Mobile Phone Turns 40??

[CP/M User]

This was on the 6pm News tonight?

They failed to disclose what the Mobile Phone was (Make/Model), nor show any original B&W (yes Australia was still in B&W TV mode in 1973!), of this phone and instead opted to show some 80s footage of the brick they had from that period. But really in '73, did the original Mobile Phone useless because there was no Phone Towers for it to pick up, or was that part of the reason why they were the size of bricks in order to have the tower stuck to your head to give you Brain Cancer or something. I guess it would be good if that was the case in one way, cause that would mean you be in a bad reception area and still have the Tower to send out a call instead of relying on something which cannot get out cause of a blind-spot issue. :D

 

[Tor]

Motorola.

From their history archive:

"APRIL 2013 - 40 years ago
World's First Portable Cellular Demonstration On April 3, 1973, Motorola publicly demonstrated the world’s first portable cellular telephone and system. The first public calls using Motorola DynaTAC (DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) technology occurred in New York City."

https://www.motorola.com/us/consumers/About_Motorola-History/About_Motorola-History,en_US,pg.html

-Tor

 

[RickNel]

Of course the first cellular call was not the first mobile telephony. There were systems called "trunked radio" relay mobile phones decades before that - usually seen as car phones in luxury limousines. So big, the working parts (including a valve radio transciever) would be located in the car boot. Cellular systems were far more efficient, but require vastly greater infrastructure investment by the telcos. This only became good business once government broke up the old phone monopolies. New investors drove the rollouts, while the old monopolies invested only as much as they had to in order to protect market share. Some lost out completely, others crushed the newcomers.

It seems common American usage to call all mobile phones "cell phones". In other parts of the English-speaking world we still call them mobiles.

Rick

 

[CP/M User]

Interesting, so it's kind of like comparing to when the Internet first began to when it became more mainstream in the community I'm guessing. :D