Comment by davnicwil
3 days ago
I was just thinking how it'd be great if there were newer, modern things like this that had sprung up in response to newer technologies.
I guess it's one downside of dematerialisation with digital tech - I can't think of a single thing that would make sense. Everyone's got their own virtual portal to all the new technologies that come out, there's not much to look at out in the world.
Maybe as more progress happens in physical 'world of atoms' type things we'll see a bit of this come back.
As someone that tries to survive (every day more difficult) with just a dumbphone with me, I just fantasized about a parallel universe where all those kiosks still existed, and they were somehow like computer that you can briefly rent, to do the things people do with a smartphone. Perhaps you tap a card, and it picks your accounts, and you can quickly Whatsapp someone, check your email, call an Uber or use Google Maps (maybe even check hacker news, but with time limit?!)
Maybe then many people would stop carrying their own portals, as you can briefly use the public ones for the one-off situation where you need it, but enjoy a portal-free mind the rest of the time. Also quite useful in case emergencies as it seems those portable-portals tend to run out of battery, or get lost or damaged...
There was a brief moment around the turn of the millennium where that was what some of us were expecting. I was in college just after that and there were some free Internet kiosks, which combined with the ubiquitous free-to-use computer labs on campus, did a pretty good job of making this type of lifestyle possible, to the extent you could store your important documents online (much harder though in a pre-Dropbox, pre-Google Docs world!). Or another thing that was a big trend then was Portable Apps. On a flash drive on your keychain, you'd have installs of apps that you needed, together with their data and whatever documents you might need.
There was a brief period before that where some airports had pay phones with text terminals and modems built in, so you could dial up your corporate email or CompuServe. I swear I did not dream this.
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“They have phones in booths now? Finally! I don’t have to lug this cell phone around.”
Hermes Conrad, Futurama Season 6, Episode 6: Lethal Inspection
a parallel universe where all those kiosks still existed, and they were somehow like computer that you can briefly rent, to do the things people do with a smartphone
In the early days of the Internet, this existed somewhere in western Europe where I was traveling.
There was a phone booth down the block from my hotel and a couple of times I popped in and used it to check my email.
Maybe Vienna or Amsterdam? It was a long time ago. Swiping one's own credit card would have been unusual then, so I have no idea how I paid for it. Especially since I mostly used travelers checks.
For a moment they put phones that had the ability to do text messages in them (but still looked very ordinary), which feels a little retro futuristic.
Looked better than the weird ad screen monstrosities you get now with a token phone on them.
Some suggestions:
- Not sure what they're called, but I've seen a lot of fully automated outdoor "locker stations" for packet deliveries
- Power bank "banks" or charging stations for smartphones in indoor spaces like malls
- QR codes on stickers/ads in public spaces are a sort of bridge between the physical and digital worlds
In some Asian countries electric scooters with swappable battery packs are very common, and they have roadside battery swap stations where (for a subscription fee?) you can take a freshly charged battery and leave your old one. Seems like a great idea.
Just went through Orlando airport and saw something called "power rod" that is basically that for small power banks: you drop your depleted bank and pick up a fully charged one. If I were a US-only traveller, I can see myself using it.
> QR codes on stickers/ads in public spaces are a sort of bridge between the physical and digital worlds
They are already like that for at least a decade. The last time I visited London the phone booths all had ads for escort services pasted inside.
> - Not sure what they're called, but I've seen a lot of fully automated outdoor "locker stations" for packet deliveries
Drop boxes!
I was part of a team prototyping these some 20 years ago. I highly doubt we were the only team doing so, but we were certainly unaware of any commercially available/deployed stations at the time. I was writing the software, in particular the orchestration of the locks and event bus for the transmissions.
Lots of fun from trying to fathom how undocumented solenoids operated, to trips to various countries for remote and environmental testing, and destructive tests simulating someone driving a truck into an installation (i.e., by deliberately driving a truck into one!)
The nerdiest moment was taking a mainboard model that we were getting intermittent faults with and recreating the exact environmental conditions to recreate the problem. This involved incubating the mainboard in a sealed environment chamber to control temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure. The fault was bit-flipping because electrons were jumping rails when the microchip(s) were cold and damp.
There are!
https://business.bt.com/public-sector/street-hubs/
How about:
If we are making lists. I'm still waiting for IRL Patch 2.0 and the fix for collision detection of eye lash to eye ball.
Maybe we’re not running the same system version, but I’m quite certain my eyelash to eyeball collision detection works great (and the alert can be anywhere from annoying to quite painful.)
A collision prevention enhancement would be fabulous!
I don't know if they still exist, but for a while when pay phones were disappearing in the US, NYC converted a number of them into free WiFi access points.
Tesla Supercharger stations.