My first two phones were the Nokia 11101. The first had to be replaced after being introduced to the inside of a washing machine, but the second I held onto long after my friends had started getting smartphones and the antiquity of mine had become a sort of novelty.
Between the handset and the SIM, storage was incredibly limited. If I’m remembering rightly, I could only store 80 SMS messages before the phone would tell me off and make me manually delete some before accepting anything new from the network. Conversations felt much more ephemeral. If I received a text with something I wanted to preserve, it was on me to write it down somewhere else. Scrolling or searching through years worth of chat was not an option.
I think about this whenever people talk about transferring old messages to their new phone, or WhatsApp pesters me to enable cloud backups, or I search through my chat history with a friend in search of something to embarrass them with. I take it for granted now that most of my conversations will live forever on one device or another. I forget about the countless messages that I was digitally shredding almost as fast as they came in.
There’s no moral here about how we should embrace the transience of things or how good we have it now. It’s just interesting how things change under our fingertips.
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Wikipedia informs me that the Nokia 1110 is the second highest sold mobile device of all time. Always good to know I was backing a winner. ↩
