HN Theater @HNTheaterMonth

⬐ wodenokoto

MMS' where ridiculously expensive when they came out. 2-3 times a regular text message wouldn't do it.

On top of that, MMS was janky AF (probably still is. I don't know anyone who uses them on purpose). Unclear if receiver could receive your message. If they couldn't, you still had to pay. Sometimes they'd receive a link instead of a picture, sometimes just junk. Pictures where already pretty lousy straight off the phone, but after a trip through MMS they where just terrible.

On top of that, pictures were excruciatingly difficult to get off your phone. I'm not saying the first few iPhones had great cameras, but they did make it relatively easy to move your pictures to your computer and from there to flickr. With the eventual app-store, wi-fi connection made it cost-effective and easy to upload to the web straight from your phone. And chat apps made it reasonable to send pictures from phone to phone.

⬐ kanisae

I owned MMS platform for a carrier back in the day. Everything about it was janky. "Hey let's emulate SMTP commands but over HTTP and then try to track all the different models of phones to transcribe images so they can kinda sorta interopate"

Thenb you got to watch the huge queue build up every Christmas morning and New Years as the inter carrier brokers got backed up hours. All in all, not my favorite carrier app to manage.

⬐ usrusr

Heh, thank you for that perspective, really interesting to see that it did not only fail from completely off the charts expectations based on extrapolating from the SMS outlier.

⬐ arpa

MMS actually work now as everyone has data on the phone. Ten years back, MMS was crap.

⬐ neurostimulant

Sending MMS internationally is still hit and miss. There is a reason whatsapp replaced MMS for most people (outside the US).

⬐ Gravityloss

This was because operators wanted the cash flow. SMS was a goldmine. So naturally they tried to get in on the MMS.

The operators were also really bad in producing any kind of services that customers wanted. The WAP era was full of applications that nobody used, like "get a poem for a lady". I think they cost per use. Really short sighted. But operators didn't have the kind of thinking or resources required.

In Europe we already had free data plans earlier and people used web pages and sent email etc. For USA that mostly came with the iphone. Applications, a software company doing it, with the app store and ecosystem with developers free to do what they wanted was a much better model.

⬐ pjc50

Yes. People bemoaning the ad-supported free-at-point of use Internet should be aware that a lot of companies wanted a much worse nickel-and-dime walled garden. It has been a great positive feature of the Internet that it doesn't include a billing mechanism.

⬐ wodenokoto

_free_ dataplans in 2006? Is in "all you can use" data at a fixed price? I haven't seen that anywhere ever. Europe, Asia, middle east.

Back in 06, I could buy a $5 add-on to stream Youtube on my 3 subscription, but the handsets were so terrible, the thought of doing that never occurred to me.

I had a 1 month subscription to music streaming on my 3 handset and it drained the phone battery within an hour.

I could access wikipedia to fact check people as a party trick in 06, but 3g still didn't feel on par with the 2g data services that Docomo and AU had been offering in Japan years before.

⬐ kalleboo

In Sweden we had it around that period, I was a subscriber. With HSDPA rolling out but everyone carrying WAP-capable features phones, the operators had lots of capacity but couldn't figure out how to use all that bandwidth.

Once the iPhone and other smartphones caught on those plans all disappeared. Now they're back again with LTE-A/5G.

⬐ p_l

What Americans call "unlimited", I used as, the only way to get Internet at home between 2005 and 2008. It was an early offering reasonably priced - I had spotty reception though so telnet/ssh and later mosh were the name of the game. Used shell account on high school servers to run torrents etc. Made Sun's offer to send you NetBeans and Solaris DVDs for free way more interesting.

⬐ jrimbault

Not 2006, but in 2007 (in France, I was 15) you could get unlimited calls, sms and mms (and a generous data cap I can't remember the details of, but it was in the gigabytes), for a fixed monthly price. That wasn't the subscription I had, it was some tier above mine.

