9 ms·

Cameras on phones? (2001) [video]

129 points by vanilla-almond 4y ago

justinator 4y ago
In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3 hours to get it up and running. I didn't realize I had invented Instagram. Shoulda spent a little more time on it.
- somedude895 4y ago
  Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?
  - vachina 4y ago
    Probably email attachment
    - justinator 4y ago
      Bingo. The phone could send a mixed text and image message as a multipart MIME message. I made an email forward that piped to a Perl script. That Perl script read the text and image data using something like MIME::Parser, and saved that stuff in a database. Another script read that data and returned some HTML using Template Toolkit and CGI.pm. Really just something I threw together the night before I left. I remember a few years later someone was showing me how you could text a message to a specific number, then it showed up on this "Twitter" site and that seemed quaint. Anyways Perl was so easy and fun some Painting and Drawing undergrad could throw something together that was that useful to his 5 friends and his completely confused professor (and pay for art school hacking on other stuff too).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Raed667 4y ago
    Around ~2005 I had a Sony Ericsson K300, and my main method was to send pictures to the computer via infrared (yes I had to buy an infrared USB dongle) and then posting them on skyblog.com The phone could even tether its GPRS connection via infrared! That always amazed me!
    - justinator 4y ago
      Yup looks similar to the one I had. I bought it at Car Toys because there weren't even T-Mobile stores yet. It took like 2 hours to transfer my number from another carrier (a new ability at the time!) and activate the account - what a process! I remember the keypad was kinda small for my giant hands, but it would connect via this thing called "Bluetooth" to my Mac. Every time you got a text, it would show up on my Mac's screen, and I could reply just using my keyboard instead of typing out something using T9 on the phone itself. Soooo much faster. Somehow the ability to do that was disabled or something, I dunno. I hadn't felt that sort of magical integration again until I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID (or however it works, I totally forget the details) so long as Bluetooth is enabled on both. Such magic and solved so many tiny little problems. I missed years of Airdropping as my last Macbook just couldn't work with Airdrop and I have no idea why not. Seeing Airdrop work instantly sold me on iPhones and I'll never go back to Android.
      - comboy 4y ago
        > I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID whoa Although I didn't realize that compromised phone can steal data from my laptop :|
        justinator 4y ago
        Universal Clipboard is something you'll need to enable. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- owl57 4y ago
  But note how you invented only the better half of Instagram. The other half is all the "social" shit: "Tell us your email to see more John's photos", "Have you seen recent posts from Kate, Mike and Cristiano Ronaldo", etc.
  - EddieDemo 4y ago
    Bear in mind; we're all on HN looking for high-quality content from strangers, rather than from our own personal network(s). The trend across all social media is to feed us with more 'high-ranking' content from 'strangers' because it's typically what we want to see more of, based on the analytics. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook — all of them are pivoting to feed us more content from people outside of our personal networks as fast as possible.
  - justinator 4y ago
    Oh that lack of features was incredibly deliberate. All kidding aside, I personally had a revelation on how much of my attention has been getting stolen away from me, tiny bit by tiny bit. I'm going to make an honest attempt to gain some of that back. More reading out of physical books, less doomscrolling. More taking people out to coffee, less overdosing on puppy videos.
jamal-kumar 4y ago
My first encounter with a camera on a phone was when I was a kid in Japan in 2004. These girls had taken a video of me being bad at bowling (Amusingly the alley was called "Exciting Boring") and showed me on the bus, I was just completely aghast at the fact that this technology existed. It felt really invasive at the time, to be honest, but out in another culture you just have to roll with things like that.
- canoebuilder 4y ago
  > Exciting Boring Ha, thanks for sharing, that is amusing! On the one hand it seems like it almost could be the way people humorously transcribe Japanese accented English, of “Exciting Bowling,” and on the other hand in a purely English context that really does strike me as a quite good description of bowling when you think about it.
  - jamal-kumar 4y ago
    I dunno I actually really like bowling and never thought it was boring but in Japan it was like the holes were too small for my fat fingers or something. ボウリング - bōringu, this is the word they have for it, so yeah
    - canoebuilder 4y ago
      Yeah I have that issue even not in Japan of having to search and search to find a ball I feel like my fingers won’t get stuck in. I didn’t mean to disparage, the exciting half carried equal weight in my mind, just something about maybe the environment, the wooden floor, the shoes, the overall aesthetic, waiting your turn in a group, punctuated by the anticipatory excitement of watching your ball travel down the lane gave me this feeling of like the type of balance common in Eastern spiritual traditions or Schrödinger’s cat, where it is boring and exciting at the same time.
  - ben7799 4y ago
