Before Phones: The Last Generation Before Smartphones

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Welcome to what we did before. Today we're exploring what we did before phones. In 2026, something strange is happening. People are buying landline phones again. They're swapping their smartphones for dumb phones. They're deleting WhatsApp, TikTok, Snapchat, and going back to a way that once was.

SPEAKER_01 0:20 It may be well within living memory that we knew how to exist without smartphones, but would you know how to exist without yours now? Perhaps you we need a reminder of what life was like before smartphones.

SPEAKER_00 0:37 Yes, definitely. And this time we're not travelling back to a time in deep history. Today, let us take you back to 1994, to the dawn of the smartphone. If you're new to the show, welcome. A lot of people have discovered the podcast recently, so we're excited to have you here. And please do subscribe to the show if you like what you're hearing. But Matt, this is going to be a two-parter episode, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 1:02 Yeah, because this is such a huge topic. Um, in our next episodes, we'll dig into the entire sort of ancient history of communication. But, you know, first there's enough for today just discussing the last 40 or 50 years, or even, you know, the last 20 years, because mobile phones and especially smartphones are super new, but they have changed so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:27 Yeah, exactly. And I remember saying, wouldn't it be amazing if we could just like press buttons on our phone screens instead of using a keyboard? And I thought at the time that sounded really cool and like futuristic. And then to be honest, it wasn't that long after I said that that I got an iPhone 3 or 3G. And and and that, I if I recall, was my first ever touch screen smartphone, and that was as late as 2008.

SPEAKER_01 1:56 Yeah, actually, I remember your first iPhone 3G because that became my first iPhone as well. Um so we were queuing up for uh I think it was the release of Call of Duty Black Ops, a midnight launch. And oh, I used to love midnight launches in games. You don't get that anymore. Yeah, we'll have to do a podcast about it, maybe. Um you had just smashed the screen of your iPhone and you were like, Oh, I'm gonna buy an iPhone 4s on contract anyway, so it's fine.

SPEAKER_00 2:27 And that will become a recurring theme later in the episode, by the way. Me smashing phone screens. Sorry, go ahead.

SPEAKER_01 2:34 Um and you were like, Oh, uh if you want to try and fix it, you can just buy me a copy of Call of Duty Black Ops and have it if you want. A bargain. Yeah, so I got it. I learned how to fix phone screens. I then ended up having a small business running uh fixing iPhone screens, um, and I got my first iPhone out of it. And then we also played Call of Duty, so win-win-win. So you owe your first career to me, really. Yeah, yeah, in some ways I am indebted to you, Ollie. Um but before that I had pocket PCs and uh palm top computers and just like a normal mobile phone, but we'll we'll get into that sort of thing later, maybe. If we fast forward to today, we've never really been more reachable than those times, and certainly uh I can't speak for everyone, but more sort of exhausted from it. Yeah. We went from calling our mates on the house phone to sort of dealing with the pressure of blue ticks on messages, um WhatsApp pressure, group chats we never asked to be in, and I'm getting so many group chats. I know, and uh not to mention work creeping into our evenings. Yeah, um, you know, after five, uh you're still reachable. If there's an emergency, it's not like, oh well, they're not at work anymore. It's like, oh well, actually, we can just send them a message. But this isn't how humans evolved to communicate.

SPEAKER_00 4:06 Yeah, and don't forget doom scrolling at 11 pm. That's that's new, and it's not great.

SPEAKER_01 4:12 Yeah, or or 3 a.m. as the case may be, maybe not for us at our age. No, I'm an old man, I don't stay up that late. Yeah, yeah, true. I'm the same. I'm in bed by 10 these days. Um, but this brings sort of a whole other element into the discussion, actually, which is that phones aren't really phones anymore, and it's certainly not the primary purpose of our phones. I think the last phone call I made was over a week ago. And I hate having them now. Yeah, yeah, me too. Uh I mean how could they phone me without texting me first to warn me that they were gonna phone me? Yeah, yeah, it's like prepare yourself, you're gonna have to speak to another human being. Um, but anyway, we're g we're gonna discuss in a bit what it was really like sort of existing without a smartphone. Um, and although that's not really, you know, that long ago, I think we have to remember, especially people of our age and older, that there are many people, you know, in 2008 when you got your iPhone 3G, someone born then is now 18 this year. So um for many people's living memory now, smartphones have just always been a thing. So to get us to the present and where we are now, we kind of need to understand when mobile phones in general crept into our lives. So if we go back to sort of the prototype part of mobile phones, there was uh an engineer by the name of Marty Cooper, and he made the first ever mobile phone call. He worked at Motorola in New York, um, and he was actually making the call to gloat to a competitor. Uh, this was in um on the 3rd of April 1973. Yeah, he was um he was phoning Bell Labs, right, to basically mock them. Yes, yeah. So I think they were working on similar kind of thing, but they were really invested on this uh car phone idea. And he phoned them and he said, Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone, um, basically saying, you know, yours, you have to be tethered to your car. Um, and you know what? Marty is still alive today, he's 97 years old.

SPEAKER_00 6:42 Wow, that's incredible. So he's lived through almost the entire history of modern communication. He's gone from landlines dominating the world to billions of smartphones in people's pockets. I mean, he he essentially put them there in our pockets.

SPEAKER_01 6:58 Yeah, yeah. Uh, and it shows just how recent this whole thing is. He's seen us go from not having phones, mobile phones, to being sort of amazed and wowed by the concept of it to potentially hating it and wanting to go back.

