Phoebe and Her Unicorn by Dana Simpson for May 02, 2015

Really drive Phoebe crazy. Show her one of these: http://www.cellphonereviews.com/who-invented-the-cell-phone/Weighed about three pounds

I still have a wall-mounted rotary phone.

Nunchaku? Wouldn’t Phoebe mean Wii controller that also resembles a nunchaku?

Okay, I chuckled. :D

And not just a phone, a PRINCESS phone!

Love that third panel expression.

Is there a rice farm in the basement?

So here I am, at my desktop computer, with a phone EXACTLY like the one in today’s strip sitting right next to me, cords and everything. Works great. I’m not giving it up.

If you want to blow Phoebe’s mind, show her a typewriter. :)

I love the dawn light of discovery / knowledge in the third panel. In fact, I still love that feeling…when you first get a completely different view of the world.

Not a Princess, a Trimline. The Princess retained the traditional narrow handle between the receiver and the transmitter of the handset, and all the works were in the body, just as they were in other phones of the period (although early Princess phones had to put the ringer in an external box).

The Trimline moved the dial to the handset, in the space between the receiver and transmitter, completely changing the handset shape. Over the decades, more of the works moved there. (An early-60s prototype of the Trimline was called “the Schmoo Phone”; unlike the final design, it used a stock, full-sized dial, which gave it a big “belly”.)

Personal Communications Systems (PCS) was also trialed in Chicago, and that was all hand held and digital. Sprint was the first to commercialize it, but Cell and PCS soon merged, taking the best features of both. Analog was phased out a while ago.

Those super-huge car phones were mobile phones, but not cell phones. Back then, there was something like one tower per county, and if you drove out of the range of the tower, you’d lose the call. The cellular phone was created by adding computers to the system so that towers can hand off a call to another tower whenever the phone moves from one cell (geographical range) to another, which means that towers can be much closer together, so that there can be many more towers, which means that the system as a whole can handle many more calls, and which also means that the phone doesn’t have to be anywhere near as powerful to reach the nearest tower. Digital cellular then multiplied the number of calls again, by sending each call in tiny little “squirts” of compressed data, so that each frequency in one cell can carry many calls interleaved together.

Freak her out with transparent Trimline phones—Phoebe would think the ’nunchucks" have innards!

After hurricane Andrew hit South Florida, my father was able to use his rotary dial landline phone, but all cell phones were only useful as paperweights — cell towers were blown down and there was no power for several weeks.

You’re right:> But the rotary phone works during a power outage, unlike the cordless one we have in the LR. And they’re a whole lot cheaper since we don’t make a lot of LD calls; we wait for our out of town relatives to call us on their cell phones.

Not that this one is bad but I liked the original punchline better.

Phones keep getting bigger (smartphones anyway) and computers keep getting smaller… will they eventually be the same thing? Oh wait we already have tablets which are basically a computer and ALSO a phone.