IBM Simon

~ the eulogy ~

IBM designed it and Mitsubishi Electric built it, and BellSouth Cellular put it on sale on 16 August 1994. It was a slab eight inches tall with a monochrome backlit touchscreen and a stylus, and no physical keypad at all: you tapped the numbers on glass. Inside were an address book, a calendar, a calculator, a world clock, a notepad for handwriting, and a 2400 bit/s modem with a 9600 bps fax. The operating system underneath was Datalight ROM-DOS with a touch layer on top of it called Navigator.

The phone part was analog AMPS, locked to BellSouth's fifteen-state footprint. That is the detail that settles where this object lived. Turkey's first mobile networks were GSM from the beginning, so a Simon carried off a plane here in 1994 was a calculator with a dead radio in it. The device existed inside one carrier's territory for six months.

It stopped in February 1995. A smaller follow-on codenamed Neon had a bigger screen and a digital radio. It never shipped, because IBM was cutting the Boca Raton operation that was building it.

~ the dossier ~

~ what eight hundred and ninety-nine dollars bought ~

The price was $899 with a two-year contract and $1,099 without. For that you got a 16 MHz NEC V30HL, one megabyte of RAM, one megabyte of flash storage, and a PCMCIA Type II slot to add more. The screen was 160 by 293 pixels, measuring 4.5 inches by 1.4.

Nobody had a word for this in 1994. The Computer History Museum's catalog entry needs four nouns to say what the thing was, listing a mobile phone, a personal organizer, a fax and a pager combined in one object. The museum also calls it the first smartphone, and that word was fastened on afterward by people working backward from the iPhone.

~ the one-hour battery ~

A 7.5 volt nickel-cadmium pack ran it for about an hour of use. Everything people remember as the Simon's charm, the backlit touchscreen above all, was also what drained it, and the dock in every photograph of the thing is in the photograph because the phone lived in it. The specification sheet says eighteen ounces; the Science Museum lists the one in its collection at 0.56 kg.

~ what Simon could not reach ~

The fax worked. The email worked, through a dial-up account. What did not exist yet was anything worth dialing: the commercial web was a year or so from being a consumer proposition, and the news and weather applications that had been planned for the device were cut from the final release because there was nothing to feed them.

The Science Museum in London bought one on eBay and put it on display in 2014 for the twentieth anniversary, cataloged as object 2013-95, with its stylus and its manual. The acquisition came two decades after the product it documents, through an auction listing. Sold as a thing you could buy, the Simon lasted half a year; preserved as a thing worth keeping, it sits in a glass case beside a credit line reading EBAY.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »