Come here, Watson! I want you!
Posted on 04/03/2011 7:56:18 AM PDT by Brandonmark
CNN) -- Sunday is the anniversary of something that undoubtedly has changed your life.
Whether for good or for bad is a question only you can answer.
On this day in 1973 -- on April 3 of that year -- a man did something no one had ever done before.
You may bless him for it or curse him for it. At this juncture, it hardly matters. The impact of what he did is so enormous that judging it now is almost beside the point.
The man's name was Martin Cooper. He was 44 at the time.
He made a cell phone call.
The world's first. At least the first public one; the cell phone had been tested in the lab, but never tried in the real world.
"As I walked down the street while talking on the phone," Cooper once told an interviewer, "sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call."
There had been car phones before -- mobile radios, really. They were powered by heavy equipment that had to be stashed in the trunk of the automobile.
But Cooper, who was the general manager of Motorola's communications systems division, had the idea that people didn't want to be tethered to a stationary telephone, even if the phone could ride along with them in their car. He thought that the phone should be so portable that it could go anywhere they went.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
“Can you hear me now?”
I just got a cell phone at age 67. Playing ketchup is tough. :-)
Long live the brick...
Beam me up Scotty.
1st cell phone at age 67. But bought a GPS (Garmin) about 20 years ago.
They had commercial GPS 20 years ago? I did not know that - thanks for sharing.
Come here, Watson! I want you!
Interesting...
We're about the same age. Which cell phone did you get, might I ask?
In 1976 Motorola put phones in the MAST/DUSTOFF UH-1H’s at Ft. Lewis. This 35K20 “helped.” That was amazing then.
Avionics tech? cool!
And now we’re totally dependent on them. Feel freaked out when we realize we left it at home.
I remember at work in The mid 90’s they were testing out a Motorola Text device to replace our beepers which was pretty cool, i could e-mail etc with it.
Then they quickly replaced that with the heavy brick Nextel phone.
I have HATED cell phones ever since.
I still cringe when i hear that nextel alert noise.
you must have been a surveyor with a 5 channel unit. they didn’t get all the satellites up until sometime after 1990.
Depends on how you do it.
My first cell phone was a Motorola Brick in 1992. Still have it packed away to show my someday grandchildren. (I’m 40.)
"What you mean 'we', white man?"
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