SPEAKER_00 7:13 Yeah, exactly. He's seen it all. He's like, oh no, what a what did I do? Um, but yeah, I mean, I think if we think about the history of smartphones, this you know, this is very different. This is a different beast. This was an absolute unit of a phone. Uh it was it was a chonky boy, and it weighed in at four times the weight of an iPhone. And it only came on the market 11 years later, actually. So 11 years after he made that first phone call was when it finally got sold to people in 1983. And remember, this was nowhere near what a smartphone is capable of today. And it was called the Motorola DynoTac 8000X, which uh I don't know, it sounds like a washing machine or something. It's a very 80s name for sure. Yeah, and I don't know why it was the 8,000X, it could have just been the DynoTac, it was the first one. Um and it cost a whopping $4,000, uh, which is the equivalent of nearly $12,500 in today's money. Even $4,000 for a phone like this now would be crazy. And when you do, you know, you consider the price of an iPhone, what $1,000, $2,000 maybe, uh, it's basically a mini computer in your pocket, and this was just a landline phone on wheels. So it hardly seems as though it would have been worth the investment at the time. And if you get annoyed at your phone's battery life right now, this thing could only go for 30 minutes and it took 10 hours to charge. So yeah, only very wealthy people could afford something like this.

SPEAKER_01 8:46 Yeah, um, so for context, this Motorola DynoTac is the foam that you see in movies like American Psycho and Wall Street. It's this huge kind of beige brick with an antenna, and it was kind of associated with the the yuppies of the 80s, and you can really see why at that price range, right? And also kind of the the use case is is so small, so it really was, I think, kind of the preserve of people who had the money and felt like they needed to be reachable or to contact someone very quickly to make some sort of business deal. And honestly, a lot of people really thought that early mobile phones were were pretty ridiculous or unnecessary or antisocial as a result. And many just kind of thought, who's ever gonna need this? You know, in the 1970s and the early 80s, most homes already had landlines, phone booths were everywhere.

SPEAKER_00 9:48 Do you remember phone booths? I do. Yeah, most have been um converted into like defibrillating machines now, haven't they?

SPEAKER_01 9:55 Yeah, um, which arguably is uh, you know, we we're gonna talk about the positives and negatives of uh mobile phones and smartphones. I would say the rise in use of phone booths being used for defibrillation is pretty good. But being unreachable wasn't really considered a problem.

SPEAKER_00 10:14 Yeah, I love that. Being unreachable wasn't a problem. That that's how it should be, really, isn't it? But now if you don't reply within minutes, you're considered rude. Uh so it is quite amazing how we can flip expectations so quickly. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 10:29 And and back then, people thought you just looked silly holding this massive brick to your ear. Most thought these mobile phone things would not really ever become mainstream, and maybe maybe we should have just ditched the idea then, uh depending on your opinion on the on things today. But in fact, there there are actually documented cases of restaurants reacting to the sudden appearance of mobile phones at the dinner table. So, for instance, in in the US in the 1990s, the Ivy restaurant banned mobile phones. This was a celebrity restaurant in Los Angeles. So the restaurant began asking customers not to use them at the table, and staff sometimes even asked people to leave the dining room to take calls. Right. Why why is that? Well, they were considered disruptive and rude in a quiet dining environment. And actually, I I totally get that. I still find that to be the case, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 11:30 Well, especially the size of the things and the fact that you weren't it wasn't texting, right? They were speaking out loud, and I guess you maybe spoke louder as well because the phone call quality wouldn't have been as good, so you had to be clearly heard. So yeah, I can imagine it wasn't the most pleasant dining experience.

SPEAKER_01 11:46 You know, we're probably this might not be a reference that all of our listeners will understand or remember, but you remember Dom Jolly, the uh you know, I'm on the phone thing, trigger happy TV, and he had this huge phone that was like this big. I think I now get where this kind of joke comes from because I always found it a bit like silly, but I think he was just referencing probably these kind of obnoxious or seemingly obnoxious people in the 80s and early 90s at restaurants and stuff, you know, using this bizarre thing and talking loudly into it when everyone's just trying to have a nice meal. Um but according to sort of the reports at the time, the diners were complaining that hearing someone conducting business calls during dinner ruined the atmosphere, and I actually totally get that. The issue became widely discussed in newspapers, and some etiquette writers argued that mobile phones were the new smoking, something that needed to be restricted in public places.

SPEAKER_00 12:53 But alas, here we are taking pictures of our food, not speaking to each other at the restaurant table, carrying our phones with us around the house, room to room. Um it's now ridiculous to be without it. But this often happens with new technology, I think, doesn't it? It happened with fridges, as we mentioned with Nicola Twille. It happened with things like microwaves when they were first introduced, uh yeah, and a lot more besides. But people fear new technology, and and I think we have this habit of never expecting it to evolve either, um, and especially not to evolve as quickly as phones did. Yeah. But by 1991, so that's the year we were born, the second generation of mobile technology launched, uh, aka 2G. And this actually marked the transition from analog, so 1G, uh, to digital. So we had you know encryption, clearer voice calls were possible, we had SMS text messaging, and we also had some basic data services around this time as well.

