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Handhelds Hardware

30 Years of Cell Phone Calls 134

Posted by michael from the ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring-ring dept.
freitasm writes "30 years ago, 3 April 1973, Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call, to a rival scientist. The NY Times has an article about the "crime scene". Dr Cooper now works as CEO of Arraycom." There's also a story on siliconvalley.com.
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30 Years of Cell Phone Calls More

30 Years of Cell Phone Calls

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  • 2003? (Score:2, Funny)

    by nurightshu ( 517038 )

    30 years ago was 2003? Jesus, somebody must have signed me up for a subscription, because I'm getting stories from the distant future!

  • sigh (Score:5, Funny)

    by Joe the Lesser ( 533425 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:08AM (#5651816) Homepage Journal
    Unfortunatly, Cooper made the call from a nearby movie theatre during a dramatic scene, thus being not only the first cell phone caller, but the first guy with cell phone to create feelings of distain and loathing from the surrounding populace.

  • gloating (Score:2, Funny)

    by nath_o_brien ( 608347 )

    Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call, to a rival scientist

    Do you think his first words were "ha ha! beat you!"?

    • Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call, to a rival scientist

      Don't you realize that this scenery implies that the rival scientist had to get the cellphone first, Dr Martin Cooper must have been second to be able to make the first call...

  • First call? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Penguuu ( 263703 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:09AM (#5651824)
    So what did they talk about in first call? Just called to another, and shouted "FIRST CALL!"?
  • Did it come with a trolley to push it around on?

    Yes, I realise it was an impressive feat at the time, but considering my phone is less than a tenth of the weight of that, it seems impossibly heavy.
    • One of my university tutors, a Ph.D. in circuit design, told the students about the first working GSM phone, made with standard logic components. It was, I think, some 4 or 5 heavy boxes, about 50cm x 50 cm x 50 cm. And you did need a trolly unless you were participating in "the Strongest Man in the World Contest".

      But, of course, they only made one of those....
    • They don't mention it in the article but Martin Cooper is only 2 feet tall. The phone he's holding is actually a mere six inches long.
    • Heh, that looks like a handy-dandy model, for the time! I remember most cell phones 15 years ago were far bulkier than that: a black box the size of a small car battery, with a long antenna and a handle to carry it around, with a separate handset connected by a curly wire. (Here's a picture [rigpix.com])
  • First annoying ringtone.
    First person to make a phoner call during a film.
    First person to say "I'm on the train loudly for the benefit of everyone else to hear"
    First person top get their credit card details stolen because they didn't realise that anyone sitting nearby can hear everything they say.

  • They don't make 'em like they used to (Score:5, Funny)

    by kinnell ( 607819 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:13AM (#5651846)
    Those were the days - cell phones which didn't get lost down the back of the couch and could double as a lethal weapon. Not like the girly things you get these days. Back in those days, the designers understood that a cell phone is an extension of your manhood, and made them with presence. And they call it progress! I don't know....

  • Cell Phones Then and Now (Score:4, Funny)

    by nath_o_brien ( 608347 ) <nath@nathans-domain-name.org.uk> on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:19AM (#5651868) Homepage

    Dyna-Tac (1973)
    Features: Talk, listen, dial

    Really, when it comes down to it, do you need anything else? Sure, text messaging is a bonus and games are fun(ish) when you're stuck in a traffic jam but you only need to be able to dial, talk and listen to ruin someone's cinema experience.

    • Re:Cell Phones Then and Now (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Tell me about it. My Philips phone "reboots" intermittently, beeps all the time when stuff happens, runs out of batteries in... i dunno but it sure doesn't last a work week. I couldn't care less about text messaging and auto-complete and ring tones and hearing it go "beep" every time i touch a button. All i want is a small address book, a regular ring, and a battery that'll last a week or two (preferably longer). Are there really that many people who want all these extra features? I know all the kids d

      • I've got a Motorola T720 and to tell me it has a low battery, it lights up its two screens and beeps. Every few minutes. There is something very wrong with that I'm sure.

      • Gee, I still carry a Startac 7760, and don't buy the inbound SMS

        It's a nice plain phone. It sits in my pocket, and has for oh, 4 or 5 years now. It rings when it's supposed to, and gets my calls out. It could use a new antenna. Other than that, I have NO problems with it

        Sometimes old is good

      • My Ericsson A2618s has such a bad user interface, I've thought of writing a paper pointing out its flaws from the perspective of HCI.

