• fakeman_pretendname@feddit.uk
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    15 days ago

    Is it worse that I still call them “telephones”?

    p.s. I am British, which gives me some allowance for using strange, historical words.

  • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    It’s slightly less absurd than that, I guess, because modern smartphones do at least still have telephone functionality.

    Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.” It made sense from an ergonomic standpoint and from the point of view of someone who had no interest in understanding what was actually going on inside the machine. It’s a rectangular plastic thing you put in the machine to make it play whatever it says on the label. Just like a VHS tape, see? Same same.

    The thing with tape was that it described the actual medium inside the casing, all the way back to the time before the tape itself came in the casing and was just loose on a spool. This would have been state of the art in the 1960’s. It’s possible that Original Series Star Trek foresaw the possibility of solid state-ish storage with no tape reels inside, but probably not. (Their computers also exhibit a distressing lack of displays, so I’m not sure the producers were too good at being prescient.) And for what it’s worth, I do know a few oldsters who now call the various small card based flash media formats “memory chips,” which I guess is pretty close to accurate. TnG did this too with their “isolinear chips,” whatever the hell those were supposed to be made of.

    Anyway, we do have a limited selection of “phones” without the phone feature, e.g. things like the iPod Touch which was basically an early-gen iPhone with the phone cut out. Nobody could really decide what to call these, with the closest thing to a standard being “pocket media players,” which turns into the rather non-melodious “PMP.” (With this I guess we missed the chance to call wi-fi enabled variants “pocket internet media players,” and therefore have the opportunity to label these “PIMPs,” which is obviously much cooler.)

    • jqubed@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      To jump on with this, sometime in TV, especially with sports broadcasts or recaps, I still hear hosts say something like, “let’s go to the videotape” even though basically no one is using tape anymore for these things.

    • Chozo@fedia.io
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      15 days ago

      Plenty of kids I grew up with also called Nintendo and Atari cartridges “tapes.”

      Our household referred to NES cartridges as “tapes”, as well. I think for our family, it came from us frequenting a local video rental store, usually once a week. We’d pick up some movies and some games every time we’d go. It started with just movies, though, because our local store didn’t carry games at first. But once we started renting games there, we just kept called everything in the bag “tapes”.

    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldOP
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      15 days ago

      upvoted for all the work you put into that, but our judges would have accepted “technically not true”.

  • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    No it’s not… Because we know what a cellphone is.

    In star trek they called it tapes because they didn’t know what they would be called in the future.

    Moreover, it’s called a cellphone as a colloquial term. They’re correct nomenclature is “smartphone”.

    • jago@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      You’re going to play “moreover” and “nomenclature” then fuck up a “they’re/their”? Hang your head.

    • big_fat_fluffy@leminal.space
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      11 days ago

      Contemporaneously, in some of Larry Nivens’ fiction, it was called a “data brick”.

      When you feel like you are getting too attached to the metaphor of the hour, abstract it up a level.

  • toynbee@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    My dad once told me of, IIRC, a Sprint ad wherein the then-president of Sprint came on screen and said something like “you know, with all the things these can do now, it’s a wonder we still call them phones.” I never saw the ad myself, but it seems to be saying something similar to what you are saying.

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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    15 days ago

    My grandmother said the same when I showed her a Motorola Droid in 2009. She said “that’s a pocket computer”.

    • Bone@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      To me, I’ve always associated the PDA with devices w/o the phone capability, pre-smartphones. Those existed. Looked similar to modern smartphones, just bulkier and with less capability. That’s been the distinction for me.

      Frankly, the only other word for (cell)phone or mobile has been smartphone. I don’t think we have a better word for them yet (pocket computer just doesn’t grab you).

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      15 days ago

      They didn’t catch on because in the era they existed it was very difficult to achieve any kind of connectivity with them to the outside world. By the time that was able to be ubiquitous, smartphones were already happening.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    This sort of icon is still used in software all over the world:

    I honestly couldn’t tell you the last time I used a floppy disk.