An early experiment involved the telephone cord. In the postwar years, the copper used inside the cords remained scarce. Telephone company executives wondered whether the standard cord, then about three feet long, might be shortened. Mr. Karlin’s staff stole into colleagues’ offices every three days and covertly shortened their phone cords, an inch at time. No one noticed, they found, until the cords had lost an entire foot.
From then on, phones came with shorter cords.
Virtually no one older than 25 uses it, but Pinger, an app that turns iPod Touches, a parent’s castoff iPhone without a service plan, or Wi-Fi-only iPads into “phones” with texting and calling capability, has drawn 8 million active users, with 80% of them between the ages of 12 and 24. Pinger assigns phone numbers and, using software and Wi-Fi, allows kids to call and text for free in exchange for viewing advertising. “We turn non-phones into phones,” said Pinger CMO Terrence Sweeney. Especially for the playground set.
Some unknown genius discovered that if you hooked two Sears or Monkey Ward telephone sets to the top wire on a barbed-wire fence, you could talk between the telephones as easily as between two “town” telephones connected by slick wire through an operator’s switchboard. A rural telephone system that had no operators, no bills—and no long-distance charges—was born
My sister maintains that Snapchat is up there with Instagram, in terms of usage amongst her peers. Her exemplary use case was a moment that she captured in the airport of a funny looking man who was snoozing in an awkward position. It’s the type of thing that you want to share with somebody, but it’s insignificance would make it awkward in a text or status update. “It’s a way to connect with friends when you don’t really have anything to say.
It may sound ridiculous to say that Bell and his successors were the fathers of modern commercial architecture—of the skyscraper. But wait a minute. Take the Singer Building, the Flatiron Building, the Broad Exchange, the Trinity, or any of the giant office buildings. How many messages do you suppose go in and out of those buildings every day? Suppose there was no telephone and every message had to be carried by a personal messenger? How much room do you think the necessary elevators would leave for offices? Such structures would be an economic impossibility.
After parcel post service was introduced, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.
150 years ago, a primitive Internet united the USA
Long before there was an Internet or an iPad, before people were social networking and instant messaging, Americans had already gotten wired.
Monday marks the 150th anniversary of the completion of the transcontinental telegraph. From sea to sea, it electronically knitted together a nation that was simultaneously tearing itself apart, North and South, in the Civil War.
Americans soon saw that a breakthrough in the spread of technology could enhance national identity and, just as today, that it could vastly change lives.
“It was huge,” says Amy Fischer, archivist for Western Union, which strung the line across mountains, canyons and tribal lands to make the final connection. “… With the Civil War just a few months old, the idea that California, the growing cities of California, could talk to Washington and the East Coast in real time was huge. It’s hard to overstate the impact of that.”
» via Yahoo! News
“Telegram for America”: A 1956 Western Union Documentaray (by MotherboardTV) - I haven’t watched this yet as it’s 20 min long but in a retrohistory kinda way it looks like it could be fascinating
When Telegrams Ruled American Communications - Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg - Technology - The Atlantic
“We call it a speedway for words” - I love this phrasing… forerunner to the internet superhighway (or is it a series of tubes ;-)
69 percent of those polled (by MSN) in the Philippines said they taught family members how to use the Internet just to be able to stay in touch …
34 percent, of Philippine respondents named social networks as their most preferred family communications tool.
In China and Indonesia, text messaging reigned supreme, as cited by 74 percent and 41 percent, respectively, of those polled.
Across the region, however, the telephone was still the most important medium of communication, cornering a 67 percent share of total responses in the seven countries included in the survey.
BBC News - RIM CEO calls a halt to BBC Click interview
Hmm… doesn’t exactly fill you with confidence
me, anything that happens in social media is an extension of stuff we were already doing in some other way… the form that most closely resembles the “tweet” is the telegram of old, which also was limited because you paid by the letter. And so short communications very rapidly sent… Even African tribal drums, for instance, could send very complex messages over great distances
