03.03.2010
Pluperfect PDAs (3)
By: Joshua Glenn | Categories:
Haw-Haw
Reporter Robert Williams (Stew Smith) fiddles with his PDA while pitching woo at Gallagher (Loretta Young) in a secluded corner of the newsroom. From Frank Capra’s Platinum Blonde (1931).
Called on the carpet by his editor, Conroy (Edmund Breese), Stew complains that he was playing with an app: “It took me three hours to get those little gadgets in the holes, and you screw it up in a minute.” So which app was it? See for yourself:
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Third in an irregular series of posts tracking down iPhones, Palm Pilots, and other personal digital assistants transported into the pre-PDA past.
Joshua Glenn is a Boston, Mass.-based writer, editor, and cultural semiotics analyst. He's cofounder of HiLobrow (named by TIME one of the Best Blogs of 2010), Significant Objects, and Semionaut. He's been a columnist for the Boston Globe, the Observer (London), Feed.com, and the Idler; he's toiled as a magazine, website, and newspaper editor; and he's authored and edited Taking Things Seriously (2007) and The Idler's Glossary (2008). In the '90s he published the seminal intellectual/pop culture zine Hermenaut.
Read more from Joshua Glenn (323 posts) on Hilobrow.
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