We Could Have Had Cellphones Four Decades Earlier (reason.com) 263
_Sharp'r_ writes: Professor Thomas Hazlett of Clemson University analyzed the history of wireless spectrum and concluded the technology was known and available for cellphones in the 40s, but there was no spectrum available. Based on assumptions cellphones would always be luxury goods without mass appeal, significant spectrum for divisible cellular networks wasn't legally usable until the early 80s. Instead, the unused spectrum was reserved for the future expansion of broadcast TV to channels 70-83. Here's an excerpt from the report: "When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.' This view -- that this would be a niche service for a tiny user base -- persisted well into the 1980s. 'Land mobile,' the generic category that covered cellular, was far down on the FCC's list of priorities. In 1949, it was assigned just 4.7 percent of the spectrum in the relevant range. Broadcast TV was allotted 59.2 percent, and government uses got one-quarter."
It would have been for an elite (Score:5, Insightful)
Without modern miniaturization, spread-spectrum, and modern data compression, it would have been for an elite. We are lucky it wasn't rolled out in the 40's because it would have been a nickel-plated vacuum tube thing, and allocated to high-payers before the technology to allocate it widely existed.
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds to me like it would have been a technology integrated into luxury automobiles. We already saw other tech like 12" phonographs in luxury automobiles, so it's not exactly a stretch to imagine such a thing being popular for businessmen in sufficiently lofty jobs where better communications would make for more decisions. On top of that automobiles have had generators or alternators since the nineteen-teens, when Cadillac adopted a Delco starter/generator unit, so something of a modern electrical system existed. I remember Dad's '40 Buick having a 6V generator, not the most sophisticated of devices, but it would have been enough to power a two-way radio like a cellular phone.
Early phones would have been huge, but as the usefulness was demonstrated companies would have sought to make them smaller. They might still have essentially remained carphones until the integrated-circuit era, but that doesn't mean that no one would have had them.
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We already saw other tech like 12" phonographs in luxury automobiles,
Well that's kind of a cool thing I didn't know about.
Re: It would have been for an elite (Score:2)
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Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:5, Informative)
NO
It was the transistor which meant a radio transmitter could be smaller than 2 cubic feet, and cost less than a Harley-Davidson bike.
Evidently, some people were born yesterday (or clickbait).
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure that both of those things are necessary (and neither of them, separately, is sufficient) in order to transform the idea of a "car phone" into what we think of as "mobile phones" today. Transistors allowed us to get to pocket-sized, battery-powered devices; cellular allowed us to get more calls into a given spectrum, so more than a dozen people could be using their mobile phones at the same time in the same city.
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:4, Informative)
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Basically the same tech that was in ship-to-shore...
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I think of "modern batteries" as lithium ion or nickle-metal hydride. In the 40's they would have had to use led-acid or nickel-cadmium. I think the lack of transistors would still be the bigger issue though (pun not originally intended, but readily accepted).
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Given the vastly more limited options(both for handsets and for making efficient use of spectrum) in 1947, I find it rather hard to imagine how such phones would have been anything but stratospherically e
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The existence of MTS was one of the reasons cites in the article for why the FCC dragged its feet on allocating spectrum for cellphones.
Cellphones had massive advantages over MTS which didn't seem to be noticed. The biggest one was why we call them cellphones, because they talked to a local cell using low power instead of trying to broadcast across the city on high power and stepping on everyone else.
That's why cellphones took off, but MTS remained expensive and only capable of a small number of users at a
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How Russia did it in the 1960's Altai (mobile telephone system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
B-Netz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] that replaced A-Netz in West Germany.
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If you read the article (I know, this is /.), then you'd read about the huge technological difference between MTS (essentially radio to one point in the city) and cellphones (talking to local cells hooked up to the phone system).
There's a reason MTS was so expensive and rare and Cellphones aren't.
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They did what they could with the tech of the day. Other nations did have to think of cell issues and moving from cell to cell.
