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Could We Have Had Cell Phones In The 60s?
TheSync writes: "MIT's Technology Review has a short article claiming "were it not for regulatory red tape, cell phones might have been available...in the 1960s"
Despite the basics of cellular technology being developed in 1947, FCC regulation kept cellular on-hold until 1975. While modern cellphones are clearly more advanced (900 MHz) than anything that could have been developed in the 60's, clearly we could have had VHF or UHF band cellular phones." Interesting to speculate what things such regulation may have prevented, as well as what developments they've spurred. (In Sabrina , though, Linus Larrabee has a radio phone in his car, and so did Alfred Hitchcock in the Three Investigators books. But I certainly couldn't have had any kind of radio phone then.)
And I suppose that all phones would be owned by Bell and merely leased to us?
Given that the best process they had in the 60s was around 1000 microns, something tells me such a cellphone would require carrying a backpack à la GhostBusters.
The U.S. were the only country regulated by FCC. If it had been possible to develop cell phones in the 60ies, it would have happened in Europe, or even in Japan.
"So how is this different than a cellphone? The only thing different now from what you describe above is increased capacity and we replaced operators with computers"
Radiophone: one big antenna, one central transmission point, high power transmitter, one set of circuits.
Cellphone = cellular tower technology = many antennas, many transmission points, low power transmitter, handoff of signal from one antenna to the next as the mobile unit moves, many circuits on same frequency across geographical area.
sPh
that we didn't have cell phones back then. The crash technology has finally evolved to the point that we now no longer need to worry about hitting each other while talking on cell phones and driving. Think of how bad it would have been in the '60s without airbags!
Yes, there were indeed mobile phones pre-1983 (my father had one in his car for a number of years until the cell era)
:))
The system we had here required you to pick up a handset, the unit would scan for an open channel among a very limited number (<30 if memory serves) of channels.
An operator would answer, you would give your ID number and the number you wished to be connected to.
If you wanted to place an emergency call one would interrupt an existing call and tell them it was an emergency. You could then get the channel.
To call a mobile you would call an operator and ask for the mobile ID.
It worked on lower frequencies and could be easily scanned (or so I hear
Trolling is a art,
It's funny really about Ma Bell, the AMPS and NAMPS standards were of course drafted in 1947. Very simple of course, no SS7 - and it does resemble a base-station 900Mhz phone of today when thought about. However it could have been entirely possible that we would have saw Mobile Phones during the era that CSS6 (common channel signaling 6) also known as SS6. To make things more interesting IS-41 was not even started until 1984 (the year that Ma Bell was broke up). IS-41 just was accepted (as in a few months ago) by ANSI and is now an ANSI standard (ANSI-41). I for one am rather happy to see that the Baby Bells are being gentrified as the winners in the internet space (see earlier today) rather than AT&T - usually LECs have much more to do to please the customers then AT&T ever did ... which gets back to why we didn't have cell phones in 1960.
Then we could have "enjoyed" hearing phone conversations in the theatre during the original Star Wars, rather than having to wait for the prequels.
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Slashdot!? Write "do your homework before trying to educate all of us about the technological inferiority of the US" and the moderation score coes up to 4!? Allthough there are no facts here whatsoever... Here we go:
1950- The swedish company Ericsson and Telia builds the worlds first mobile phone prototype. It fills up the trunk of a car.
1955- The worlds first fully automatic mobile/cellular phone system is introduced in
Stockholm, Sweden. The price for a phone and installation is about 750 dollars.
1956- The system has 19 users in Stockholm and 8 in Gothenburg.
I dont know what teacher Petros definition of a cell phone system is. If it must be digital to comply to his definition then there where no cell phones before 1991, when the first digital system was brought on line.
And the Ericssons and Telias system was NOT just a radio phone. It was fully automatic system.
Do YOUR homework next time
1. Thousands of accidents related to cell phones. What is it about a cell phone that makes people think they should navigate along the highway with one hand on their phone, while the other desperately tries to steer, shift geers, drink the coffee, changes the radio station.
2. Many many hours of enjoyment in a cell-phone free movie theatre. Ok ok, so you forgot to turn your cell off in the theatre. What makes you think that in the case it does ring, you should answer it and talk? jeez.
