With the emergence of the 4G smart phones, it seems to me that the transition from cell phones as communication devices into a computing services platform is complete. Speaking never was so outdated. These days the cool thing is to text friends, send emails from your cell, see your profile on Facebook, take pictures on spot and upload them so your friends can see what you see and tell you what they think. There are apps for everything and the difference of today's cell phones cameras and the real cameras are getting smaller. Cell phones are taking some of the roles of yesterday's laptops/desktops, GPS devices, cameras and who know what more.
Here it follows a brief description on how everything began, at least as I see it.
The 40's and 50's
This was a world of solid frontiers, a compartmentalized life. You had to work on a office, you had to use a phone only available on certain specific locations. The person you were trying to reach had to be in the other end of your call. The texting experience would involve calling an operator over the phone, dictating your text to her (normally her, not him) and then having the text deliverer on a paper to the person you were trying to reach. There were computers, but they used to occupy entire warehouses and generate an incredibly large electric bill. Only the biggest organizations would operate and use them, several times on some secret circumstances involving national security issues. These computers were custom made and difficult to operate. Mass produce them was something only possible on science fiction. Valves, not transistors, were the hardware and direct binary programming, not even assembly, was the means to program them.
The 60's and 70's
And let there be the main frame – with its customized OS and dumb terminals, time sharing, and very specialized and custom made applications hugely expensive. From those days we had COBOL and FORTRAN, and amazingly they are still here, which is a living proof of how big they were back in the day. There still are applications that worth maintaining form that era.
The 80's
Then there came the personal computer. On the server side there was UNIX and all its implementations: Solaris, AIX and others. On the client side there was DOS/Windows, Linux, OS2 and Mac OS. From those days we pretty much still see their shadow around. That's when today's giants, like Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, where forged. That's the frontier of the killer apps: the spreadsheet, the word processors, the stand-alone games. That's the time when C established itself as THE programming language, the time of PASCAL and procedural programming (do you remember, fellow programmer, of DFDs? -- Data Flow Diagrams). The time when we started to move into that strange new concept of object-oriented programming and C++ came into been.
The 90's
Let there be the web. The Internet was born here, which inevitably declared the death of the BBS (Bulletin Board Sites?) as the wider frontier of the web spread around the word. That's when acronyms like TCP/IP, UDP, FTP, HTTP and others became part of the tech junkies’ vocabulary. Web browsers became an important part of the OS sold then, Internet Explorer had to fight for its place in the market when Netscape was king. It was a time when the Internet was carried over dialed lines; you had to actually connect to the internet. Being disconnected was still the status quo, to connect you had to occupy your landline and anyone calling you while you were connected would listen to a fax like noise. It was the time when Windows NT and Windows 95 and Linux came into being, the recording industry stated to lose its grasp of the marked as the MP3 became popular, the Napster and ICQ became the last killer apps -- or at least it was the time when that term "killer app" was out. It was also the time when Java and C# languages came into being, promising a hardware independent programming platform ideal for web applications and the term Virtual Machine was added to the repertoire of tech terms floating around the world. Hackers, Virus and Anti-Virus, Firewalls, and cyber security left the realm of science fiction. It was also the time of the ".com" boom and bust, NASDAQ was born and the world didn't end when the Y2K bug came and went by.
The 00's
This is when Google.com emerges as the predominant search engine on the web and to google becomes a widely used verb. It's when Microsoft is no longer in the cutting edge and the desk top computer start it's decadence. By the end of this decade, to own a lap top was a lot more interesting than owning a laptop: adding mobility to the Tech World became more and more important. The cell phones became digital and started to add functions. The digital cameras replaced the analog ones and soon every cell phone had a digital camera. By the middle of this decade texting was becoming more popular than talking and the social media exploded to re-shape the World Wide Web into a new topography. Google, Microsoft and Apple fully realized what the next logical step to take was: go mobile -- the cell phone as the next computing platform. GPS was now available, and getting lost on a strange city became an anachronism of a past era. Ubiquitous Computing and hyper reality are now the next paradigms for this new age.
The 10's
We are now on the verge of fully adopting the mobile computing platform. This will change the way we work, the way we travel, get to know people, share our lives with each other, and communicate. And all that will be done at a supreme price: we will lose our privacy. No longer is possible to carry our personal affairs without leaving behind us a trail of clues informing anyone interested who we really are. The cell phone will amass more and more processing power and functions, and being connected will be our fate -- and when not connected, we will try to get connected as soon as possible.
