tymshft

The first telephhone book wasn’t a book…and didn’t have any telephone numbers

I was reading the Wikipedia entry on the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol when I was struck by this sentence:

Telecommunication companies’ understanding of directory requirements were well developed after some 70 years of producing and managing telephone directories.

I then asked myself the question – when was the first telephone book created? According to this page, it appeared on February 21, 1878. It listed all of the subscribers of the New Haven (Connecticut) District Telephone Company.

But when you look at the directory, you’ll notice two things.

First, you’ll notice that it consists of a single page. Since telephones were in their infancy, there weren’t a whole bunch of people with telephones at the time. Only eleven residences, for example, had telephones.

Second, you’ll notice that there are no telephone numbers. That’s because telephone numbers hadn’t been invented yet. If Rev. John E. Todd wanted to call the American Tea Co., Rev. Todd would simply pick up the phone and ask to be connected to the tea people. The idea of telephone numbers wouldn’t be invented until 1892.

And, of course, the telephone was tied to a wall by a cord…something that would persist for over a century.

It will be harder to key your car

[DISCLOSURE: I work for a subsidiary of Morpho, one of the companies mentioned in this post.]

Back in the late twentieth century, if you wanted to unlock and start your car, you would use a metal object called a “key.” I still use such a device today.

Alternatives to keys have emerged, and Morpho and Valeo are working on one of those alternatives:

Morpho has teamed up with its technology partner Valeo, a major automotive equipment supplier, to introduce Valeo InBlue™ Virtual Key System, an innovative virtualization and remote car key management solution.

The Valeo InBlue™ Virtual Key System turns users’ mobile phones into a connected key with which they can lock, unlock and start their cars….

And since a smartphone has a lot more computing and communication capability than your average hunk of metal, there are other things that you can do.

And when you couple the capability of a smartphone to start a car with the capability of a car to be driverless, you could do some pretty fantastic – or pretty terrifying – stuff.

Incidentally, there’s an interesting discussion on Quora about driverless cars vs. augmented cars.