☞ The iPhone and the Wonder of Computing

In the course of working on my forthcoming book (which you can now preorder!), the following little remembrance of the iPhone’s release found itself on the cutting-room floor, but I thought a version of it might be of interest to readers.

Soon after the iPhone’s release in 2007, I went to a mall in the suburbs of Buffalo to see this new device in all its glory. I was home from graduate school, and together with my father and grandfather, went to our local Apple Store and stood amidst throngs of fans, hoping to see for ourselves the seamless blending of “an iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator” promised to us by Steve Jobs. When we finally got a turn, my father removed it from its pedestal and played with it.

My grandfather, who lived to the age of ninety-nine, was an avid science fiction reader his entire life. He read the novel Dune when it was serialized in a magazine, as well as Popular Science magazine for over seventy years—for he loved the facts of science as well. He subscribed to one of the flagship science fiction magazines Analog Science Fiction and Fact for years (and gave me shopping bags of old issues when he was done with them).

After watching his son—my father—pinch and swipe his way around the iPhone’s screen, my grandfather proclaimed something to the effect of “This is it! This is what I’ve been reading about my entire life.” For him, bringing human knowledge to your fingertips was not a device for imagined interstellar explorers; it was real and it was for all of us.

Leave a Comment