A Tech Jones
Chapter 4: Reach Out and Touch Someone
TODAY'S RAMBLINGS
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Happy Friday. This is the fourth chapter of A Tech Jones.
Introduction and Chapter 1: Not a Zero or a One in Sight
Reach Out and Touch Someone
We continue with the aforementioned landline telephone service remaining about the only way to communicate with others in real-time. This is from 1979; long distance operators!
Yet it ends in the early 2000s with Broadband Internet in everyone’s home.
And many fewer long distance operators.
Pagers
Kids, pagers (beepers!) used to be important - critical, even, in fields like medicine, where they remain so, and also drug-dealing - but you’d be excused for never having seen one.
For the record, I only had one, for a short time in 2000, as a Technical Director at Charles Schwab. I’d get a page when there was a big outage, although I don’t know why: I had no role in operations.
Cell Phones
To me, it felt like the whole cellular phone thing just kind of came on.
One minute, the world revolved around landlines, call waiting, and answering machines. Watch this brief clip from Seinfeld, the finest TV comedy ever and a veritable encyclopedia of the 1990s, for evidence.
The next minute? In London, Seaco let me borrow one (an early model, but it worked great), and upon my return to SF in the fall of 1998, I got my own - this exact model, in fact.
There would be no going back.
Cell phones were also the nail in the coffin for “dialing zero” and “calling the operator.” But that’s a different blog post.
Palm Pilot/Blackberry/MP3 Players
Frankly, I had always been a Day-Timer kind of guy.
But being the geek I am, I took to the Palm Pilot immediately. I got my first in 2000.
Yet - and it’s one of my only unchecked tech boxes - I’ve never owned or even used a Blackberry, which was in many ways ahead of its time.
But it is my MP3 Player from this period of which I am most proud.
MP3 is a compressed digital music computer file format, which exploded onto the scene, along with the original Napster (probably worthy of its own post) in the late 1990s. MP3 files are much smaller than uncompressed digital audio files, and thus there’s a quality compromise, but most didn’t (still don’t) care, because it meant you could bring an incredible (for the time) amount of music with you.
Being the music obsessive I am, I had to have the first and best, and it was this, the cleverly named “Personal Jukebox.”
But we called it “The Device,” and I got it in 2000. It had a whopping 5 gigabyte hard drive and was the first consumer player to have one. Made by long-gone but huge-at-the-time Compaq Computer, they licensed it to an unknown Korean company named HanGo (true!), and the product went nowhere.
But you can ask Arthur and my wife: that thing got a lot of use, and it worked famously well.
And it was nearly 2 full years before Apple released the original iPod.
True story: In my cube at Schwab in mid-2001, I looked at my cell phone (which by now was a flip phone), Palm Pilot, and The Device all sitting there, all separate.
I wondered: Can’t we just have one thing that does it all?
But we’ll get to that.
Broadband Internet at Home
I am mostly skipping over this nonsense, in terms of consumer Internet access. I am kind of blowing off America Online, too.
Because: My computer’s telephone? Are you fucking kidding me?
And this was the so-called Walled Garden of AOL. The garden had crabgrass.
Because the Internet didn’t really become THE INTERNET until it dumped the screechy dial-up modem for home access, and gave residences what we were already enjoying at the office by now:
High-speed and always-on Internet access, A.K.A. Broadband Internet
For many, this came first via DSL from the telephone company, and later, a cable modem from your cable TV provider.
I remember my first residential broadband experience vividly, although it was not in SF but instead in Fort Worth, TX, at a friend’s home, in 2001. He had just gotten broadband Internet service, and upon using it, I was stunned. By then there were a lot of consumer websites, of increasingly higher quality, and I surfed the web for hours that trip.
For fun. I may have even looked at a shopping site or two.
But is that going to be a good thing for everyone to be doing? All of the time? Kids, too?
Next: Digital Immersion
FROM THE UNWASHED MASSES
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KLUF
It’s almost like a band captured an entire era’s power and angst in one single album.
Oh, wait.
In 1997, they did and OMFG is it Diamond Certified.