EDITOR’S NOTE: We chose this topic before Steve Jobs died. I think that was kind of ironic, don’t you?
I was a pretty young kid when my stepdad showed me something pretty cool. It was a portable telephone.
To help you see this thing in your mind, it was tan, about the size of a shoe box, and had an antenna the length of a car. And on a clear day, you could maybe walk as far as the next-door neighbor’s house until you could no longer hear through the static. We rarely used it. It was novelty; kind of like the as-seen-on-TV sandwich maker that my parents still have in the storage closet downstairs. Read more