When i was your age we didnt have ... and walked 2 miles to school in the snow.

With technology advancing every day its hard to imagine everyday life without email or text messaging or phones. If you ask current high school students today, you'd be hard pressed to find one that didn't have the Internet exist in the majority of their life. There are probably more high school and college students that are computer literate than adults. They have also have access or at least know someone who has access to a cellphone. In a relatively short amount of time, technology has changed the ways we normally communicate with each other (I will covering telephone technology only in this post, since email and other data based communications could easily take up one post).

Lets take a quick look back at the past at how we used to communicate. Since the focus of this blog is on new technology, i will only touch on the past. For the most part of history, we communicated orally or by physically marking some object and passed it along(stone tablets, paper, etc...). Then came advances in electricity and we started to send information down wires via simple means such as the telegraph. That gave us a means to send a message a great distance almost instantly, although still just passing a message along. Soon after, Alexander Gram Bell was awarded a patent for the telephone. It let people have a real time conversation over long distances. For a large part of time that form of the telephone hasn't changed much. You had a terminal (phone), a line from your house to the telephone service provider, and the trunking and switching equipment that connects the users. The advances in technology improved quality in service and hardware but people were still tethered to their homes. Even with the adoption of pagers, and could be paged, we still needed to find a regular phone to reach someone. However, the fact that we could send wireless pages out to people meant that it was just a matter of time before we could send voice.

We could send voice over radio waves before, but the equipment to do so was bulky and consumed lots of power. It wasn't until advances in electronics and batteries came around that we were able to shrink the components to something more realistic to be carried around. As seen in this picture is one of the first commercial cellphones.



(Image From Wikipedia)

After which mobile communications have taken off, and each year brings in newer phones and other devices that pack the latest and greatest that technology has to offer. Now we aren't limited to location to have our conversations, or even just our voices (with the next generations of mobile phones like the iPhone 4, video calls are possible). Really cool if you ask me, since i considered a pager that could receive the number '80085' from my buddy the pinnacle of technology while in high school.

Here is a link to some more history of mobile phones
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones