Saturday, April 3, 2021

Mobile phones

 

Today  in 1973  Martin Cooper of Motorola makes the first handheld mobile phone call to Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.





On October 13, 1983, Ameritech Mobile Communications became the first company to launch a 1G phone network in the US, starting with Chicago. On March 13, 1984, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x of Cooper’s call finally went on sale—for $3,995.

The 8000x wasn’t very mobile—it weighed almost two pounds and took ten hours to charge for thirty minutes of talk time.

(From A Brief History of the Smartphone)


Compare smartphones--a computer in your pocket--with the earliest mobile phone to remind yourself just how rapid technological advance can be.   Then think of how rapidly battery-pack prices have fallen; how EVs have moved from very expensive to price parity; how the cost of lifting a tonne of payload into low earth orbit has fallen 90% and will fall another 90%; how precision fermentation will slash the price of food, while drastically reducing food's environmental impact.

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