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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."
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.
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.
...and so were cellular telephones when they first came to market. All that you needed was a scanner.
It was so easy to listen to any cell phone conversation, that website operators even setup websites allowing anyone to listen to live cell phone conversation streams in various cities.
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/investigations/investigations-into-businesses/incidents/2001/cf-dc_010917/
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
So were cell phones until almost the end of the analog era. Because of cell phones the FCC made it illegal to listen to certain frequencies that finally had been set aside for cell phones, and then made it illegal to sell scanners that could even listen to those frequencies.
The only difference with digital cell phones is that since you're encoding already, it's not exactly a burden to encrypt too, at least weakly enough that random third-parties cannot decode the communications between the phone as a transceiver and the tower as a transceiver as a matter of course.
For a time there were attempts to use spread-spectrum or spectrum-hopping to protect analog cell phone calls, but the technology didn't work as well as digital communications does.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
PCs much sooner than we did except some asshat in the 1940's said the world only needed five computers.
Problem is they would take time to warm up and were a little hot to hold to your ear.
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...
The whistle they give off when someone calls makes me think someone is making tea.
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.
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.
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Tin can phones have been around since 1667. The extent to which they were mobile depended on the length of the conduit.
Hence the rhetorical question "how long is a piece of string?" was coined.
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.
TV was not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury' in the 40's?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
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.
"Cellular" means using low powered transmitters at a high frequency and something like frequency modulation, which has a "capture effect" to create small geographic zones of reception. This enables more conversations to take place over less frequencies, particularly in built-up areas. As you move from one "cell" to another you hook up with a different base station. Not quite what radio hams were doing. If you turn up on a frequency they are already using with some new-fangled FM signal they would probably tell you to QSY or QRP in no uncertain terms.
Cell phones used analog transmissions as late as 2008. How do I know this? Because that was when my cell provider bought me a new phone so they could retire all their analog equipment. I had a "dual mode" phone then that could do digital and analog. The FCC would not allow the cell providers to get rid of their analog equipment until enough of their subscribers had digital phones. I hung on to that phone so long that not only did I get a free phone but I was paid $50 to take the free phone.
Another thing that prompted the switch were instances of high up government officials having their phone calls listened to by people with scanners.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
TV is a broadcast technology. This means a potentially unlimited number of people can be watching, only the number of stations is limited. Cellphones required a good chunk of spectrum back in the AMPS days, so the limitation was the number of simultaneous calls per tower, which wouldn't be high. 40s cellphones would be way worse, meaning it would remain a niche technology for decades, only able to serve deep-pocketed people/organizations, until better technologies such as digital cellphones came along.
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.
Do cell phone use magic pixie dust? I thought they used radio waves.
The real answer is that we did, they were called car phones. The transmitter and receiver took up most of the trunk of a normal sedan. By 1948, AT&T's network coverage extended to around 30 cities and busy sections of the major interstates on the East and West coast
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.
No, they were cell phones. Cellular phones. They transmitted and received unencrypted analog signals in small geographic cells.
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.
Maybe, but tiny vacuum tubes smaller than a thimble existed by the early 1950s. Transistors enabled radios to be "pocket-sized", but the best portable radios of the tube era were ALREADY as small as a typical 1970s-era cassette tape recorder.
Why did most CONSUMER items keep using big tubes? Tubes went bad. Large tubes were commodity items that you could easily buy at local stores, even in small towns. Subminiature tubes were expensive, proprietary, and fixing a device that used them was comparable in difficulty to replacing the broken USB port on a Nexus 7 (ie, not literally impossible... but pretty damn hard, even if you know what you're doing and have the right tools available). On the flip side, subminiature tubes also lasted a lot longer... but in the 50s, consumers EXPECTED tubes to go bad after a few years, and large tubes (based on 30+ year old technology) continued to reinforce that perception.
