Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Public got first cell phone demo 30 years ago

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 13:00:45 -0500

Public got first cell phone demo 30 years ago

(AP) --It's time to make "Happy Birthday" the ring signal of your cell phone -- Thursday
is the 30th anniversary of the first public demonstration of a call from a handheld
wireless phone.

Martin Cooper, a researcher at Motorola Inc., made the call from the corner of
56th Street and Lexington Avenue in Manhattan on April 3, 1973.

Bystanders were agape at the spectacle, Cooper recalls.

"We were surprised, because we thought New Yorkers were so blase. We
caused a great stir," he says.

The phone was a mammoth by today's standards -- it weighed almost two
pounds and was 10 inches long. Talk time was 20 minutes. Still, it was a huge
advance over the car-mounted mobile phones that had been in use since the
1940s.

The purpose of the public demonstration was not just to dazzle New Yorkers.
Motorola was at the time trying to head off regulatory approval of AT&T's
vision of wireless communications, which focused on car phones.

"We thought the world was ready for personal communications, and the only
way you do that is with handheld communications," Cooper says.

Cooper placed the first call to Joel Engel, the head of research at AT&T's Bell
Labs.

"I told him: 'Joel, I'm calling you from a REAL cellular phone,'" Cooper says. "I
thought I heard gnashing of teeth at the other end, but he was polite."

The Federal Communications Commission gave AT&T's competitors a slice of
the wireless spectrum and, 10 years later, the first commercial cell phone
network was inaugurated.

Cooper, 74, is now chief executive of ArrayComm Inc., a San Jose, California,
company that is designing what he says is the next big advance in wireless
technology: "smart" antennas that promise better reliability, lower cost and
higher Internet browsing speeds.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/04/03/cell.phone.anniversary.ap/

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Save Smiley. Help put Messenger back in the office.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/4PqtEC/anyFAA/i5gGAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/