Today in meaningless anniversary news, the smartphone is – wait for it – 20 years old.
Now if that seems a little bit bonkers to you, don’t get too excited. It’s not smartphones like we know them TODAY are 20 years old, oh, no no no. What’s actually 20 years old is IBM Simon, the groundbreaking but essentially useless mobile phone that could (drum roll) send and receive faxes and had 1MB of RAM. WOWOWOW. Calm down there, IBM. What will you guys think of next? A phone that can play cassette tapes? One with a detachable floppy disc drive? We’ve seen the future kids and it weighs five times as much as an iPhone and is powered by dial-up internet.
Here’s a few nostalgia moments from your mobile phone history.
Snake
Short of Candy Crush, modern mobile phone games haven’t ever been able to master the life-ruining addictiveness of Snake. And when we say Snake we absolutely mean Snake and not Snake 2 which essentially bastardised the original game by choosing to ignore the fundamental rule it was based on; walls aren't for going through. You can actually download an app for your iPhone that turns your phone into an old phone with Snake on but it’s not quite the same without the physically clickable buttons and Weezer playing in the background is it?
Character Limits
Turns out that when Twitter rolled around we were actually more than prepared for it’s 140-character limit, having spent most of our teen years agonisingly trying to fit a story about how fit Ryan Phillippe was into a depressingly short 160-character text message. God forbid we go over and risk spending another 10p on message number two. Pity the fool who ran out of credit before their money from their minimum wage job at River Island came in for the month. How rude did they look not replying to texts?
Purple Ronnie
A right of passage for any wicked trendy noughties teen. Whether it came in your stocking or from your ‘kooky’ aunt you absolutely had a Purple Ronnie cover for your Nokia 3310 that featured a stick drawing of the eminently punchable Ronnie and his girlfriend with a poem about willies, bums and snogging that didn’t know it’s rhymning couplets from it’s iambic pentameter.
Storage
If you thought IBM Simon was somewhat pathetic in his memory capabilities, cast your mind back to the agonising reality of having a phone that would only store 12 messages. Did you finally delete that text message you got from that dreamy boy in Geography (‘ne homwrk frm sir lol’) to make way for the one that had your mum’s birthday wish list in? Of course you didn't.
READ MORE: Definitive Proof That Texting While You’re Walking Isn't A Great Idea
These
Oh god, these.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.