Slashdot Mirror
We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier (reason.com)
_Sharp'r_ writes: Professor Thomas Hazlett of Clemson University analyzed the history of wireless spectrum and concluded the technology was known and available for cellphones in the 40s, but there was no spectrum available. Based on assumptions cellphones would always be luxury goods without mass appeal, significant spectrum for divisible cellular networks wasn't legally usable until the early 80s. Instead, the unused spectrum was reserved for the future expansion of broadcast TV to channels 70-83. Here's an excerpt from the report: "When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.' This view -- that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base -- persisted well into the 1980s. 'Land mobile,' the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC's list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter."
We did. I think they were called ham radios. They just weren't very portable.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
Without modern miniaturization, spread-spectrum, and modern data compression, it would have been for an elite. We are lucky it wasn't rolled out in the 40's because it would have been a nickel-plated vacuum tube thing, and allocated to high-payers before the technology to allocate it widely existed.
Fuck Professor Hazlett.
Are you kidding me... We could of had cell phones off it wasn't for this ass clown.
Many kinds of technology were involved into making the cell phone - from hardware to software - and most were simply not matured enough during the 1940's
The were called "radio phones/car phones". They were in use since the late 1940's and were quite popular in the 60s, 70s, and through the early 80s and often found in Limousines etc, before cell phones.
This author does not really know what they are talking about.
-- Given enough time and money, Microsoft will eventualy invent UNIX.
US Military example. The Germans too, they even had a sort of video phone prototype in the 1930s, although probably wasn't commercially viable.
Sizing obviously played a big role. No one is gonna carry around vacuum tubes as a civilian. The transistor was first invented in 1947 and the first transistor radios was around 1954. They were a big deal among kids back then, just like the walkman in the 80s and the ipods in the 00s. Nevermind microprocessors and miniaturized circuitry. The 1980s cell phones were still huge bricks.
Just look at early pagers from the 1950s-1970s, big. Like the Motorola Pageboy II.
This isn't figuring pathetic batteries and the like. The simple convergence of multiple technologies weren't there yet. Simple as that.
In the fourties we would have tube-based cellphones. You think bag phones where big? You haven't seen anything yet.
PCs much sooner than we did except some asshat in the 1940's said the world only needed five computers.
Given that the first commercial transistor radio was not sold until 1954 my guess is that a 1940s cell phone would have been rather heavy and not had very good battery life.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
We could all be using satellite phones now...but they're not commercially viable...capability does not equal widely applicable. Especially technological capacity in its infancy. We could theoretically all be travelling in electromagnetic floating cars...but we're not...it's technically feasible...but not practical or commercially viable at this point in time...so...even though Tesla demonstrated wireless electricity in the 1800's...we're just now coming into induction charging as a regular thing. We're still not powering every device in our house through one central electrical generator...it's all being worked on though folks...you just can't get it cheap now...
regular nmt was shit easy to listen to and the carphones that came before were even easier - and those had an operator patch/dial your call. cops could ask their operators to patch them through. does that make cop radios cellphones? no.
and yes, I vote bullshit on the article. sure we had radios. we didn't have the automation to handle traffic and connecting the calls and THOSE are largely what counts as a cellphone vs. a radio.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
but it took a long time for tech to catch-up plus the fact that they didn't take-off in other countries that didn't have the same restrictions, proves the FCC wasn't the ones responsible for how long it took for them to become popular.
That plus my $2+k per month carphone bill in 1993 showed that the tech even over four decades later was just too expensive for the average person.
"Go home dad, you're drunk!"
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Apparently AT&T had a consultancy firm do a study which concluded people didn't want them. From today's Computerphile:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Even with technology of the 80's cell phones were still impractical.
Do you mean that all of those social skills - being courteous, planning ahead, knowing how to make eye contact, respecting the rights of others to sit in silence - that have been holding Mankind back for decades, could have been eliminated already!? An opportunity lost.
The technology was barely there in the 70s to make it profitable. I think most likely, a few really wealthy people (captains of industry) would get it in the 10940s, and the upper class (millionaires) would slowly get them in the 60's.
