Was the term "voicemail" commonly used in the early 90s?

[ButterflyBlood]

I just noticed this lyric listening to the Buffalo Tom song "Porchlight":

Your voice is small on my voicemail system/A million miles away

This album is from 1992. I figured the term was cell phone only related and back then it was just answering machines or whatnot. I guess you can learn things from odd places...so when did the term come around?

[Rochester]

1. Probably just a marketing term by the phone companies...

...to try to get people to pay a monthly fee for the "convenience" of being able to access their messages by pushing ten or fifteen buttons.

Because we all know that a one-time expense for an answering machine which is always in the user's house and under the user's control and costs $0 per month to maintain and gives you your messages at the push of one button isn't good enough, right? God forbid that someone should call and get a busy signal.

(scowl) Is my cynicism showing?

[TorchTheWitch]

2. I know the term was around in the 80's and maybe earlier

and I think it originated with businesses rather than personal phones.

[OriginalGeek]

7. You are correct!

One of my duties at work is managing the Nortel phone switch - a phone exchange in our server room that handles the 500ish phones in my building and a hundred or so more in remote locations. They have been building these things for decades and they've had voicemail for as long as I can remember. (mine is at least 20 years old - although I haven't been working here that long)

[distantearlywarning]

3. Yes, because a lot of phone companies offered it as part of landline packages

It was one of those upgrades, like call waiting and so forth.

[Enrique]

15. and ironically the term "landline" was never heard back then

because back then that was known as your "phone".

[Shagbark Hickory]

4. I don't remember it from that early. I have to beg to differ with the others.

Early adopters of mobile phones didn't have voicemail. As I recall, if they didn't answer, you'd get a recording that said the "The SuchnSuch Mobility customer you are calling is unavailable or has traveled outside the area". Being able to leave voice message on a mobile phone account started showing up on the scene a few years later but it still took a little longer for the term "voicemail" to replace "answering machine." I got my first in 1996 and it didn't have voicemail. I don't know if there was an extra charge for it or not but in any case it wasn't to the point where everyone called it voicemail.

Large Office telephone systems may have had something called voicemail but I worked in a hotel and an office and in neither place did anyone have voicemail. People were still writing down messages for others in those days as I recall it.

Home phone accounts would often use a device known as an "answering machine". Someone might say, "Why didn't you return my call? I left you a message on your answering machine."
If you said "I left you a voicemail" back in those days people would look at you funny.

That is my recollection.

[RebelOne]

9. I also beg to differ. I only knew the term "answering machine."

As far as I know, voicemail was only known in the mid-'90s.

[TorchTheWitch]

11. I know it was a common business term used in the mid-80's

I was a receptionist then, and when putting calls through to people if they didn't pick up it automatically went to their "voicemail"... it was called "voicemail". People may have referred to their home line messages as their answering machine messages, but at businesses that had a busy switchboard voicemail was common and was called "voicemail". When the term started being used on home land lines or mobile phones, I haven't a clue, but it was definitely a common term in the mid-80's at businesses that were busy enough with phone calls to require voicemail messages rather than hiring more than one receptionist to take all the calls and messages.

[Shagbark Hickory]

12. We must've not got that so soon in the south. We had sticky pads.

Heck, I used an answering service up to around 2002.
With real live humans. Imagine that.

[LanternWaste]

5. We always referred to it as "leave a message on the machine"

We always referred to it as "leave a message on the machine" (the machine being the telephone's answering machine which was finally becoming rather common among the middle class by the end of the early 80's.

I honestly cannot remember the time I ever heard the term 'voicemail', but would bet it was in the early nineties.

[Lucinda]

6. It was in common usage by the 1980's according to wiki

and actually goes back to the 70's for business usage.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voicemail

[Rambis]

8. Answerphone

:evilgrin:

[MadrasT]

10. Yes.

I remember being the project manager for the installation of a voicemail system in a bank right around 1990.

[Xithras]

13. The word Voicemail was trademarked in 1979

The concept of telephone based voice recording existed even earlier, but a company called Televoice was the first to really package it as a service that could be sold to normal people. They created a service where you were given an 800 number and a pin code. You then gave this number and code to anyone who wanted to contact you. You could periodically call the number yourself to listen to any waiting messages. They called the system Voicemail, and pulled a trademark on the name. It was crude, but that system was the ancestor of all modern voicemail systems.

Televoice later changed its company name to Voicemail Corporation, and began retooling its systems so that it could sell its wares directly to the telephone companies. For a while, Voicemail service was a standard part of many pager services. Someone would call you, leave a message, and your pager would go off (sending you on a hunt for the nearest payphone) Lots of average people started using it, and the term "voicemail" became synonymous with voice messaging. They also licensed their technology to some manufacturers of corporate telephone systems, which is how the word "voicemail" made it into offices.

The company eventually went out of business, and the term passed into the public domain. The name stuck around and became synonymous with the technology, but hardly anyone remembers that there was actually a "Voicemail company" at one point.

[BrendaBrick]

14. I remember that it all started with beepers

which at the time was reserved for only doctors on call. From there it expanded into an everyday 'answering machine' about the size and weight of an old metro yellow pages..uh oh - maybe some don't even know what the yellow pages are/were :-)?

[fishwax]

16. I remember it from the early 90s with businesses and so on

Cheaper than an answering machine for every line, I suppose ...