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:5, Insightful)
IMTS isn't the same as MTS. Also, the reason why MTS was so expensive and rare is because in the 1940s the technology simply wasn't there to run such a system without hugely expensive equipment weighing 80 pounds. Reason's argument that it's the Government's fault for not allocating the spectrum just doesn't fly; the UHF frequencies they're talking about are, if anything, harder to operate on than the VHF frequencies used by MTS. Similarly, the technology to do handoff between cells and automatic frequency selection and dialling didn't exist yet either. Both MTS and IMTS were actually right at the bleeding edge of what was possible when they were introduced - bear in mind that IMTS predated the availability of ICs and MTS that of transistors, while cellular handsets were complex enough to need microprocessors.
It's important to remember that Reason magazine has an ideological opposition to government regulation and indeed government in general that drives a lot of their reporting.
Re:It would have been for bodybuilders (Score:3)
Even the simplest bare-minimum function (making calls) would require a system the size of a house. In the early 40's, it was virtually impossible to reliably build anything that ran above about 50 mhz in mass-production, forget *890* mhz. There were AM "apex" broadcasts in the 50 mhz range, and early FM was around there, too, because that was the best they could do.
Even in the mid 50's the "new" FM band at 100-ish mhz was very marginal to even build into a receiver, and there was *never* a portable
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(As well as what everyone else said about miniaturization and batteries and whatnot)
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In the late 50s and early 60s I was exposed to the automobile trunk filling technology of the mobile telephone. When I think of the timing requirements for trunking radios let along cell phone radios rendered in empty state electronics (large, hot, and nifty-drifty) I get an extreme case of the giggles. The Jolly Green Giant's limo MIGHT have had room for the electronics if the giant himself rode in the trunk.
It's time to put away the tin-foil conspiracy hat and come back to reality. There is a difference b
Car phone - 1946 - 80 lbs (Score:2)
"A car phone is a mobile phone device specifically designed for and fitted into an automobile. This service originated with the Bell System, and was first used in St. Louis on June 17, 1946.
The original equipment weighed 80 pounds (36 kg), and there were initially only 3 channels for all the users in the metropolitan area. Later, more licenses were added, bringing the total to 32 channels across 3 bands (See IMTS frequencies). This s
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Or for farmers. Telephone and power Lines in the 1940s didn't well cover the rural areas. This could had been marketed as a poor quality tool for those hicks who didn't live in the city.
I actually think if it was marketed as a high end product for the rich the FCC would had allowed it.
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Very elite is more like it. These things were big and very expensive. Here's a site with a few of those early units.
http://www.wb6nvh.com/MTSfiles... [wb6nvh.com]
Scary enough, I've actually had part of the Motorola Deluxe Phone in my garage and though for years it was an old amplifier. One of the neighbors on my block threw it out and I dumpster dived it when I was 9 but dad threw it out before i figured out what it was.
I found out later from his wife that not only did the guy have a cellphone, But it was installed in h
Re:It would have been for an elite (Score:4, Insightful)
Because if something shit gets entrenched as the standard it obstructs something better that comes along a little later. See also: Windows(TM).
Spectrum is only one of the obstacles (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm....they did exist since the late 1940's. (Score:5, Insightful)
This author does not really know what they are talking about.
Re:Ummm....they did exist since the late 1940's. (Score:4, Informative)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Mobile radio telephone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] has the 1950's and 60's networks.
No shit (Score:5, Insightful)
Particularly since cellphones as they actually were/are, meaning phones that work with individuals radio "cells" and move between them need computers to work. They don't have to be amazing computers, but they need some computer logic to handle dealing with dynamic frequency assignment and handoff between towers.
That one piece of a technology, even an important piece, existed at a given time doesn't mean the tech could happen. Many devices require a confluence of a number of technologies before they can happen.
Smartphones are an example. They aren't particularly a novel idea, we've seen shit like them in sci fi for a long time. However to actually be a thing on the market we needed a lot of shit:
--Processors had to get fast enough at a small enough size
--Displays had to get small, light, and low energy
--Batteries had to get sufficient energy density
--Silicon based storage had to evolve to usable levels
--We needed wireless digital communication
--We needed the Internet (or something like it to have something worth connection to)
Without any one of those things, you don't have a workable smartphone. That they started to rise to prominence when they did isn't some amazing stroke of genius or luck, it was because the various technologies had reached the needed point.