The list goes on. While I think cell phones have their place in modern society it seems to me that they have become more of a fashion statement than a functional device. Just go to your local mall and take a look at the various cell phone accesory sites.
I think one of the funnier moments I had related to cell phones was on a trip to france. I got off the plane and was walking down the ramp, while the person next to me, who had immediately turned on their phone as soon as they got off was saying something to the effect of (french isn't too good) "I'm here I just got off the plane.... Oh good you're waiting for me right outside the ramp". Is it really necesary? I dunno. Maybe it's just cuz I hate the phone in general.
S.t.e.v.e.
... a CB Radio?
Strange that thousands of accidents weren't blamed on them every year.
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If a tree falls on an anonymous coward yelling 'first post' in the forest, does anybody hear?
I did another quick search, but I can't find any indication that the system you are talking about was cellular. I don't think cellular is an ambiguous term. It means that the coverage area is divided into smaller areas (cells), each served by a relatively low power transmitter. Non-adjacent cells can use the same channels, and calls are handed off from one cell to another as the user moves in the cellular system (which requires that cells have some overlap, obviously).
So, please, point me to a reference that shows that the 1955 system was cellular, as opposed to automatic radiophone. If this is the case, I'll admit the error of my ways, and will have learned something new in the process. I have done my homework, and I haven't found any evidence that there were any commercial cellular systems anywhere in the 1950s...
Sorry to tell you that these were not cellular phones, just mobile radio telephones, and that these were also available in the US. Commercial cellular service started in the (very) early 1980s (don't remember exactly), and Scandinavian countries did beat the US to it by a couple of years. IIRC the first commercial system in the US went live in 1984 in Chicago. I believe that there was a considerable delay between the time AMPS was ready and the time it went live, because it happened at the same time as the AT&T breakup.
So, next time do your homework before trying to educate all of us about the technological inferiority of the US.
So I can safely overclock my brain? Sweet. Grad school, here I come!
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
There was intense competition to be the architect of the cellphone standard, a competition that Motorola won. This was not surprising in light of the fact that Motorola had commercialized most of the key technical capabilities in a range of mobile radio products (police and fire radios in particular) that are still in service today.
In the bad old days each radio had a transmit and a receive frequency. When each mobile unit was on the same frequencies, they stepped on each other (remember to say over, listen before speaking, and other disciplines that still survive in the CB world). When you gave each mobile unit its own frequencies you consumed lots of bandwidth and there had to be a very big system in the central office.
Motorola solved this problem by building flexible systems that used a number of frequencies plus a special channel that was only used very briefly in the instant when you pressed the "push to talk" button. During a tiny interval when this button was pushed the mobile set would transmit a request for a channel to the central station and get a response assigning it a frequency to use, to which it would tune its transmitter. All of the mobile receivers were tuned to the same frequency, thus for N mobile sets you only needed N+3 channels (N inbound, 1 request, 1 response, and 1 central broadcast). The ability to build frequency-agile transmitters was all that it took, and Motorola mastered that.
That, in essence, is the root of first-generation cell phone systems. The only thing required to make it all work was the basic cellular architecture, the handoff system that lets you rebind from one cell to another as you move around, and little more. Microprocessors, which arrived in the early 1970s, made it possible to do all of this affordably.
I remember following the debates over the technical details of cellular systems in the early and mid 1970s and I remember two specific examples of short-sightedness that stand out in retrospect:
A lot of the commentary in this thread seems to me to be overly paranoid. I may be a Pollyanna, but I remember the electronics of the early 1970s. The estimates that drove decisions were not unreasonable or irrational. In retrospect they didn't include Moore's law (or an appropriate corrollary for analog electonics) and as a result they were way off for capability, cost, and size, but I don't think there was a conspiracy. I don't think the AT&T bureaucracy was smart enough or paranoid enough back then to have been that scheming. They were amazingly arrogant, and that led them to dismiss things they hadn't invented or thought of themselves. They really never learned to factor in the dynamic of change, but it would be giving them far too much credit to accuse them of having enough savvy to deliberately sabotage the cellphone movement.