⬐ wwtrv

I recall (in a European country) a brief time window around then when you indeed could a get an unlimited plan rather cheaply. There were no restriction on tethering either so you could get unlimited data on your laptop. Considering how low GPRS/EDGE bandwidth was (and that only a very limited number of people probably did this) the operators probably didn't mind, they added caps pretty soon after '3G' came out.

⬐ herbst

Can confirm. Not sure where the actual caps were but it was basically free to use for me as a teenager

⬐ wodenokoto

Now that you mention it, I actually seem to remember that most plans nowadays are limitless in the same sense: When you've spent you 4 or 10gb, you simply "run out" of 3/4g data and start using data speed limited to essentially 2g, which is unlimited.

⬐ usrusr

“because operators wanted the cash flow“

It's impossible to put too much emphasis on this part. The envisioned MMS money deluge never happened (at least outside Japan? I have zero understanding of market history there), but it was the sole reason that suddenly all phones had cameras. In those days network operators were still the almost exclusive sales channel for phone hardware, so if they decided that phones without camera would not sell, that's what happened. Even if no consumer actually wanted that feature.

I really believe that in an alternative history where the SMS goldmine never happened (and thus no MMS goldmine illusions) it's possible (though not likely?) that we might still use dedicated hardware for image capture. And in that case, given the political implications of "every person always has a camera with them", world history would be meaningfully different, just because its past does not contain that future that never happened (MMS goldmine).

⬐ d--b

I went to Japan in 2004. I hiked a mountain and at the top saw a woman talk to someone on her flip phone. At some point she said something like “hey do you want to see the view?”, she then turned the phone around and I realized she had been video chatting the whole time. I was so amazed. I bought a Wap-capable NEC that year, it felt so ahead of anything we had in Europe!

⬐ noobermin

That with the video of shakira someone posted, it's a shame Japan now has a reputation for being behind the times now, I wonder how much the language barrier had to do with why none of the tech companies in japan other than those tied to video games have an international footprint today.

⬐ JKCalhoun

I assumed it was the lack of a homegrown OS? It seems OS's turned out to be a pretty big deal when device complexity moved beyond menu/+/- buttons on the side of the device.

⬐ kridsdale2

The only one I could imagine having had a chance would be Sony. They had a rather well built out OS on the Playstation 3 with lots of modern online features.

⬐ jinto36

I'd also suggest that the "bubble" era had a long tail in terms of innovation- the huge R&D investments that were made in the 80s and early 90s were still showing results into the early 2000s. Then we started to see the result of a recession that ended up spanning more than a decade.

⬐ ginko

The Japanese have a term for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gal%C3%A1pagos_syndrome

⬐ glandium

Interestingly, I remember people using video chat back around that time in Japan, but despite the fact that it's still supported and even better than back then, I haven't seen people using it in a long while.

⬐ TaylorAlexander

It was a weird time, being in the USA and learning that Europe and Japan had all these great technologies in their mobile phones that we didn’t have. It sucked being so behind the times here. It’s interesting that now every country has the same high tech mobile phones, though there are still niche devices that may only be produced for a specific region.

⬐ poisonarena

example of country specific niche devices for the curious?

⬐ vbezhenar

I'm not sure about specifics but when I was looking for android devices with small screens (like 3") last time, I found some indian smartphones. They were ultra-budget and I wanted something premium so I didn't pursue it further, but it was definitely something I never saw in the public market.

Another specific niche might be babushkaphones. It's a cell phone made for babushkas. Basically huge buttons, screen with huge fonts, dumbed down interface so people with very little technical knowledge could use them to be on line.

⬐ weberer

There was a company called Jitterbug that old those huge button phones in the USA in the 2000s.

⬐ TaylorAlexander

The brand still exists under a new parent company name:

https://www.lively.com/phones/jitterbug-smart3/

⬐ zinekeller

Well, Japan had plenty, including devices that integrate NFC for payment (before smartphones globally routinely have it) and built-in digital television receiver (while a lot of phones in Asia have analogue TV receivers, Japan's are usually digital in part because their digital TV format (1seg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1seg) have been developed with this in mind).

