Because of a $400 error in a newspaper advertisement, I purchased my first mobile phone in the Fall of 1991 for only $99. It was a Panasonic EBJ-1114 “transportable mobile phone,” a monolithic brick that required its own backpack in which to cart it around. I used it only once, and the allure to be always available faded. Plus, CompuServe, AOL, and Prodigy had all just recently opened easy passage to the Internet.
Times were changing.
Now we take for granted the device in our pockets that gives access to the entirety of human achievement, from shopping, communicating, and calculating, to researching, gaming, and watching cat videos. Long gone are the archaic relics of a bygone era, like beepers, encyclopedias, fax machines, 9600-baud modems, VHS tapes, and floppy disks. Comparing…