        One of its amazing features is that the longer a text message gets, the longer it takes for it to respond to letter selection. (No predictive text, thank God.) I've easily managed to get 10 to 12 characters ahead of it. Presumable every time it adds a character to a string, it copies the whole string to a buffer one character longer and then appends the new char...

        That's

    • Up until recently I had an older cell phone that did not have all these fancy features. The only reason I upgraded was for digital reception. Sometimes, however, I wish I still had the old one. I could hear better and it had a better battery life. They just don't make them like they used to. Even the phone I have now, which is about a year old, is considered ancient. What ever happened to KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid)?
  • Hello this is Dr. Cooper. Can you call me back please because my batteries are running emp

  • I'm on the train......

    With apologies to Private Eye.
  • Well I never realized these things were that old. I remember in the Netherlands we first had the kermit (green phones) that had to be very near to access points. Back then we used to laugh at people making a cellular call.

    With the arrival of Libertel (now Vodafone) in 1995 I took my first subsscription. I remember getting the phone for donating a small amount (about $10) to the red cross.

    The first few phones were big, heavy and had very little battery-life compared to modern cellphones

    Wow this sure bring

  • 30 years of _american_ phone calls... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:23AM (#5651884)
    In Finland, building of commercial wireless ARP (car radio phone) network started in 1969 and network was in use a year later.

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

    More information about telecommunication history can be found here [info.uta.fi].

    • An American failure..... (Score:5, Informative)

      by harriet nyborg ( 656409 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:53AM (#5652026)
      Cellular is an Anerican failure, not a Scandinavian success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      i.e., We did it to ourselves.

      • Standards are good though. Doesn't that mean we should have a lot of them?

      • And the sick thing of all this is that while we Americans laud "choice" and "competition," teeny-tiny countries like Slovenia have 5 providers for a 2-million head market. Calls are dirt cheap (often free for intra-provider) and coverage is amazing. When you go into a Mobitel shop, you get help and clear, understandable plans like "calls are 10 tolars a minute and one tolar Mobitel to Mobitel. You don't even have to get a plan and still have a full featured phone (SMS, voicemail, bank account access, web, e
      • America invented cellular, but our pro-competitive government thought it would be a good idea to let a variety of 2G standards (DAMPS, CDMA, Nextel) to compete against each other in the market, and killed it.

        It's a bit difficult to make a case that the market is dead given that roughly half the population owns cell phones.

        And it was the FCC, not Reagan, who (correctly, IMO) decided that it should not impose a technology on the market but that it could and should let market forces determine which technol
        • And it was the FCC, not Reagan, who (correctly, IMO) decided that it should not impose a technology on the market but that it could and should let market forces determine which technology won out.

          Hey you- don't you dare get in the way of Democratic Reagan-bashing! How are they ever going to get the history books falsified if you're going to keep correcting them!

    • I also had trouble believing some claims in the article because of remembering the early NMT networks. However, the article seems to really be about handheld mobile phones, and I am not sure when the first truly handhelds for NMT came out. I remember those systems with a special unit to lug around to which your reciever was connected. They were most appropriately put in a car, and would only look dorky for a yuppie to bring to a bar...

      When did the first handhelds arrive in NMT?

    • Correct me if I'm wrong, but ARP was not a cellular network, but a semi-automatic network with a bunch of base stations and uplink channels.

      A similar car phone network, but smaller than ARP, was in place in Chicago during the 1930s. Al Capone used a car phone -- but not a CELLULAR phone.

      This article is not about car phones, it's about CELLULAR phones.

      BIG difference. Non-cellular car phones are, for all intents and purposes, more powerful versions of the wireless phone you have in your house hooked to a P

  • The First Call (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:23AM (#5651886)
    Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call, to a rival scientist.

    ring...ring...

    Hello?

    Hear this byotch? It's the sound of me 0wnz0ring you!

  • It may well be 30 years since the first cellphone call, but it's three years since the NYT article was written . . . couldn't you find something a little more up to date?!

    P

  • Talking while driving (Score:3, Funny)

    by red_dragon ( 1761 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:30AM (#5651924) Homepage

    "30 years ago, 3rd April 2003 Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call"...

