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All that I could do on that 1993 bag phone was talk

Country Roads

My wife and I purchased new cell phones recently. We had tried one of the companies that promotes their lower rate products to seniors. I enjoyed the lower cost but was frustrated when I couldn’t get a signal in rural Iowa and, on occasion, couldn’t make a call in a metro area.

The new service costs more but we haven’t been without a signal or service yet.

Whenever I have to deal with mobile telephone technology I am reminded of a sixth grade reader story that told of a doctor who had a telephone in his car. I had never heard of such in 1960 but I loved electronics and was fascinated with the concept.

During the next two decades I became more familiar with mobile telephone technology but never imagined I would ever have a phone in my own car. It was expensive.

Then, in the late ’70s, I began reading about cell phone technology which promised to make wireless telephones a reality for the masses. The concept got its name from the way the system divides a service area into many cells ̶ each served by a low power base radio transmitter and receiver ̶ and calls are transferred from base station to base station as a user travels from cell to cell.

In 1981 the Federal Communications Commission adopted rules which created a commercial cellular radio telephone service and the cell phone industry was born! The system was quickly embraced by the business community and within four years there were 345,000 cell phones in use in the United States. By early 1998 the number reached 50 million and the estimated number of cell phones in use in the U.S. today is 266 million.

Worldwide there are more mobile devices in use than there are people.

The history of using radio signals to communicate from automobiles actually goes back to 1921 when the Detroit Police Department began using communication radios in their cars.

The first attempt at a public mobile telephone system took place in St. Louis in 1945. The unsophisticated equipment, however, experienced interference problems. Two years later, a public mobile telephone system was initiated along a highway from New York to Boston.

This cumbersome and expensive mobile telephone system grew slowly through the ’50s with each call having to be handled by a special mobile telephone operator. A new system which eliminated the need for “push-to-talk” operation and which allowed mobile customers to dial their own calls was introduced in 1964. More channels were authorized in 1969 and mobile service was standardized throughout the country.

The cellular telephone system was conceived by AT&T in 1947 but the technology did not exist to make it a reality. AT&T prodded the slow-moving FCC to open up frequencies to make cell service available and to provide an incentive to develop the new technology. The FCC finally budged in 1968.

In 1977 Illinois Bell was authorized to build and operate a developmental cellular system in Chicago where more than 2,000 trial customers began testing the system in 1978.

The FCC gave the concept its final approval in 1981 and the rest is history.

I purchased my first cellphone in 1993. It was a big, heavy “bag phone” with an external antenna and required inputting a code whenever I passed from one cell company’s tower system to another. Our new phones slip into a shirt pocket. The bag phone’s basic plan offered only 30 “free” minutes. Today’s basic plan offers unlimited talk and texts.

Our new phones have many more bells and whistles than we need but we’re both having fun learning about them. Though I still prefer to shoot photos with my DSLR camera the phone camera takes amazingly good photographs. Checking email and Facebook while waiting for an appointment is quite handy. In addition, I can watch movies, listen to music, read books and find the nearest Starbucks.

All I could do on that 1993 bag phone was talk. I guess that’s all I needed to do in the first place.

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