No, it’s not my marriage to the beautiful Mrs. BrandChef.  It’s not the anniversary of being hired at Love Scott. Nope.  Not even the anniversary of my first kiss.  Nope.

But it’s almost as exciting…

Today is the 15^th anniversary of my induction into the elite club of mobile device users. YES!  On this day in 1995, I was given a “Work cell phone” as “a perk” while working as creative director at a local advertising agency.

While I knew it was really so my boss could call me, guilt-free at 2 a.m., I didn’t care.  I HAD A FREAKIN’ CELL PHONE! I was on cloud nine.  I could drive down the “hustle-bustle” of I-235 while drinking my Jolt Cola and talk to clients, vendors, my wife, my mom and my boss… all on my bitchen-cool cell phone.

Momentous? Heck yeah!  It was my personal introduction to the most revolutionary change in communication since grunts and cave paintings.

Well, okay, maybe there were a few other more significant milestones, but this was MY revolution…

Think of it… (and this is just a snapshot!)

• 45,000 to 10,000 BC: Grunts and cave paintings
• 1450: Guttenberg uses block printing press to print a love poem
• 1841: The advertising agency is born (Then all hell breaks lose!)
• 1860: Pony Express carries mail between St. Joseph, Mo. and Sacramento
• 1865: Atlantic cable ties Europe and U.S. for instant communication
• 1877: Edison invents the phonograph
• 1887: Montgomery Ward mails out a 540-page catalog
• 1914: First transcontinental telephone call
• 1926: Permanent radio network, NBC, is formed
• 1939: New York Worlds Fair shows television to public
• 1940: Disney’s Fantasia introduces stereo sound to American public (Tom Brokaw is born)
• 1949: Magnetic core computer memory is invented
• 1959: The microchip is invented
• 1968: FCC approves non-Bell equipment attached to phone system (I was born)
• 1971: Wang 1200 is the first word processor (just fun to say)
• 1975: The microcomputer, in kit form, reaches the U.S. home market
• 1976: Apple introduces the Apple I to the Homebrew Computer Club
• 1981: The IBM PC (meh)
• 1984: The one-megabyte memory chip
• 1991: Baby Bells get government permission to offer information services
• 1994: Prodigy bulletin board fields 12,000 messages in one after L.A. quake
• 1995: Andrew B. Clark (The Brand Chef) gets his first Nokia 6100 cell phone -AND life changes forever!

Simplistic?  Dreamy?  Sure… but technology is evolving faster every day, and I’ve been trying to keep up since THAT day.

The vision of the future is in the palm of your hand – figuratively and literally.  If you take into consideration that my first cell phone (sporting capabilities like incoming & outgoing calls as well as all the dropped signals I could manage) was less than 15 years ago, and today I can create this entire post (excluding graphics) on a BlackBerry mobile device that hangs right beneath my love handles; think of what the next 15 years will hold!

What was the first technology experience that you consider to be “Life altering?” Was it a cell phone?  Was it an electric typewriter? Or was it the recent iPad?

What ever it was, I bet Twitter still crashes on it…

How does your technology future look?

Keep Cooking (with the latest and greatest)!
Andrew B. Clark
The Brand Chef