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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.)
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.
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,
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.
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.
Don't forget, Maxwell Smart had his shoe phone.
GeneralKael -- Slacker Extraordinaire
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.
The FCC auctioned off large blocks of microwave bandwidth, then Worldcom bought most of them from the auction winners. Most of these frequency allocations are just sitting idle now.
I've talked to people wanting to start wireless Internet ISPs, and I have to tell them "good luck". It's not that we don't have the technology, it's that the FCC has made it all but impossible for little players to get bandwidth in the microwave ranges for commercial use.
Note that I am talking about fixed point-to-point use, not the mobile wireless data technology that is being developed.
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I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
Well, this depends on how broadly you want to look at this. Let's see. If we got rid of the FDA, new drugs would get to market a lot faster, as would genetically-engineered foods. This is a double-edged sword, though. We might get new medicines faster, but we'd also have more dangerous drugs reaching consumers when they shouldn't. And coming from the perspective of a farmer's son, I can tell you that if the EPA wasn't around, we'd have much better pesticides and herbicides. Of course, we'd still probably have DDT and all the proplems it's caused. Getting back to telecom, one could argue that less regulation is better, but a lack of regulation has killed technologies as well. Look at the AM stereo fiasco. The FCC decided not to choose a standard and let the marketplace decide between C-QUAM and the Kahn system. The result was two competing systems that hampered adoption of the technology. Eventually, C-QUAM won out in the marketplace, and Congress finally mandated it as the AM stereo standard, but by then it was too late. If the FCC had just made a decision and picked a system, AM radio might have had a better shot at survival. I'm not saying it would have, but the situation wasn't helped by the Commission's inaction. I don't think we should fall into the trap of thinking that our lives would be better without regulation per se. Without stupid, arbitrary regulation, yes, but regulations in and of themselves aren't all bad. If the telephone network had been allowed to grow based on market forces alone, rural areas wouldn't have received service when they did, and some places still might not have it, or they may only have it at exorbitant prices. And let's not even get into the broadband mess. No one regulates it, so if you get bad service or no service at all, you have no one to help you. I'm not necessarily saying we should impose rules, but there are pros and cons to everything.
That light you see at the end of the tunnel might be from an oncoming train.
Radiophones were around. My dad (a small town doctor) had one in about 1962. As previously mentioned by Beowulf, it looked like a 60's wall type phone mounted on the dash. It had a long-ass whip antenna that you bent over and connected to a hook mounted on the rear door, and a large suitcase sized box of electronics (tubes and stuff maybe?) mounted in the trunk. It cost several hundred 1960s dollars, maybe even as much as a grand, but it didn't have much effect on your month to month phone bill (according to my Mom's recollections, my dad passed away in 1966).
It was a big deal to my dad that he had the first one in Arkansas, even the governor didn't have one at the time. We also had radio controlled toys, a stereo phonograph in 1959, FM radios before there were local stations to listen to on them, etc.
Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds. Robert Nesta Marley
Personal tactical nuclear weapons. Ideal for home defense and we've had the tech since at least 1945!
Stop Continental Drift! Reunite Gondwanaland!
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...