Life before smartphones

Yeah I remember waiting for people - I got a smartphone at 16, in 2004, something like that, so it's hard to really imagine how it was for adults...

My parents told me they spend evenings at the phone booth talking to each other - but even that is ultra convenient compared to my grandparents sending letters :D

But I think it's better anyway - we sample mating candidates more, we cycle through faster, we can stop and try anew nearly any time until 50, and with some difficulty above.

I mean my aunt had a crushing divorce when she had 3 young children and stayed alone working with all 3 until the internet arrived and she could find a partner much faster...

> * Inane arguments in pubs about facts that couldn't be instantly googled.

I don't miss those. Before the Internet, if it wasn't on an encyclopedia and you weren't at the library, you had no way of corroborating information.

On the other hand, since facts are so accessible right now, those arguments have shifted to voicing their feelings and wishes because those can't be falsified.

There's a modern Seinfeld twitter account, which has a bunch of zany plot lines that are only possible in the smart phone era.

You know, that's another thing that has changed a lot. Modern TV writer just can't stop himself from using the mobile phone as a device to advance the story. We have to watch some guy in a TV show sending iMessages. That is so boring, and as a caveman from the pre-cellular era it takes me out of the show and makes me want to turn it off. A recent offender in this regard was the Amazon show "Bosch". If you made a supercut of the titular detective answering his iPhone, it would be almost as long as the series itself. This is particularly irritating since the Bosch novels were written in the 90s, before the smartphone era, in the car-phone era at the latest.

I still occasionally marvel that I can wake up at 4:30am in Denver and be in Very Rural Virginia by 5pm...and that's with stopping over in Atlanta first.

It's not the travel, or the time, it's the 'it's more efficient to go thousands of miles out of the way due to logistics.'

This has not been particularly new, but I can still marvel at it.

Having fixed plumbing, I'm reminded that the current iteration is as a result of 2000 years of refinement.

I have a lathe, manufactured in 1966, it still holds tolerances, and I refer to a book (how to run a lathe) that's first printing was at the turn of the 20th century (1912 or thereabouts)

Old stuff is remarkable, too.

Something I've been wondering about lately:

In the pre-Internet era, rumors, incidents, conspiracies, book and movie opinions were passed on verbally. I saw an article nobody else in my circle ever read; a friend watched a movie nobody else is going to see any time soon, etc. There were endless opportunities to get together and talk.

We were each other's Internets.

Do people talk less these days? I certainly do but that might be due to my age. But I'm genuinely curious if the topics of conversations are as intellectually fulfilling as they used to be.

The pre-LTE era was quite the experience as a teenager, and it wasn’t until the iPhone 5 when smartphones became a ubiquitous and affordable thing (or justifiable) for many of my friends. I didn’t have a smartphone until my junior year of high school!

SMS feature phones like the sidekick, with physical keyboards, ruled the day and many of my classmates actually disliked smartphones because of the lack of physical keys!

Aligning the infrared ports of two phones until max speed was achieved and being extremely careful to not move them for minutes which felt like ages to just send over a polyphonic ringtone..

And if the bell rung, well, you were out of luck

You can always go back, any time! Get a dumb phone.

It's great. Engage with others more authentically, more meaningfully, and more consistently.