Maybe the general public would have got them ten years earlier.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I don't think the electronics were small enough back then for this application. Maybe. Doubt it. Certainly battery technology back in the 40's was vastly inferior than what we have now.
I mean, just think about what they produced in the 80's, those frick brickphones. And our electronics advanced by 30 years. Even then, it really did take another 20 years of advances in batteries, electronics and miniaturization to get where we were in the early 2000's, and it's advanced even wildly faster since then.
So I'd say this one is a huge maybe.
Even the simplest bare-minimum function (making calls) would require a system the size of a house. In the early 40's, it was virtually impossible to reliably build anything that ran above about 50 mhz in mass-production, forget *890* mhz. There were AM "apex" broadcasts in the 50 mhz range, and early FM was around there, too, because that was the best they could do.
Even in the mid 50's the "new" FM band at 100-ish mhz was very marginal to even build into a receiver, and there was *never* a portable tube FM radio (forget the transmitter part). The first portable FM radio in wide release wasn't available until 1961 (Zenith Royal 2000 - still the best performer), and it used transistors, weighed about two pounds, and was the size of a large lunchbox/small briefcase. And that, again, was just the receiver.
Essentially, cellphones weren't practically realizable until large-scale integration came along in the 70's, and available spectrum had nothing to do with it.
Particularly since cellphones as they actually were/are, meaning phones that work with individuals radio "cells" and move between them need computers to work. They don't have to be amazing computers, but they need some computer logic to handle dealing with dynamic frequency assignment and handoff between towers.
That one piece of a technology, even an important piece, existed at a given time doesn't mean the tech could happen. Many devices require a confluence of a number of technologies before they can happen.
Smartphones are an example. They aren't particularly a novel idea, we've seen shit like them in sci fi for a long time. However to actually be a thing on the market we needed a lot of shit:
--Processors had to get fast enough at a small enough size
--Displays had to get small, light, and low energy
--Batteries had to get sufficient energy density
--Silicon based storage had to evolve to usable levels
--We needed wireless digital communication
--We needed the Internet (or something like it to have something worth connection to)
Without any one of those things, you don't have a workable smartphone. That they started to rise to prominence when they did isn't some amazing stroke of genius or luck, it was because the various technologies had reached the needed point.
The Romans had all the technology to make guns. But they didn't, because they lacked the requisite mindset to make black powder and bronze gun barrels.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
It took a couple of decades for the technology to mature and that probably wasn't just a factor of time since launch. We are talking, battery size, digital technology etc. we'd still get a similar timeline.
The US isn't the only country on earth and in fact Europe was ahead for a large part of the last decade in cellular because Europe was more regulated (GSM). The world is pretty much using Europes regulated GSM standard for cell communications today.
If anything, this is proof nothing significant happened at Roswell, NM in 1947. If it HAD, we would have had things like this popping out of government-funded reverse engineering groups and stuff like transistors would have come along in the mid 50's and.... oh wait, transistors DID come along in the 50s, didn't they? And early integrated circuits, lasers and all sorts of other high tech innovations.
Never mind, clearly we DID come up with a lot of advancement in a very short period of time. But nobody thought about using it for mobile phones.
In all seriousness, the invention of the cellular phone WAS still ahead of actual demand. The first such systems were a gamble because there was no previous demand and people had to be convinced to fork over a fortune to have one... and only for making phone calls, nothing else. There is no way this would have worked decades before it did work. The tech and the demand were not there.
Sig for hire.
Yeah, right. With valves. You'd need some kind of cart just for the batteries.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The summary reads like: if we had known the future, we could have done something differently.
I think you could make the claim about a trillion other decisions made throughout history.
In the 50's, radiophones were analog, which means definitely whatever the spectrum available only very few users could use it at a time, isn't it?
IMHO only the much greater share allowed by numerics, sampling and compression did open the thing to many users. (and maybe some here remember, yet in the beginnings compressed voice handling were still rather bad)
I don't buy the "because of the FCC we didn't get it". Almost a fake new.
Herve S.