SPEAKER_01 13:52 I didn't realize that the basic data came sort of that early, actually. I do remember using 2G like WAP internet uh in the early 2000s, but that's um that's amazingly uh early. Um and actually, we're sort of approaching the end of an era with 2G. Um, many networks are shutting it down now, and there's plans for a complete switch off in the UK by 2033.

SPEAKER_00 14:22 Wow, that's soon, isn't it? And so by 2033, then those old phones really will have earned their place in museums. Because I always find it hilarious that they're already being showcased in some. But you know, when you do look in the cabinet, they do look like ancient artifacts. But yeah, by 2023, uh 2033, sorry, when 2G shut down, they will have earned their place. But but anyway, 2G phones um they brought the price and the accessibility of of mobile phones down a lot. So by the mid to late 1990s, entry-level handsets dropped to around 100 or 200 pounds, somewhere in between that region. So a big difference from the DynoTac. And by the late 90s, some were actually free on contract, so that's how I paid for my iPhone. And as a result, teenagers got their hands on them. And then by 1997, you know, you could play Snake on your Nokia if you wanted to, um, just three years before the iconic Nokia 3310 came out.

SPEAKER_01 15:20 Oh, I did love playing Snake. Um, and yeah, it was amazing and quite revolutionary, I guess, at the time, but just amazing how easily uh easily amused we were just all playing this. Um, yeah, we gotta do an episode on before video games and include mobile phone games, I think. But definitely. But you know, these were all side quests to the main thing that phones were for, which was calling people. And a phone is obviously short for telephone. Telephone comes from Greek roots, so telly meaning far or distant, and phone meaning voice or sound. So it literally means distant voice or sound from far away. And that really doesn't sum up smartphones of today with cameras, GPS, internet, you name it.

SPEAKER_00 17:13 Yeah, and without the touch screen, I think it would surprise a lot of the younger generation the lengths that we had to go to just to write a text. So, you know, I I wonder if muscle memory would kick in if I was given an old phone now. But yeah, the reason text speech became a thing where we shortened words like you to just the letter U was because it was just such a pain writing things out in full.

SPEAKER_01 17:37 Yeah, exactly. And uh there's a interesting fact if you wanted to write the word telephone, you'd have to click the buttons on your keyboard 18 times since you were just working with nine buttons and you know you had to press one button multiple times to cycle through the letters. But you know, this this text speak, not to mention it being quicker, it was also just cheaper for us to write this way. Most of us had pay-as-you-go contracts, at least in our generation, and a single SMS message length is a maximum of 160 characters. So if you sent a message with just one more character at 161, it would charge you for two SMSs, which is not ideal when you're a poor student. So, yeah, C-U-L-H-R.

SPEAKER_00 18:28 Those were the days. They really were. Um even if teachers and journalists in the early 2000s were worried that texting shorthand would destroy the English language. But I think that those worries have not gone away with social media. But um, actually at the time it became a huge media debate, didn't it? Like genuinely. Um, but surprisingly, linguists today generally say the opposite that texting like this actually encouraged creativity within language.

SPEAKER_01 18:57 Yeah, that's interesting. And um also, you know, I think it was like in the early 2010s sometime. So in the era of smartphones, one of the Oxford words of the year was the crying laughing emoji. Um no way. Yeah, so like not a word act at all, but it was at this time, you know, when people were starting to use emojis quite a lot and stuff.

SPEAKER_00 19:22 Yeah, you say it's not a word, but I use the laughing, crying emoji probably just as frequently as any other word in my uh lexicon. So maybe maybe it does count.

SPEAKER_01 19:32 Yeah, maybe, but you don't use it in the real world, presumably. You don't say, oh, crying laughing emoji. Yeah, I do, so that I don't have to show real emotion. Oh it's much more efficient that way. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Crying laughing face. Yes. So anyway, um phones back then in the early 2000s, they were pretty unique. Every smartphone now just looks like a variation of the same black slab, uh, a black mirror, and that's actually where the show then gets its name from, but I digress. There were so many different styles that you could choose from. Like one of my friends had this old Nokia 7600 that was I don't know how to describe the shape, it was kind of like this diamond or teardrop shape, and the buttons ran around the edges of the screen.

SPEAKER_00 20:27 Yeah, it was wildly impractical.

SPEAKER_01 20:29 Yes, I can see why you know I can see why it didn't catch on.

SPEAKER_00 20:34 Yeah, I I had a Nokia N gauge, which was one of the first serious attempts to merge a mobile phone with a handheld gaming console, which I thought was so cool at the time because I loved my Game Boy. I spent a lot of time on that Nintendo, and but a lot of people didn't agree that it was cool. Yeah, um, yeah, I think a lot of people thought it was very weird. Um, it doesn't look actually that different to like a handhold gaming console that you'd see today, and because of that, it made making calls like look really, really weird, which is another reason why I think people um thought it wasn't that cool. So you kind of had to hold it to your ear, tilted on its thin side. Um, so you had like this really wide bit sticking out in the palm of your hands. Um yeah, I I got mocked of that. Um, but anyway, um I fell over doing the paper round and cracked the screen, um, as uh as seems to be a habit of mine, apparently, according to the uh iPhone 3G memory that you just brought up. So uh yeah, that was a sad day for the N gauge.

SPEAKER_01 21:33 Uh yeah, um well the screens back then were not like this gorilla glass or whatever it's even called these days. Um they were a lot more kind of fragile. Yeah. Although we do talk about like the Nokia 3310 being like an indestructible brick. But generally speaking, these things did break. And it's interesting that you you didn't get this the screen for your end gauge fixed.

