Farewell to Apps

​We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.

Marshall McLuhan

 Will the App soon be ancient history?Artificial Intelligence will answer that question.  AI will not only fulfil our needs - it will anticipate them.  until then I remember...

Gestetner Machines - A great photo-copier.  You could obtain multi-copies of a document and tone your shoulders at the same time!
Telegraph - The only way to arrange the date and time for a long distance call. Yup. Once upon another time it was so super-expensive to talk on the phone people had to plan the call in advance.
Dial telephones That good-old-dial phone had a lot of benefits.  For one, the dial's rotation gave us time to think before we said or sent something we might later regret.
Busy Signals The beep-beep may have been annoying if you were the one trying to get through  but taking the phone off the hook meant you could stop people from getting through.  It was absolutely the best way to take get work done!
Inter-office memos Four pages - white, pink, yellow and green. Every page had a different meaning and everyone knew what the meaning was. There were no multiple messages.  No never-ending streams of emails on the same subject.  White/pink = Message Sent. Yellow/green = Reply Received.  Job done.  Issue resolved.
Liquid Paper A dab of liquid paper took a full minute to dry.  In that minute you took a break.  Doodled.  Thought.  Reflected.  Ahhh - the memory...
Typewriters And people complain of carpal tunnel... pshaw!  Try pounding out a full page letter on a standard Underwood!  It's not for ninnies!
Facsimile Not that long ago a fax was the way to send and receive - it seems like a   dinosaur by today's standards.

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