If you select the stock option, here is your prompt: describe to a future college student (somebody born within the past 20 years but who is not yet in college, to include next year’s freshman class or that little girl born yesterday) an old-school technology you grew up with that she or he won’t adequately recognize or understand. Explain its relevance and importance. Your blog entry should use second-person address (in other words, talk to your audience as “You”), and should clearly reflect your (imagined) audience’s age and assumptions. (“You know, back in the day, we used to. . . .”)
A friend of mine made a Facebook post yesterday that was just strangely perfect for this:
Once upon a time, my parents took me to the Verizon kiosk in Costco and bought me my first phone, the Motorola RAZR V3. It was THE phone to have back in 2007, when I was approximately your age. I had just turned fourteen and was incredibly excited to be getting it a full two years sooner than my sisters had, who were all sixteen when they received their first phone.
I had the Motorola RAZR for precisely five days before I dropped it in a toilet. Miraculously, I put it in a box of rice for two days and it lasted another two years after that. Minus the camera, that never made a comeback. I actually didn’t have texting on this phone for the first six months to a year. I was pretty much the VERY last person to get a phone, and I was additionally EVEN MORE LAST to have texting. But it was a flip phone, and it was super cool and silver and shiny and thin, and it had a really big screen that was probably about one inch by one and a half inches.
Now, when it came to texting, I was originally an ABC person, meaning that if I wanted to type “Hello” I had to follow this pattern: 44-33-555(pause)-555-666. And that gave me the word “hello.” If I didn’t want to do all that work, I could set the keys to T9, meaning to type “hello” I just had to press 4-3-5-5-6 and it would probably suggest the word “hello” and if that was what I wanted, as opposed to “gfjjn” or something to that effect, I pressed the up button.
And if I touched the screen, the only thing that changed was its color relative to the pressure I was putting on it.
Why was this phone relative or significant? Well it wasn’t much different from the smartphones we have now, really. It even had internet capabilities, so I could actually log on to Myspace if I wanted (which I didn’t, because it was expensive and my mother would ask me to kindly pay for it myself. Not easy on a high school freshman’s budget.) This phone was the foundation of modern smart phones, the building block of autocorrect, smooth sleek design, camera buttons, and easy internet access. This phone is now far, far outdated by the phone you, as a fictional thirteen year old probably received sometime around your tenth birthday, but this phone was the building block.
Laurel Does DTC 375 
Josie T:
Oh my goodness! T9! Wow my phone had that too. Crazy how T9 got a smartphone upgrade to autocorrect. Which I find can be extremely unhelpful and even detrimental to relationships, sometimes. I never had a Razr, because I have this thing where I break phones. So I had the indestructible Titanium Voyager (think brick with buttons and a crappy camera). By “voyages,” I think Verizon meant “safe to travel with b/c it would survive being thrown off the Empire State Building.” My first year at WSU my dad “upgraded” me to a small phone with a name I can’t remember. I liked it cause it was almost half as big as the Voyager, and had T9! I hope my kids will be able to experience what I went through, if such ancient pieces of technology don’t completely go away, that is.
I totally agree with what you said about using ABC over T9 at first. When I first started to text that was the only way I knew how and T9 kind of confused me. Plus I was really fast at pressing the button enough times to get the right letter that I thought it was faster than T9 anyways. As technology advanced I eventually learned T9 and how much more faster and efficient it was, especially once the iPhone’s came out, they were already programmed to guess the word for you! I didn’t have the razor back in the 7th grade but I remember it being all the rage. It was also especially cool once we were able to start touching the screens to do things instead of the button.
This was a very well worded letter! It really took me back to the days when the razr was the coolest phone and its screen was so big. To me it seems like the last line of your blog “This phone is now far, far outdated by the phone you, as a fictional thirteen year old probably received sometime around your tenth birthday, but this phone was the building block.” already applies to children today. My sister got an iPhone when she was 11 (for safety purposes) and she probably has never even seen a flip phone. Your post really made me think about the way future children will look at phones and not even realize the foundation that they were built on. It makes me want to learn more about the building blocks of past technology that has gotten us to where we are now. I feel like this is going to happen every generation though, with the younger ones not appreciating where their technology is coming from. I know that I never really thought about it too much when i was younger because why would i want to learn about technology I am never going to use? After taking this class it has opened up my eyes as to why we need to appreciate where things started so we can better understand where we can take them in the future. (great use of the Facebook post by the way!)
Oh the good old text by number system. I remember getting my first phone and figuring out how to text. I think I spent a few months before I switched to T9. I’m glad I did switch. Eventually I upgraded to a phone with a full keyboard and I loved that. I currently love my smart phone but I think it is important to know where texting evolved from.