SPEAKER_00 21:58 Well, yeah, clearly I I just like to just throw things away or trade them in for Call of Duty. But but back then, actually, you didn't really have this abundance of screen repair shops like you do now. You know, they're basically on every street corner now, like iSmash or whatever they're called. But when we were young, I don't really remember seeing a single one, do you?

SPEAKER_01 22:16 No, you don't. Um, and also I don't think the expertise of doing it or the parts were really available. I'm sure there'll be people in the comments that might say, well, actually, I was fixing a Nokia 3310 in you know the early 2000s. But generally speaking, I guess we didn't have YouTube, so people couldn't learn from other people doing it.

SPEAKER_00 22:37 Well, that's how you've set up your business because there weren't other reputable companies doing it. Not that you weren't reputable.

SPEAKER_01 22:44 Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. I positioned myself as a uniquely unreputable option for people. Yeah. They loved it. Yes. Um, no, I mean the reason why it was a thing for me or the reason. Why I was able to do it for a while is because I think at a number of things back then phones weren't quite such so prevalent. They weren't quite so expensive. And people had so such a variety that I think it was a bit harder to know, like, you know, how this is how you fix an N gauge, this is how you fix a Nokia 3310, this is how you fix a Motorola. But anyway, when we go back to that time, not only were there the N gauges and the teardrop shapes and these clamshells and slides, there were also flip phones, which are kind of making a bit of a comeback. And also there were phones like the Samsung SPH N270, which was inspired by the Matrix films. Yeah. And this was really cool. It had like a spring-loaded sliding design and these Matrix style green lights. I loved the image of the future in the 2000s.

SPEAKER_00 23:57 I know that that's what we imagined the future was going to be like, and it ended up being like really, well, boring. Yes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 24:04 There's actually a name for this, if anyone's interested, uh, for this design style of the two like futuristic design uh of the 2000s, and it's called Frutiger Aero. Uh I highly recommend looking this up if you want a bit of a nostalgia hit. Fruitiger Aero. It's like, you know, the design style of these old phones and Windows XP, and it's actually a bit of an aesthetic now that people are starting to be like, oh, it was actually quite an optimistic time, wasn't it?

SPEAKER_00 24:37 Yeah, yeah. I mean, if then we thought we were going to have hoverboards in the next 10 years. Actually, um, I've heard Alain De Botton from the School of Life talk a lot about how the world has become uglier because we've sort of homogenized uh the way things look. We're we're designing things to look very similar, um, sort of not as creative and and colourful as it used to be in the past. And I I guess that sounds like a similar thing happened with phones, but I also saw another person recently saying that we're starting to be a bit more experimental with um the way that we design architecture and other things as well, at least in the last couple of years. So maybe we're moving back out of that period of of ugliness. I hope so. Uh maybe we'll we'll see the return of the end gauge. But um Siemens uh even launched a whole line called uh Zelebri, which was designed like fashion accessories. So some looked like makeup compacts, um pendants, you had some which looked like jewellery. And the idea was that phones um would be kind of like fashion items rather than just gadgets. But the truth is back then I don't remember spending much time on them. Like we could talk all about the end gauge, and even with its um game capabilities, I didn't I wasn't you know obsessed with it and chatting on it as well. Texts cost like what 10 to 20p per message, and like you said before, you if you went over the character limit, you spent double that amount and you had to go and manually top up your balance. So you just kind of used texts quite sparingly, which you know made us not use them as much, but maybe that was kind of nice because you had to be really selective about who you text and why and what you were actually saying to them. You had to have something relevant to say to them, you wouldn't just do a boring, like just checking in kind of message because it really wasn't worth the 20p.

SPEAKER_01 26:34 Yeah, I suppose if you did, that meant you really liked them. It's like I spent 20 20p just to send you nothing. But there's also, like we mentioned before, this whole like 160 character limit for an SMS. So yeah, there's that. Yeah, why why did they do that limit actually? That's well, SMS text messaging was actually built into the sort of standards for mobile phones long before people really started using them. Engineers developing the GSM mobile network in the 80s realized they could send short text messages using the same signal channels that phones used to set up the calls, essentially sending messages during the moments when the network wasn't busy. And because these signals were tiny, the messages had to be short. There was an engineer named Friedhelm Hillebrand, and he studied things like postcards and telex messages, and he concluded that 160 characters was enough for most communication, which is why early text messages had that famous limit. Now, the first SMS was actually sent in 1992 by the engineer Neil Papworth, and he simply texted Merry Christmas.

SPEAKER_00 27:54 Oh, he didn't use his uh 20p effectively there, didn't he? I know. No, I I love it, and and these restrictions are kind of like the Twitter of old, right? So it are like almost intentionally restrictive.

SPEAKER_01 28:08 Yeah, and people the interesting thing with Twitter, I won't talk about Twitter too much, but they branded this restriction as a feature, and interestingly, this is the exact reason that old Twitter was limited to 140 characters. It was so that it would fit into an SMS and there was then 20 characters reserved for the username. So Twitter is older than we might remember. It launched in 2006, and back then, smartphones weren't really much of a thing. I think there were some pre-iPhone, you know, uh devices that would have been able to connect to the internet, but really it wasn't such a big thing. So, how do you allow people to tweet their thoughts on the go without smartphones? And that's with an SMS text message. But I will say the less said about modern Twitter, the better. Um X or whatever it's called now.

