Why the Nineties Matter by Terry H. Anderson

Author:Terry H. Anderson [Anderson, Terry H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, 20th Century, Modern, Political Science, History & Theory
ISBN: 9780197763018
Google: we78EAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0197763014
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2024-05-06T22:00:00+00:00

Many films, including Clueless, 1995, helped to popularize cell phones. Photo by Paramount Pictures/Getty Images.

These devices became so popular and so addictive that many referred to the BlackBerry as “CrackBerry.” “It should be reported to the DEA,” declared Intel’s chairman, and another CEO declared, “It is the heroin of mobile computing. I’m serious. I had to stop. I’m now in BA: BlackBerry Anonymous.”

Eventually, BlackBerry was superseded by Samsung, which became the largest cell phone producer in the world, as smartphones changed human behavior, from instant worldwide telephone calls, to encrypted texting, to watching videos and playing games, to driving with Google Maps. By 2020, about 90 percent of Americans, and about two-thirds of all people in the world, owned a smartphone.

Then in 1999, the Japanese electronics corporation Kyocera claimed to launch the first camera phone, or “Visual Phone” 210. CNN aired the story to a fascinated audience. The phone had a 0.1 megapixel camera and only could take twenty pictures before its limited storage was full. It sold for about $325 and had a stand so the users could take pictures of themselves, or “selfies.”

Kyocera dominated the market for only a year, for the next summer Samsung introduced the SCH-V200. It could take up to twenty pictures at a resolution of 0.35MP, and you could see them on the phone’s 1.5-inch screen. However, one could not use the phone to send the pictures to someone else directly. That happened at the end of the year when Sharp introduced their J-Phone, a cell that integrated the phone’s hardware with the camera. With that the user could send the image directly from the phone to email—which proved incredibly popular. Next year, the Sanyo SCP-5300 hit the United States running, and Time labeled it the “Most Influential Gadget and Gizmo” of 2002, claiming that by 2010 the “total number of images captured on camera phones will reach 228 billion . . . exceeding the number of photos taken on digital still cameras and film cameras combined.”

Next for the cell phone came applications—apps. In the 1980s Steve Jobs imagined a place, an “App Store,” where software could be bought or obtained over a phone line, but his vision was off in the future. The future arrived in 1997 when the Nokia 6110 phone included a built-in version of the basic arcade game “Snake,” which many consider the first mobile app. The first iPod would also come with built-in games: Solitaire and Brick.

Meanwhile, America Online was in many ways the company that began social networking. AOL created member communities with searchable “member profiles.” Customers could list particular traits about themselves that other users could utilize to find similar people with similar interests. Engineer Randy Conrads saw the potential in this information. A child of a military family that moved a lot, he was frustrated finding old friends, so he decided to quit Boeing and in 1995 founded perhaps the first social networking site, Classmates.com. The idea was to allow members to find, and stay connected with, friends from school, college, work, and the military.

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