I remember, in high school, a presentation on desktop PCs, which were then fairly new. They promised that one day, one of these would fit in your pocket. I didn't doubt this prediction, and I don't know that anyone else did, but it was a big thing to imagine. What were we going to do with them? Run Lotus 1-2-3 in our pockets?

Around the same time, the last vestige of 19th century telephone technology was finally retired in Bryant Pond, Maine. It was the same year that Maytag stopped producing gasoline-powered washing machines, if I recall correctly. Meanwhile, some of us teens liked to make fun of the new expensive status symbol, the cell phone, which had to be hardwired into the customer's Mercedes, to the switched side of the ignition, lest the power-hungry device drain the car's battery. For $5, you could buy a fake squiggly antenna and stick it on your '77 Corolla, just for laughs.

But the prediction came true. We all have computers in our pockets. It's weirdly quaint that we continue to call them phones, since that function is incidental for so many people.

I love it!

Who would have thought that 80 years hence a telephone/computer/camera thing would be owned by just about all people and rarely leave their hands?

You had to be mobile in order to get to a phone.

"No service"? It was rather a matter of "no phone" at all.

I remember inconspicuous plates installed on the walls some house or other in West German villages directing non-locals to the next phone. Just in case somebody "from out of town" needed to make distress calls and the village didn't rate a regular phone booth. In villages without an inn or a pub these might even have been private residences. Those phones were actually subsidised as part of the emergency relief and rescue system.

Even modern conveniences could be problematic.