With yesterday’s ten-year anniversary of the iPhone, I spent a bit of time marveling at how far pocketable technology has come in the past few decades.

At the time the iPhone launched, I was happily toting a Blackberry Pearl, a big upgrade at the time after years of carrying a series of Treo’s.

But my mobile nerd-ery extended far further back than even that, to 1999, when at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I stumbled across a small booth where a Canadian startup called Research in Motion was selling a new email-enabled two-way pager they were calling the Blackberry 850:

At the time, the company I was running built software for hedge funds, and I remember the bankers staring at my Blackberry, incredulous that anyone might need – or even want – to check email away from their desktop.

Of course, the Blackberry existed in a parallel universe to my phone, a trusty and chic Motorola StarTAC. So at the same point, I also owned a Starfish ClipOn Organizer, which piggybacked thickly on top of the flip-up screen, stored a “whopping” 1000 contacts, and allowed you to – get this bit which blew my mind at the time – dial your phone just by clicking a contact’s number on the Starfish:

The Starfish also boasted a calendar, and a notes app. Though as there was no data-entry mechanism, the notes were read-only. And as the Starfish synced by popping the thing off the phone, and then sticking it into your PC’s PCMCIA card slot, the calendar was perpetually out-of-date.

Today’s a far cry, indeed, from those primitive times back in 2007 or 1999. Back when we couldn’t check Google Maps any time we got lost, couldn’t search the web to find relevant information on the fly, had to spend dinner actually paying attention and talking with the real people physically surrounding us.