Around 900 phone boxes are to be removed from Scotland in the next three years, as the digital revolution continues to change the country.
Telephone communication has evolved from chunky booths to sideboard ornaments into the slender handset we all use today, but the devices have also proved to be the ultimate evolution of navigation systems, gaming, film/telly screens, music playing and even computing.
With more and more people claiming to suffer mobile phone addiction, it’s perhaps no wonder considering it’s now a GPS, game system, walkman, cinema and PC all hidden behind a keypad.
Here is how the most popular gadgets and media have been swallowed by the mobile in your back pocket.
In the 40s, the first major computers were built at Bletchley Park by the heroic Enigma code breakers, with their flagship invention Colossus.
Even by 1980, a computer the size of a fridge was required to hold 1 gigabyte of date. Today you can buy a 200GB Micro SD (the sixe of a fingernail) for less than £100.
The home computer was pioneered by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak’s iconic Apple II in 1977, which was followed by the Microsoft windows revolution, making PCs ubiquitous in modern family homes.
The giant desktops have shrunk to slim screens, tiny laptops, and now most smartphones can do major computing, word processing and all kinds of applications.
The first cinema opened in Pittsburgh in 1905 and spawned a whole new medium and industry based on visual entertainment. Silent films moved to talkies and the visual format evolved into television with John Logie Baird’s invention in 1925.
Black and white evolved into colour and then we had home video with VHS video cassette recorders in 1976. Laserdisc and DVD followed as digital versions of the classic spool, with televisions shrinking in depth but expanding in size to mimic cinema screens.
Video shops became massive successes until the emergence of internet movie delivery destroyed the industry - with just about every film and TV show possible available for download, catch-up or stream instantly.
In 1958, New York-based scientist William Higinbotham developed Tennis for Two, which became the first computer game. In the 70s, table tennis game Pong was the first worldwide sensation. The arcade boom saw millions of kids around the world playing on stand-up consoles, while adults enjoyed table top systems in pubs.
In terms of home gaming, Atari consoles became very popular in the late 70s into the 80s, and were later joined in the early home gaming world by Nintendo and Sega.
The PlayStation revolution arrived in the 90s, and while consoles are still popular, with handheld offshots like the Gameboy, 3DS and PSP, mobile phone gaming has become a massive industry.
The earliest maps were found in 2300BC Greece, and evolved into the modern paper, or digital, representations of areas of land and sea around the world.
The first compass, using magnetic north to find direction, was used in 206BC China, and the modern magnetic compass was created in the 15th century.
A device to help sailors navigate sing the stars, the idea for the first sextant was developed by the work of John Hadley and Thomas Godfrey in the 1730s and refined by English astronomer John Bird in 1759.
The wax cylinder phonograph, invented by Thomas Edison and his team in 1877, was the first music playing/recording technology which later made way for the gramophone, using flat wax records, and then into the vinyl turntables, which were the staple of the music business from the 50s to the 80s.
The ghetto blaster offered portable music ready to sit on your shoulder or on the beach, while Sony’s Walkman was a pocket cassette player which set the tone for personal music on the go, while the compact disc back in 1982 was the last major software format of music pre-mp3.
In 1876, Alexander Graham Bell made the first call to his assistant with the words: “Watson, come here! I want to see you!”
That was followed by various large telephones, the ear and mouth-piece desk set in the 1890s, and in 1920s, the first cradled handset came along, with the dial to ring numbers.
Push buttons followed, and then came digital landline phones and cordless receivers, which of course set the scene for the first cellular phones, which themselves evolved into the smartphone, these days divided into iOS Apple iPhones, Nokia and Android operating systems.