Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

30 Years of Cell Phone Calls

Posted by michael on from the ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring dept.

freitasm writes "30 years ago, 3 April 1973, Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call, to a rival scientist. The NY Times has an article about the "crime scene". Dr Cooper now works as CEO of Arraycom." There's also a story on siliconvalley.com.

2 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. 30 years of _american_ phone calls... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    In Finland, building of commercial wireless ARP (car radio phone) network started in 1969 and network was in use a year later.

    In early 1980s first multinational cell phone network (NMT) was already in use in Scandinavia.

    More information about telecommunication history can be found here.

  2. An American failure..... by harriet+nyborg · · Score: 5, Informative
    Cellular is an Anerican failure, not a Scandinavian success.

    NMT was more or less a copy of AMPS which was developed by Motorola and AT&T.

    It's in the paper, so you know that's a fact.

    In 1990 - two years before GSM was launched - the United States had a single country-wide cellular radio system (AMPS) and Europe had a hodgepodge of incombatible standards (NMT, TACS, etc.) In 1990 an American could drive between New York and Washington DC and have AMPS coverage the whole way... while a European could not drive from Antwerp to Aachen (about 1/3 the distance) without having to use a different phone.

    America invented cellular, but our pro-competitive government thought it would be a good idea to let a variety of 2G standards (DAMPS, CDMA, Nextel) to compete against each other in the market, and killed it. Thank you Ronald Reagan.

    While competition was creating a patchwork quilt of cellular standards in the US, the Europeans developed GSM and agreed to use the SAME standard in all the European countries.

    Today, I can take use my GSM phone in 100 countries (even the US), but I can't use a CDMA phone in all 50 states.

    Thus did "Old Europe" kick the shit out of the New World.

    i.e., We did it to ourselves.