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That they started to rise to prominence when they did isn't some amazing stroke of genius or luck, it was because the various technologies had reached the needed point.
Are you suggesting we'd still have smartphones now if it wasn't for Apple? ;)
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That they started to rise to prominence when they did isn't some amazing stroke of genius or luck, it was because the various technologies had reached the needed point.
Are you suggesting we'd still have smartphones now if it wasn't for Apple? ;)
Horrors.... no.... It's not a smartphone without rounded corners... (grin)
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We could have had... (Score:2)
Transistor radio (Score:2)
Given that the first commercial transistor radio was not sold until 1954 my guess is that a 1940s cell phone would have been rather heavy and not had very good battery life.
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Commercially Viable and Highly Distributive (Score:5, Interesting)
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We're still not powering every device in our house through one central electrical generator...it's all being worked on though folks...you just can't get it cheap now...
Nor will you ever get it. Your electric range, your refrigerator, your microwave, your electric clothes dryer, hell, even your hair dryer are all too high wattage to power from a central transmitting coil without suffering tremendous losses, even with resonant antennas.
Even if you're willing to tolerate the losses, only your appliances are large enough to accommodate the required antenna. Neither your hair dryer nor your vacuum cleaner is big enough to lug around an antenna large enough to be resonant wit
Not wanted (Score:2)
exaggeration (Score:2)
The technology was barely there in the 70s to make it profitable. I think most likely, a few really wealthy people (captains of industry) would get it in the 10940s, and the upper class (millionaires) would slowly get them in the 60's.
Maybe the general public would have got them ten years earlier.
Re:exaggeration (Score:4, Insightful)
It was certainly possible to modulate analog signals on today's cellular frequencies by the late 40's and early 50's (at least the lower SHF frequencies,) but it required several stages of tuned circuits; lots of hot, fragile, temperamental tubes. Without precision VFOs and digital control there is no frequency agility, so you manually tuned everything. Filtering was laughably bad by today's standards, so the sort of narrow band operation we rely on today was not feasible. Digital would be right out for at least two decades and fabulously expensive even then, and good ADC/DACs simply didn't exist. Without that stuff there is no cost effective way to implement time division multiplexing in an robust manner... So the best you might have done is a large, costly, fragile analog "phone" stepping on/crosstalking with others on some sort of duplexed repeater system, I guess.
The premise of the story is BS. The FCC was not the reason there were no iphones in 1955. Just more clickbait.
Not sure about that (Score:2)
I don't think the electronics were small enough back then for this application. Maybe. Doubt it. Certainly battery technology back in the 40's was vastly inferior than what we have now.
I mean, just think about what they produced in the 80's, those frick brickphones. And our electronics advanced by 30 years. Even then, it really did take another 20 years of advances in batteries, electronics and miniaturization to get where we were in the early 2000's, and it's advanced even wildly faster since then.
So
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Cellular relates to the method of radio communication used, not the size of the device.
As others have pointed out, such phones were already available back in the 40s (I personally never saw one until the 80s)
Yes they were quite large.
Yes the batteries were different. Typically it was a heavy dry cell car battery, and typically that battery was still installed in the car the phone was installed into.
Large whip style antennas were needed too, as that was before the event of fractal antenna design.
I think this is the point, given the tech of the time they were luxury goods with no mass appeal. AT&T probably would have just wasted the spectrum.
Instead, the unused spectrum was reserved for the future expansion of broadcast TV to channels 70-83.
There's an alternate reality where tiny portable phones never caught on and broadcast TV (or its successor, possibly 2-way chatting TVs) really needed the extra spectrum.
I don't think the FCC erred here, the spectrum is a limited resource and they couldn't predict the biggest user of the future. Accommodating the current environment was the right call.
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There's an alternate reality where tiny portable phones never caught on and broadcast TV (or its successor, possibly 2-way chatting TVs) really needed the extra spectrum.