Let's think about this. An actual microwave oven puts out about 1000W of power (700 if you buy a cheap one) nearly all of this power gets absorbed by the food since the sides of the oven are microwave reflective. A cell phone puts out less than one Watt worth of RF power. Unless you put the antenna in your mouth at least half of the energy is radiated away from your head. Think about how long it would take to noticably heat 4 Kg of scrambled eggs in a microwave oven. Now multiply that by at least 2000. Then add in a large factor to compensate for the fact that your head is liquid cooled and it should be apparent that the risk to your health due to heating your head via microwaves from a phone is much smaller than the risk from stepping outside or holding a discharging battery near your head.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
It was largely as a result of that experience in trying to advance technological frontiers with the US Federal Government that I came up with a white paper on a net asset tax to not only offload tax burdens from capital gains, income and sales, but also to open up all undefined assets to private claims without government intervention, except as defender of the legal system under which claims to those rights were made valuable assets.
The Telecommunications Act of 1934 got government into the business of handing out "the people's airwaves" to the politically connected media giants (a pattern that is continuing to this day with Reston, VA-based AOL/Time-Warner enjoying a government assist against Microsoft), as well as establishing a state-backed monopoly on wire communications. I'm actually of the opinion that the banking panic of 1907, the great stock market crash of 1929 and the New Economy Crash of 2000 were, all, part of a pattern in which new media technologies are created, social controls are being threatened and capital manipulations occur in such a way as to depress prices of newly emerging media companies enabling them to be bought on the cheap. Such social controls need not, of course, be consciously planned since they may be evolutionary emergent controls and evolution is, almost by definition, not a conscious process. Nevertheless, if this theory is correct, then just as cinema came under the control of a few giants after 1907 and broadcast came under the control of those same giants after 1929 (via the TCA of 1934), the NASDAQ crash of 2000 may allow giants to buy up and centralize Web/Internet media assets on the cheap. This sort of nonsense is profoundly destructive to culture, itself the basis of human social organization including technological advances, given the key role media companies play in defining culture.
Seastead this.
I was going to comment on this and ask how long this has been around...
"Autopatch" as it's called, was something I had a lot of fun with when I first became a ham back in 1991. This was well before cell phones were anything close to mainstream (especially with 8th graders, as they are these days)
The "cell" site you're talking about is actually a repeater, which is a popular ham way of extending the range of a radio and congregating on a frequency (same concept as an ethernet repeater)
I remember bringing my 2m handheld to school and showing everyone how I could make phone calls from anywhere by patching through on the local repeater. I remember one kid saying how badly he wanted to become a ham, and my having to explain that there's a bit more to amateur radio than making pseudo phone calls (and half-duplex ones, at that)
Anyone know when the first repeater -> phone autopatch arrived on the scene?
nlh
Ferrari and other exotic car rentals in New York
So using this as a history lesson that we can learn from, and hopefully not repeat. What tech is possible right now that The Powers That Be are preventing us from using, and how can we fix that to give ourselves access to that tech.
I am thinking regulations on private rocketry, genetic engineering, hydrogen/fuel-cell powered vehicles, and high quality encryption. Though the last one is making headway. Anyone have some other suggestions.
Is this the end yet?...How 'bout now...how 'bout now...how 'bout now?
The most striking example of this for me was when I was looking at some old movies at the internet moving picture archive and watched "Once Upon a Honeymoon 1956" featuring color telephones as a color accessory in the home. An angel in big white brimmed glasses is sent down to earth. While in transit (he's just kinda falling out of the sky) he reaches into his robe and pulls out a wireless phone, just like our modern day cell phones, only larger to accomodate for the rotary dialer!
I'm sure we could point to many other examples. It's important that we pay attention to our creative thinkers for such ideas because they not only come up with challenges for scientists to grapple with, but they also help to demonstrate whether or not it would even make sense to invent X or Y.
It's unfortunate that Regulation is such a necessarily slow process. Otherwise we could be moving ideas from their testbed on the screen to full scale productions in the real world with unprecedented speed.
This is all true if any putative health impact is caused by bulk heating of brain tissue. In other words, you have just effectively argued that if cell phone usage causes damage to brain, the mechanism is not bulk heating. This much seems obvious.
