All of us of a certain generation have had experiences like this: the other day one of my young daughters heard a new word and asked, "What's a typewriter?”
She was born after the smartphone and just before the last new typewriters rolled off assembly lines. So I said, "It’s a device with a keyboard, like the one Daddy uses to type on a computer. Except instead of the words appearing on a screen, they appear on a piece of paper."
Her question left me wondering what other obsolete consumer technologies from my generation's youth she might one day ask about. There are many such lists online, like this one. But it turns out that most of those items would be easy to explain to a child. Because the devices aren’t really gone, they’re simply merged into smartphones. The lists included:
Answering machines
Public pay phones
Cassette players
Print media
Folding maps
Cathode ray tube televisions
Pagers
Wikipedia struggles to define a technology revolution. Maybe one definition should be that the revolutionary device must replace at least X number of other technologies.
What my daughter's question really made me wonder, though, is what one communications device might turn a bunch like this into memories?
Smartphones
Tablet computers
Touch screens
Keyboards
Printers
HDTVs
Satellite radios
The Apple Watch suggests that for now we’re in for more of the same – smartphones, shrunk. It even may suggest that designers are reaching the hardware limit that seems to presage revolutions. Because to work for consumers, words still have to be visible to the human eye. Which means never mind Moore's Law--the screens can only get so small. And audio and video are so tediously linear. No wonder companies are scrambling to merge hardware with biology (e.g., brainchips). If you can’t beat ‘em, join ’em.
Of course some genius somewhere may have this all figured out, and is ready to turn today's smartphone into yesterday's typewriter. If that's right, I can hardly wait to ask my daughter how it works.