Put another way... if your table radio seemed to have a tube go(ing) bad, you'd open it up, pull out the tubes, take them to the store in a box, an employee would test them, and you'd go home with a new tube or two to replace the bad one(s). If your "ultraportable" radio seemed to have a tube go(ing) bad... you kept using it until it either became intolerably flaky or died outright... and then you threw it in a closet, basement, attic, or garage, where it sat gathering dust for years until you died & someone finally threw it out (kind of like older Android & Apple devices with cracked screens... not valuable enough to fix, but too expensive to throw away).
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.
Nope
http://www.tvhistory.tv/1950-5...
20 million TV sets for a population of 150 million- almost 50 million of whom were children. So about 1/5 households had TV's by 1953.
By 1959 it was over 67 million TV sets. It was explosive.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
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
Deep pocketed people that could carry 6lbs of disposable batteries.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
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.
Sure, it was possible to listen in but the important bit was that you could direct it to a specific person and have them receive it when they weren't actively listening for you. Making a phone call instead of sitting in front of a radio set and hoping they turned theirs on.
"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.
> This means a potentially unlimited number of people can be watchin
The number is large, but not unlimited. Enough TV receivers, and the effects of their antennas and even their bodies on the radio passing through them, would tend to block out the signal further away. But the effect is modest and it would take a quite large number of antennas to achieve something like a Faraday cage to block the transmission completely.
There were mobile radio services as early as the 1950s. Mostly used in cars/boats because of the weight of batteries required to power vacuum tube technology. Technically not cellular and therefore needing higher transmitter power to cover the greater distances from the user to the phone company. And they were expensive.
The limiting factor for mobile phones wasn't spectrum, it was the mass of the mobile transceiver one had to lug around. Once practical handheld transcievers shrank to something that could fit into a (large) pocket around 1970 cell service came into being in about a decade.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Or vehicles which already carry a quite large lead-acid battery, or homes that did not need land lines or for whom running copper landlines was quite expensive or even dangerous, or for whom landlines have proven vulnerable. The technology has proven useful, especially for disaster recovery where well protected, reliable cell towers have proven lifesaving for isolated people needing, or offering, help.
Deep pocketed people
Literally
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
"By 1948, AT&T's network coverage extended to around 30 cities and busy sections of the major interstates on the East and West coast"
Ahem. No interstates in 1948. There were a few miles of freeway in California and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That looks to be about it.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
So basically you are another Professor Hazlett apologist.
Jesus, yet another Prof. Hazlett apologist. Crazy days we're living.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
It's called the "Eisenhower Interstate System" for a reason :-)
Another thing that prompted the switch were instances of high up government officials having their phone calls listened to by people with scanners.
One in particular. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb...
Think Tinkerbell. Made her famous.
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...and so were cellular telephones when they first came to market. All that you needed was a scanner.
In fact, it was perfectly legal under the Communications Act of 1934 to listen to - but not repeat - communications received in any mode on any frequency.
Then Reagan Got The Government Off The Backs Of The People and signed a law that made it not merely illegal to receive cellular communications, but to sell radios capable of receiving cellular communications. Land of the Free.
Not that it did much good. Cellphones of the day tended to leak over onto my police-band radio anyway. And technically whoever blew up Newt Gringrich's reign by publishing a cell call intercepted in Gainesville, Florida should have been prosecuted, but no one was.
These days, however, more communications than not are both digitized and encrypted. That includes the public-service stuff like fire departments, public transportation, routine police work and a lot more. You can no longer hear what you're paying for or how your local/state government does its day-to-day work.
The cell-band lockout was generally easy to defeat. I had a Radio Shack scanner in which it was controlled by a jumper on the PCB -- and the jumper conveniently had a little slack in it, raising it a quarter inch above the PCB for easy snipping.
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.