Biology, however, is often very subtle. It is possible that the RF energy from a cell phone could be interacting with brain in some more localized manner.
The normal way to answer a question such as: "does cell phone usage increase the risk for brain cancer?" is to run a study to check if people who use cell phones have a higher incedence than those who do not. If they dont, then there is probably no problem. If they do have more cancer, then one has (maybe) found a correlation between cell phone usage and cancer, but one can say nothing about causality ; maybe there are other differences which cause cell phone users to get more cancer than non-users.
Only after one was fairly certain that a causal relationship existed would one begin to test possible mechanisms. Of course, bulk heating would not be a likely mechanism, for the reasons you have pointed out.
The point is: Although what you say is true, it does not speak to the issue of whether or not cell phone usage can lead to cancer. It is non sequitor .
Personaly, I doubt that there is any health risk from cell phone usage, but I can not prove this.
Don't forget, Maxwell Smart had his shoe phone.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
Distributed power generation has tremendous potential advantages, most notable being the reduction in line loss (which can be up to 40%) and better load/demand balancing.
Wireless telecom is another big one, which has been mentioned. The FCC sold out the American people bigtime on that one.
The laws governing private rocketry used to be extremely restrictive. They've gotten ALOT better in the last five years, although they're hardly perfect. The bigger government impediment is the government's involvement in the launch industry as a competitor. Not that they are competitive in terms of cost or anything else, but it has a big psychological effect on companies that might otherwise be willing to invest in development in the field.
As far as genetic engineering goes, I'm just as glad that there is regulatory oversight, even if it is inefficient and cumbersome. Genengineering is one of those genies that can't be put back in the bottle if it gets out, and I know just enough biology and chemistry to know just how little we truly understand about how the genetic code really works. For example, we just now figured out that humans have many, many fewer genes than we thought, which has forced us to totally rethink our theories about how these relatively few genes can encode enough information to build a people. It seems likely that that timing of expression and synergistic effect play a much larger role than we previously thought. Bottom line: this is NOT a well understood, mature science.
Oh yeah, and let's not forget nuclear power. Although nukes suffer a public image problem that is probably even more of an impediment than the regulatory restrictions. Which is a shame, because it is now possible to build a reactor that can't melt down no matter what. These reactors aren't as efficient as the older, hotter designs, but so what. Of course, there's still this small matter of waste disposal... But now we're back to the discussion of private rocketry :).
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Anyway, the premise seems pretty ignorant, and most the posts seem prety ignorant too, if not totally irrelevent. (Offtopic posts that get modded up as "funny" are getting to be a bore.) Here's some actual history:
It's true that the 40 years ago, the telecom industry was grossly over-regulated. But this had nothing to do with government bureaucrats or congressional do-gooders. The prime force behind all the extreme regulation was the telecom industry itself. Why did they industry like being regulated. Because it consisted almost entirely of a single entity: the "Bell System", which consisted of AT&T and its various subidiaries.
Most regulations had the main effect of forcing everybody to deal with "Ma Bell". The law made it impossible for anybody but AT&T to offer long distance service. If you needed voice or data service of any kind, you almost had to deal with one of their operating companies. With few exceptions, the only legal way to obtain premises equipment of any kind, including phones, "datasets" (basically, primitive modems), and terminals, was to lease (not buy, lease) it from Ma Bell. Most equipment was hard-wired to the wall, and even if you had a plug, plugging anything not manufactured by Western Electric (owned by guess who) was illegal.
Ma Bell argued that third-party equipment would screw up the system. They actually claimed a single malfunctioning phone could bring down whole regional networks!
Naturally this slowed innovation. AT&T never came out with a practical answering machine, and it was illegal to wire in your own. Some early models got around this with weird kludges that picked up the phone when it rang, interfacing to the system through microphone and speaker that slid under the headset.
Come to think of it, that weird dialing mechanism in The Matrix was probably a real-life gadget, somebody's attempt at building a legal autodial modem. There was a WE modem too (very bulky, and the dialer required its own serial port!), but its annual lease was more than the total cost of an aftermarket product.
Oh well, enough Ma Bell bashing. They are mercifully gone. Though, judging from news about AT&T and Lucent, not to mention the poor picture quality on my cable tv, their arrogance and ineptitude lives on.