    It is also apparently obvious that Dr. Cooper placed that call while driving a DeLorean.

  • hmm (Score:1)

    by Epistax ( 544591 )
    30 years ago, 3rd April 2073 Dr Martin Cooper placed the first cellular phone call, to a rival scientist... ironically they were both driving SUV's and crashed into eachother... and it was good...
  • GSM is a digital standard in Europe, and many other countries. "GSM for Iraq!" by the way :-|

    GSM [gsmworld.com].
    SMS/MMS [europemedia.net].

    Some of my tutors have seen the logic port prototypes of the first GSM phone, and that took several trollies to cart around.
    Then they were able to make a portable version. Well, portable, I guess it weighed over 10 kg, and was carried in a "backpack" configuration. Like those field radioes you see in Vietnam war movies, only twice as big and heavy.
    I saw a picture of one guy on a testing trip with tha
    • One opf my friends commented that the GSM spec formed one of his office walls. Despite the precise specification, different manufacturers still manage to interpret aspects of it differently.
  • They compare the old phone to a "new" (1999) Nokia 8860. I still have one of those - it is nice and shiny, but wasn't that terrific a phone - but I guess still better than a brick from 1973.

    I should pop over to EBay and see if anyone is still buying the Nokia 8860s - I never use mine anymore since I have the 8890 now.
  • Well, considering the olden-days them things are about the size of a 4-year old child (and just as heavy) - and these days we have wrist phones as per previous /. story (ok ok, it's only PHS - but real cellphones are getting pretty easy to lose now - look at one of those ultra-thin samsung ones that Sprint offer), anybody (conan-the-early-adopters, especially) figure that the cellphone size (volume, let's say) follows or exceeds moore's law?

    I would think it should - but anyhoo...
    • Futurama had an episode where Amy got a call on her cell phone. It was about the size of a fingernail, and she had to hold it to her mouth to speak, then move it to her ear to hear.

      The charger was about the size of a standard beige PC.

      Yay progress.
  • I remeber my first cell phone. It was analgo and was the Nokia Ringo (Ring-Go). Absolutly horrible phone and was like carrying around a small brick. Now many years down the line I've got a Nokia 7650 which can take photos, texting, is digital and is still the size of a small brick :)

    Of course I could just get a Nokia 7250 but thats not the point

    Rus

  • Maybe first in America... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 03, 2003 @09:58AM (#5652050)
    Actually Ericsson and The Swedish Telecom developed a cellphone prototype back in 1950 and Sture Lauhrén made the first call on the 3rd of December.

    In 1955 the first automatic mobile phone system was launched in Stockholm to the public.
    • are yu sure that's a CELLULAR phone network ather than just an old fashioned RADIO phone system? Radio telephones were available in the 50s in the UK too...

      as for me, my first phone was a Sony CMH 333 (Mars Bar) which I think I got in '90 or '91 - though my father had a SIMPLEX TACS Motorola car phone several years before that. I now use a Nokia 8910 - it having just displaced my old Ericsson T-28s because Ercsson don't make gorgeous phones anymore with covered keypads, whereas Nokia do...
    • If you read american news, americans are always first at everything. It's no use trying to correct this, because people are so used to it, that they simply wont believe you.
    • Every time I talk about an American innovation, a European always tells me that they were actually first. Transistors, integrated circuits, televisions, you name it!

      The facts are usually twisted to give one country the credit over another. In this case, The Swedish Telecom likely had a radio system patched into land-lines. Can you verify that it was truly a cellular system?
  • ..shouldnt his rival be honored for having invented a device that could recieve the call?

    That would be the hard part.....
  • They failed to mention it in the article, but since the DynaTac was such a huge and priceless piece, it came with its own anti-theft measures... Simply take the phone, throw it at the head of the thief, and watch him go down from the impact of that huge thing.

  • No, they are about 20 years late. (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    3 december 1950 was the first automatik cell phone call made by Sture Lauhrén.

    An recent interview with Sture is availble here (in swedish) http://www.aftonbladet.se/it/0001/03/mobil.html

    1955 Stockholm, Sweden has a working cell phone system.

    More on the topic can be found here (in english :-)

    http://neptunus.approach.se/pdf/1_2001_The_Roots .p df

    • I just read your pdf and, interesting though it was, what was described was the first AUTOMATIC (ie operator-less) radio telephone system, not the first CELLULAR radio telephone system.