SPEAKER_00 29:05 Yes, um, fair. Moving swiftly on. So anyway, it was these limitations that created the earliest text smiley, right? So this is colon, dash, and then a bracket. It was proposed in 1982 by computer scientist Scott Fullman because text messages lacked um tone. And then that spread massively through SMS culture in the 90s. And I remember um I was playing World of Warcraft and my friend typed a message ending in equals D, so equals and then a capital D. And I was like, what does that mean? I just thought he'd accidentally typed it on the keyboard, and I had to ask him, uh, what do you mean equals D? And he said it's a turn turn your head, it's a smiley face. And I was like, it was like You thought it was algebra. Yeah, I couldn't believe it. I was like, wow, and that's that's how I learned about smiley faces. I think I was a little late to the party by this point because this would have been in the 2000s and people had already been using them. But yeah, I thought it was incredible at the time.

SPEAKER_01 30:06 Oh, yeah. Well, it's this Scott Falman, I think is a real um genius there because I mean I still know people, and no offense if you're one of these people, but that text in short sentences will with full stops between each sentence and no smileys, no tone. And I just think like, what have I done to upset you? Um anyway, there was this idea when we were teenagers, and I'm sure you remember that this that us millennials were addicted to texting. Uh, I remember our parents being like, You're always on the phone texting someone. Um but without apps and without a solid internet connection or any at all, there was no reason to really look at them that much, apart from you know, games like Snake trying to hit your high scores. Well, that was incredibly fun. They were very linear and low dopamine, especially with you know our black and white screens on our Nokia 3310. You couldn't really get addicted to them in the same way as you can with modern mobile games or apps like TikTok.

SPEAKER_00 31:16 Well, yeah, and let's not even get into the advent of the infinite scroll, which is what made apps so addictive. The fact that there's you know never an end when you're scrolling through your social media feeds. Even the engineer who invented the infinite scroll says it was one of the worst things ever invented. He really deeply regrets it. And although he invented it in 2006, it wasn't it wouldn't have been a major problem at first. You know, people weren't using things like Facebook on their phone, they had to boot up their PC for things like that, and that in itself, I think, is enough of an obstacle to stop most people from spending too much time there. Uh you know, not everyone, mind you, there were still lots of people who spent far too much time on Facebook on their PC, but still you couldn't easily take your desktop PC to bed with you or out and about with you. Um, and laptops really were only just getting going as well.

SPEAKER_01 32:08 Yeah, that's true. I mean, people had laptops then, but you know, it was it was a very different time, and actually before laptops is potentially a good episode, so is before computers, but yeah, you know. Um let's not forget also an obsolete business from our sort of generation, which was the ringtone business. Uh, this was huge. So, do you remember in the early 2000s? People could pay like two, three, even five pounds to download a ringtone, and some companies made hundreds of millions selling things like the crazy frog ringtone. Oh god, not crazy frog. Yeah, yeah, horrendous.

SPEAKER_00 32:55 It was awful. Uh, what a strange thing. Why did that capture everybody's imagination? What a weird thing for everybody to become obsessed with.

SPEAKER_01 33:03 Yeah, I mean, it's kind of you can kind of see that the progression from Crazy Frog to now in in meme culture. I think it's not that obscure, but when you look back at it in the lens of today, it's like, oh god, what were we all thinking? I mean, I thought it was cringy and horrible back then, you know. Obviously, I was better than than everyone on that.

SPEAKER_00 33:23 Well, for anyone who doesn't know Crazy Frog, we will not play it for you right now because that's just not bearable. But yeah, go away and and Google it maybe.

SPEAKER_01 33:33 Um, but there were also, you know, these polyphonic versions of pop songs and custom tones. I think people could get things that where there was like an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator saying something is your ringtone, that kind of thing. Anything and everything. And at one point, ringtone sales were worth more than the entire global music industry's digital downloads.

SPEAKER_00 34:01 Wow. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 34:02 Yeah, it's pretty mad. I mean, obviously, we're talking about a time when the digital downloads probably weren't as high as they are now. We're talking about, you know, the mid-2000s or so. But still, it's still an obscene statistic.

SPEAKER_00 34:17 And there's something else uh too that existed back when texts and calls were expensive and like you just didn't have unlimited everything. You know, like when you buy a contract now, pretty much everything's unlimited. Yeah. And that was the missed call code culture. I I never used this personally, but I found out about this in a lot it happened more in countries where calls were particularly expensive, but um, in many countries, people used missed calls as signals to avoid paying for text. So, as an example, if you left a single missed call on someone's phone, uh it means I arrived safely, for instance. If you left two, it means call me back. And if you left three, it means I'm outside your house, something like that. And so, yeah, this was you know, a a lot of the time where calls or texts were expensive, and it was basically a free way of sort of using the phone network itself to give people messages. So you would phone them and immediately hang up, so there was no risk of them actually actually answering.

