{"id":469,"date":"2012-09-09T13:44:25","date_gmt":"2012-09-09T17:44:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.borg.org\/?p=469"},"modified":"2012-09-09T13:44:25","modified_gmt":"2012-09-09T17:44:25","slug":"finally-my-picturephone-so-cool-and-ho-hum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/?p=469","title":{"rendered":"Finally, my Picturephone, so cool! And ho-hum."},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a child of the future.\u00a0 When I was young the future was going to be great! In fact every few years they held World’s Fairs to tell us about the future (and show us quaint glimpses of distant peoples and big corporations).<\/p>\n

One of the perennial staples of this future was the Picturephone. (Notice, only one uppercase letter in the name, we were more tasteful then.)<\/p>\n

\"AT&T
AT&T Picturephone<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

AT&T spent many millions of dollars on it, and it failed.\u00a0 They persisted, but it failed.<\/p>\n

I did once get to try a real Picturephone.\u00a0 There was a bank in downtown Minneapolis that had a fancy corner spot with a very early model ATM.\u00a0 In addition to the ATM, there was an AT&T Picturephone on which one could talk to a human teller, and I tried it out.\u00a0 The teller was very nice, I could see her, she could see me, it was cool.\u00a0 We didn’t have much to talk about, so it was a short conversation.<\/p>\n

Now it is here.\u00a0 Yes, it has been here for awhile (Skype, for example) but I mostly never got around to making video phone calls because it was not really that compelling.\u00a0 That was one of AT&T’s problems: Cool at it was, was a Picturephone really good for anything? Good enough to justify the bother and expense?\u00a0 No, it was not even worth the desk space.\u00a0 Certainly not worth the confusion.\u00a0 And don’t even think about the toll charges that would have been necessary circa 1970.<\/p>\n

But this morning I was doing a video chat between Boston and Los Angeles, in living color, on speaker (itself something from the future), and my mind was blown away to contemplate it.<\/p>\n

\"Nexus
Nexus 7 Tablet<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The goll-darn future was finally sitting on my kitchen table!<\/p>\n

For a geezer like me, who was raised on the future, to compare the promise with the reality, was stunning.<\/p>\n

Amazing quality, easy to use, and free.\u00a0 That last part, free, is a really big point.\u00a0 No, a Nexus 7 is not free, nor are the wifi access points in my house (need more than one, need good coverage at home!), nor the DSL service to connect me to the internet.\u00a0 It all costs a lot, but this infrastructure is there for other reasons.\u00a0 Doing video calls is just a side-feature, so it gets to ride along for free.\u00a0 I might go for months before I have occasion to make another video call, so it is a good thing I don’t need to use video chatting as the justification for all this expense.<\/p>\n

The Future Isn’t What it Used To Be<\/h3>\n

So much of The Future that was shown at all those World’s Fairs was technically doable, but somehow not practical and stubbornly resistant to becoming reality.\u00a0 Consider the robots that would soon clean our houses. Now, 40+ years after the heyday of The Future, the best we have along these lines is the Roomba!?\u00a0 The Future has resisted happening.<\/p>\n

Yet, that doesn’t mean the world hasn’t changed over these years.<\/p>\n

“Data Processing”!<\/h3>\n

The World’s Fairs had computers, but they were oddly off to the side.\u00a0 Something to marvel at, but outside of business and science, not obviously useful.<\/p>\n

I remember as a teenager learning about early hobby computers and realizing that a computer was a universal machine that could do anything!\u00a0 Well, anything that had to do with well defined logical operations, but still, what else is there!?\u00a0 (I was a geek.)<\/p>\n

Industrial vs Information Age<\/h3>\n

The clich\u00e9s about how the information age changed the world are true.\u00a0 (Does anyone still remember the “information age”?) But the way it changed the world wasn’t by just using electronics to build new single-purpose appliances, that was an industrial age perspective. No, it was by taking advantage of the universal properties of storing, transforming, and transporting information.\u00a0 (Miniaturization, plunging costs and power consumption, and increased speed were also important.)<\/p>\n

Consider the cell phone.\u00a0 It started out as a carphone.\u00a0 Your house had a phone line, your work had a phone line, so for fancy people, why not get a phone “line” installed in between, in your car?\u00a0 Cool!\u00a0 But, powerful as that was, it wasn’t worth it for most people.\u00a0 Over a few years (thanks to miniaturization et al<\/em>) the phones shrunk until they could fit in a purse or even pocket.\u00a0 They became less specialized (more general purpose) and so more compelling.\u00a0 People, not locations, started to have phone numbers.\u00a0 It was big.\u00a0 But kind of only the warm-up act.<\/p>\n

Enter the “smartphone”. By putting a powerful computer in your pocket instead of just a telephone, things really change.\u00a0 Yes, my Galaxy Nexus is an impressive “phone”.<\/p>\n

\"Galaxy
Galaxy Nexus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I use it constantly. But I hardly ever talk<\/em> on it.<\/p>\n

General Purpose<\/h3>\n

What do I use it for? Everything! Well, Twitter, but lots of other<\/em> stuff, too.<\/p>\n

It is a “transistor radio”, camera, weather station, pocketwatch, newspaper, shelf of paperback books, atlas and world-wide street map, impressive reference library, wire-service news printer, stock ticker and trading terminal, calculator, flashlight, compass, artificial horizon (really: fly your small plane in bad weather), “cassette player”, calendar, address book, chess set, somewhat odd TV set, mail order catalog, bus and plane schedule, airplane arrival screen, GPS receiver (for you time travelers from 1970: “GPS” is a really fancy version of LORAN or Omega; it uses satellites!), constellation\/sky map, dictionary, notepad, magazine rack, (small screen) movie player, video recorder, audio recorder, restaurant directory and reservation making machine, credit card, real estate directory, alarm clock, and more.<\/p>\n

It does e-mail.\u00a0 And, as long as I have it with me anyway, it will do video calls.<\/p>\n

But sometimes I go for days without actually talking<\/em> on this “telephone” of mine.<\/p>\n

It is the general-purpose nature of this device that makes it compelling.\u00a0 Most of the things it can do would not be worth putting my pocket, not alone, but the fact that it can do all that stuff, all from the same pocket, that is what makes it worth it.<\/p>\n

The teenage geek in me was right, computers can do anything, particularly if you give them really cool sensors and many, many billions of dollars worth of support infrastructure, installed all around the world.<\/p>\n

Before we all forget about the “information age”, stop to realize it happened, it is here.\u00a0 No, you didn’t get a flying car (probably not a pony either), but an astounding change has come over our lives and I think it is damn cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am a child of the future.\u00a0 When I was young the future was going to be great! In fact every few years they held World’s Fairs to tell us about the future (and show us quaint glimpses of distant peoples and big corporations). One of the perennial staples of this future was the Picturephone. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[28,51,55,58,80,118,119,143,209,236,280,284,328,337],"class_list":["post-469","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech","tag-atm","tag-car-phone","tag-carphone","tag-cellphone","tag-data-processing","tag-future","tag-galaxy-nexus","tag-information-age","tag-nexus-7","tag-picturephone","tag-skype","tag-smartphone","tag-videophone","tag-worlds-fair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=469"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/469\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=469"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=469"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.borg.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=469"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}