    This actually does make sense with the traditional difficulty of the L sounds for Japanese speakers due to the way L and R are kind of merged into one sound in Japanese. My father went to Japan a lot in the 80s and always remarked at how the L in our last name got pronounced as an R in Japan making the name sound totally different. Exciting Bowling would easily get pronounced as Exciting Boring and then someone could have had a laugh and come up with the name.
_def 4y ago
I remember seeing a land-line phone with video capability on a prime time talk show sometime in the 2000s as it was presented as a thing from the future. I'm glad that never really took off :D
- kristopolous 4y ago
  They put a different meter on it and it was prohibitively expensive. ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor. It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet) Even if you got a couple price insensitive buyers, the technology is only useful if there's a network effect and that's where it broke down. You weren't emailing their phone, it was an inbox they'd see next time they dialup to logon to the internet. It wasn't some obvious gain and faxing documents was a more reliable way to get to someone because you're changing their environment with a fax
  - zrules 4y ago
    There’s a movie directed by Wim Wenders called “Until the End of the World” with tech similar to this. It’s a Pay phones actually, where you’d flip the arm with the screen up attached up to make a call and down to end a call. The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time grasping today.
    - kristopolous 4y ago
      features in the trailer around 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8 You want that era? Here's two things to flip through https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000 https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000 https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/ https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/ I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right. That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.
stevejb 4y ago
I just watched this video on a plane, going nearly 600mph at 33K ft above northern Canada. The pace of technological evolution I have experienced in my lifetime is absolutely miraculous.
- julian_t 4y ago
  I often think about this. My grandmother was born at the end of the 1800s (yes, I'm old) and remembered electricity and the first car coming to her rural village in Wales. By the end of her life she'd lived through two world wars, seen men on the moon, could talk to her relatives in Australia on the phone, and been on holiday to America on a 747. And what always amazed me was that she grew up with people (mainly farm workers) who had never been more than 5 miles from where they were born. I go further than that to visit the supermarket!
  - neuronic 4y ago
    The things you can accomplish when education, science and curiosity are valued over theology... the Enlightment was truly an enormous age.
  - neurostimulant 4y ago
    Heck, I grew up in a village and I remember my family didn't have electricity when I was 6. Fast forward 25 years later, everyone there has fiber optic internet.
  - ljf 4y ago
    Many years ago, my father bought a house and one day when he was talking a neighbour about time and age, and the neighbour told him that he'd had an uncle that had been born in the 1700s... This isn't as remarkable as it sounds when I say this was in 1960, and the neighbour was 80 something, and his uncle had been born in 1798, and had lived well into his 90s. But is still seems such a large span to be able to reach back.
wodenokoto 4y ago
MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it. On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the phone, but after a trip through MMS they where just terrible. On top of that, pictures were excruciatingly difficult to get off your phone. I'm not saying the first few iPhones had great cameras, but they did make it relatively easy to move your pictures to your computer and from there to flickr. With the eventual app-store, wi-fi connection made it cost-effective and easy to upload to the web straight from your phone. And chat apps made it reasonable to send pictures from phone to phone.
- Gravityloss 4y ago
  This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.
  - wodenokoto 4y ago
    _free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.
OnionBlender 4y ago
I remember Mike Lazaridis (BlackBerry CEO) saying: > There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera. https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-at-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-made-smartphones-smart/ https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-...
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  I recently started trying not to be overly dismissive about all the new stuff that is trending or picking up traction. I like tech, I make living off it, yet I'm one of those that happily move to 70's and use paper and pen instead. Now,instead of trying to shoot it down immediately, I at least try to understand what's going on and how different groups could benefit of it. So far it seems to be a positive thing.
  - rvense 4y ago
    I also have very strong (negative) feelings about new technology. I used to think this was the result of Very Deep And Rational Thoughts, but a while ago I realized that it was maybe a little conspicuous that I'd decided that computers happened to reach their peak when I was about 21. Like some boomer Bob Dylan fan.
Milank 4y ago
It is very hard to imagine how life was back then. And it was only 20 years ago!
undebuggable 4y ago
He is right, media over MMS never took off. Mobile internet with messaging apps were the next big thing. Phones of that era were not capable of user friendly apps.
- vesinisa 4y ago
