Tag Archives: phone

Multi-Asking

22. Apr, 2019 0 Comments

Gold Bond Building Products ad, 1975

[JJ]

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Call Wading

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[BuzzFed]

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Well, You May Not Know My Name Is Simon

23. Apr, 2012 1 Comment

The IBM Simon Personal Communicator was the world’s first smartphone, created by a joint venture between IBM and BellSouth. Simon was first shown as a product concept in 1992 at COMDEX, the computer and technology trade show held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Launched in 1993 it combined the features of a mobile phone, a pager, a PDA, and a fax machine. After some delays it was sold by BellSouth in 1994 in 190 US cities in 15 states and was originally priced at $899 although it was free with a two year BellSouth contract

Besides a mobile phone, the major applications were a calendar, address book, world clock, calculator, note pad, e-mail, and games. It had no physical buttons to dial with. Instead customers used a touchscreen to select phone numbers with a finger or create facsimiles and memos with an optional stylus. Text was entered with either a unique ‘predictive’ on-screen keyboard or QWERTY keyboard. The Simon had an optional PCMCIA memory card

The Simon ran DOS as its native operating system and could be upgraded to run third party applications from either the PCMCIA card or by downloading the application to the phone’s internal memory. The only aftermarket application created for Simon and quite likely the first ever third party smartphone application was DispatchIt by PDA Dimensions of Atlanta GA. This application was sold to only two customers before BellSouth notified the developer that Simon was end of life and that no more of them would be manufactured [wiki]

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