Then and Now#2

Do you remember your first cell phone? I do know that the first cell phone I ever saw was the big fat brick Motorola phone, DynaTAC. I couldn’t afford it at over $3,000. It was introduced in 1983.

My first cellular phone was the Motorola MicroTac in 1993. My service provider then was *Cellular One. I think it was still analog. It was the first flip phone.

I do remember my first cool phone, however, and that was the Motorola StarTac. That was the first clamshell phone ever. That was my new toy in 1996. I bought it because I was wanting the smallest of everything. PC World put StarTAC at #6 in The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years[1].

So when I got my first PDF in 1997; it was a Rolodex the size of a credit card. Franklin Rolodex Electronics REX PC Companion, it had Starfish software and could synch with Microsoft Outlook when fitted into the PCMCI slot. at #33 in The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years[1].


I didn’t switch to a Palm Pilot until 1998; at #4 in The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years[1].
I hesitated to learn the Palm Pilot shorthand. Once I did I had one until 2001. By then the cell phones were so sophisticated I didn’t find it necessary to carry a PDF.

Then I had a few Nokias. They were probably the most dependable phones.

My first multimedia phone was the Sony Eriksson. Instead of a flip, the cover rotated to open the phone. It also stored music and it used Walkman technology.

Now I carry a Samsung D870, which is my second camera phone, it had the highest Mega Pixels at the time I bought it last year. I don’t know why I bother; I can’t do anything with 1.3 MP, maybe a postage stamp. It also can store music, again, why bother, I have an iPod. It is a slider phone. #2 in The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years[1].
*Cellular One was bought by Cingular (here in the greater Bay Area) who was later bought by SBC which used to be Pacific Bell, who bought Yahoo and is now all ATT.

I don't like that nowadays you are discouraged to get new batteries by making the cost prohibitive and in some cases they don't even make repacement batteries available.

I now can't stand ATT service. I can't get good signal in Ben Lomond, I used to. I don't understand why everytime I just want to change a phone I have to sign a two-year contract. What, they don't think I'm a loyal customer? I've been with the same system since 1993 when I got my first cell phone.

They have no loyalty to me, I will switch to Verizon when my contract ends in February.

What did we do before cell phones?

The whole list of 50 Greatest Gadgets of the past 50 year.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,123950-page,7/article.html

Then and Now

It’s been fun blogging. One of the observations I’ve had lately is that I don’t have all my photos organized as I thought I did. I realized that I just started uploading my digital photos to Yahoo in 2002. I used my ISP and Outlook at the time and only used Yahoo as a search engine. I ended up becoming more involved with Yahoo when SBC and Yahoo merged. So I am guessing that that was in 2002.

Before that I used to upload pictures to my own website. I bought my first digital camera in 1996. It was a Fuji 1.3 pixels and the maximum size was 640x480. Bandwidth then was so poor, you had to make your images web friendly which meant making them small and light.

In visiting the site that I started in 1996 I noticed that most of the images have degraded in one way or another. So I am guessing that over time and Internet Explorer upgrades, those images then are now somewhat corrupted or not very compatible with the current version. I viewed it using IE and FireFox. Then again maybe my expectations were much lower then, I just can’t recall. I doubt that any company or web developer has archives of their older sites. There is however a website http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and it takes snapshots of websites over the years. I would be curious to walk down memory lane. I think we just take things for granted today.

Here are some examples…notice the graphics.

Here is what Yahoo looked like in October 1996 http://web.archive.org/web/19961017235908/http:/www2.yahoo.com/
and this is what Yahoo looks like today, http://www.yahoo.com/

Dell in December 1996 http://web.archive.org/web/19961221053000/http:/www.dell.com/
Dell today http://www.dell.com/

Toshiba in December 1996 http://web.archive.org/web/19961219002946/http:/www.toshiba.com/
Toshiba today
http://www.toshiba.com/tai/

Maybe you don’t notice these things and don’t care, that’s okay. This is just an observation.

In 1996 I learned to do GIF animations and I thought they were so cool. I am embarrassed to show you what I did but I will anyway
http://www.gracespace.com/txtp15.htm
Today here is an example of a Flash animation I did in the home page of my Digital Grace website http://www.digitalgrace.info/ and this http://www.digitalgrace.info/test/Restaurant_template/fish.html
Notice how now they can even be interactive.

Anyway hope you are having a good day. These are just passing thoughts.