  Operators charged per MMS sent. And MMSes were much more expensive than SMSes. I was a student back then and won an early premium Nokia phone with camera in a competition. It was cool for taking pictures for my own use. But I literally knew no one who had a phone that could receive MMSes, and even if I had known, I definitely saw it only as a trap to getting ripped off by the mobile operator. The camera quality was of course terrible compared to modern standards, but under good lighting conditions it was still acceptable. But I ended up selling the phone (for beer money) on eBay in short order while it was still "like new".
- herbst 4y ago
  MMS was kinda popular around here when picture phones and the first weird meme videos became popular. Pretty sure most of the time our teen prepaid contracts contained a few free mms and receiving was free with the SIM I had.
d--b 4y ago
I went to Japan in 2004. I hiked a mountain and at the top saw a woman talk to someone on her flip phone. At some point she said something like “hey do you want to see the view?”, she then turned the phone around and I realized she had been video chatting the whole time. I was so amazed. I bought a Wap-capable NEC that year, it felt so ahead of anything we had in Europe!
- TaylorAlexander 4y ago
  It was a weird time, being in the USA and learning that Europe and Japan had all these great technologies in their mobile phones that we didn’t have. It sucked being so behind the times here. It’s interesting that now every country has the same high tech mobile phones, though there are still niche devices that may only be produced for a specific region.
  - poisonarena 4y ago
    example of country specific niche devices for the curious?
    - vbezhenar 4y ago
      I'm not sure about specifics but when I was looking for android devices with small screens (like 3") last time, I found some indian smartphones. They were ultra-budget and I wanted something premium so I didn't pursue it further, but it was definitely something I never saw in the public market. Another specific niche might be babushkaphones. It's a cell phone made for babushkas. Basically huge buttons, screen with huge fonts, dumbed down interface so people with very little technical knowledge could use them to be on line.
      - weberer 4y ago
        There was a company called Jitterbug that old those huge button phones in the USA in the 2000s.
        4y ago
deleted 4y ago
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optimalsolver 4y ago
The most charming of these is the singer Shakira seeing a camera phone for the first time in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lY3jzsFWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lY3jzsFWU
- tmjwid 4y ago
  I'd say her reaction was pretty negative than charming. Her only example of its use is paparazzi which says it all really. It seemed to me she was mortified at the idea and I can understand why.
paulsutter 4y ago
The Onion: “Long-Lost Jules Verne Short Story 'The Camera-Phone' Found” https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-the-camera-phone-foun-1819567554 https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-t...
martyvis 4y ago
"Picture texting" (next thing they'll be sending pictures in text, oh wait ... )
emptyparadise 4y ago
Nah, it'll never take off.
glandium 4y ago
You know how nowadays you'll see crowds brandishing their smartphone to take pictures or videos? I remember seeing something similar in Japan with flip phones, either in 2001 or 2002. I think one of the moments where I witnessed that was when Koizumi Junichiro was elected in 2001. I definitely have pictures of individuals taking pictures of sakura with their flip phone in the Kyoto imperial garden in 2001.
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
"Phonemakers never expected it to takeoff, it was teenagers who decided that this was the way to keep in touch" Makes me wonder what new trends dinosaurs like us don't see coming. VR?
- ilyt 4y ago
  VR isn't something average teenager can afford yet. I can see something that's a mix of VR chat and some creation tools a'la Dreams would be a hit. User generated content for VR Chat is already popular and making it possible to make the game in the game is natural next step
  - slfnflctd 4y ago
    > isn't something average teenager can afford The best selling VR headset is cheaper than either a smartphone or a gaming console, though, is it not? You don't really see anyone arguing that teenagers can't afford those. Also, this stuff is usually bought by parents anyway. I personally think a larger market will probably emerge for AR than for VR due to friction factors, but from what I've read, teenagers are in fact using VR right now.
  - kumarvvr 4y ago
    Yeah, back in the day, camera phones were very expensive. Not to mention internet connection, data rates, call rates, etc. It was very expensive to maintain a phone without a camera. Definitely prohibitively expensive for teens to have a camera phone and use sharing / MMS.
- dghughes 4y ago
  I hear rectal texting is catching on.
- weberer 4y ago
  VR seems to be the opposite. Every company was pushing for it, but the consumer demand just wasn't there.
fricklers 4y ago
The format is about right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI
dghughes 4y ago
Not a phone but in 1999 I bought a JVC CyberCam camcorder but it also had a feature of a digital camera. It was only 640x480 on a small MMC card. But it was pretty amazing for the time. I think the camera came out maybe 1997?
NoPicklez 4y ago
Now in my mid 20s, I feel like I am experiencing that part of my life of "when I grew up". It is incredible how far camera technology has come in phones. Not just the cameras but the ability to send the image. I remember sending an MMS and not really being guaranteed the receiver would get the image. Perhaps they didn't have MMS enabled, or have a device able to receive images, or they didn't have a large enough phone plan to send/receive MMS's. Now days, sending an image is just part of the furniture. A part of me would like to rewind and see what the world was like without social media.

