Daily One Inch Button - Calculator

When I was a kid we once went to a fast food restaurant and the cashier's register wasn't working at all. The person working could not for the life of her figure out how much change to give us and it took one of my parents to tell her how much was due to us. As we drove off my father marveled at how inept the cashier must have been in the field of simple mathematics that she could not handle a simple matter of subtraction without the aid of her mechanical friend.

I think it has something to do with these small friendly devices - the calculator. Whether powered by the rays of the sun or not, the calculator has simultaneously made us a little faster and yet a little bit dumber; or has it? The bigger question is how does the ancient abacus feel about its successor? For that matter, how does one incorporate decimal points into an abacus? I guess if you eat at a restaurant that has menus with no decimal points, it doesn't matter.

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Daily One Inch Button - Old Style VCR

We, the people of the human race, were at one point in a way attached to these machines. At the same time, they were our liberators. No longer did we have to be in front of our television at a certain time on a certain day: as long as we had our VCR programmed correctly (assuming we could get that horrible blinking 12:00 to go away) and had a VHS tape (or BetaMax if you were cooler, I hear) in the machine and the tape wasn't full already, you could come home later and watch your recording of whatever you really wanted to see on PBS.

The death bell for the VCR started to sound when a certain machine called the TiVo(TM) made its appearance on the scene. Suddenly you no longer needed a tape. There was a lot less of an uncertainty. Still, considering that this is the kind of machine that my brother and I used to record the Fat video on MTV (am I dating myself? Yes, MTV actually used to play videos!) I think it still stands the test of awesome time.

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Daily One Inch Button - Digital Camera

Go on. Tell me more about how digital "photography" will never catch on because it's not really about taking photographs and it's more about capturing images digitally. You have to admit that for the majority of people who buy cameras, that is enough. The majority of people out there aren't shooting from the hip lomographers, they are ordinary people who just want to get everyone in a circle to say "cheese" and every pose is as important as the next. John Proletariat isn't interested in the refraction of light off of real celluloid - he wants to be able to take a hundred pictures of his kid smiling with Buzz Lightyear and then erase most of them if they don't come out quite right.

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Daily One Inch Button - Micro Processor

Ah, the microprocessor. Without it, we would still have massive rooms full of computer parts that would barely be able to do in the matter of a few months what my Blackberry is able to do in a few minutes. Who would have thought that processing could get smaller and smaller yet faster and faster? I imagine that there were plenty of science fiction / fantasy writers in days gone by that dreamed up computers that would fit in your handbag but just could not fathom how they would possibly work.

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Daily One Inch Button - Laptop

Ah, the humble laptop. I remember when my mother brought a laptop home from work, only it would have never been used on anybody's lap. It weighed a ton, or at least it did to me (I was a child at the time) and it had a really small black and white monitor. I would say it was about five times thicker than the laptop I use nowadays. Even through all that, it was a lot smaller than the desktop computers of the day and so people with business all over the world ran them from place to place; well, maybe "ran" isn't quite the right word considering how heavy they were.

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Daily One Inch Button - The Pager

I seriously used to have one of these. Nowadays they seem sort of... useless. What can you possibly do with a pager that you can't do with a mobile phone? Does anyone even make pagers these days? Even when I had one it rarely went off. Why? Because that's just how popular I wasn't. Also available with "Page me!" text - let us know if you want that one in the notes.

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Daily One Inch Button - Blackberry

Now that's what I call an addictive phone. Gets me on with my daily insane amount of text messaging, lets me do some web perusal while I'm out and about and keeps me from getting lost with every new iteration of Google Maps. I love that little blue dot.

Note that if you want your own phone provider represented on the phone we also have an AT&T version - and if you want something else we can surely accommodate - just let us know in the note section of the order.

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Daily One Inch Button - Old Mobile Phone

My first mobile phone was a Nokia - I forget the exact number of the model but it was green and looked a lot like this button. It was before the era of everyone and their cousin sending text after text, before people on the bus thought it was okay to tell everyone else the latest goss about their Uncle Brosefer. Sometimes people would cover their mouths while speaking so people wouldn't hear them. (Some people still do!)

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Daily One Inch Button - Anniversary of the CD - Anniversary Week

It was the little silver disc that changed the world. Sure, for some people it meant an aggravating return to stores to re-purchase their Beatles discography... seemingly over and over again. Yet it didn't matter. You didn't have to worry about a record needle scratching your music so that it wouldn't be listenable, or a stray magnet erasing your collection. Did you know that for a long time, Sony received money every time any CD was sold? How we love you, dear little compact disk. Happy 25th.

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