Monthly Archives: November, 2024

Five years before the iPhone

Trying to organise some of my old video footage recently, I came across a little demo I recorded of the AT&T Broadband Phone, a project we started in 1999 but which, sadly, died, along with the research lab that had created it, in 2002.

Looking back at it now, I notice how slow-paced it is compared to the typical YouTube video of today!  So if you watch it, you might need a little patience!  Nonetheless, it’s quite fun to see some of the ideas we were considering back then, five or six years before the launch of the iPhone… things like the suggestion that streamed music “might be a service offered by a record company, where you pay a small amount for each track”, for example…

 

Cordless Broadband phone and iPhone comparison

Direct link.

 

(P.S. I had an idea I had written about this here before… and indeed discovered that I had… but not since 2008, about eighteen months after the iPhone was launched.) 

We’re not in Lake Wobegon any more, Toto

For those struggling to understand the US election results, I can only offer the following statistical observations:

  • Roughly half of the world are of below-average intelligence.
  • Roughly half of the world are of above-average gullibility.
  • More than half of the world are on social media.

Sometimes these combine in unfortunate ways.

For those not familiar with the Lake Wobegon stories… Each monologue would end with, “That’s the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

A glooming light this morning with it brings

A sombre mood here in our half-American household. The phrase that keeps running through my head is…

Elect me once, shame on me.
Elect me twice…

© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser