Almontage

It is hard to believe but we have been mobile phone customers since 1991 – the World Wide Web wasn’t even in service back then. I’d like to take a brief look at the history of our mobile phone usage by describing the various types of phones we have used over the years.

Motorola Bag Phone This was the very first cellular phone we ever used. It was a heavy gadget that resided in a nylon satchel and plugged into a car power outlet or cigar lighter as they called it back then. It could only be used in the car, and we had it for emergency voice calls only. The protocol was AMPS analog or what today is called 1G cellular. We used this dinosaur for nearly nine years until I thought maybe we should join the 21st century.

Nokia Candy Bar Phone This classic phone design was a major step up in utility and convenience. It could be taken out of the car, charged up at home and then carried in a purse or small bag. It was a bit too thick and heavy for your pocket. Again it was for emergency voice calls only. The protocol was TDMA – Rogers’ digital 2G signal – but it could be used for analog calls as well if that was the only available service. This phone served us very well. In fact, it was our home phone for a few months after we moved to Almonte. At that time Bell technicians were on strike and we couldn’t get a land line installed at home. We had to retire this one in 2007 after Rogers decided to unplug both their analog and 2G digital networks.

Nokia Flip Phone A lovely little piece of tech. It was a bit better than I would have paid for, but Rogers gave it to us for free since our old phone was now a doorstop. This one was certainly pocket or purse sized, had a nice display and you could send actual messages with it – although that was a painful exercise since you had to type on what was essentially a numeric keypad. The protocol was GSM or what is now known as 3G technology. We had it in service for nearly 10 years, but it wasn’t really all that good for messaging, and certainly not a Smartphone. We thought of it basically as a voice unit.

Smartphones Part 1 By 2017, just about all our friends and family members had Smartphones and Maria wanted to send messages as well as call them. The tiny Nokia had outlived its usefulness and we got a Samsung Android Smartphone. It took us to a whole new level. Mostly we used it to send messages and make phone calls but we could surf the Web – particularly at home where we connected to wifi. This thin slab of silicon also served as a watch, camera, calendar, and much more. We liked it so much I got a similar phone for myself in 2019. Protocol on these was LTE or 4G.

Smartphones Part 2 You may have noticed that we used our earlier mobile phones quite a long time. Unfortunately, Smartphones do not have the same longevity. Battery life goes down over time, and eventually the manufacturer does not support the phone for software updates – a security issue. There was also another upgrade in network technology to 5G. So in 2021 Maria switched to a new 5G Samsung phone, and I recently upgraded my phone to a Pixel 7. That is where we are now. Voice calls I believe are still handled by LTE but data transfer outside the home is now arriving via 5G in most situations. I might add that 5G plans have given us quite a massive increase in data capacity – something we haven’t needed so far, but nice to have I suppose.

So in summary we’ve had 5 levels of technology in the 32 years we have used mobile phones. We have gone from a simple telephone to a pocket computer and camera and much more. The phone apps allow online banking and bill payments, storage of tickets for hockey games, GPS for traveling, and configuration of home wifi as well. It costs a fair bit but hey.. we are worth it.

My niece Rachel got married on the weekend. My granddaughters were flower girls.

I took along my tiny Lumix camera (see above,) but for most part I tried to stay out of the way of the wedding photographers and videographer doing their very capable jobs.

I did get to see a lot about how wedding photography (?) has evolved in the past decade or so. Some rather cranky observations follow:

• The pros stick to real cameras. They are packing mirrorless now. The old SLR is history. The still photogs used Canon and the video guy had a Sony. They all used secondary light sources (i.e. a big powerful flash.)
• The pro photos tended to be taken with a longer range zoom lens at greater distances than I remember from past weddings. Why this is I don’t know.
• I was glad I packed my own little Lumix instead of my Nikon SLR kit as I would have looked like an impossible photo nerd otherwise. As it was, I probably had the only amateur camera at the festivities.
• Which brings me to the other so-called photography – whoa! There was an incredible amount of quantity versus quality going down.
• Everybody else at the wedding was using Smartphones. Millions of bad photos and videos were recorded. People took stuff during the wedding ceremony which I think is gauche. At least they were polite enough to kill the flashes. Otherwise it would have looked like an Adele concert and driven the real photographers nuts.
• During the dinner and dancing folks were doing selfies, still photos and videos in bad light without a flash. I am sure the phones’ computational photography might help – but gimme a break. I saw videos taken without even looking – just hold your phone at waist height, point it toward the dance floor, and record. Using a weak flash at a distance of 10 meters in semi darkness used to be a recipe for disaster. Today they just keep on shooting.
• I also discovered for the zillionth time why I would never want to be a professional wedding photographer. The pressure to be nice, meet all the expectations, take flattering portraits of old folks with the radiant and beautiful bride must be incredible. Spare me.

When the pros called it an evening the snapshot and video frenzy carried on. I hope the happy couple gets the benefit of these additional 100,000 pics. They might get a couple of good ones.

The wedding venue was lovely so I contented myself with a few landscape shots without people. Not many other folks did that. But that is my shtick.

I have often lamented the fact that photography appears to be a dying art today – especially amateur photography. Thank goodness for the pros – at least Rachel and Dan will have something nice to look at when they celebrate their 50th anniversary.

Labour Day marks another change of scenery for the grandkids – Teddy is now officially in secondary school, Veronica is finishing up her junior high experience, and Susannah is right behind them in Grade 5.

As for the old folks, Nonna is now starting her 19th year of not returning to the classroom, a fact that is not lost on Grandpa. There were 50 Labour Days that I either returned to school myself or had a family member going back. That adds up to a lot of disruption and chaos – trust me.

In case you were wondering, the photo above was taken in Caledon at the then brand new St. Cornelius elementary school. This was the height of 1980s school architecture.

I figure Sarah was in Grade 4 when this photo was taken. It’s now been 27 years since we took her to the University of Guelph.

The classroom was an Age of Innocence situation compared to today. Maybe it had a single eight-bit green screen Commodore PET computer that nobody knew how to program. No remote learning or Google Educational Suite. No Chromebooks, wifi networks, Smartphones, Snapchat, Instagram or Tik Tok. Schoolyard bullying took place in the schoolyard and was a bit easier to spot and deal with. There were no controversies over cursive writing or times tables.

If you talk about this type of learning with our grandkids, they look at you with a sort of eyeroll disbelief. It’s as if you had to stoke the one room school woodstove and write on a slate back then.

A few years later Maria took courses in “Computers in the Classroom.” A central theme in her courses was an Apple program called Hypercard. Little snippets of information were digitally connected by hyperlinks.

At the time I thought this was one of the dumbest pieces of tech ever. To use it effectively you would need incredibly powerful processors, gobs of memory and storage, and much better graphics than even Apple Macs had at the time.

One of my Unilever colleagues was in Boston learning about how to network all sorts of computers in all sorts of locations. That should have given me a clue as to how wrong I was. Three years later we were on the World Wide Web. Go figure.