Except that's not really true, we had things like the SCR-536 (AKA Handy Talkie) in WW2 that operated on batteries and had ranges in AM up to a mile on open ground. If we had these we could probably have set something up similar to a cell network in the 40s, and the handests would only have weighed a few pounds at most. Heavy by today's standards but certainly not out of the question.
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
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).
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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.
Tin can phones have been around since 1667. The extent to which they were mobile depended on the length of the conduit.
Hence the rhetorical question "how long is a piece of string?" was coined.
But... the Tin can wasn't invented until 1810
Just imagine the money to be made if people using tin can phones took the mouth pieces off and sold them as tin cans.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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.
This. Cell phones wouldn't be much further along today if they'd been introduced in the '40s. They simply would've existed for 50~60 years as rich people toys rather than 20~30.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
Yup that's how they caught Prince Charles wishing he was a Camilla's tampon! which is kind of appropriate really as when you think about it....... royal family...tampons.. both stuck up c*nts!
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."
Not that it did much good. Cellphones of the day tended to leak over onto my police-band radio anyway. And technically whoever blew up Newt Gringrich's reign by publishing a cell call intercepted in Gainesville, Florida should have been prosecuted, but no one was.
Publishing is a different matter, but the couple that actually recorded the call were prosecuted. They took a plea agreement.
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.
And technically whoever blew up Newt Gringrich's reign by publishing a cell call intercepted in Gainesville, Florida should have been prosecuted, but no one was.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... has all the details about the Newt Gingrich call intercept. Ironically, I'm from Gainesville, but never heard about this story until today.
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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?
The scanner I had, had one jumper that both unblocked the cell frequencies, AND doubled the channel memory capacity (I'm guessing it used that memory to decide which frequencies were off limits?) it was a no-brainer to cut the jumper. Especially being that it was completely legal in my jurisdiction to do so.
That said, if you've ever listened to random people's phone conversations, you'd quickly learn it's simply not interesting enough to do so. Especially if you happen to get a teenager.... But I did enjoy the extra channel capacity.
Cell phones wouldn't be much further along today if they'd been introduced in the '40s. They simply would've existed for 50~60 years as rich people toys rather than 20~30.
I completely disagree. Adoption of a technology drives development of the technology: when cellphones were adopted by more of the population, there was more development of the technology, making it smaller, more power efficient, and better featured. The same could have happened with cellphones; the development curve may have been slower (because modern cellphones have benefited from developments in other related industries such as microprocessors/computing), but it probably would have been faster than what we've experienced. In fact, earlier adoption of cellphones could have driven other technological developments much earlier than what actually happened: electronics miniaturization, batteries, digital communication, etc.
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
I don't see how the existence of a niche item could accelerate the development of all the technologies required for cell phones to be affordable. Cell phones benefited from other, mainstream industries, it wasn't driving them any more than RC planes or HAM radio were.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"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.
Cell phone adoption drove cell phone use. If rich people used them, they would get them for important people in their businesses, sparking a further need. Then regular people see how useful they are, etc. Basically how it happened in real life too.
Here I'd just about managed to get that out of my mind, and you had to bring it back...;-(
Absolutely wrong. I guess you weren't old enough to see how cellphones got adopted in our timeline and how the adoption drove the technology. They started out as expensive gadgets for rich people who wanted to always be in touch, and then for real estate agents where it was a real boon to their business to be reachable by clients while they were out looking at houses. Eventually, it became affordable to more and more people as costs came down, and then as other people saw how useful they were, demand rose, again driving the technology in a feedback cycle.
RC planes and Ham radio never had such popularity, and never had such potential. RC planes have little practical use (only now are we seeing any with drones, and that was helped a lot by them being able to hover, something only recently achievable in an RC machine and doable by any amateur), and Ham radio has zero privacy, no interface to the telephone system, and requires significant licensing which alone puts it well out of the reach of most people. Cellphones have always been useful; the only thing holding them back was cost (and for a while, size, but they had car phones way back which is still a big improvement over no mobile phone service at all, and they also had "bag phones").
