We recently cut loose from our land line. It’s a little scary for those of a certain age, casting off the bowline and trusting ourselves to the high seas of smart phones, texting, apps and all that good stuff.
I love the term “killer app.” It implies that there have of course been other apps but here’s the one that will turn this gadget into something we won’t be able to imagine life without. The old fashioned telephone-as-household furnishing was of course long a killer app. Now the phone as an article of clothing, to give one 100% availability, is a new killer app.
Killer app suggests that necessity is not necessarily the mother of invention. There’s the killer app of a cure for cancer, of course: the crying need driving billions of dollars of research. But the early development of personal computers was motivated by apps less compelling.
In the early 1980s, I remember reading in a home magazine about this groovy new device called a personal computer. It had all kinds of promise, the article said. Why, just think how useful this could be in helping you organize your recipes. I breathed a sigh of relief. Something of a technophobe, I felt let off the hook. It was an app, but not much of one, at least for one of simple culinary needs such as myself. The killer apps of the pc, the ones that have changed life and all of us irreversibly—internet, email, word processing–lay well in the future.
Old fashioned telephones, that basic ingredient of civilized life, were once pre-killer according to Clarence Day’s memoir,”Life with Father,” (1935): “Telephones had [in the 1890s] been invented but, like most people, [father] hadn’t installed one. There was no way for anybody to get at us except by climbing up the front stoop and ringing the bell.. . it seemed only natural…. hardly anybody cared to install one. . . As a matter of fact, for a long time they were of little use in a home. Since almost nobody had them . . . there was no one to talk to.” When little by little they came into use “the outer world now began intruding upon us at will. This was hard to get used to.”
If necessity were actually the mother of invention, the cell phone would have been invented long before it was. Jane—or my obsession with her—would have been its mother.
Back in the1960s I lived in a one story cottage in the San Francisco Bay Area . One of my favorite things to do was to get up on its flat roof and bask in the California sun. But then there was Jane, by whom I had been smitten but who adroitly kept me uncertain of her affections through intermittent reinforcement. As pathetically in thrall as I was I didn’t want to risk missing her phone call. But the sunny roof beckoned. I was deeply conflicted.
After a while I got a long cord and began to drag the phone up there with me. But I still couldn’t leave the house for fear of missing her call. If ever there was a situation that called for a cell phone, that was it. But did I, mothered by that dire necessity that might determine my whole future course, who my children and grandchildren would turn out to be, invent the cell phone? I did not. A killer app but it never occurred to me. Wikipedia says answering machines had in fact been invented in 1960, but nobody told me about that and probably could not have afforded one if somebody had.
Of course the phone-as-furniture world had its advantages: a feeling of freedom and legitimate irresponsibility when you walked out the door. I remember once getting a lot of extra exercise walking around outside to avoid a dreaded phone call about the outcome of an operation.
A variation on Newton’s Third Law: It seems that for every killer app there’s an equal and opposite killer loss.
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