Going through some old 8mm videotapes, I found a video from 2000 that I took when back in Australia and working for their largest mobile operator, Telstra.
Back then, Wireless Application Protocol (or “WAP” for short”) was the only real way to get the internet (or a version of it) and email on your phone.
You will see featured in the video my Nokia 7110 (“banana phone”) which was one of the first to be WAP enabled.
As the video depicts, it was quite cumbersome to enter information using a numeric keypad, even with the 7110’s “scrolling wheel”, and it took what seemed like ages to connect and download each page.
The reason for this was that the data was sent at around 9.6KB/s, as a circuit-switched connection. as GPRS (the G you sometimes see on your phone) was still a year or so away enabling 56KB/s always-on connections.
Back in 2000, there was no 3G, no 4G and Twitter and Facebook were years away.
In the last 17 years, we have come a long way to now have smartphones running at 100MB/s with 4G services able to access anything on the internet.
Enjoy a nostalgic look back into the past with the video below (note the video has no sound), and see how we “Gen Xers” had to connect to the internet via mobile to get email or attempt to “browse” the web – very painful!