⬐ yaky

Not a specific device, but usage. In early-mid 2000s in Ukraine, most (if not all) cell phone services were prepaid, and special SMS or codes allowed you to send some amount of money from your account to someone else. Since not many people had actual banking accounts, this was a de-facto banking system at the time.

I believe this or similar systems are still in use in some countries.

⬐ AnotherGoodName

Not a device but a lot of norms: Digital everything. Even digital drivers licences. It's a norm to carry only a phone and keys in some parts of the world. Even payments have a different norm. The vending cart lady has tap and go payments and has done for over a decade now. When I moved to the USA I had to buy a wallet for the cards they use here. That was 5 years ago and the USA still isn't there yet.

Banking. Not a niche device but there's no need for Venmo or PayPal type apps in much of the world. The government mandates all banking system Apis and there's instant free transfers to other accounts. I just had to pay a $10 transaction fee for a bank transfer in the USA and it was a hassle (not done phone to phone but through routing and bsb numbers).

Taxation. It's a government integrated system. It still has a ton of special tax edge cases but for the most part you log in see your employers entered wages and tax paid and acknowledge. It's a much much better app than TurboTax and for the exceptions they are just checkboxes for meeting the criteria and fields for amount spent in the category etc. No TurboTax premium required since it's the government's app.

Universal public transit apps. You tap on the ferry with your phone and tap out of the train station later in your trip. It's all integrated.

In fact riffing on taxation why isn't there more done online. Why do I need to go to the DMV short of an in person driving test?

⬐ JKCalhoun

Then: I want emoji too!

Now: <sigh>.

⬐ stevejb

I just watched this video on a plane, going nearly 600mph at 33K ft above northern Canada. The pace of technological evolution I have experienced in my lifetime is absolutely miraculous.

⬐ julian_t

I often think about this. My grandmother was born at the end of the 1800s (yes, I'm old) and remembered electricity and the first car coming to her rural village in Wales. By the end of her life she'd lived through two world wars, seen men on the moon, could talk to her relatives in Australia on the phone, and been on holiday to America on a 747.

And what always amazed me was that she grew up with people (mainly farm workers) who had never been more than 5 miles from where they were born. I go further than that to visit the supermarket!

⬐ neurostimulant

Heck, I grew up in a village and I remember my family didn't have electricity when I was 6. Fast forward 25 years later, everyone there has fiber optic internet.

⬐ neuronic

The things you can accomplish when education, science and curiosity are valued over theology... the Enlightment was truly an enormous age.

⬐ ljf

Many years ago, my father bought a house and one day when he was talking a neighbour about time and age, and the neighbour told him that he'd had an uncle that had been born in the 1700s...

This isn't as remarkable as it sounds when I say this was in 1960, and the neighbour was 80 something, and his uncle had been born in 1798, and had lived well into his 90s. But is still seems such a large span to be able to reach back.

⬐ jamal-kumar

My first encounter with a camera on a phone was when I was a kid in Japan in 2004. These girls had taken a video of me being bad at bowling (Amusingly the alley was called "Exciting Boring") and showed me on the bus, I was just completely aghast at the fact that this technology existed. It felt really invasive at the time, to be honest, but out in another culture you just have to roll with things like that.

⬐ canoebuilder

> Exciting Boring

Ha, thanks for sharing, that is amusing!

On the one hand it seems like it almost could be the way people humorously transcribe Japanese accented English, of “Exciting Bowling,” and on the other hand in a purely English context that really does strike me as a quite good description of bowling when you think about it.

⬐ jamal-kumar

I dunno I actually really like bowling and never thought it was boring but in Japan it was like the holes were too small for my fat fingers or something.

ボウリング - bōringu, this is the word they have for it, so yeah

⬐ canoebuilder

Yeah I have that issue even not in Japan of having to search and search to find a ball I feel like my fingers won’t get stuck in.

