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Riding the Technology Wave
:
ifty years ago this past April 3, 2023, Motorola engineer Martin
(Marty) Cooper placed a phone call on a street in downtown New
FYork City to his competitor at Bell Labs on what was then the Regional Bell Operating Companies (“Baby Bells”), and the FCC
world’s first cellular hand-held portable telephone. It would be over a
decade before Cooper’s working prototype was commercially available
but even then, the idea of a phone extending beyond the
phone cord and an outlet was outside the imagination of
most. Now, 50 years later, we would find it almost impos-
sible to live without our cellphone and almost everyone we
know has one. It’s stunning to consider that within a
generation this late 20th-century technology based on
Alexander Graham Bell’s 19th-century invention of the
telephone has forever changed, like its predecessor, how
we communicate as a society.
1982 B.C. (Before Cellular)
In 1982, I left my job in retail advertising to work for
a trade association in Washington, D.C. that represented
the Radio Common Carrier industry. At that time, Radio
Common Carriers were FCC-licensed providers of land
mobile radio services. The trade association, Telocator
Network of America, also represented the network
providers and equipment manufacturers of paging services
and “beepers” as they were then called. My first day on the
job as Telocator’s new advertising and trade show manager
was at an industry convention where Motorola unveiled its
alphanumeric pager that allowed users to receive and send
a message through a digital network. Their technology
turned the popular beeper from a one-way notification
device mostly associated with doctors into the first gener-
ation of text messaging as we know it today.
During my tenure at Telocator, two other significant
changes took place that have forever altered the communi-
My Front-Row Seat
to the Rise of
Cellular
By Maxine Carter-Lome, publisher
cations landscape: AT&T Corp. agreed to split up its “Ma Bell” nation-
wide telephone monopoly to be replaced by seven independent
began awarding licenses in the Top 30 major metropolitan markets in
the country for a new mobile telephone service based on Bell Lab’s
cellular technology. Two licenses were to be awarded in
each market: one to an independent “telephone” company
such as a Baby Bell and the other to a Radio Common
Carrier or non-telephone entity. That put Telocator in the
early 1980s at the center of the telecom universe, repre-
senting and lobbying for the paging/messaging, mobile
communications, and cellular telephone industries.
The products and services being introduced by
Telocator members allowed corporations, mobile workers,
and business professionals for the first time to stay
connected and communicate even when in their cars.
“The Brick” – A Motorola DynaTAC 8000X from 1984. This phone
has an early British Telecom badge and primitive red LED display.
photo: redrum0486
On October 13, 1983, the company named Ameritech
Mobile Communications (now AT&T) turned on the
first commercial cellular network in the United States in
Chicago, Illinois. At the time, little hope was held that
the return would be worth the investment. The general
consensus among all but a few was that—given the cost of
the phone and the cost of service—it would be 10 years
before the market reached one million subscribers. With
Los Angeles coming online less than one year later, that
prediction was broken at the end of year two.
By the spring of 1984, the cellular telephone industry
was set to turn on in additional major cities across the
country, and new consumer cellular phone products
backed by Madison Avenue advertising and Bell operating
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