In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3 hours to get it up and running. I didn't realize I had invented Instagram. Shoulda spent a little more time on it.

somedude895 4y ago
Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?
- vachina 4y ago
  Probably email attachment
  - justinator 4y ago
    Bingo. The phone could send a mixed text and image message as a multipart MIME message. I made an email forward that piped to a Perl script. That Perl script read the text and image data using something like MIME::Parser, and saved that stuff in a database. Another script read that data and returned some HTML using Template Toolkit and CGI.pm. Really just something I threw together the night before I left. I remember a few years later someone was showing me how you could text a message to a specific number, then it showed up on this "Twitter" site and that seemed quaint. Anyways Perl was so easy and fun some Painting and Drawing undergrad could throw something together that was that useful to his 5 friends and his completely confused professor (and pay for art school hacking on other stuff too).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Raed667 4y ago
  Around ~2005 I had a Sony Ericsson K300, and my main method was to send pictures to the computer via infrared (yes I had to buy an infrared USB dongle) and then posting them on skyblog.com The phone could even tether its GPRS connection via infrared! That always amazed me!
  - justinator 4y ago
    Yup looks similar to the one I had. I bought it at Car Toys because there weren't even T-Mobile stores yet. It took like 2 hours to transfer my number from another carrier (a new ability at the time!) and activate the account - what a process! I remember the keypad was kinda small for my giant hands, but it would connect via this thing called "Bluetooth" to my Mac. Every time you got a text, it would show up on my Mac's screen, and I could reply just using my keyboard instead of typing out something using T9 on the phone itself. Soooo much faster. Somehow the ability to do that was disabled or something, I dunno. I hadn't felt that sort of magical integration again until I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID (or however it works, I totally forget the details) so long as Bluetooth is enabled on both. Such magic and solved so many tiny little problems. I missed years of Airdropping as my last Macbook just couldn't work with Airdrop and I have no idea why not. Seeing Airdrop work instantly sold me on iPhones and I'll never go back to Android.
    - comboy 4y ago
      > I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID whoa Although I didn't realize that compromised phone can steal data from my laptop :|
      - justinator 4y ago
        Universal Clipboard is something you'll need to enable. https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460
deleted 4y ago
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owl57 4y ago
But note how you invented only the better half of Instagram. The other half is all the "social" shit: "Tell us your email to see more John's photos", "Have you seen recent posts from Kate, Mike and Cristiano Ronaldo", etc.
- EddieDemo 4y ago
  Bear in mind; we're all on HN looking for high-quality content from strangers, rather than from our own personal network(s). The trend across all social media is to feed us with more 'high-ranking' content from 'strangers' because it's typically what we want to see more of, based on the analytics. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook — all of them are pivoting to feed us more content from people outside of our personal networks as fast as possible.
- justinator 4y ago
  Oh that lack of features was incredibly deliberate. All kidding aside, I personally had a revelation on how much of my attention has been getting stolen away from me, tiny bit by tiny bit. I'm going to make an honest attempt to gain some of that back. More reading out of physical books, less doomscrolling. More taking people out to coffee, less overdosing on puppy videos.