Yes I read that book too. I think it was by Tony Blair or some other Brit with a similar name.
We could have had guns in Roman times (Score:3)
The Romans had all the technology to make guns. But they didn't, because they lacked the requisite mindset to make black powder and bronze gun barrels.
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But they could have built a glider (Score:2)
Rags, sticks and wires (or ropes). It is entirely possible that someone did, probably a sailmaker.
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Roswell! (Score:2)
If anything, this is proof nothing significant happened at Roswell, NM in 1947. If it HAD, we would have had things like this popping out of government-funded reverse engineering groups and stuff like transistors would have come along in the mid 50's and.... oh wait, transistors DID come along in the 50s, didn't they? And early integrated circuits, lasers and all sorts of other high tech innovations.
Never mind, clearly we DID come up with a lot of advancement in a very short period of time. But nobody tho
With valves (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, right. With valves. You'd need some kind of cart just for the batteries.
If we had only known (Score:3)
The summary reads like: if we had known the future, we could have done something differently.
I think you could make the claim about a trillion other decisions made throughout history.
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Yeah. If Ug and Eng's great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaddy had bang those rocks together instead of Ug, we'd be in fucking spaceships now.
Vacuum tubes? (Score:2)
Portable phones, sure - the military had radios, so why not?
Only, they would hardly have been cell phones in any sense. The transistor wasn't invented until the late 1940s, and wasn't really mass produced until the early 1960s. So you'd have been holding a huge case full of vacuum tubes up to your ear, not exactly comfortable. Heck, remember how huge the early cell phones of the 1970s were, and that's already with integrated circuits. Even a purely transistor-based phone would have been huge.
Handheld? Don't think so (Score:4, Interesting)
4 decades? (Score:5, Interesting)
The article tells us that the first "cellular" call (the author's opinion seems to be that this was the only contributory technology required to make "cellphones" as we know them today) was made in 1973. So 4 decades earlier would have meant starting celular technology in the early 1930's.
But to claim we could have had "cellphones" at any particular point in time implies all the infrastructure that goes with them: small size, portability, low cost, cell-towers, call routing computers, high capacity batteries. Simply saying that technical feasibility is the same as being able to develop a commercial product is naive.
The ancient Babylonians used oil, does that mean thay should have developed the internal combustion engine?
Math doesn't add up. (Score:3)
Just some back of the napkin calculations: So with 44 chanels (4.7% of the spectrum) they could host 575 callers. If they had the 59.7% of the spectrum allocated to TV, they could have hosted around 650 channels, which, by extension would support about 8000 callers. In New York City, a city with more than 7 million people in 1940. So, no, we couldn't have had everyone using cell phones in the 1940's even without FCC meddling. *AT BEST* it would have increased the cellphone user base from 0.01% of the population to 0.11% of the population. Without the geographic cells and spectrum switching tech that AT&T brought about in the 1980s, cell phones would have remained toys of the very wealthy and lucky.
Come again? (Score:2)
"When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.'"
Whereas broadcast TV - in particular, scores of additional channels on top of the scores of already existing channels - are not "in the nature of convenience or luxury"?
Oh, I forgot - reaching all American citizens with continual advertising is essential to the health of the nation. Silly moi.
The social implications could have been enormous (Score:2)
A 1949 cellphone would have had to be implemented as a wheeled suitcase. Unfortunately, wheeled luggage was still far in the future, so each cellphone user would have had to be accompanied by a grinning redcap to carry his phone around just like the railroad passengers of the day., search for a 220V outlet before making a call, and give the tubes time to warm up. Hollywood and Broadway people would pride themselves on hiring white redcaps.
Battery tech? Switching tech? (Score:2)
The ability – financially – to deploy the ground-based network to support cellular.
IMO there's no way we could have done anything with the spectrum.
No (Score:2)
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Tin can phones have been around since 1667. The extent to which they were mobile depended on the length of the conduit.
Hence the rhetorical question "how long is a piece of string?" was coined.