SPEAKER_01 35:17 Yeah, I actually remember doing this. So um we used to call it a one-ringer because you just let it ring once you and then just hang up. And I'm I'm not sure if everyone did, but it was how people in my family and some of my friends would tell each other a simple message for free, like, you know, I'll pick you up from school later, I'll one-ringer you when I'm outside. Um, maybe I did use it actually, and now you mention it. Yeah, I'm not sure if it was kind of an obscure thing that just our family did or what, but obviously plenty of people did, as you mentioned. But it's it's certainly something that I don't miss from those times. Uh I would forget what the purpose of the missed call was. Um, you know, like the day would go by, I'd get a missed call from my mum or something, and I'd be like, Oh, I have to call her back now, and it just completely ruined the point. And then I was the one who was charged for her wanting to speak to me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:15 Oh, yeah, people did used to do that. They'd one ring of you said that you would phone them back and use your credit. And you're like, hold on a minute, I've been scammed by my own friends.

SPEAKER_01 36:24 It's so annoying. I knew some people that did that sort of thing, and they were just like, Oh yeah, you know, I'm I'm poor, I don't want it's like, so am I. But you know, it's something that I don't miss, and we have to not forget, you know, we don't want to be looking at this purely with rose tinted glasses. The reasons why we have all of the innovations that we do now and WhatsApp and iMessage and everything else are certainly more convenient from this point of view and and free as long as you have the data. But let's take this trip down memory lane one step further back in time, back to old ant landlines. So I remember a time when I and I have no idea how I did this because I memorized all of my best friends' landline numbers and my family's, and I'd regularly call their house. Usually their mum or dad would pick up, obviously, and they transfer me to my mate, but calls were short and quick and usually just made so you could arrange a meetup or something like that. Back then, communication belonged to a place the house phone, the office phone, the payphone on the street corner. Today's communication kind of belongs to the person.

SPEAKER_00 37:45 Yeah, and if you got a busy tone uh back in those days because someone was on the line already, you just had to well wait.

SPEAKER_01 37:52 Yeah, I guess. Yeah, it was so annoying. Like if I um if I knew someone who also had siblings um and I was trying to get in contact with them, but their like their sister was on the phone for two hours with her boyfriend or something like that, and I'd be like, Oh, for God's sake, I just want to just tell my mate that I'm going to the park later or something. Um but do you remember if you picked up the landline to make a call and someone was using the internet, you'd get that dial-up sound in your ear.

SPEAKER_00 38:24 Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:25 And that could even cause your internet to drop out if you were using the internet on the PC and someone in your house tried to use the phone while you were using dial up.

SPEAKER_00 38:34 It was so annoying. Yeah, I lived in a family with four siblings, so you can imagine the many arguments that came about because of those limitations. And you know, you were really limited by the tech back then. Those limitations have now been stripped away, which for in many ways is a really good thing, maybe not always for the better. Um, but there was definitely a dark side to the landline days. You know, it's quite bad now being phoned by a scammer uh or even just a marketer, but at least it pops up on your phone screen as a potential scam, and you can just easily block the number or ignore the call. It was really frustrating though, back in the days of the landline, having your very loud landline phone ringing out through the house only to pick it up to a scammer.

SPEAKER_01 39:20 Ah, so annoying. Yeah, I would remember we'd be watching something on TV and the phone would ring. I think our main phone was in like the hallway, and it would be ringing, and one of us would have to get up and pick it up, and then it would just be like a scammer or a cold caller trying to sell you something. It's like I got up for this. Yeah, I had to do efforts. Yes. Um, and this was particularly bad before cooler ID became common. Before the 1990s, many people answered the phone like this, you know, like hello 482371. Um because you didn't know who was calling, and it helped confirm that to the cooler that they dialed the right house. And before cooler ID, every call was a mystery. Uh apart from I remember this thing. Do you remember this as well? Where you would get like a missed call and you could call, I think it was 1471, and it would tell you the last number that called you. Um that's just like a core memory just got unlocked. That if if I was like, I don't want to answer this, I would just wait for I would just wait for it to stop and then call 1471 and see if I recognise the number. Uh so some things don't change because now I just will if I don't recognise the number on my phone, I'm like, uh yeah, I'll just uh Yeah, I'll I'll get a text if it's important is what I think. They'll text me or they'll email me if it's important. Yeah. And something else of note from this time, we had to use phone books to look up numbers quite a lot. Um if you don't have the memory of this, it was these huge books that um had, at least where we're from in Guernsey, everyone on our island's phone number, unless you explicitly said I don't want to be part of this book, would be listed, you know, every name in alphabetical order, and then you'd have every number in numerical order as a separate index. So um if somebody phoned you, you could find the name, and if you wanted to find somebody, you could find their number. Now I think with data protection and things like that, uh most people by default are not in the phone book, but back then that's how you'd find people. And also, you know, this was before most people used the internet, so you'd find them in you'd find uh services in the yellow pages. If you needed a plumber, you'd find it in the phone book. It was like the Bible in some ways in the house, it was a very important item. I wondered how many young people have even ever flicked through the pages of a phone book or wandered over to the yellow pages.

SPEAKER_00 41:56 Yeah, I can't imagine many would want to or need to. The last time I handled a phone book was at a music festival and I was in a phone book ripping competition. Um and I I've heard of two-year-olds now getting hold of like a book, not a phone book, but any old book, and swiping because because iPads have become so ingrained in their consciousness. So, yeah, flipping pages uh doesn't, you know, of a phone book probably not.