jamal-kumar 4y ago

My first encounter with a camera on a phone was when I was a kid in Japan in 2004. These girls had taken a video of me being bad at bowling (Amusingly the alley was called "Exciting Boring") and showed me on the bus, I was just completely aghast at the fact that this technology existed. It felt really invasive at the time, to be honest, but out in another culture you just have to roll with things like that.

canoebuilder 4y ago
> Exciting Boring Ha, thanks for sharing, that is amusing! On the one hand it seems like it almost could be the way people humorously transcribe Japanese accented English, of “Exciting Bowling,” and on the other hand in a purely English context that really does strike me as a quite good description of bowling when you think about it.
- jamal-kumar 4y ago
  I dunno I actually really like bowling and never thought it was boring but in Japan it was like the holes were too small for my fat fingers or something. ボウリング - bōringu, this is the word they have for it, so yeah
  - canoebuilder 4y ago
    Yeah I have that issue even not in Japan of having to search and search to find a ball I feel like my fingers won’t get stuck in. I didn’t mean to disparage, the exciting half carried equal weight in my mind, just something about maybe the environment, the wooden floor, the shoes, the overall aesthetic, waiting your turn in a group, punctuated by the anticipatory excitement of watching your ball travel down the lane gave me this feeling of like the type of balance common in Eastern spiritual traditions or Schrödinger’s cat, where it is boring and exciting at the same time.
- ben7799 4y ago
  This actually does make sense with the traditional difficulty of the L sounds for Japanese speakers due to the way L and R are kind of merged into one sound in Japanese. My father went to Japan a lot in the 80s and always remarked at how the L in our last name got pronounced as an R in Japan making the name sound totally different. Exciting Bowling would easily get pronounced as Exciting Boring and then someone could have had a laugh and come up with the name.

_def 4y ago

I remember seeing a land-line phone with video capability on a prime time talk show sometime in the 2000s as it was presented as a thing from the future. I'm glad that never really took off :D

kristopolous 4y ago
They put a different meter on it and it was prohibitively expensive. ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor. It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet) Even if you got a couple price insensitive buyers, the technology is only useful if there's a network effect and that's where it broke down. You weren't emailing their phone, it was an inbox they'd see next time they dialup to logon to the internet. It wasn't some obvious gain and faxing documents was a more reliable way to get to someone because you're changing their environment with a fax
- zrules 4y ago
  There’s a movie directed by Wim Wenders called “Until the End of the World” with tech similar to this. It’s a Pay phones actually, where you’d flip the arm with the screen up attached up to make a call and down to end a call. The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time grasping today.
  - kristopolous 4y ago
    features in the trailer around 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8 You want that era? Here's two things to flip through https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000 https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000 https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/ https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/ I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right. That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.

