Wristphones
The wristwatch/phone hybrid used to be the way forward. Now it’d be considered clunky or annoying to use - either a case of too much bulk or no room for buttons - and associated with all sorts of bizarre RSI. The delicious irony is that today most people use mobile phones to tell the time.

Written by: Andrey Pissantchev

Poster Child:
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In the waning days of 2009, Julian Dibbell mentioned videophones as a holy grail technology that ended up being a b-teamer. I liked the concept so much that I ran a contest on Quiet Babylon, looking for more instances.

The entries were fantastic and after a long and occasionally contentious dinner-meeting with my gracious panel of judges, it’s time ( Read more... )

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There is a possibly apocryphal story about a conversation on the subject of the solar system between Wittgenstein and a student. Wittgenstein asks the student why early people thought that the sun went around the earth. The student says that it’s because it looks that way. Wittgenstein asks, “And how would it look if the earth went around the ( Read more... )

In the 1930s the UK had the following bombing defence policy: “The bombers will always get through.” Which, in my opinion, is a perfectly wonderful stiff-upper-lip attitude to have. Then radar was invented and it became possible to track planes. Actually shooting them turned out to be stunningly difficult.


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One of my favourite traditions from LiveJournal is the automatic year-in-review post. Here’s how it works: You go to each month, take the first post of the month, take the first sentence of that post and transcribe it. The result is a cut-up-technique overview of how your year went. It doesn’t get your best posts, or your most popular posts, or ( Read more... )

Films like Tron have a lot to answer for … Children see these worlds, and the men and women they become try to build them.

Will Wiles posting on Spillway

For most of my life the videophone was telecom’s holy grail, & now? Just another of the Net’s many afterthoughts, & a B-teamer at that..

Julian Dibbell, on Twitter


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In the 1960s, the legend goes, NASA spent millions developing a pen that could write in zero gravity. The Russians used a pencil.


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There were a lot of new buzzwords in play in 1999 when I was taking calls for our local Telecom’s ISP. This was 1999, just before the dotCom bubble burst; an exciting time that demanded exciting verbiage. Multimedia. Information Super-Highway. eVerb-of-your-choice.

My favourite was “Paperless Office”. We used to use it as a kind of curse word. An ( Read more... )

Taking a page from Posterchild, it’s Follow-up Friday!


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