I didn’t mean to disparage, the exciting half carried equal weight in my mind, just something about maybe the environment, the wooden floor, the shoes, the overall aesthetic, waiting your turn in a group, punctuated by the anticipatory excitement of watching your ball travel down the lane gave me this feeling of like the type of balance common in Eastern spiritual traditions or Schrödinger’s cat, where it is boring and exciting at the same time.

⬐ ben7799

This actually does make sense with the traditional difficulty of the L sounds for Japanese speakers due to the way L and R are kind of merged into one sound in Japanese.

My father went to Japan a lot in the 80s and always remarked at how the L in our last name got pronounced as an R in Japan making the name sound totally different.

Exciting Bowling would easily get pronounced as Exciting Boring and then someone could have had a laugh and come up with the name.

⬐ OnionBlender

I remember Mike Lazaridis (BlackBerry CEO) saying:

> There will never be a BlackBerry with an MP3 player or camera.

https://bgr.com/general/rims-inside-story-an-exclusive-look-...

⬐ cosmodisk

I recently started trying not to be overly dismissive about all the new stuff that is trending or picking up traction. I like tech, I make living off it, yet I'm one of those that happily move to 70's and use paper and pen instead. Now,instead of trying to shoot it down immediately, I at least try to understand what's going on and how different groups could benefit of it. So far it seems to be a positive thing.

⬐ rvense

I also have very strong (negative) feelings about new technology. I used to think this was the result of Very Deep And Rational Thoughts, but a while ago I realized that it was maybe a little conspicuous that I'd decided that computers happened to reach their peak when I was about 21. Like some boomer Bob Dylan fan.

⬐ optimalsolver

The most charming of these is the singer Shakira seeing a camera phone for the first time in Japan:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1lY3jzsFWU

⬐ tmjwid

I'd say her reaction was pretty negative than charming. Her only example of its use is paparazzi which says it all really. It seemed to me she was mortified at the idea and I can understand why.

⬐ _def

I remember seeing a land-line phone with video capability on a prime time talk show sometime in the 2000s as it was presented as a thing from the future. I'm glad that never really took off :D

⬐ jaclaz

In Europe (France) there was a much earlier experiment (subsidized, the actual cost was astronomical) in the city of Biarritz:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32062275

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16347686

⬐ kristopolous

They put a different meter on it and it was prohibitively expensive.

ATT was early on a lot of technology such as working with MagicCap and Go. They had their own Hobbit processor.

It was pretty cool tech until you saw the pricetag. Then you laughed, and laughed, tears rolled down your face ... $2,000 devices in 1995 money with $200/month usage bills being common (modern money is about double so think $4,000 tablet)

Even if you got a couple price insensitive buyers, the technology is only useful if there's a network effect and that's where it broke down.

You weren't emailing their phone, it was an inbox they'd see next time they dialup to logon to the internet. It wasn't some obvious gain and faxing documents was a more reliable way to get to someone because you're changing their environment with a fax

⬐ zrules

There’s a movie directed by Wim Wenders called “Until the End of the World” with tech similar to this. It’s a Pay phones actually, where you’d flip the arm with the screen up attached up to make a call and down to end a call.

The movie is really an alternate universe where tech like this is ubiquitous. There’s something about the late 90s / early 00s vision for tech future I have an increasingly difficult time grasping today.

⬐ kristopolous

features in the trailer around 30 seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfFWBWKwQT8

You want that era? Here's two things to flip through

https://archive.org/search.php?query=mondo+2000

https://archive.org/search.php?query=verbum%20magazine

I went deep into that for back research on my most recent article https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/

I'll revisit it soon for something else I'm sure. Maybe the Douglas Rushkoff Cyberia world where this tech scene was entangled with the most hedonistic strains of new-ageism and overly indulgent on psychotropics - where a burner rambling about their dreams who won't live to see Y2K is somehow in the same car with a 25 year old stanford grad who just made $10 million and maybe just maybe how these ways of meaning somehow re-emerged together 20 years later to build the modern far right.

That's not my theory here btw, that's what I've been hearing from the journalists that covered it in the 90s. Pulling those narratives together from an outsider perspective using primary source material ... that's my offer.