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There were mobile radio services as early as the 1950s. Mostly used in cars/boats because of the weight of batteries required to power vacuum tube technology. Technically not cellular and therefore needing higher transmitter power to cover the greater distances from the user to the phone company. And they were expensive.
The limiting factor for mobile phones wasn't spectrum, it was the mass of the mobile transceiver one had to lug around. Once practical handheld transcievers shrank to something that coul
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Re:Ham (Score:5, Informative)
...and so were cellular telephones when they first came to market. All that you needed was a scanner.
It was so easy to listen to any cell phone conversation, that website operators even setup websites allowing anyone to listen to live cell phone conversation streams in various cities.
https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-actions-and-decisions/investigations/investigations-into-businesses/incidents/2001/cf-dc_010917/
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...and so were cellular telephones when they first came to market. All that you needed was a scanner.
In fact, it was perfectly legal under the Communications Act of 1934 to listen to - but not repeat - communications received in any mode on any frequency.
Then Reagan Got The Government Off The Backs Of The People and signed a law that made it not merely illegal to receive cellular communications, but to sell radios capable of receiving cellular communications. Land of the Free.
Not that it did much good. Cellphones of the day tended to leak over onto my police-band radio anyway. And technically whoever blew
Re: Ham (Score:5, Informative)
Cell phones used analog transmissions as late as 2008. How do I know this? Because that was when my cell provider bought me a new phone so they could retire all their analog equipment. I had a "dual mode" phone then that could do digital and analog. The FCC would not allow the cell providers to get rid of their analog equipment until enough of their subscribers had digital phones. I hung on to that phone so long that not only did I get a free phone but I was paid $50 to take the free phone.
Another thing that prompted the switch were instances of high up government officials having their phone calls listened to by people with scanners.
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Another thing that prompted the switch were instances of high up government officials having their phone calls listened to by people with scanners.
One in particular. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb... [pbs.org]
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Think Tinkerbell. Made her famous.
Re: Ham (Score:2)
Deep pocketed people that could carry 6lbs of disposable batteries.
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Or vehicles which already carry a quite large lead-acid battery, or homes that did not need land lines or for whom running copper landlines was quite expensive or even dangerous, or for whom landlines have proven vulnerable. The technology has proven useful, especially for disaster recovery where well protected, reliable cell towers have proven lifesaving for isolated people needing, or offering, help.
Re: Ham (Score:4, Funny)
Deep pocketed people
Literally
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> This means a potentially unlimited number of people can be watchin
The number is large, but not unlimited. Enough TV receivers, and the effects of their antennas and even their bodies on the radio passing through them, would tend to block out the signal further away. But the effect is modest and it would take a quite large number of antennas to achieve something like a Faraday cage to block the transmission completely.
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So were cell phones until almost the end of the analog era. Because of cell phones the FCC made it illegal to listen to certain frequencies that finally had been set aside for cell phones, and then made it illegal to sell scanners that could even listen to those frequencies.
The only difference with digital cell phones is that since you're encoding already, it's not exactly a burden to encrypt too, at least weakly enough that random third-parties cannot decode the communications between the phone as a trans
it's numeric that allowed reasonable # of users (Score:2)
In the 50's, radiophones were analog, which means definitely whatever the spectrum available only very few users could use it at a time, isn't it?
IMHO only the much greater share allowed by numerics, sampling and compression did open the thing to many users. (and maybe some here remember, yet in the beginnings compressed voice handling were still rather bad)
I don't buy the "because of the FCC we didn't get it". Almost a fake new.
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The cell-band lockout was generally easy to defeat. I had a Radio Shack scanner in which it was controlled by a jumper on the PCB -- and the jumper conveniently had a little slack in it, raising it a quarter inch above the PCB for easy snipping.
regular nmt was shit easy to listen to. (Score:3)
regular nmt was shit easy to listen to and the carphones that came before were even easier - and those had an operator patch/dial your call. cops could ask their operators to patch them through. does that make cop radios cellphones? no.
and yes, I vote bullshit on the article. sure we had radios. we didn't have the automation to handle traffic and connecting the calls and THOSE are largely what counts as a cellphone vs. a radio.