Am I supposed to believe that cell phones played any meaningful role in the miniaturization and affordable production of electronics in general, and the development of lithium batteries? You may be right in terms of the development of cellular networks but that's only half of it. If you could teleport a relatively modern and functional cellular network back to the 40s, 60s, even the 80s, it wouldn't have made cell phones much more affordable or practical to the average Joe.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
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.
Alternatively, if the FCC of that day had not been so (small-c) conservative, they could have allocated the bandwidth to something relatively useless except to some mega-corporation and it would not have eventually been freed for cell use.
Someone had to do it.
Here I'd just about managed to get that out of my mind, and you had to bring it back...;-(
sorry bud...but if that heinous memory came back to me and haunt me then i had to infect other people with it!
Damn those Democrats! Even when they're the minority party they still rule the whole country!
Merritt Parkway, 1938.
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Cell technology did not become practical until it became practical to intelligently switch calls among a large number of interconnected transceiver stations. Infeasible in the 1940s and 1950s, still too expensive for anything but proof-of-concept experiments in the 1960s.
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Am I supposed to believe that cell phones played any meaningful role in the miniaturization and affordable production of electronics in general, and the development of lithium batteries?
Um, yes? The reason lithium battery tech is as advanced as it is now is purely because of cellphones, as well as some other mobile devices (laptop computers, ipods, PDAs, etc., which have largely converged to smartphones and tablets). What else would it be? Nothing else uses lithium-ion batteries as much. EVs came more recently, after the big mobile-device explosion.
And miniaturization? Are you kidding? Phones have been the biggest driver of that in the last 15 years. Go take a look at a typical laptop computer's motherboard, and then the main board of a typical smartphone. Smartphones have easily the most advanced miniaturization technology in the world now.
If you could teleport a relatively modern and functional cellular network back to the 40s, 60s, even the 80s, it wouldn't have made cell phones much more affordable or practical to the average Joe.
Who cares about the average Joe? Average Joes didn't have cellphones in the late 80s either, but cellphones did exist and were growing in adoption and popularity then. It took adoption by people with more money (or businesses willing to spend on them) to help the tech develop so that it could become more affordable. Technologies like that don't just develop all at once in some company's lab, and then enter the market at a low price point so everyone can afford them. That wasn't the case with cellphones, it wasn't the case with cars, it wasn't the case with just about anything. New stuff always starts out being expensive and having a limited market of either rich people or people willing to spend a large amount of their money on it. Have you forgotten that PCs used to cost thousands of dollars in the 80s, and that's before adjusting for inflation? An IBM PC cost a significant fraction of what a car cost back then.
You don't need to teleport a "relatively modern" cellular network back to the 40s or 60s, just the network they had back in the 80s (AMPS). They would certainly have been able to make use if it in the 60s at least. We all could have had affordable cellphones (80s-style) a decade or two earlier than we did. It's really hard to say when we would have gotten decent smartphones, but that's a bit of a separate question because smartphones are a convergence of a bunch of different technologies, not just radio communications interfacing with the existing telephone system. But we could have had workable cellphones earlier than we did. We had radiotelephones back in the 50s, after all.
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!
Nuvistors were socketed. Removal and reinsertion was easy. Testing and replacement was more difficult, even if the drugstore tube-tester had a nuvistor socket, the nuvistor probably wasn't stocked. However TV repair shops were common back then, and they would have had nuvistors because they were used in some UHF tuners.
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Wire recorders date from 1898, and although they weren't ever very good, they were better and safer than you describe.
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The Bell system's monopoly was limited. Consider GTE and ITT, among others.
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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.
The packet switching protocols started in the HAM radio community in the 70s. What AT&T was working on in the 40s was shared spectrum radio telephones. You need both techs to develop the current digital systems.
There were radio telephones going back to the 1930s but the service area was basically urban only and expensive as hell.
NRRPT/RCT
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...
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