A time before smartphones

What did we do prior to mobiles?

I have to admit, I don’t really think about it very much and if I do, I have flashbacks of taking landline phone calls while stuck in the room a phone happened to be in and trying to coordinate catch-ups with people with no way of knowing whether they’d be on time.

These days, we know that this isn’t generally a problem. We’re fully mobile when talking on the phone and the ‘wondering’ has also been taken out of timing when catching up – you actually know that someone is running late.

It’s undeniable that smartphones specifically have changed our lives and apps have changed the world. There are few things we are unable to do on these little devices that would have filled a room with an equivalent computer not that many decades ago, especially considering how fast technology is moving.

Throw Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the mix and I can’t help but wonder where we’ll be in five years and where we’ll be in ten.

This can be a challenge for writers.

What contemporary novels are concerned, if you were to include even a mention of technology while it’s being written and edited, will it still seem fresh by the time the novel is published?

So, what did we do before smartphones?

We rang our friends, we texted, and we used PCs to browse the internet and find things. We (the navigators in cars) used paper-based street directories and inevitably got lost, only to fuel an already tense situation with whoever was doing the driving at the time.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on who you ask) my characters will have to make do with technology before smarthpones. Pre-smartphone mobiles are where it’s at.

They’ll be texting and phoning and getting lost in the early 2000s.

This was an interesting time, anyway.