how we used to do it

Broadband celebrates it’s tenth birthday! It is hard to believe that a decade has passed since we were running businesses and buying on-line via those toe-curlingly slow whistling, humming, clicking 56kb dial-up modems. And yet in the day we were so impressed! A few years earlier I’d brought a fax machine that had the impressive go faster stripe on the side saying ‘all data transmitted at ultra-fast 9600bauds a minute (that is 9.6kb). A page of A4 text every 40 seconds – zipperty do da. We really thought we were cooking on gas. Despite Steve Job’s best efforts, people still hanker for technology that feels comfortable – hence the delightfully retro ‘dialler’ app for the iPhone. No doubt someone is designing a typewriter iPhone app with full carriage return so that we can send text messages the old fashioned way.

Yes it's the Carling iphone app. Still no news on a real ale version.

If there is one thing marginally more boring than listening to someone drone on endlessly about the number of apps on their iPhone, it is listening to four iphone users drone on together about how the iPhone has, like, you know completely changed their lives.  I happened to be talking to four iPhone obsessives as the sole non-iphone user and my phone rang.  As I answered my phone, everyone burst into laughter.  ‘A Blackberry????  What a loser!’ ‘Look’ I said, ‘The phone works, I can send and receive emails, manage my appointments, take photographs and clips of film and even navigate with GPS. It’s all I need’.  But to no avail.  They were back sharing their app stories.  ‘Bet your Blackberry can’t do this’, one of them said. It was a motion detector. ‘Look’ he said excitedly ‘I can measure the vibration in the floor – it could be really useful in an earthquake’. I sighed and tried to visualise being somewhere when an earthquake began and whether I would have the presence of mind to put my iphone on the floor to check the reading on the richter scale. Probably not.  I have got nothing against the iPhone.  I just wish their owners stop trying to convert the rest of us……