cordless receiver. But those who strayed too far from the ‘base station’ of the phone found themselves bila network.

Cordless phones that were a hit in the 1990s Kenya were shortly replaced by pagers and Motorola and Erikson cellphones, which were the size of cordless phone receivers.