Yeah, I got my first in 1997, after being encouraged by the soon to be Mrs Secure. It was a Sony Ericsson phone from CPW. £14.99/ month with One2One, a GA628, I believe.
I had one of those free calls at evenings and weekends deals.
Orange poached me with the promise to keep the free calls deals but with a cheaper monthly cost. When PAYG became cheaper than contract for me, I rang Orange to ask if they could move me from contract to PAYG, but they refused (even though my contract had expired) because I didn't give them a reason. I wasn't in financial trouble but there could have been personal reasons why I wanted to move, so I told her as much. I said it was unreasonable of the company to demand a reason why, that they should allow me to move and it was stupidly short-sighted of them not to do so.
I told them to stick it and moved to Virgin, and lost my original One2One number. The number I originally got from Virgin is now Number 1 son's number. In fact, I collected more memorable numbers for me and the lads that all begin with the same 5 digit prefix.
In the early days, when I chose a phone, I used to ask CPW to give a choice of numbers that they had in the stock room: they were printed on the packaging.
So my history of service providers goes (from memory):
One2One (may have morphed into T Mobile)
Orange
Virgin
Asda (who moved from Voda to EE then back again.....)
3
Smarty
There were some dalliances with Tesco and Sainsbury Mobile along the way, but I can't remember where they fitted in.