SPEAKER_01 42:21 Wow, that's um yeah, that shows how much that is actually changing sort of neural behaviour of people. And I mean, as a two-year-old, if that's their main experience of of something of that shape, you can kind of understand it. But but something else interesting. During this time, we we spoke about a company before that was uh creating car phones, so people were renting car phones, these were huge devices installed in cars. So this was before handheld mobile phones became affordable. These would often be used by salespeople or doctors or business executives, those types of people. You could drive around, and whether you're a passenger or driving, I don't know if you're supposed to when you were driving, you could uh speak to people. You could even rent them by the day for business trips.

SPEAKER_00 43:16 Actually, um, mobile phones have their roots in car phones. So the very first wireless phone call was made from a car in 1946, and that was from the front seat of uh Chrysler. Um and it was it was heavy, this thing, it weighed around 35 kilos, so it filled the car's trunk. Um and the company behind it was Galvin Manufacturing, which later became Motorola. And they were already pioneers in car electronics, having invented one of the first successful car radios. And during World War II, they also built something called the Handy Torky, which was a handheld two-way radio used by the US military, and it basically paved the way for mobile phones decades later.

SPEAKER_01 44:02 That's amazing, and it's something that I'd not really thought about. Actually, one of my first mobile phones was a motorola, and it it combines the the words motor for a motor car and ola, which was a pop popular suffix for sound-related products at the time. Um it was effectively meaning sound in motion. Uh that's fascinating. That's something I hadn't really thought of until you just mentioned it. But anyway, making calls on these things really was expensive. It was it was also prone to signal loss. To be honest, all these old versions of phones might just sound like a lot of hard work to many people listening. Yeah. So let's make the case maybe of why we might want to go back, even if it's a devil's advocate.

SPEAKER_00 44:54 Yeah, well, it's it's a good point to make because people are doing digital detoxes more than ever, right? Like I Said at the start, people are buying these things called dumb phones, which are basically just phones if you're living in the 2000s. But they're they're phones with very limited uh functionality. People are also setting screen time limits, they're deleting apps, they're even reinstalling landline phones. In fact, I actually came across this company the other day, Tin Can. Unfortunately, I think they only ship in the US because I'd love to have one myself, but they make Tin Can landline phones for kids. It's quite a cool premise. Basically, um, the idea is to help parents keep their kids off of smartphones and you know, all the dangers of unfettered access to the internet. And so Tin Can just lets kids call approved contacts like friends or grandparents, and then parents control the contact list through an app. So you just have that same experience of just having to ring somebody on the landline, but you don't have the experience of dealing with scammers.

SPEAKER_01 45:57 Oh, that's quite nice. Um, yeah, I remember being a kid actually and and making the tin can phones, and I remember thinking how cool it would be to like me and my friend who lived like I don't know, let's say half a mile away. We could make a really long string and we could talk to each other in our bedrooms. And I really thought like that's the way that we could do it. It'd be really cool to be at home and be able to just talk to my mate. Um, and now like it's just insane what you can do. Um, and it's it is a cool idea, and dumb phones in general have really interested me. I've actually installed um an app on my phone that's supposed to sort of turn it into a bit of a dumb smartphone. Something I'd like to talk about for like why would people do this? Uh that is the effects of smartphone use on people in general, but especially kids. So when me and you, Ollie, were teenagers, we both, I would say, were in kind of the minority among our generation by having pretty unrestricted technology and internet access.

SPEAKER_00 47:07 Yeah, definitely. And and it did feel amazing at the time. Um, but I absolutely had an unhealthy obsession with the computer, and it was sometimes to the detriment of my real life. I mean, um, there was the first summer that I got World of Warcraft, for example. Um, it was the summer holidays, and I I paid oh god, it's just awful to reminisce about this, but I I had 25 days of gameplay time during the summer holidays.

SPEAKER_01 47:39 Just the six weeks of summer.

SPEAKER_00 47:41 I yeah, I must have racked up at least a few days before summer happened, uh surely, because I don't know how it could have been possible to fit all that time in. At one point, my sister came into my room and said, Ollie, we're going to the beach. Do you want to come? I said, No, no, no, I'm I'm busy. She said, Ollie, you're coming to the beach. I was like, oh fine. So um, yeah, so definitely it was unhealthy. Uh, but I that was particularly bad. I I haven't been so bad since. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 48:08 Um, and to be clear, I'm in a similar boat. Maybe it wasn't World of Warcraft for me, but it was um Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike and pretty much any other game that I got obsessed with. And also just the internet was really interesting to me going on forums and things like that. So I get it. I get like smartphones are just like the new beast for you know Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And we're talking about the detriment of like maybe socially and mental health and physical health for me, at least. I think it may have had some detriments. It's not so black and white, at least for me. So equally, I think my literacy with technology that I built and um the internet and just you know the obsession that I could nurse with this technology, I don't think I would be a software developer today if I hadn't have done that. Um, and if I hadn't really had nursed that kind of uh real passion for for it and learnt how these things were working as it was happening.

SPEAKER_00 49:14 Yeah, I I agree. Like I don't know if I'd be able to be a podcast producer like I am today without all of those skills that I learned from being so obsessed with technology, and all of that has come in super handy now that we've moved into uh an era where phones and tech are more dominant than ever. We couldn't have predicted that, so we weren't making some educated bet. We were just addicted. But it really did help us. So yeah, you're you're certainly right. It's not it's not as black and white as saying it's good or it's bad. And so, how does this all translate to today? Well, there are studies that show that smartphone ownership at the age of 12 uh was associated with increased risks of depression, obesity, insufficient sleep, reduced cognitive performance, even. And so with unfettered access to these devices, kids are they're being affected negatively. And it's not just kids. There are studies that show over a quarter of adults displaying behaviors consistent with behavioral addiction to their phones and linking them to mental health issues and even structural changes in the in the brain's reward pathways as well.

