You are watching ColdFustian TV. Hi, welcome to another ColdFustian video. Degogo here. If you ask people what they think the very first all touch screen smartphone was, most people would probably say the original iPhone.
So if they knew a bit more about technology, technology history, they might say the LG Prada. But it is by no means either of these phones. To find the answer, we have to look even before the 2000s.
The story starts in 1971 with Theodore Paraskevikos. He was the very first person on earth to envision devices that combined telephone communication capabilities and computing. Not only that, but he was the very first to introduce the concepts of intelligence, data processing and visual display screens to the world. into telephones.
Theodore issued over 20 patents and created a special transmitter and receiver that was used within his work at the Boeing company. Although Theodore was a visionary, his inventions never really found its way outside of Boeing, so as a result, they weren't largely unrecognized. Over a decade later, in 1984, Motorola shocked the world with the first ever mobile phone, the Dynatac 8000X. It was a bulky inefficient thing taking 10 hours to charge for a measly 30 minutes of talk time. But it was the seed of what is oh so familiar today.
However, it was by no means smart. So we got to ask the question, when did the smarts actually get into the phone? To find out, we've got to continue our story and fast forward into 1992. This was a time when primitive PDAs or personal digital assistants were starting to become hot possessions.
For some fun context, let's take a quick look at AT&T's vision of the future through PDAs, or as they called them, personal communicators. There's the fax machine, there's the phone, there's the voicemail, there's the email, the electronic mail system. All of that's all fragmented, it's not all in one place, so if it were all in one place, it would be great.
You want to design a system that works for me, get something that will climb up that ladder with me. I need something that's going to work here. I want to be able to take the things I have at home on the road with me. If I had one in my car it would be even better. My dream system would integrate voice mail, email, fax, and it would have one, maybe two buttons.
This is incredible. Everything I need to do my job, everything that's on my desk, is right here in one packet. Now these are the kinds of faxes I like to get.
You know, my daughter's quite the artist. She's really good. To have this kind of information go where I go, and to have it come up on screen...
This is great. Now this is really communicating. So when can I get one? Okay, so hold your laughter. Back then, that kind of stuff was revolutionary.
Also around this time, it's important to know that laptops themselves were only just barely becoming feasible. While other companies were experimenting and looking to find the right combination of communication capabilities, IBM already had a prototype. In this year, at a Comdex Computer Industry trade show, history was very quietly made. IBM showed off a small prototype phone that they had been developing.
It included PDA features and a large touchscreen. In 1994, The phone was refined further and put onto the market with the name the Simon Personal Communicator. And you guessed it, this was the very first smartphone. Interestingly enough, even though the phone was developed by IBM, it was actually manufactured by Mitsubishi Electronics.
So what could this phone actually do? Well, in addition to its ability to make and receive phone calls, Simon was able to send and receive faxes, emails, and included several other apps like an address book, calendar, and... appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, and a notepad through its touch screen display and stylus. It was so advanced that people didn't even know what they were really looking at.
Sales of the IBM Simon were short-lived between August 16th, 1994, and was discontinued less than a year later in February of 1995. It sold 50,000 units. For those of you interested in a few technical fun bits, let's check out some specs of the phone. It had 1MB of RAM and flash storage and a 16MHz processor which was actually x86 compatible.
For those of you wondering, x86 is the chip architecture used in Windows PCs. Okay, so how is 16MHz when compared to computers of the day? Well, for comparison, the PCs of the day were around 20 to 100MHz in speed. So this phone was actually not that bad, it was actually somewhat of a powerhouse mobile computing device. Of course compared to today's phones with 4GB of RAM and 8 core processors in the 2.5GHz range, you can see that things have really come a long way.
The IBM Simon today doesn't sound like much, but as you can imagine, at the time, it was an absolutely revolutionary concept. So revolutionary, that it would take another 13 years until the smartphone industry truly realised once again that a screen that could change to fit your application worked better than fixed buttons. It's funny how things go. So hopefully that enlightened you somewhat and that was just a fun little bit of tech history.
If you want to see more alternative stuff on many aspects of technology and society, don't forget to subscribe. Thanks for watching guys, this has been Dagogo, you've been watching ColdFusion and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys, have a good one.