stevejb 4y ago

I just watched this video on a plane, going nearly 600mph at 33K ft above northern Canada. The pace of technological evolution I have experienced in my lifetime is absolutely miraculous.

julian_t 4y ago
I often think about this. My grandmother was born at the end of the 1800s (yes, I'm old) and remembered electricity and the first car coming to her rural village in Wales. By the end of her life she'd lived through two world wars, seen men on the moon, could talk to her relatives in Australia on the phone, and been on holiday to America on a 747. And what always amazed me was that she grew up with people (mainly farm workers) who had never been more than 5 miles from where they were born. I go further than that to visit the supermarket!
- neuronic 4y ago
  The things you can accomplish when education, science and curiosity are valued over theology... the Enlightment was truly an enormous age.
- neurostimulant 4y ago
  Heck, I grew up in a village and I remember my family didn't have electricity when I was 6. Fast forward 25 years later, everyone there has fiber optic internet.
- ljf 4y ago
  Many years ago, my father bought a house and one day when he was talking a neighbour about time and age, and the neighbour told him that he'd had an uncle that had been born in the 1700s... This isn't as remarkable as it sounds when I say this was in 1960, and the neighbour was 80 something, and his uncle had been born in 1798, and had lived well into his 90s. But is still seems such a large span to be able to reach back.

wodenokoto 4y ago

MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it. On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the phone, but after a trip through MMS they where just terrible. On top of that, pictures were excruciatingly difficult to get off your phone. I'm not saying the first few iPhones had great cameras, but they did make it relatively easy to move your pictures to your computer and from there to flickr. With the eventual app-store, wi-fi connection made it cost-effective and easy to upload to the web straight from your phone. And chat apps made it reasonable to send pictures from phone to phone.

Gravityloss 4y ago
This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS. The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required. In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.
- wodenokoto 4y ago
  _free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east. Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me. I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour. I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.

OnionBlender 4y ago

I remember Mike Lazaridis (BlackBerry CEO) saying: > There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera. https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-at-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-company-that-made-smartphones-smart/ https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-...

cosmodisk 4y ago
I recently started trying not to be overly dismissive about all the new stuff that is trending or picking up traction. I like tech, I make living off it, yet I'm one of those that happily move to 70's and use paper and pen instead. Now,instead of trying to shoot it down immediately, I at least try to understand what's going on and how different groups could benefit of it. So far it seems to be a positive thing.
- rvense 4y ago
  I also have very strong (negative) feelings about new technology. I used to think this was the result of Very Deep And Rational Thoughts, but a while ago I realized that it was maybe a little conspicuous that I'd decided that computers happened to reach their peak when I was about 21. Like some boomer Bob Dylan fan.

Milank 4y ago

It is very hard to imagine how life was back then. And it was only 20 years ago!

undebuggable 4y ago

He is right, media over MMS never took off. Mobile internet with messaging apps were the next big thing. Phones of that era were not capable of user friendly apps.

vesinisa 4y ago
Operators charged per MMS sent. And MMSes were much more expensive than SMSes. I was a student back then and won an early premium Nokia phone with camera in a competition. It was cool for taking pictures for my own use. But I literally knew no one who had a phone that could receive MMSes, and even if I had known, I definitely saw it only as a trap to getting ripped off by the mobile operator. The camera quality was of course terrible compared to modern standards, but under good lighting conditions it was still acceptable. But I ended up selling the phone (for beer money) on eBay in short order while it was still "like new".
herbst 4y ago
MMS was kinda popular around here when picture phones and the first weird meme videos became popular. Pretty sure most of the time our teen prepaid contracts contained a few free mms and receiving was free with the SIM I had.

d--b 4y ago

I went to Japan in 2004. I hiked a mountain and at the top saw a woman talk to someone on her flip phone. At some point she said something like “hey do you want to see the view?”, she then turned the phone around and I realized she had been video chatting the whole time. I was so amazed. I bought a Wap-capable NEC that year, it felt so ahead of anything we had in Europe!

