TECHNOLOGY
I Miss My BlackBerry 8800
It was the only phone I ever had that wasn’t behind the curve, but now I crave its old-fashioned solidity and simplicity
September 1989. I had just started at university in the UK when I first spotted a mobile phone in the wild, rather than on a National Technologic documentary. We were alerted to its presence by the excited report of a confirmed sighting.
“You know that Sarah Simon? She’s got a mobile phone!”
“A what?”
“A mobile phone!! I think her dad works in the City or something. He must have got it for her.”
Well I never! A callow 18-year-old with such a prized ingot of futuristic tech! ‘Ingot’ in the sense of ‘the size, shape and weight of a gold brick’, that is. Such stuff as dreams are made on!
Sarah’s close friends might perhaps have been allowed to touch the hallowed device, or even call their folks up on it in exchange for a king’s ransom in connection charges. The rest of us spent the next four years queuing at the payphone outside the college bar, with a pocketful of 10 pence pieces.
September 1999. A decade had passed, and mobile phones were well on the way to achieving mononym status as a societal artefact. You could call them ‘mobiles’, or even just ‘phones’…