      Mind you, Americans always says they invented things first, so it could well be that the Slashdot story's a load of bollox...
      • still, i find that it took 20 something years to make the 1st cell phone call a bit of BS. They had been around since '47 - just not in much use, and not in the the celluar structure we think of today until '68. Do a little research and the idea that the first cell phone call was mde in '73 is quite laughable

  • cell phone?? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by lfourrier ( 209630 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @10:11AM (#5652150)
    what is interesting with cell phone is not the portable phone, it is the cell(s).
    So when was the first cell boundary crossing without dropping the conversation?
    That would be a date to remember.
  • "HELLO? NO, I'M IN AN ART GALLERY. No, IT'S ALL RUBISH. OK, CHOW!"

    (lower caps to pass the filter - muster)

  • Early "cell" phones (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Alioth ( 221270 ) <no@spam> on Thursday April 03, 2003 @10:26AM (#5652249) Journal
    My Dad used to be a salesman for Nacanco (a can making company). In about 1980, they equipped their sales force with car-phones. They had a whole fleet of Ford Cortinas with (presumably at the time) very expensive car phones!

    The car phone looked a bit like a CB with a normal telephone handset attached instead of a CB mike. You didn't have a phone number as such, you had a call-sign. My Dad's was "Amber zero eighty six". You had to manually change the cell you were in with a switch on the front of the CB-like unit. The units came with a map to tell you where you should switch cells.

    The bit you talked into was like a normal phone handset connected to the CB-like bit. Except it was half duplex and had a push-to-talk switch, so you were encouraged to say "Over" after you were done saying something to the person at the other end. The phones were incapable of dialing a number - you picked them up, and spoke to an operator who dialled the call for you, and then called you back when the other end answered. The operator couldn't tell who was calling - you had to give them your callsign so they could call you back.

    The phones were made to ring (as far as I could tell - I wasn't very old at the time) by some kind of analogue tone signalling broadcast. When the phone recognised its tone sequence, it'd start to ring (well, beep loudly actually). The AirCall operator would then connect you to whoever called (or the party you were calling, if you were trying to make an outgoing call).

    It was trivial to use the equipment to listen to everyone elses calls, too :-) I think these carphones were more "radio phones" than cell phones that we think of today.
    • I can't see why they didn't just use good old CB radios. Sure, 7W isn't much power, but with good stations with properly calibrated antennas they could have gotten killer range. If you're only half-duplex, a telephone style handset is a nuisance. I suppose that's necessary for privacy.
    • You had to manually change the cell you were in with a switch on the front of the CB-like unit. The units came with a map to tell you where you should switch cells. ... it was half duplex and had a push-to-talk switch

      And people think just talking on a modern cell phone is dangerous!

  • And tomorrow marks... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Hershmire ( 41460 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @11:13AM (#5652595) Homepage
    the anniversary of the first drunk cell phone call at 3AM to Cooper's ex-girlfriend.
  • To his rival: "Dr. Watson, don't come here. I don't want you."
  • One side of the phone call to the rival scientist: Eh? No, it works well What? Well my brain does feel a bit warm now you mention it. Why are you laughing? Really? You're working on some kind of oven instead of the cell phone now? Look I'm going under a bridge, talk later.
  • Ya, and the signal coverage at the spot the first call was made from is probably still spotty...

  • Analog cellular phones... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @12:30PM (#5653165) Homepage Journal
    They didn't cause interference to hearing aids like mine. These days, many digital cellular phones interfere my hearing aids. :(

  • First cell phone call? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cruciform ( 42896 ) on Thursday April 03, 2003 @01:34PM (#5653755) Homepage
    "The person you are trying to call is out of the service area at this time. Please try your call again later."
  • The first cell phone call was this:

    "lo! -'m -alling -ou -rom my -ell phone! Can -ou speak -ouder? -'m -aving -rouble -earing -ou! I'll -all ou -ack -rom a land -ine!"

  • "No, it's not a pay phone, it's a CELLULAR PHONE!"

    -the only scene from "That '80s Show" that anyone has ever seen.

  • The more things change... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Sway ( 153291 )
    And according to this article [cnn.com], the Designated Hitter is also celebrating it's 30th birthday. Even then it was the geeks vs. the jocks!

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