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Our Reliance on Cellphones Began 35 Years Ago This Week (qz.com)
With 95% of Americans owning a cellphone, it can feel like we've been calling, texting, and tweeting on the go forever. But the infrastructure supporting our cellphones has actually not been around that long. From a report: While we're now on 4G networks, it was only 35 years ago this week that Ameritech (now part of AT&T) launched 1G, or the first commercial cell phone network. That network, called the Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS), went online on October 13, 1983, allowing people in the Chicago area to make and receive mobile calls for the first time. Ameritech president Bob Barnett, who made the first call, decided to make the historic moment count by ringing Alexander Graham Bell's grandson. A little more than a year later, UK's Vodafone hosted its first commercial call on New Year's Day. Israel's Pelephone followed suit in 1986, followed by Australia in 1987.
Cellphone technology had been around for quite a while before that. AMPS was in development for around 15 years, and engineers made the first mobile call on a prototype network a decade before the first commercial network call. It took that long to troubleshoot the various hardware, software, and radio frequency issues associated with setting up a fully functional commercial network.
Cellphone technology had been around for quite a while before that. AMPS was in development for around 15 years, and engineers made the first mobile call on a prototype network a decade before the first commercial network call. It took that long to troubleshoot the various hardware, software, and radio frequency issues associated with setting up a fully functional commercial network.
It did not become generally affordable to the masses until around early 2009 when we saw the beginnings of unlimited cell usage at a fixed price point courtesy of Boost Mobile. In January of 2009, Boost introduced an unlimited phone plan for 50.00 and it touched off a revolution. Before that time, plans were metered and expensive.
I remember shows from the 50s that had this guy with one in his car.
NMT was active years before any of the systems mentioned in the summary, as were some other systems.
Fuck off. Nobody in their right mind would own, wear, use or speak to anyone who wears one of these satanic surveillance devices. Have fun getting blackmailed and tracked 24/7, you dumb fucking sheep.
I still don't own a cell phone. I'm like Raymond fucking Reddington - I let my servant, whom I choose to call "SuperKendall", for sentimental reasons, carry one of several dozen burner phones which I use in the event that I want to order some chateaubriand and a nice Richebourg Grand Cru 1949 from my local watering hole.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Mobilephones
FALSE.
*Your* reliance on cell phones began 30 years ago.
*I* can survive without one.
We are still not 100% reliant on cell phones. Most businesses and homes still use land lines. A very significant chunk of people are cutting the cord. But they are not even the majority yet.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
NMT was operational in Northern Europe 37 years ago. And it wasn't the first system
Our reliance on clean water started ... ...
Our reliance on indoor plumbing started
Advances that lead to better lives for people are awesome. Reliance on them is a good thing.
October 1 1981 ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Mobile_Telephone
Article and dopey blurb make this sound like gee-gosh it wasn't so long ago. Well no, it isn't, relative to any larger timescale you wish to pick. But almost every poster here lived in a time when cellphones weren't ubiquitous even though cell networks existed.
35 years is still an "eternity" of progress in modern industrial microelectronics. 35 years ago a 4G network would have been practically impossible to build.
TFA mentions 1G cellular service beginning in the USA (1983), UK (1984), Israel (1986) and Australia (1987.)
No mention of Canada, where cellular service went live on Canada Day (July 1) 1985.
I suspect there are other omissions.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
With 95% of Americans owning a cellphone...
Source for that? I'm kinda doubting it's that high given general age distribution.
Actually, only 40% of US households still had landlines as of late 2015. It’s almost certainly a smaller percentage now.
https://www.digitaltrends.com/...
#DeleteChrome
My mom worked second shift and had a long drive home, my dad got her a car phone in (about) 1990.
Here is the German Wikipedia article about 1G, or what we called it, the "B" net.
We called it the B net, because before that, we had the A net, which started in 1958!
I wouldn't be surprised if the US had similar systems during similar times too. And pretty much every other country with our level of technology.
In any case, TFS us one huge heap of revisionist history bullshit.
The AT&T Tech Channel under the AT&T Archives section has a cool video regarding AMPS service on youtube.com.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My first cell phone was a car phone in 1990 in Canada.
The cost was $30/month for a three year term plus (I believe) $57 for the radio license and something like $200 for car installation.
Coverage was all through Ontario for about 200 minutes a month. I can't remember what happened if you went over but I think it was around $0.30 per minute.
I still have that cell phone number - it is probably the second most constant thing in life (my first being my Social Insurance Number - Canadian version of SS).
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
I do carry one (when I remember), and find it useful sometimes, but I will never be reliant on it. When they first came into common usage, I started
refering to them as electronic leashes, and now they are also electronic tracking devices. I don't need that.
