Page 290 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Mob le Med a |

a tiMeline oF MoBile Media
3000 b.c.—Reed pens and papyrus in use in Egypt.
300 b.c.—Paper in China.
100 b.c.—Parchment in Pergamom.
1450 a.d.—Gutenberg introduces printing press in Europe.
1850s—First modern fountain pens in Europe.
1870s—Victorian portable laptop desks in widespread use.
1880s—Waterman mass-produced fountain pens.
1888—Kodak camera by George Eastman.
1929—Transitone radios in automobiles.
1946—Motorola and Bell operate first commercial mobile phone system.
1948—Transistors invented independently in the United States and in Europe.
1973—Martin Cooper of Motorola makes first call on handheld mobile phone.
1981—First laptop computers.
1992—PDAs (personal digital assistants).
1998—Bluetooth standards established.
2001—iPod launched by Apple.
2002—First widespread cameras in cell phones in the United States.
2006—80 percent of world’s population has cell phone coverage; 2+ billion in use.
2007—iPhone launched by Apple.
2007—More than 100 million iPods in use.

ThE moDErn Era

Microchip technology replaced the transistor in the 1980s and facilitated the
rise of laptop computers. RadioShack’s M100 was an early successful model, and
by the end of the decade IBM-compatible laptops weighing a few pounds or less
were commonplace.
The cell phone became ubiquitous in many parts of the world in the 1990s
and the early twenty-first century. Eighty percent of the world’s land mass had
mobile phone service in 2006. Japan, Israel, and Hong Kong, among other na-
tions, have more than 100 percent cell phone saturation (meaning there are
more cell phones than people in those countries). As of 2007, Africa had the
sharpest growth rate in cell phones. Historians of technology call this kind of
growth “leapfrogging”—it occurs when a culture with few technological assets
catapults to the most advanced stages.
Advances in wireless technology such as Bluetooth have made cell phones not
only wireless but “handless.” At the same time, integration of cell phones with
laptop Internet functions resulted in all-purpose, small, mobile communication
devices, with which users could not only talk, but send text messages, watch tele-
vision programs downloaded from the Web, listen to radio via live-streaming,
and in fact receive on this one device the dozens of services that only a decade