TaylorAlexander 4y ago
It was a weird time, being in the USA and learning that Europe and Japan had all these great technologies in their mobile phones that we didn’t have. It sucked being so behind the times here. It’s interesting that now every country has the same high tech mobile phones, though there are still niche devices that may only be produced for a specific region.
- poisonarena 4y ago
  example of country specific niche devices for the curious?
  - vbezhenar 4y ago
    I'm not sure about specifics but when I was looking for android devices with small screens (like 3") last time, I found some indian smartphones. They were ultra-budget and I wanted something premium so I didn't pursue it further, but it was definitely something I never saw in the public market. Another specific niche might be babushkaphones. It's a cell phone made for babushkas. Basically huge buttons, screen with huge fonts, dumbed down interface so people with very little technical knowledge could use them to be on line.
    - weberer 4y ago
      There was a company called Jitterbug that old those huge button phones in the USA in the 2000s.
      - 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

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optimalsolver 4y ago

The most charming of these is the singer Shakira seeing a camera phone for the first time in Japan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lY3jzsFWU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lY3jzsFWU

tmjwid 4y ago
I'd say her reaction was pretty negative than charming. Her only example of its use is paparazzi which says it all really. It seemed to me she was mortified at the idea and I can understand why.

paulsutter 4y ago

The Onion: “Long-Lost Jules Verne Short Story 'The Camera-Phone' Found” https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-the-camera-phone-foun-1819567554 https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-t...

martyvis 4y ago

"Picture texting" (next thing they'll be sending pictures in text, oh wait ... )

emptyparadise 4y ago

Nah, it'll never take off.

glandium 4y ago

You know how nowadays you'll see crowds brandishing their smartphone to take pictures or videos? I remember seeing something similar in Japan with flip phones, either in 2001 or 2002. I think one of the moments where I witnessed that was when Koizumi Junichiro was elected in 2001. I definitely have pictures of individuals taking pictures of sakura with their flip phone in the Kyoto imperial garden in 2001.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

"Phonemakers never expected it to takeoff, it was teenagers who decided that this was the way to keep in touch" Makes me wonder what new trends dinosaurs like us don't see coming. VR?

ilyt 4y ago
VR isn't something average teenager can afford yet. I can see something that's a mix of VR chat and some creation tools a'la Dreams would be a hit. User generated content for VR Chat is already popular and making it possible to make the game in the game is natural next step
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  > isn't something average teenager can afford The best selling VR headset is cheaper than either a smartphone or a gaming console, though, is it not? You don't really see anyone arguing that teenagers can't afford those. Also, this stuff is usually bought by parents anyway. I personally think a larger market will probably emerge for AR than for VR due to friction factors, but from what I've read, teenagers are in fact using VR right now.
- kumarvvr 4y ago
  Yeah, back in the day, camera phones were very expensive. Not to mention internet connection, data rates, call rates, etc. It was very expensive to maintain a phone without a camera. Definitely prohibitively expensive for teens to have a camera phone and use sharing / MMS.
dghughes 4y ago
I hear rectal texting is catching on.
weberer 4y ago
VR seems to be the opposite. Every company was pushing for it, but the consumer demand just wasn't there.

fricklers 4y ago

The format is about right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

dghughes 4y ago

Not a phone but in 1999 I bought a JVC CyberCam camcorder but it also had a feature of a digital camera. It was only 640x480 on a small MMC card. But it was pretty amazing for the time. I think the camera came out maybe 1997?

NoPicklez 4y ago

Now in my mid 20s, I feel like I am experiencing that part of my life of "when I grew up". It is incredible how far camera technology has come in phones. Not just the cameras but the ability to send the image. I remember sending an MMS and not really being guaranteed the receiver would get the image. Perhaps they didn't have MMS enabled, or have a device able to receive images, or they didn't have a large enough phone plan to send/receive MMS's. Now days, sending an image is just part of the furniture. A part of me would like to rewind and see what the world was like without social media.