Some other historical corrections. Mobile phones have been around since the 50s, at least, but Cells only date back about 15 years. Before that, mobiles were simply a kind of mobile radio, with the base station operated by the phone company.
In theory, the cell system could have been built any time after radios become small and reliable enough. But to be practical, a cell network needs cheap low-maintenance automatic switching technology. In the 60s, not even the land-line system had that! What automatic switching there was, was done by complex electromechanical devices that needed constant human attention. Totally impractical for the thousands of unmanned cell switches that now cover the planet. The changeover to electronic, solid-state technology lasted into the 80s. And only when electronic switches became cheap enough to use everywhere did the last human-operated local exchanges disappear.
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Sometimes, economies of scale would not have benefitted us and we may have ended with a monopoly by AT&T or worse. Cell phones are rumored to be dangerous (though unproven), but they may have actually been so with early adoption.
Think of the chemical industry. DDT helped millions avoid starvation, but in the end proved unsafe because of early adoption. Consider Thalidomide. Thalidomide is now recently a useful drug in treating certain types of cancers but is given a bad stigma because early adoption led to absent safeguards for the general public, providing birth defects to countless children.
Safety may have been a concern.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
For example, you quote Gibbon who is not only very early but also very creative in his interpretation of the sources; with ancient literary sources one has to be a little careful with what they depict, because you can also interpret the giant bird that the Arabian Nights speak of as the Rukh as a helicopter if you insist and so on. It is known that Archimedes was a bright little fellow, so to speak, and that he definitely used technology that was not seen before or afterwards in order to defend Syracuse, but it was destroyed during the siege, and Archimedes was killed, so we know nothing of what it actually was. The Greeks and their steam power use are poorly documented. The only relatively certain application of steam power (for which we have a reliable source) was a steam turbine consisting of a metal ball with two exhaust pipes that would rotate when heated; it was built by one Heron of Alexandria, but it appears to have been more of a scholar's toy than of an industrial application. I'd be grateful to have either a modern scientific reference or an ancient source for that story about Hadrian and the Greeks.
The key to understanding why the Greeks (and Romans) did not employ this type of technology on a large scale is probably their mindset; a steam engine was a philosopher's toy, but it had no practical value and was not regarded as something applicable in the real world; it's a bit like building giant observatories to observe the skies for astrological purposes. The Romans had an economy capable of generating surpluses (not surplus; it has been shown by Polanyi in 1957 that the economy as such has no susplus), but they did not have banking capable of large-scale investments, shared loans or shares, no insurance (except the "sea loans" the Greeks employed) and very little money transfer without actually transfering cash; there was some giro transfer between granaries in Ptolemaic Egypt, but it was too impractical and did not extend beyond a very limited geographic range. Most of these infrastructural requirements for industrialization were instantiated by Arabic or Jewish traders in the sixth to tenth century, and the necessary mindset evolved in Europe after Averroes and Thomas of Aquin, i.e. in thhe twelfth to thirteenth century. The ancient civilizations (in Europe, that is) might have had some technological toys, but they did not have technology in such a way that they did anything useful with it.
As a state gets corrupt, its laws multiply; the most corrupt states have the most numerous laws. (Tacitus, Annales 3:27)
I submitted this a couple of days ago, but it was never posted. We actually had mobile phones in the 60's. In 1950 the first fully automatic mobile phonecall was made by an engineer at Ericsson. By 1955 the first commercially mobile phone system were in use in Sweden. The base stations had a coverage of 25-30km, and the phone equipment weighted about 50 kg. It was called MTA, and was later followed by MTB. In 1981 the first analogue cellular network was in use in the scandinavian countries. It was called NMT (Nordisk MobilTelefoni). (I realise that a mobile phone network is not necessarily a cellular network, but this seems relevant anyway.) Look here for more info (in swedish). /Trynis
This is not a sig.
There are these little books in Cracker Barrels called pages of Time that have Adds from you birthyear.
I was looking at one from the 50's, and it had a guy talking on a phone in his car. Though the phone was a regular sized phone, and it went on a hook on the Dashboard. It was pretty funny looking, and they had to have a big CB type antenna, but it worked.
