It really is What A Cell Appeared like In 1964…And There Were Over A Million Of Them [History]

The first cellphones weren’t component to the Gordon Gekko, Zack Morris family. They were rugged, shock-proof, vacuum-tubed rigs that hijacked nearby radio waves, built so powerfully that car headlights dimmed after you talked. And this was half a century ago.

The always fascinating Pew Internet & American Life Project details these dinophones , for which calls had to be manually paired by a remote operator. They were huge. They were heavy. They were very expensive. And yet, by 1964, there were 1.5 million people using them within the US-running on AT&T’s ” Improved Mobile Telephone Service” tech. To have had to have faith in the sort of beasts frequently feels like it might probably had been a pain-but boy, are they gorgeous . [ Pew via Boing Boing ]

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This post is tagged: american life project, half a century, mobile telephone, project details, telephone service