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My grandfather was a field engineer with the utility company in Aalesund, Norway; they got one of the first cellular phones (of sorts) in the Aalesund area some
by lb1lf 4y ago
My grandfather was a field engineer with the utility company in Aalesund, Norway; they got one of the first cellular phones (of sorts) in the Aalesund area sometime in the early sixties.
As he recalled it, the phone occupied most of the trunk of the Ford Anglia they used to get around town. It was a fully manual affair - they had a calling channel where the operator would say something like 'Subscriber 11, phone call for you on channel 4' - subscriber 11 (and anyone else who cared to listen in) would then turn a dial to channel 4 and get on with their conversation. After the call ended, they had to manually revert to the calling channel.
There only being a handful of subscribers had its perks - once when he was on his way to lunch with the head of the local branch of the phone company, when they heard on the phone official's cellular that a call was incoming for my grandfather.
He simply answered using the other guy's phone, and the operator chuckled and said that was OK, she recognised his voice and would bill the airtime to the utility company's account.
- dmix 4y agoIs that the same thing as "party lines"? I'm curious how many channels they could operate at once.
- homero 4y agoNo it was like a CB radio over a large city or area. There were only a handful of channels. It wasn't a "cell" phone. It was like a walkie talkie. The cell part came later.
- idatum 4y agoOr maybe like farmers using electrified barbed-wire fences to chat? Like Claude Shannon used in his youth! Came across this in a bio on Shannon I read recently. And here we are now.
- homero 4y agoNow that sounds like telegraph
- zikduruqe 4y agoIMTS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improved_Mobile_Telephone_Service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improved_Mobile_Telephone_Serv... We used to hack the local system as a youth and make free calls.
- mcculley 4y agoThat does not sound like a cellular system. Mobile telephone systems predated cellular services, which support automated roaming between cells. Pre-cellular systems just talked to a nearby tower and the call would end if one drove out of range.