Mobile Phones
For people born after the year 2000, it may one day come to seem incredible that the world could ever have functioned, as much as it can be said to have done so, without the use of mobile phone technology being available for its every purpose and for the vast majority of its citizens. Today mobile phones have come to see a ubiquitous aspect of day to day life, not so much the luxury or highly specialized tool that they might have appeared to be so much as a basic necessity, for purposes ranging from basic safety, to the performance of an active social life, to the requirements of professional life and business activity. For a long time prior to the end of the 20th century, however, mobile phones enjoyed a status as an almost exotic technological commodity, more closely associated with the fantastic worlds of the Dick Tracy comic strip and the Star Trek television program than with anything that was expected to people in everyday life. Despite this widespread perception of the out-of-reach nature of mobile phones as a viable presence in everyday life, the technology that enables the existence of mobile phones has existed in some form for a long time. For people who remember when the instant convenience and persistent nuisance offered alike by the mobile phone concept had first emerged into public view, and for those who tend to feel that the current situation has always existed, looking more closely at the history of how the use of portable phones was made available, at first to a tiny subset of the technologically savvy or well-equipped, and then to increasing segments of the public existing above some financial level, may furnish some useful insights into how this technology operates in today's world, and how any kind of technology graduates from a rare commodity to a public necessity. Though the transition to digital from analog modes of technology proved instrumental in the progress of this development, other forms of technology played important roles as well in the buildup to this current moment of widespread mobile phone technology.