The Good Old Days of Tech
THE EXTENSION
Exploring topics beyond our day-to-day coverage.
The Good Old Days of Tech

It’s easy to look back at earlier eras and declare them the good old days. I’ve heard a lot of that lately when it comes to the tech and gadget landscape, and I get it. When I think back to 2007 and the introduction of the iPhone, the first things I think of are the PalmPilots, Handspring Visor, BlackBerries, and Danger Sidekick I had leading up to it and the sea change the iPhone represented. They were simpler, exciting times for gadgets, but I’d never want to go back, either.
Rose-tinted glasses make it easy to long for those old days, but do you remember what EDGE networks and dial-up connections that were measured in kbps were like? It’s easy to forget that the original read-later apps were developed to skinny down websites so they could be saved locally and read when no mobile network was available. Even though the iPhone brought the “real” web to our phones, it was years before it was usable, except when a site spun up a special text-based mobile version.