SPEAKER_01 50:25 Yeah, I mean, that that's crazy to consider, right? That it's observable that there are structural changes in your brain's reward pathways. Like you are rewiring your brain to seek reward and pleasure and dopamineergic kind of responses by using these things. So it kind of makes you think like, well, why are we doing this? And on the other hand, society has been made increasingly kind of difficult or even impossible to function in without a smartphone. You know, often setting up household devices requires an internet connection at some point in the journey or an email address or a phone number or an app. It might not require it, but it might make it easier. And many workplaces require you to have a smartphone to be contactable, to join their WhatsApp, or to download an app, to register for some internal systems for their two-factor authentication, these kind of things. And also smartphone and social media literacy to a different degree, but definitely smartphone and technology literacy is simply necessary for a huge portion of the way today's world works. So you really don't want to be cutting off kids from learning about these things. There are also electronic ID cards in many countries, with the UK planning to roll theirs out, and while it's now voluntary, that had been planned to be made mandatory. So if you think about old people or people who just want to not use smartphones, you know, you're really excluding people from doing things that potentially you need to do to just exist. Bank branches are closing, they're pushing people more and more towards dependence on banking apps. Even if you just want to use some tech and have a PC that may more often require a smartphone for again two-factor authentication becoming the norm, not to mention checking into flights online and having your boarding pass on your phone. Some airlines like Ryanair even penalize you for checking in at the airport.

SPEAKER_00 52:46 Of course they do. But yeah, just despite the negatives to smartphone overuse, you know, the fact that sometimes you'll just go to the pub or a restaurant and people are mentally checked out. You can't just reject modernity. Like I've always considered, oh, I would love to do a week without my phone, but actually it would be hugely detrimental to my business and to loads of other areas of my life as well. So locking it away in a cupboard isn't actually that feasible, I don't think.

SPEAKER_01 53:14 No, and I've kind of unfortunately come to a similar similar conclusion. And of course, if you can do this, then then respect to you. But for many, many of us, the reason that these phones got so big and these smartphones became such a thing is because and and the reason why we were so willing to give up our privacy and and everything else is convenience. And yeah, that convenience is so ingrained in life that not having it or not using it could be a real disadvantage. So, in so many ways, let's think about like a few examples. One is could you imagine going on a long-distance trip the old-fashioned way without real-time flight updates on your phone, or if you're driving without Google Maps? Yeah, you could use a dedicated sat nav or a paper map, but these are often just not as good. And it's another device or thing to carry and another thing to break or lose.

SPEAKER_00 54:14 Yeah, not to mention, you know, the pain of not being able to check in with your family. Like that is something that people long for. It's why Facebook became so popular. People finally could check in with people they hadn't heard from in years. And yeah, you know, if you go down this dumb phone and dumb devices route, you it's just harder, unquestionably harder. Like we make things like this because it makes our lives easier. It has other knock-on effects, as we discussed, and so there's really no um that there's no good without as a yin and yang to everything, isn't there? Yeah, but if you go for a dumb phone, you may have to carry the phone, then a separate camera, then a satnav, a wallet, um MP3 player just to have some of the functionality that your iPhone had before, and still you're gonna be that person that can't be included in WhatsApp groups. Yeah. And so perhaps you socially miss out on things as a result.

SPEAKER_01 55:06 Yeah, that's true. Um I think that the uh advantages that we have from this probably do outweigh the disadvantages, but I think that we could have a healthier relationship with them.

SPEAKER_00 55:21 Yeah, and that's why it's good to tackle their history. And you know, it it seems weird to be talking about history when it's only in the last few decades, but this this is a fast-moving history. The kind of technological advancement that we've made in the last 50 years could be equivalent to technological advancement over new numerous centuries in the past, you know, it may seem oh well, we're already talking about 40 or 50 years ago, but actually we've just radically changed so quickly it is worth reflecting, I think, because we can become so used to the way that we live that it's hard to remember any other way of living. It might seem almost impossible to bring back a landline or buy a DOM phone. We might ask ourselves, how could we really live without them? Well, our ancestors did it for a very long time, right? Not not just no smartphones, no phones at all, no instant communication.

SPEAKER_01 56:21 Yeah, it seems absurd. And um, as you were saying before, it it is very new and it but it has been such a huge societal shift that we can't really imagine living without them. And the the reality is that 50 years ago we didn't know about mobile phones, 20 or 30 years ago we didn't know about smartphones. So how did our ancestors do it? What did we do before phones existed at all? Well, that's what we're gonna be tackling in our next episode.

SPEAKER_00 56:58 Yes, this was too big of a topic to cover in one single episode, as you've discovered from listening. So we're gonna be looking at the ancient communication methods of our of our ancestors, from Morse code to carrier pigeons to smoke signals, and a time when leaving home often meant silence for weeks, for months, sometimes years. Thank you for listening to what we did before. I'm Ollie.

SPEAKER_01 57:25 And I'm Matt. And please uh do subscribe to the show if you like what we're doing, and comment if you have any opinions on whether phones have been a good thing, whether they're a bad thing. And we will see you again next time. Bye bye. Bye bye.