Trunk-size receives? Come on. What normal consumer is going to buy that. Think about it: if it were going to take off, but it was only the regulations stopping it from happening, why then did it not take off in Europe, Canada, or Japan? We have seen in recent history that fewer restrictions have made it easier for companies to create new wireless infrastructure in non-US countries, for example, the popularity of wireless messaging in the Netherlands and Japan, and the creation of wireless infrastructure in poorer countries.
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Know someone who is stealing cable? Report them!
For example, public key encryption was first discovered by GCHQ many years before it was independantly discovered by RSA.
Also of note is that the class of device which "Patent Information: 1970 Official Gaz. (U.S. Patent Office) 11 Aug. tm 65 Van Brode Milling Co., Inc., Clinton, Mass... Spork for Combination Plastic Spoon, Fork and Knife. "
If this had not been witheld from the public domain by the government-imposed patent system, sp0rk5 would be in wide use today and the world would be a far better place for it.
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RCC stands for Radio Common Carrier. This service provided the customer, basically, a restricted area from within which he could make and take phone calls. In smaller towns and cities, the coverage was from usually from a single tower site with the repeater pushing 250 watts or more at either 15x.x MHz or 45x.x MHz.
IIRC, there were 13 channels or so available for the area. These were simplex (one way at a time) channels. You talk they listen and vice-versa.
MTS-Mobile Telephone Service (not to be confused with Message Telecommunications Service) was a refinement on RCC including duplex conversation.
IMTS-Improved MTS provided the ability to use trunked radio systems granting longer range and occasionally better quality plus full duplex conversations.
IMTS's limitations were what really pushed Cellular development. The 'Improved' in IMTS was more a state of mind that a reality.
Check out Chapter 4: The Cellular Telephone for a pretty good rundown of the regulatory and economic push for cellular.
I don't think that really matters that the FCC held back cell phones yere. Do you realize how fcsking HUGE those older cell phones were? If you apply moore's law, you will see that the mobile phone of 20 years earlier would have either been really fscking huge, signifigantly less capable, or both. The earliest research ones were the sort of thing that was perminantly wired into one's van.
We missed the boat by a few years, tops. Not the 20 years that the article says.
I mean, part of technological adoption is doing things at the right time. Cell phones came at the right time, with the right form factor and set of features, etc.
Gentoo Sucks
More sophisticated systems had multiple "repeater" stations linked by phone lines to allow better coverage. Even this enhancement did not really make these dinosaurs practical for the masses.
They were sorely limited in all regards, and made very poor use of spectral resources compared to today's state of the art. They were available in most major metro areas, and a number of smaller ones, but could handle such a small number of simultaneous users that they could not practically be deployed on a wide scale.
Although the theoretical underpinnings for the modern cell phone - at least the original analog variety - were relatively mature in the 1960's, at least two key developments, and a substantial amount of engineering, precluded the appearance of something like AT&T's Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS) - which is what we call 1G cell technology - until the late 1970's at the earliest:
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The microprocessor (uP) and the programmable read-only memory (PROM) (Intel, 1971)
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Low cost solid state devices able to operate
at 1 GHz (Motorola and a few others, early 1970's)
----The complexity of the control software used even in first-generation cell phones - handling, among other things, control requests from the cell site to change to a different pair of frequencies and "handoff" to another cell site - pretty much precluded pure-hardware implementations this early in the game.
High-frequency solid state devices and microstripline circuitry made possible the RF tranmitter and receiver components needed to build reasonably portable cell phones. Although devices working at somewhat lower frequences were available in the 1960's, there simply wasn't enough free spectrum space that low in the RF spectrum for practical deployment of a cell phone system which could support many users.
These two developments, plus an enormous amount of elbow grease, allowed AT&T to deploy AMPS in Chicago in 1983 (right before the Consent Decree broke them up into the Baby Bells) - the world's first high-capacity cell-based full-duplex communication system, featuring frequency re-use among cells, frequency-agile base stations and portable (customer) units, providing connections between each other and the public switched telephone network (PSTN), and offering a user interface nearly identical to the standard POTS telephone!!
It WAS black magic...