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Post by gar on Apr 3, 2023 18:28:07 GMT
The 1st mobile phone call was made  It was made in New York from one engineer to his rival. link
It's hard to remember that for quite some time it was only a voice interaction unit before becoming a visual thing we are obsessed with today.  |
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Post by compeateropeator on Apr 3, 2023 19:42:40 GMT
Look at the size of that baby. Hahaha. No sticking that in your back pocket. Hard to believe so much has changed in 50 years, yet that seems like a lot of years ago also. 😄
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Post by tuva42 on Apr 3, 2023 20:13:09 GMT
My first thought was the devastating tornadoes that destroyed towns in Kentucky and Ohio. I was a teenager and spent the night in the neighbor's basement. But I was off by a day and a year. It was April 4, 1974.
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Sarah*H
Pearl Clutcher
Posts: 4,036 
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Post by Sarah*H on Apr 4, 2023 2:43:28 GMT
The first mobile phone call was just before my time but my dad bought two of the very first "car phones" about 12 or 13 years later. They were in big leather pouches like binoculars. And they still looked remarkably like the phone in this photo, lol! It's kind of crazy to think about because my family didn't even get cable television until after I was in college. But my uncle worked at AT&T so my dad purchased some of the very first useable desk top computers (manufactured by AT&T) and car phones available in our area. There wasn't any internet back then so the computers were used for word processing and I don't have any idea what network the phones connected to.
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Post by AussieMeg on Apr 4, 2023 3:45:28 GMT
Wow, I didn't realise it was that long ago! I worked for a telco straight out of school, in 1986. I should say, THE telco, because we were a monopoly at that stage, and still part of the public service. At that time, our sales reps only had pagers, because mobile phones weren't available. A couple of years later they all got Traveller mobile phones, AKA The Brick, which came in a big carry case. I was the first one of my friends to get a mobile phone, because we got a big discount through work. I thought I was the ant's pants!  Mine was a lot smaller than the one pictured. |
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RedSquirrelUK
Drama Llama
Posts: 6,923
Location: The UK's beautiful West Country
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Post by RedSquirrelUK on Apr 4, 2023 8:15:29 GMT
I was an ambulance volunteer 30 years ago and we had a great big black box with a telephone attached to the top by a curly cord in the ambulance. There were smaller ones available, but the boss said that one wouldn't get stolen. He was right!
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Post by bratkar on Apr 4, 2023 12:33:41 GMT
1993, newly married, and a love to travel we had a 'car phone' installed in our car. It was some crazy price per minute with roaming and not even free weekends or nights yet.... about two years later we traded that in for the 'bag phone' same plan.
I want to say it was probably around 1996 we actually had mobile phones that went with us everywhere.
Nowadays my current phone has 10 times the memory and running power as my first computer (commodore 64, in 1986).
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Post by bluebird71 on Apr 4, 2023 15:36:23 GMT
Thanks for bringing up the topic area of my PhD dissertation LOL [mobile technology and also history of video games] - I know more about mobile phone technology than I ever thought I would and when I saw the photo I immediately knew where it came from
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Post by bluebird71 on Apr 4, 2023 15:43:18 GMT
I want to say it was probably around 1996 we actually had mobile phones that went with us everywhere. Mobile phones were available earlier but 1996 is when Motorola's StarTAC, the first flip phone, became available. The issue wasn't the lack of phones but that the nationwide network wasn't big enough [here in the US]. The first commercial cellular network in the US was the 2G, which came out in 1991, I believe. It marked the transition from the 1G, which was analog, to the first digital network. 3G didn't come out until 2007, which is also when the iPhone was released |
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Post by bratkar on Apr 4, 2023 22:26:57 GMT
I want to say it was probably around 1996 we actually had mobile phones that went with us everywhere. Mobile phones were available earlier but 1996 is when Motorola's StarTAC, the first flip phone, became available. The issue wasn't the lack of phones but that the nationwide network wasn't big enough [here in the US]. The first commercial cellular network in the US was the 2G, which came out in 1991, I believe. It marked the transition from the 1G, which was analog, to the first digital network. 3G didn't come out until 2007, which is also when the iPhone was released So my memory isn’t shot as bad as i thought:). Funny after being married 30 years and never having kids the years start to run together. I try to separate them by events but even then those are starting to blur. Except for our IPhones we still have all the phones prior to that. But I still have the original iPod. And a lot of other apple toys 😉 |
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Post by bluebird71 on Apr 5, 2023 17:33:21 GMT
Mobile phones were available earlier but 1996 is when Motorola's StarTAC, the first flip phone, became available. The issue wasn't the lack of phones but that the nationwide network wasn't big enough [here in the US]. The first commercial cellular network in the US was the 2G, which came out in 1991, I believe. It marked the transition from the 1G, which was analog, to the first digital network. 3G didn't come out until 2007, which is also when the iPhone was released So my memory isn’t shot as bad as i thought:). Funny after being married 30 years and never having kids the years start to run together. I try to separate them by events but even then those are starting to blur. Except for our IPhones we still have all the phones prior to that. But I still have the original iPod. And a lot of other apple toys 😉 Oh the subjects of my research study sometimes couldn't remember things, or even general dates. A couple times they definitely remembered using something at a certain time when the thing hadn't even been manufactured yet. It happens! But I loved probing their memories of video games and mobile phones. |
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It was made in New York from one engineer to his rival.
Mine was a lot smaller than the one pictured. 
