the onda

Supermarkets that stay open late are depressing places to be on Friday night to be sure. Just tonight I found myself walking into one and I was presented with the relic pictured here.

I was shocked because I remember using this very phone 15 years ago when I was in college and the world was so completely different. Can you spot the three things in this picture that the pace of technology has made completely obsolete in the last decade and a half? First, the web killed the phonebooks— both white and yellow— tucked in below. Then Craig's List and eBay killed the classified ad hanging to the right of the phone.

But it was the mobile phone that has most completely rendered this picture a quaint anachronism of a time long past. For years I remember having to have this 14 digit number in my head (my calling card), or worse yet scrounging for dimes and the quarters, to use phones like this one to coordinate life in a way that would seem completely foreign to the average college student today.

To that point, the Economist has an excellent piece this week on the exploding mobile phone landscape, one bright spot in an otherwise dim tech economy. As they so eloquently put the shift to smartphones:

But at the same time the industry is going through a transformation that promises to fuel rapid growth in the years to come. To draw a parallel from computing, it is as if the personal computer (PC), its graphical user-interface, high-speed internet access and open-source software had all taken off at the same time.

I'm not sure I am quite that optimistic but boy have we come a long way from the antique in that picture.