The IBM Simon Personal Communicator (or IBM Simon) was released today in 1992 and despite being labelled a PDA (personal digital assistant), it is generally referred to as the first true smartphone although in true technology fashion, nobody could buy one for a further two years due to software problems.
Once available, it sold 50,000 units at $599 a pop which is expensive when you consider that it looked like a brick so was hardly easy to slip into your back pocket and the battery lasted only an hour as long as you never went mad with the calendar, clock, maps or made too many calls, sent too many emails or checked the news too often.
Obviously smart phones are much smarter now but there was something else...hmm..what was it...oh year, smartphones are apparently ruining our memories.
Before the smart phone genie got released from the bottle and disappeared over the hills and scarpered far away, we would write things down in a diary or on slips of paper and shove them in our pockets but now we just set a reminder on our smart phone instead and get notified in the morning of where we are supposed to be, with whom and why we were meeting them in, the first place.
A Professor at the neurobiology department in the Montreal University in Canada, has said that he has evidence that having more memory in our pockets mean there’s less in our head and our reliance on smartphones is having a detrimental effect on our brains.
'Once you stop using your memory it will get worse, which makes you use your devices even more' he says and he does have a point because where as before my purse was full of scribbled down notes of names, quotes and things to remember, now it holds only a few moths and a couple of coins with everything recorded or typed into the calendar on my smartphone.
Whereas before i would need to go to a bookshelf somewhere to look up some fact, now i can google it instead and then instantly forget it again because why would i need to remember useless tat when i need the valuable memory space in my head for the lyrics to songs from the 80's.
Anyway, where was i, that's right, memory, the Prof says we need to cut back on the use of the phone and wean ourselves using it to constantly remind ourselves of things and in time our memories will improve again but that's a scary thought because without notifications pinging me i would be afraid of missing things like my meeting with this morning at 11am...and it's now 7pm...damn, another over-running meeting excuse coming up i reckon.
1 comment:
ehhh, before that, circa 1986, IBMers had a device they called a "brick", because it was the size and weight of a brick used to on many homes. it allowed IBMers to communicate, using satellites. with any other IBMer that had a brick.
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