⬐ r_transpose_p

That description of the 1990s brings back memories for me.

⬐ NoPicklez

Now in my mid 20s, I feel like I am experiencing that part of my life of "when I grew up". It is incredible how far camera technology has come in phones.

Not just the cameras but the ability to send the image. I remember sending an MMS and not really being guaranteed the receiver would get the image. Perhaps they didn't have MMS enabled, or have a device able to receive images, or they didn't have a large enough phone plan to send/receive MMS's.

Now days, sending an image is just part of the furniture.

A part of me would like to rewind and see what the world was like without social media.

⬐ 2OEH8eoCRo0

"Phonemakers never expected it to takeoff, it was teenagers who decided that this was the way to keep in touch"

Makes me wonder what new trends dinosaurs like us don't see coming. VR?

⬐ weberer

VR seems to be the opposite. Every company was pushing for it, but the consumer demand just wasn't there.

⬐ dghughes

I hear rectal texting is catching on.

⬐ ilyt

VR isn't something average teenager can afford yet.

I can see something that's a mix of VR chat and some creation tools a'la Dreams would be a hit. User generated content for VR Chat is already popular and making it possible to make the game in the game is natural next step

⬐ kumarvvr

Yeah, back in the day, camera phones were very expensive. Not to mention internet connection, data rates, call rates, etc.

It was very expensive to maintain a phone without a camera. Definitely prohibitively expensive for teens to have a camera phone and use sharing / MMS.

⬐ slfnflctd

> isn't something average teenager can afford

The best selling VR headset is cheaper than either a smartphone or a gaming console, though, is it not? You don't really see anyone arguing that teenagers can't afford those. Also, this stuff is usually bought by parents anyway.

I personally think a larger market will probably emerge for AR than for VR due to friction factors, but from what I've read, teenagers are in fact using VR right now.

⬐ undebuggable

He is right, media over MMS never took off. Mobile internet with messaging apps were the next big thing. Phones of that era were not capable of user friendly apps.

⬐ herbst

MMS was kinda popular around here when picture phones and the first weird meme videos became popular. Pretty sure most of the time our teen prepaid contracts contained a few free mms and receiving was free with the SIM I had.

⬐ vesinisa

Operators charged per MMS sent. And MMSes were much more expensive than SMSes. I was a student back then and won an early premium Nokia phone with camera in a competition. It was cool for taking pictures for my own use. But I literally knew no one who had a phone that could receive MMSes, and even if I had known, I definitely saw it only as a trap to getting ripped off by the mobile operator.

The camera quality was of course terrible compared to modern standards, but under good lighting conditions it was still acceptable. But I ended up selling the phone (for beer money) on eBay in short order while it was still "like new".

⬐ glandium

You know how nowadays you'll see crowds brandishing their smartphone to take pictures or videos? I remember seeing something similar in Japan with flip phones, either in 2001 or 2002. I think one of the moments where I witnessed that was when Koizumi Junichiro was elected in 2001. I definitely have pictures of individuals taking pictures of sakura with their flip phone in the Kyoto imperial garden in 2001.

⬐ paulsutter

The Onion: “Long-Lost Jules Verne Short Story 'The Camera-Phone' Found”

https://www.theonion.com/long-lost-jules-verne-short-story-t...

⬐ dghughes

Not a phone but in 1999 I bought a JVC CyberCam camcorder but it also had a feature of a digital camera. It was only 640x480 on a small MMC card. But it was pretty amazing for the time. I think the camera came out maybe 1997?

⬐ Milank

It is very hard to imagine how life was back then. And it was only 20 years ago!

⬐ fricklers

The format is about right: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHun58mz3vI

⬐ habibur

And slashdot post a few years before it, that a new digital camera can now take VGA resolution photo. 640x480. And that's almost professional quality.

⬐ martyvis

"Picture texting" (next thing they'll be sending pictures in text, oh wait ... )

⬐ emptyparadise

Nah, it'll never take off.