Rags, sticks and wires (or ropes). It is entirely possible that someone did, probably a sailmaker.
Even the simplest bare-minimum function (making calls) would require a system the size of a house ... and there was *never* a portable tube FM radio (forget the transmitter part).
You're way off. Even in the 40s they had man portable, FM based radio phones operating in the 40-50 MHz range. Something common enough in the war would at least be affordable enough for luxury & business users. And tank radios in the British Army used a band around 240 MHz during WW2 with a unit that could easily fit in a car too. There was still a lot of lower frequency stuff around, but WW2 is when the transition to "mass-produced" and "reliably built" VHF equipment began.
Portable phones, sure - the military had radios, so why not?
Only, they would hardly have been cell phones in any sense. The transistor wasn't invented until the late 1940s, and wasn't really mass produced until the early 1960s. So you'd have been holding a huge case full of vacuum tubes up to your ear, not exactly comfortable. Heck, remember how huge the early cell phones of the 1970s were, and that's already with integrated circuits. Even a purely transistor-based phone would have been huge.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
As an AC pointed out above, there was something analogous in the 1940s.
"A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946.
The original equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and there were initially only 3 channels for all the users in the metropolitan area. Later, more licenses were added, bringing the total to 32 channels across 3 bands (See IMTS frequencies). This service was used at least into the 1980s in large portions of North America. On October 2, 1946, Motorola communications equipment carried the first calls on Illinois Bell Telephone Company's new car radiotelephone service in Chicago. Due to the small number of radio frequencies available, the service quickly reached capacity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
First handheld cell phone from Motorola in 1973 was quite big, and they said it was a huge research and manufacturing effort to squeeze components down to that size with 70s technology.
The article tells us that the first "cellular" call (the author's opinion seems to be that this was the only contributory technology required to make "cellphones" as we know them today) was made in 1973. So 4 decades earlier would have meant starting celular technology in the early 1930's.
But to claim we could have had "cellphones" at any particular point in time implies all the infrastructure that goes with them: small size, portability, low cost, cell-towers, call routing computers, high capacity batteries. Simply saying that technical feasibility is the same as being able to develop a commercial product is naive.
The ancient Babylonians used oil, does that mean thay should have developed the internal combustion engine?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Wth what Feynman and Heisenberg were working on we could have had quantum computers too. Picture billions of cats in boxes being shipped back and forth and messages encoded in groups of 1000's.
> We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier
Ridiculous claim because the technology just wasn't there around 1947. That's the very year when the transistor was reportedly invented (although some fringe source claim it was known since 1922).
Trying to build a portable radio transmitter-receiver out of thermionic valve tubes is not fun. If you have seen the movie Kelly's Heroes - well, those double-brick sized handheld radio telephones used by tank crews are faux and they are actually Vietname-era, discreet transistorized US army equipment not WW2 relics. Pocketable things require microchips.
Things built out of tubes (and it's large and heavy pack of batteries providing the tubes with fuzzy warmth) were carried on the back of an officer's valet, with only the handpiece held by the officer and there was one radio comms link for every 100 people or so and that in well developed armies of WW2, like USA or Britain, not the soviets or japanese.
Also remember that tape deck only became known in 1945, when allies captured nazi propaganda equipment and learned that it was possible to manufacture a "magnetophone" with ferrite covered paper or plastic reel tape. Before that, there was no reliable, automateable read-write-erase sound storage. Try to build mobile phones without temporary sound storage, considering area radio coverage can never be 100% full. (BTW, prior magnetophones worked with piano wire, giving extremely poor sound quality or with very high speed full-steel reel tape, which had the habit of randomly exploding and instantly creating a lethal samurai sword duel effect, so the deck had to be housed in an armoured vault.)
We could not have had cell phones as we know them 40 years earlier. They didn't even have God damned transistors until 1947. The first commercially viable transistor products weren't produced until the 1950's. Not to mention the miniaturization required didn't happen until the 1970's. Who here remembers the giant car phones of the the early 1980's? Were they going to lug around car-sized phones full of vacuum tubes? Let's not even start talking about the radio technologies like TDMA and CDMA required to handle all the traffic on limited spectrum and the processing power required. How about fucking batteries? Battery tech 40 years ago would've required lugging around a car batter with your giant vacuum tubed behemoth. Is the author a fucking idiot?
