Well the day has finally arrived. The New Apple i-Phone 4 has just been released and the number of individuals that have camped out in front of the Apple i-Store in Midtown Manhattan can finally go in and get one. One of the biggest features of this new version of the I-Phone is that it can allow you to see the person that you are talking to live on a video camera when you call them to chat as long as they too have an i-phone 4. This technology sounds amazing and it has been impressing the heck out of a lot of people who are hearing about it for the first time. Few people seem to realize that this video phone capability goes all the way back to the World's Fair of 1964 when it was first debuted. Back at the fair (in a section of high tech displays known as "Futurama") The Video Phone was a lot bigger and bulkier than the slick I-Phones of today of course. It was basically a telephone with a TV like monitor attached to it. If the person you were calling had the same set up you could dial the number and when the call connected you would be able to see the other person on the other end of your call as long as they were standing in front of their monitor. For some reason the video phone back then did not take off and the idea died for many decades. Now 50 years later it is coming out again and the public seems to think it is state of the art technological advancement and they are jumping all over themselves to own one. It is the same kind of story that happened with the wireless remote control for televisions. The wireless remote debuted in the 1950's but again for some reason the public was not interested in it and it did not sell. Because of this rejection the American public opted to stick with their old style TV sets with the little knob tuners that they had to get up from their couches to turn in order to change the channel. The wireless remote control was again re-introduced in the 1980's and then it took off big. Now we have a generation of young people who don't even know what a TV with knobs on it even looks like. That kind of TV would probably look to them like what a cave man's eating utensils would have looked like to my generation back when I was a kid watching a TV with knob tuners on it.
Saturday, June 26, 2010
What's Old Is New Again In High Tech
Well the day has finally arrived. The New Apple i-Phone 4 has just been released and the number of individuals that have camped out in front of the Apple i-Store in Midtown Manhattan can finally go in and get one. One of the biggest features of this new version of the I-Phone is that it can allow you to see the person that you are talking to live on a video camera when you call them to chat as long as they too have an i-phone 4. This technology sounds amazing and it has been impressing the heck out of a lot of people who are hearing about it for the first time. Few people seem to realize that this video phone capability goes all the way back to the World's Fair of 1964 when it was first debuted. Back at the fair (in a section of high tech displays known as "Futurama") The Video Phone was a lot bigger and bulkier than the slick I-Phones of today of course. It was basically a telephone with a TV like monitor attached to it. If the person you were calling had the same set up you could dial the number and when the call connected you would be able to see the other person on the other end of your call as long as they were standing in front of their monitor. For some reason the video phone back then did not take off and the idea died for many decades. Now 50 years later it is coming out again and the public seems to think it is state of the art technological advancement and they are jumping all over themselves to own one. It is the same kind of story that happened with the wireless remote control for televisions. The wireless remote debuted in the 1950's but again for some reason the public was not interested in it and it did not sell. Because of this rejection the American public opted to stick with their old style TV sets with the little knob tuners that they had to get up from their couches to turn in order to change the channel. The wireless remote control was again re-introduced in the 1980's and then it took off big. Now we have a generation of young people who don't even know what a TV with knobs on it even looks like. That kind of TV would probably look to them like what a cave man's eating utensils would have looked like to my generation back when I was a kid watching a TV with knob tuners on it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment