Challenging Times

The iPhone will change our lives.

In my forty-year love affair with all things digital, there have been just a few defining moments, ‘aha’ moments when I’ve realised that everything has changed.

One was when, as a sixth-form student in Fareham in the early 1970s, I was one of a small group of favoured maths students. We were allowed to travel once a week to Southampton, to use Southampton Institute’s IBM 1170 computer. (Southampton Institute is now Solent University, and the mobile phone that I’ve just discarded in favour of an iPhone had considerably more power than that 1170.)

IBM’s Thomas Watson once famously predicted that the world demand for computers could not exceed about five. I realised, even in the 1970s, just how wildly wrong he was.

Another ‘aha’ moment came the first time I saw Windows 3.1. It wasn’t the windows, icons, or the mouse that lit my fire: it was the realisation that you could have several applications all going at once, and could move information between them.

A third ‘aha’ moment was the day I installed my first broadband connection. After playing around for a while, and being amazed at how quickly emails could be sent and received, I started worrying about how to disconnect… because surely if I left the connection up, I would be racking up a bill. And then the penny dropped – this wasn’t just fast. It was on all the time. I didn’t need to disconnect.

Now, of course, we take broadband, multi-tasking, and massive processing power for granted.

But the iPhone will change everything. For the first time, we have a device that can connect to the Internet just about anywhere, and can handle ‘normal’ web sites without emasculating them like most mobile phones.

Of course, the change is not just the iPhone. There will be other, no doubt more powerful, devices. But five years from now, we will take for granted that we have always-on broadband Internet access in our pockets wherever we go. And this will change our lives.