Just some back of the napkin calculations: So with 44 chanels (4.7% of the spectrum) they could host 575 callers. If they had the 59.7% of the spectrum allocated to TV, they could have hosted around 650 channels, which, by extension would support about 8000 callers. In New York City, a city with more than 7 million people in 1940. So, no, we couldn't have had everyone using cell phones in the 1940's even without FCC meddling. *AT BEST* it would have increased the cellphone user base from 0.01% of the population to 0.11% of the population. Without the geographic cells and spectrum switching tech that AT&T brought about in the 1980s, cell phones would have remained toys of the very wealthy and lucky.
"When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.'"
Whereas broadcast TV - in particular, scores of additional channels on top of the scores of already existing channels - are not "in the nature of convenience or luxury"?
Oh, I forgot - reaching all American citizens with continual advertising is essential to the health of the nation. Silly moi.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
we could arrange to have cell phones four decades LATER? Seriously, what of consequence do cell phones add to our lives? Endless inane public chatter about the pointless minutia of our lives. Last week on the T in Boston, this is the conversation that a woman had next to me: "I'm on the T. I said, I'm on the T. Uh-huh. Going to lunch. Maybe Panera. Uh-huh. Maybe shopping." Such scintillating conversation! Plus, as a first responder, I've seen more motor vehicle fatalities caused by cell phones than by alcohol.
There were numerous obstacles militating against cellphones in the 1940s and 1950s - the principal obstacle being the lack of a digital radio packet schema and related computerized packet-switching to route signals to a mobile transceiver moving between stationary hubs. Additionally, FDMA, TDMA, CDMA, and SDMA modulation techniques were yet-to-be developed.
On a more practical hardware level, the then newly developed bipolar transistors (PNP and NPN) were not capable of UHF or VHF operation, requiring the use of power hungry vacuum tubes (the RCA Nuvista minature ceramic vacuum tube was not available before 1960). While a structure akin to a planar IGFET was known in the mid-1930s, the now-dominant MOSFET did not arrive until the 1960s.
Tiny base == AT&T pricing targeted the 1%ers. Thank you FCC.
This is nonsense.
1. Radio Phones were available in that time frame.
2. They were analog, because there it wasn't possible to do digital signal processing, or even practical A/D D/A conversion when a practical device contains on the order of 6-12 tubes (equivalent of 1 or 2 transistors).
3. Even AMPS analog cellular requires digital call setup, base station seelction and handoff. In the 40s, automated call setup was not available (think switchboard operator). So, you are looking at what is called a 'phone patch', with -one- base station for the whole city.
4. Of course, most readers have no idea what 1940s technology looked like, or was capable of.
5. Some dumbass down thread said (something like) 'ham radio was broadcast... anyone could listen'. WTF are you talking about, the fact that cellular is encrypted? 1940 had encryption too... a good example was called Enigma, it managed about 5-20 bits per minute (information content in text is something on the order of 2-3bits per character). Assuming you could get audio into a PCM, or maybe delta modulated signal, you will need a whole battalion of keypunch operators to encrypt it in real time, and even then the latency would be killer ;^}
Ignorance of technology history is no defence. Neither is ignorance of what 'cellular' actually means.
A 1949 cellphone would have had to be implemented as a wheeled suitcase. Unfortunately, wheeled luggage was still far in the future, so each cellphone user would have had to be accompanied by a grinning redcap to carry his phone around just like the railroad passengers of the day., search for a 220V outlet before making a call, and give the tubes time to warm up. Hollywood and Broadway people would pride themselves on hiring white redcaps.
I think I wouldn't trust such tech to be developed that early.
IIrc, radars on certain types of warships is said to be responsible for cancer afflicting crew members.
