Fortunately, there's a great deal of perspective waiting behind the instinct to revel in the great, good fortune of living & working in the PC/smartphone era. A pair of such moments were waiting for me a week ago at the Army Museum located in the Citadel of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The first is was an example of headphones. Not exactly the padded featherweight of Bose, these. But that probably wasn't high on the priority list of the folks using them to locate mines in World War II. My maternal grandfather, a mine-sweeper of 54-F Pioneer Company in the First World War, would have rejoiced to have such technology at hand. Preferably before his best friend (also a mine-sweeper) missed a trip-wire and was blown apart while Grandpa could only watch (and/or dive for cover).
The second artifact is what WWII called a mobile phone. Transmission of radio waves (which, in military terms, replaced a terribly vulnerable--wired--telegraph technology) predated even Grandpa, and had already seen use by the British during the Boer Wars, and developed a highly complex system for sending messages to its fleets after war broke out again in 1914. Doughboy Signal Corps units relied on "portable wireless outfits" (i.e. wireless telegraphs that could be comfortably carried by four men or truck-mounted for field use) with antenae ranging between three and four feet tall.
In addition to adding full-fledged telephony, WWII's mobile communications (as shown above) saw great advances in compactness. But, alas, our perennial complaint of losing all bars has a long and dishonorable history: Significantly, it was a contributing factor in the ill-conceived debacle known as Operation Market Garden. Needless to write, the cost was paid in blood and treasure--and dearly.
Which, IMLTHO, may be something to keep in mind when the next iGadget is unveiled to the sound of the trade press hyperventilating over how it "revolutionizes," well, everything. In reality, that particular revolution's been here and gone. Sure, another may come along, but spending all attention on whether or not something has a a built-in camera pretty much guarantees that the next (real) revolution will come out of left field.