The cell phone showed up when I got a real job...actually when I got my second real job. You could go to lunch. People took messages and you could call them back with no hurt feelings and having digested lunch. You could go on vacation. Calls on vacation were tough to get, especially at the beach or in another country. You could go to sleep. No one would send you a message or call you after hours in 99% of situations. I still get crap from family and friends if I leave my phone in another room or the car. Yes, there are benefits, but the absolute loss of alone time or solitude isn't worth it. Also like most advances, the only benefit was had before the entire US moron population got on the web and then the trash got Samsung smartphones.....
Hmm, Motorola invented it long before most of you little kids were born. Now get off my lawn...
"The NMT network was opened in Sweden and Norway in 1981, and in Denmark and Finland in 1982. Iceland joined in 1986. However, Ericsson introduced the first commercial service in Saudi Arabia on 1 September 1981 to 1,200 users, as a pilot test project, one month before they did the same in Sweden."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... NMT (Nordisk MobilTelefoni or Nordiska MobilTelefoni-gruppen, Nordic Mobile Telephony in English) is the first fully automatic cellular phone system. It was specified by Nordic telecommunications administrations (PTTs) and opened for service on 1 October 1981 as a response to the increasing congestion and heavy requirements of the manual mobile phone networks: ARP (150 MHz) in Finland, MTD (450 MHz) in Sweden and Denmark, and OLT in Norway.
When they where available the first time, we laughed how only idiots and people who thought they where important would be using them.
35 years later: It looks that we where right. (Yes, I am an idiot as well).
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The first time I used a mobile phone and a computer was in 1975.
It was military technology, called RITA, developed by the French, Spanish and Belgian armies and also bought/used by the American army.
The tech was actually what would later (1991) be called "2G" (i.e. like GSM): the signal was transmitted digitally (1G was analog) and scrambled. The exchange centrals were powered by MITRA mini computers in fixed locations or on trucks: they could literally roll out the network.
I have seen two models of those phones: one had a battery which could be mounted in a jeep, the other had a huge backpack for the batteries.
Really surprised that the first cell call was not to order pizza.
My boss bought the entire service department the dyna-tac phones to supplement the cell phone since they charged you by the minute, plus, the battery didn't last long. MY first owned phone was the motorola flip phone that had the huge piece that flipped open to reveal the keys. Then I went for the analog Star-Tac, which was SUPER tiny compared to the previous phones, then the digital star-tac, then the V60 and then graduated to the PDA phones until 2010 when I moved up to the smartphone with the HUGE (at the time) Dell Streak 5, with a "whopping" 5" screen.
Clearly this article must be wrong. After being assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh in 1982, Christine Ford says she called someone on her cell phone. We must believe victims of sexual assault! So clearly cell phones were in wide enough usage that teenagers had them before this article claims the first US network went live.
I live in the Boston Mass area in the 1970's and my dad's brother was into electronics. In 1976 he had assembled a large walkie-talkie from a Heath Kit that switched between 427MHz and 435Mhz with a mechanical switch that had 7 different frequencies. It had a keypad on the bottom of it that would dial a phone number if you had switched to a band not in use and pressed the key button. It used repeaters all throughout the Boston area. He would come over to our house and show my mom and dad how it worked. I had thought my uncle was magical.
It was kind of a weird device because you could switch to a band in use and listen to the entire conversation. Every time by uncle would come over I would ask if I could listen in on it. He would let me listen for about 2 minutes and then turn it off.
In 1977 we moved to Atlanta Georgia and my uncle had given me this walkie-talkie device because he said that it was too expensive to operate any more. My uncle was also leaving the Boston area and probably had no use for it also. I still have this device today. I used to power it up just to scan the frequencies. I used to go driving around with it well after high school in the middle to late 1980's and noticed that stores like Kmart, Book Nook and even Radio Shack were using the frequencies in their stores. In the early 1990s I went to work for a warehouse company that used a band of this cellphone like walkie-talkie to talk to all the different warehouses in the state of Georgia. It worked for listening to the conversation but I couldn't talk back as I believed it used a different frequency to transmit on.
So in 1976 there was a limited use commercial cell phone like service in Boston Mass, except it wasn't using cell phones. Who the company was I have no idea. I have no idea how long before 1976 it was in existence too. It could have been several years for all I knew.
Worth mentioning:
https://www.ece.iastate.edu/profiles/donald-linder/
We had the Motorola Mac-Tac, on our shelves and drawers. I didn't know you could make a phone call with the stuff; turns our expectations were too low!
Mobile telephones existed back in the 40's. AMPS was just another step in a long series of technologies and approaches that runs continuously back to the end of the second world war. By 1948, Bell had wireless car telephone service in 80 cities, and was handling over almost 150,000 calls a month. Early phones were naturally very large, and required the space and power of an automobile to operate, and early systems were little more than radio links to the local PSTN, but either way, it's not really fair to say that mobile phone dependence "started" in the mid-80's when 40 some years prior, there were about half as many mobile phone users as television sets in the US.
The line in the sand for when mobile phone *dependence* started is much more recent, basically the point in which mobile phones became suitable replacements for land lines, and market penetration was deep enough that mobile phone ownership became expected. That's some point in the early to mid-00's.