So were landlines back then. My grandparents still had a party line in the 90s, you could pick up the phone and listen to any number of conversations of the other parties that were on that line (there were 4 on their line). I remember the fun we had with it...you had to hang up after dialing any of the other party members, then it would ring the party's phone...which allowed for dialing yourself to ring your own phone...ah the trouble I got into.
The ability – financially – to deploy the ground-based network to support cellular.
IMO there's no way we could have done anything with the spectrum.
A small group of incredibly wealthy people who could afford the electronics could have had cell phones 4 decades earlier. Making electronics that could do cellular and be affordable is a fairly recent thing (think mid 80s).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The article discusses decisions made by the FCC, but ignores the existence of other countries. So the US didn't have cellphones four decades earlier, but why didn't other countries have cellphones much earlier?
Fortunately — for AT&T — they had a government-protected monopoly by then.
So they didn't insist — and no one else could, because there was no one one else... Sure, the devices back then would've been clunky and hardly "mobile". But they didn't have to be to be very useful — a wireless device could've solved the "last mile" problem for the remote dwellings, for example... But why would do that, if you have a monopoly, that subsidizes copper-wires for you instead?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
One of the factors that helped make cell phones practical was the wide availability of small integrated circuits and very small components. From what I know from my own electronics hobbies in the late 70s, things were still rather large, even in electronics I disassembled.
Anyone remember the Osbourne 1? The first "portable" computer weighing in at something like 24 lbs!
However, if that is true, I can't see cell phone technology becoming mainstream much too sooner. Part of the success of cell phones appears to be the very portable and compact nature of the phone.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
So we could have been rude in restaurants a generation early?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Reason is libertarian rag. Was the FCC wrong? This was the freakin' '40s! Bell labs didn't **demonstrate** the transistor at Bell Labs until December 23rd, 1947. So no big bad government did not prevent cell phones coming to market sooner. But hey if you assholes want to justify why the US pays more for cell service than Europe, I would love a good laugh.
We could have had the internet 40 years ago too.
My guess is because because in the 1940's Europe was a real fucking mess.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
... tubes. TUBES. No, we did not have the technology in the forties. And the US military had hand-set radios in WWII that they tried very hard to use in combat, and they sucked. We didn't have the technology to do them even in principle until the transistor radio came along in 1954, and it took decades to advance transistors into ICs into things that actually have the power requirements and ability to chop up signals and share bandwidth in a way that anybody could afford or that could be broadly deployed.
Portable phones happened when they happened because that is when the technology advanced to the point where they were BARELY feasible -- as devices almost as large as those 40's miltary walkie-talkies, that had to be run on your car battery most of the time.
Next we will hear that personal computers were possible using technology from the 40's. Right. Sure. All they had to do was invent VLSICs and a dozen other things, and we could have had computers in the 40s! Doh!
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
While I don't doubt this article is true. It seems suspicious that it's coming right as net neutrality is on the table.
"Oh consumers we want to help you but the dumb dumb dumb government is in our way."
Imagine those wonderful 100kg "mobile" phones made with vacuum tubes. I don't think so...
1940 had encryption too...
But not in real time. The idea of encrypting radio signals dates back to the early 1940s. But the first implementation of this for voice communications wasn't put into operation until the Cuban missile crisis (early 1960s).
But why tie cellular communications to encryption? AMPS systems were analog, unencrypted and possible to eavesdrop with only a radio scanner. AMPS was in use into the current century. The channel control and cell handoff problem was also dependent on compact digital processing technology, which was developed in the 1960s and '70s.
Have gnu, will travel.
It wasn't just the transistor. A mobile cellular phone in the late 40s wouldn't have been as small as a pocket phone right away, but if you look at 80s-or-so car phones, those were all transistors, yet still briefcase-sized, mainly because they needed a big-ish transmitter and thus quite a lot of power. Because, and this is in the article, actually: The cellular structure means you need less transmitting power in the handset, meaning it can do with less hefty amplification, thus smaller batteries, and so on.
So yes, "cellular" was key, but not just because transistors or capacity, but all that plus lower radio distances thus lower power needed on the handset. Go look how much your GSM can put out, and compare to earlier car phone systems' output power. It can really only work with so little power because relatively short distances and big huge high gain sector antennae at the towers. But that's again very much part of that "cellular" thing.