⬐ justinator

In the early 2000's, I remember in art school I did a project that involved driving around the country, leaving tiny sculptures wherever I went. To keep people updated where I was, I made a Perl script that accepted messages and photos sent to it that I authored on my fancy Sony Ericson picture phone. The script would update a website showing the photos and messages in reverse chronological order. Took maybe about 3 hours to get it up and running.

I didn't realize I had invented Instagram. Shoulda spent a little more time on it.

⬐ underbrush

I did so as well around 2004. Mine was my own personal version of Pud's mobog.com. "Mobile blogging" was one of the "next things" together with things like "microblogging" since blogging was so popular at the time. But this was of course before Facebook became popular and killed most of the smaller social networks, communities, photo albums and eventually many blogs. Instagram was launched in 2010 and I think mobile consumption was as big a thing as posting. Most of the "using a phone feature" apps are no longer around.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB109052470765771301

⬐ somedude895

Nowadays I'd know how to do this with an Arduino with a GSM module, how did you receive the pictures back then?

⬐ vachina

Probably email attachment

⬐ justinator

Bingo. The phone could send a mixed text and image message as a multipart MIME message. I made an email forward that piped to a Perl script. That Perl script read the text and image data using something like MIME::Parser, and saved that stuff in a database. Another script read that data and returned some HTML using Template Toolkit and CGI.pm. Really just something I threw together the night before I left.

I remember a few years later someone was showing me how you could text a message to a specific number, then it showed up on this "Twitter" site and that seemed quaint.

Anyways Perl was so easy and fun some Painting and Drawing undergrad could throw something together that was that useful to his 5 friends and his completely confused professor (and pay for art school hacking on other stuff too).

⬐ scintill76

Some (many?) cell providers let you send an email by addressing an MMS message to the email address rather than a phone number.

⬐ Raed667

Around ~2005 I had a Sony Ericsson K300, and my main method was to send pictures to the computer via infrared (yes I had to buy an infrared USB dongle) and then posting them on skyblog.com

The phone could even tether its GPRS connection via infrared! That always amazed me!

⬐ justinator

Yup looks similar to the one I had. I bought it at Car Toys because there weren't even T-Mobile stores yet. It took like 2 hours to transfer my number from another carrier (a new ability at the time!) and activate the account - what a process!

I remember the keypad was kinda small for my giant hands, but it would connect via this thing called "Bluetooth" to my Mac. Every time you got a text, it would show up on my Mac's screen, and I could reply just using my keyboard instead of typing out something using T9 on the phone itself. Soooo much faster. Somehow the ability to do that was disabled or something, I dunno.

I hadn't felt that sort of magical integration again until I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID (or however it works, I totally forget the details) so long as Bluetooth is enabled on both. Such magic and solved so many tiny little problems. I missed years of Airdropping as my last Macbook just couldn't work with Airdrop and I have no idea why not. Seeing Airdrop work instantly sold me on iPhones and I'll never go back to Android.

⬐ comboy

> I realized you can copy and paste between a Mac and an iPhone you had on the same Apple ID

whoa

Although I didn't realize that compromised phone can steal data from my laptop :|

⬐ justinator

Universal Clipboard is something you'll need to enable.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT209460

⬐ owl57

But note how you invented only the better half of Instagram. The other half is all the "social" shit: "Tell us your email to see more John's photos", "Have you seen recent posts from Kate, Mike and Cristiano Ronaldo", etc.

⬐ justinator

Oh that lack of features was incredibly deliberate.

All kidding aside, I personally had a revelation on how much of my attention has been getting stolen away from me, tiny bit by tiny bit. I'm going to make an honest attempt to gain some of that back. More reading out of physical books, less doomscrolling. More taking people out to coffee, less overdosing on puppy videos.

⬐ EddieDemo

Bear in mind; we're all on HN looking for high-quality content from strangers, rather than from our own personal network(s).

The trend across all social media is to feed us with more 'high-ranking' content from 'strangers' because it's typically what we want to see more of, based on the analytics. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook — all of them are pivoting to feed us more content from people outside of our personal networks as fast as possible.