A Different View with Dave O’Connell

The person who invented the flip phone probably thought that they were made up for life – and they possibly were because they’d have made a lot of money in a short space of time, but if they spent it as though this was a bottomless pit, it might not have been enough to last a lifetime.

We’d come from a time when the cutting edge of communication technology was a mobile device that was literally as big as a brick – so a little fold-away phone that doubled in size when you opened it out, or one of those where the mouthpiece slid from the back of the main phone, made us feel like things would never be the same again.

And then you discover that’s only the start of it; long before the iPhone came along with the whole world stored in the palm of your hand or an Android device allowed you to access all you’d ever need to know at the flick of a thumb, the flip phone was the dog’s proverbials.

But then so too were Amstrad computers, the budget option that made Alan Sugar a very rich man – wealthy enough to buy Tottenham Hotspur and discover that football is a way of leaking cash as quickly as computers might generate it.

Go back through recent history and you’ll find it’s littered with breakthroughs that seemed to take the world to a place that could never be bettered – only to find themselves on the technological scrapheap before the decade was out.

Telex machines, faxes, tape recorders, electronic organisers, camcorders, video players, floppy disks – all developments that looked set to make our world forever only to discover they were just another stepping stone on the way to hi-tech heaven.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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