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As per the article, a "cellphone" is where the radio communicates with a local cell, which then transfers the call to the regular phone network.
Don't confuse that with a radio which communicates directly with another radio. Cellphones allow for way more users in a geographical area than regular radios.
They talked about and planned for cellphones and cells which could be subdivided smaller and smaller in order to increase the numbers of users, but when they wanted to implement it, it literally took four deca
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As per the article, a "cellphone" is where the radio communicates with a local cell, which then transfers the call to the regular phone network. [...] Don't confuse that with a radio which communicates directly with another radio.
Out of curiosity, what would it take to allow a cell phone to communicate with other nearby cell phones directly, as a fallback for when no towers are nearby? Is that something that could be done in software alone, or would the hardware need modifications as well?
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Don't know how it worked, but there were phones with a walkie-talkie function. I worked for a company where site engineers had them to save calling costs or if they were in a bad signal area.
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Verizon has had that as a feature for a big chunk of their phones for a while (Google Push to Talk). It used to require specific phone hardware, but recently with the advent of widespread smartphones there are apps to do it, although I think they actually use your internet data connection and not the radio directly.
It's really helpful when you want to be able to push one button and talk to a bunch of people at once, like for instance, at a school where the staff need to be able to send to a group of staffer
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well yeah I called bullshit on them being able to automate the cell stuff that early making it a real cellphone. I said as much.
look the idea itself, sure. but we didn't have consumer technology to make it happen at that point in time.
so we could not have had cellphones decades earlier. look, they had not rolled out automated telephone exchanges in most parts back then. they didn't have the computers available to handle the cell exchanges.
i'm 100% sure they knew the problems that they would need to fix and
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I'm not sure if anyone was willing to spend the money to develop this tech with the hope that the FCC would change its mind.
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What defines a "cell" phone is the geographic area that the transceiver covers which is known as a coverage "cell".
tele means from afar, and phone means audible communication. So the only thing that defines a cellular telephone is any technology which allows remote (from afar) communication within a predefined geographic area (cell).
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You are confusing the origin of the (parts of) the term with the definition of the term itself. Cellular technology refers to a specific method of subdividing areas into cells, along with provisions for handing calls off to different towers as the handset moves. There's lots of other details, too.
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I vote bullshit on the article. sure we had radios. we didn't have the automation to handle traffic and connecting the calls and THOSE are largely what counts as a cellphone vs. a radio.
Strongly agree.
Any cellular system designed in 1940 would use relay logic, because there were no computers. Postwar? Very primitive ones, which took up entire rooms.
Data transmission was by teletype, at 10 WPM. You'd fill the back of your car with gear to support any kind of intelligence in the mobile side, and changing to your assigned channel (a crucial part of the trunked or cellular system) would be by a relay, changing crystals.
Look at the carphones of the 50s. They had dials and channel buttons. T
so were landlines... (Score:2)
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"By 1948, AT&T's network coverage extended to around 30 cities and busy sections of the major interstates on the East and West coast"
Ahem. No interstates in 1948. There were a few miles of freeway in California and the Pennsylvania Turnpike. That looks to be about it.
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It's called the "Eisenhower Interstate System" for a reason :-)
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Maybe, but tiny vacuum tubes smaller than a thimble existed by the early 1950s. Transistors enabled radios to be "pocket-sized", but the best portable radios of the tube era were ALREADY as small as a typical 1970s-era cassette tape recorder.
Why did most CONSUMER items keep using big tubes? Tubes went bad. Large tubes were commodity items that you could easily buy at local stores, even in small towns. Subminiature tubes were expensive, proprietary, and fixing a device that used them was comparable in diffic
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"Go home dad, you're drunk!"
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So basically you are another Professor Hazlett apologist.
Jesus, yet another Prof. Hazlett apologist. Crazy days we're living.
Why didn't other countries invent cell phones? (Score:3)
My guess is because because in the 1940's Europe was a real fucking mess.