And of course, the transistor existed in the 50s already, and vacuum tubes were getting ever smaller too. So with cellular back then, you'd have an even bigger push at miniaturization much sooner.
If there's an EE reading this and looking for some historic-flavoured tinkering: How about a cellular phone and tower controller done in 50s tech? Just to see what size such a thing would be. Probably wouldn't work with the full-on digital spec so invent something else, possibly analogue, but it ought to work and be able to function on the reserved TV spectrum.
I guess the fact we still didn't have good miniturization and was pre solid-state didnt matter. We could have all had 20 lb backpacks for making phone calls. Oh, dont forget the 80lbs of batteries for your filament (A+) supply. Could have and "could have" are entirely different. We could have had satellites in the 40s by that reasoning.
I recall from his '50s-era novel "Space Cadet" Heinlein described a cell-phone as used by one of his characters. Technology aside he actually got the social impact right: "hey is that your phone ringing? Oh yeah I guess it is." In other words how a portable phone obtrudes (would obtrude) in a social setting.
Anyone else remember that? (My books are packed deep and far and I haven't seen that particular one in decades so I am curious if I remembered it right.)
If you want to understand anything in the United States of Avarice, follow the money.
How ya like dat?
We all know the tech was made available after the Roswell crash. They have been releasing newer technology advances ever since.
Yeah sure, the only thing holding back cell phones in the 1940s was lack of allocated bandwidth! If there had only been bandwidth allocated specifically for them cell phone systems would simply have burst forth.
In other historical news, the only thing holding back automotive travel in the 1890s was lack of gas stations. I mean there were hardly any! I they had simply built lots of gas stations the roads would have been flooded with cars in 1895.
Also, the only thing holding back popular air travel after the turn of the century was lack of airports. If we had only had lots of airports in 1910 the sky would have been full of airliners.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Yeah, the very idea of providing affordable phone service to everyone in America. What was up with that? The B-astards!
It would have been much, much better to have private companies only running phone lines to well heeled customers who would have to pay whatever they were charged. The ROI would have been insane! Freedom!
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
There were other issues besides spectrum that kept cellular from being practical until the early 1970s. For example, solid-state UHF devices were in their infancy in the 1970s and a 1960s era mobile phone would have had to be powered by vacuum tubes and would be the size of a suitcase. Earlier than that it would simply not have been practical. It took the developments in miniaturized and low-power electronics for the space race and military to get to the point where cell phones were practical and economically viable. In the era of the 40s to 70s there was little of the current suspicion of "big government" and corporations (Motorola, as mentioned in the article) were very risk-averse. By the late 70s the combination of technology and a younger, more mobile and tech adopting population (boomers) made cellular an attractive commercial proposition. Note how slow the uptake of mobile was once it was announced. We take multiple mobile phones per family for granted now, but It was the 1990s before more than 10% of US households had one. http://visualeconsite.s3.amazo...
1940 had encryption too...
But not in real time.
Well they did. It was SIGSALY, developed with the aid of Alan Turing. Of course it weighed over 50 tons, and used about 30 kW of power, necessitating an air-conditioned room to hold it.
About a dozen of these systems were built.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
Mobiles are worse than crack and other similar mind bleachers.
"ead, the unused spectrum was reserved for the future expansion of broadcast TV to channels 70-83."
Uhhh, those channels were definitely in use. One of Toronto's big independants was on 79 for years.
This is from Reason, a magazine mostly ready by crazy people. If the author's case were true, then cel phones could have popped up in another country that didn't have the same FCC restrictions prior to their introduction in the US.
We also didn't have transistors either. So carrying around a 80-120 pound cell phone would be beyond most.
Well, except for the idiots that never studied history and post on /.
You could probably have made something functionally similar, if you'd had the ideas. But you'd never have been able to get the network in place for adequate coverage, even if you could have convinced people that it was a good idea; it would have bankrupted any private company that tried, whilst institutions such as the military would have (and did) found far cheaper ways to achieve their needs. It was the potential for market penetration that made it commercially viable, pure and simple.
People miss this time and time again. Tech ideas need the right time and infrastructure. Being clever isn't enough. Many a "brilliant" new idea has died because people simply didn't want it in the form it was being delivered. Look at apps like Skype and Facetime, for example; people have been talking about "video phones" since before the war, and anyone who lived through the 70s here in the UK will have seen the latest "coming thing" (which never did) on the weekly tech peek into "the futrure", Tomorrow's World. It simply wasn't going to happen until the platforms to support it were sufficiently ubiquitous - not least because no-one was going to pay out a fortune just to have a phone that had pictures as well. Whereas once we had devices that could effectively do the task for free, and increasingly just about everyone had them, it was a simple no-brainer - and I, for example, can talk face to face with my son and his wife in Australia at about 2 minutes notice, if I need to.
What magic device would have been transmitting and receiving these signals and what would power it ? A vacuum tube cell phone would have weighed about 100lbs and plugged into the wall. A primitive discrete transistor device would have been atrociously huge and ungodly expensive since they were invented in 1947, integrated circuits didn't exist until the 60s. What a complete load of garbage. These cell phones would be restricted to the home or monster backpacks with no practical use. Someone needs to put down the crack pipe it wasn't spectrum that delayed the cellphone.
Lots of folks have rightly pointed out that the electronics for cellular telephones wasn't ready in 1947 but neither was the switching infrastructure. The first customer-dialed long distance telephone call wasn't placed until 1951 and it took at least the better part of a decade for that technology to be widely available across the US. Telephone switching was largely electromechanical until the early 1970s with the first Electronic Switching System having been deployed in 1965. But even at that time, the #1 ESS didn't have the sophistication or compute power to keep track of phones and perform handoffs as they moved from cell to cell. (The first true cell phone networks were built on the 1A ESS that came over 10 years later.) Having said that, AT&T did demonstrate the cellular concept with a pay phone service on the Metroliner train service between New York City and Washington DC in the late 1960s. The pay phones used land mobile radio channels and would switch from channel to channel with a reuse pattern up and down the Northeast Corridor. There was a lot of work that had to be done and technology that had to be developed to get to that point - it took them a good 20 years to build this proof of concept, which they did prior to the FCC allocating what ultimately would become cellular spectrum. In fact, the Metroliner payphone system was a key milestone in opening up the conversation to get UHF TV channels 70-83 allocated for cellular. TFA would have been more accurate if it had focused on 1970s as lost time for cellular development, but I think it was only a marginal effect. Much of the technology was still being developed (like Marty Cooper's handheld cell phone) while the lawyers and lobbyists haggled over the spectrum. By the point, it was pretty clear cellular was going to happen, it was just the regulatory details that had to be worked out.
In Soviet Russia, the Beowulf cluster imagines you!
Wire recorders date from 1898, and although they weren't ever very good, they were better and safer than you describe.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The Bell system's monopoly was limited. Consider GTE and ITT, among others.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The hardest part of introducing any new technology is getting people to adopt it. There are, and have always been, tons of inventions known and used by a few people here and there. Just watch those late-night infomercials to see some examples. Invention is the easy part, getting people to adopt it in large numbers--that's the hard part.
240 mhz in a car is a far cry from a hand-holdable 800 mhz system.
Yes, you got it. In a free country, government must not be able to compel anybody to provide service to any one else. It can only be voluntary — motivated either by profit or sincere benevolence.
Of course, it would've been! When the cell-phones finally appeared, they were for "uber wealthy" as well. In 10 years they become affordable to middle class, in 20 became ubiquitous, and now they are handed-out to homeless
.
Without Capitalism to create, your beloved Socialism would not even know, what to mandate ...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Bell labs actually had video phones working in 1963. There were concerns about etiquette, combing your hair before answering the phones, junque like that. It was expensive--you neded a vidphone at both ends--and no one could see if it would ever catch on.
Now we have skype.
Hindsight is usually 20/20.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
You definitely gave me food for thought, hmm http://williamreview.com/im-vi...
http://williamreview.com/