AT&T Archives: Testing the First Cell Phone Network (Bonus Edition) 

Same here

@@QUIZFILTER Way before I was born 🥰 born may 3 1990 I'm age 31

I have to say I agree, it’s pleasing watching humans adapt technology in previous worlds.

@@unknownwolf4046 lol you’re younger than the Simpsons.

I started working for what's the lottery, AT&T, and February 1963. I started working on Electro mechanical systems switching systems, that is. I remember working on a number 5 crossbar, at the 1964 65 World's Fair, in Corona, New York. I attended my first number one ESS School in 1965, at Madison Avenue New York. I worked on number one ESS, that stands for electronic switching system, for several years, then learned about ETS, electronic translator systems, that was the controlling systems for the, T1 carrier systems, at that time. Then went to school for tsps, Traffic Service position systems. That was the first electronic telephone operators switching system. Then went to school for, number f o u r, ESS, first digital electronic switching system, in Rego Park, Queens New York. Worked on several of those systems throughout New York metropolitan area as well as Upstate New York and Rochester for Rochester Communications. Then when to school for number five ESS, first electronic fiber optic switching system, and at the same time I was a member of the New York Tech Center in Manhattan, giving support wherever they needed, over the phone or I would fly, to whatever area had a problem. I'm retired from that position, due to Major complications of a spine surgery, 18 and 1/2 hours of surgery, approximately 13 to 14 days later on additional 5 and 1/2 hours of surgery, due to a major staph infection in my spine. I was given my last rights, and became disabled and unable to continue my employment with AT&T. I have 36 years employment. Today is August 28th 2022. Thank you for this post it brought back, great memories for me. God bless all of the former employees of AT&T in Western Electric, that are no longer with us. And God bless all of us who are still fortunate to be on this side of the lawn.

Yes, no more neckties either.

drott150 that’s what happens when you break up the companies doing the development work.

@@Mrcaffinebean Ah, so true. I was working at Western Electric in Pennsylvania in the 70s & 80s. A cell tower was installed outside the plant around 1980. The Bell System breakup was in 1984. The technology took off at other manufacturers, but AT&T did the research and laid the groundwork.

are you saying people were shit then and shit now?

@@Mrcaffinebean you might wanna look up why AT&T was broken up... they took their government granted monopoly for granted and let the largess get in the way and started ripping people off and squelching innovation from others. They *had* to be broken up. Otherwise we’d all still be using these AMPS phones, and paying out the ass for long distance, and renting phones from the telephone company and paying through the nose for more than one phone and all the other services that are included today.

good one!🤣🤣🤣

Lessons have been learnt :)

Hands free kits have been invented since like speaker phone and diologe recognition for ancer or reject, so you're kind of right

@@TheRicheg what is this magic you speak of?

@@hivemind8817 😂😂

That's not even remotely what is known as autopatch. Using autopatch does not require the use of a third party. The radio has a tone pad on it like a touch tone dial that sends tones to a repeater patching it into the PTSN. When that is accomplished a dial tone is returned to the Amateur Radio operator and they enter the digits for the phone they are calling.

Ryan Hanselman in germany a cellphone is called handy

In Poland cell phones are called cell phones. 😉

I saw that too. I hate it when cords are tangled like that.

😂🤣

The cord is so you can't lose the phone!

I use to wrap the cord around the phone and then hang it up

Bella Bella did you ever consider gluing your cellphone to a brick?

This is gold

Lol

Yeah, sure. I'm going to trust Ma Bell. :)

Bull Puckey

I love you, AT&T. You're beautiful. Never change.

@@noway9880 lol what a strange thing to say

MY LATE DAD HAD ONE OF THESE THINGS EXPENSIVE WOULDNT WORK TODAY WITH THAT 5G KRAP I GOT ATT NOW AND THEY RAISED THE RATES 35 CENTS A CALL 30 CENTS TEXT TOO ADDS UP

Doctor X will build a creature!

having went through the training to be a Wireless support tech (ffs telemarketing job) I can tell you this. there whole motto is "make a sell or be written up" each call. oh if you call in crying or trying to deactivate a service of some one who's died, nope, got to make that sale to them, because they get so many sales from widows and other people calling in for just that to deactivate a service of a dead person. I quit a day after I took my first call for this, since I refused to make a sale to a widow, att is the deathstar

Huawei is leading with innovation, atnt time had gone.

The AT&T that developed this got broke up in 1984. The US government thought it was a good idea to break them up. A democrat elected judge approved it.

Tanuki So true, laziness and greed.

@@seceber Bullshit. Huawei = Chinese government and therefore banned in any decent country.

Trance88, I have just caught you "in the wild" in a comments section!

Yes and on the show Cannon in the early 70's William Conrad had a mobile telephone. They had the phone ringer hooked up to the car horn so if you were away from the car it would beep the horn to alert you the phone was ringing.

I remember seeing a re-run of Perry Mason with the titular lawyer talking to his secretary back at the office from the phone in his convertible.

I believe it goes back to at least the late 1940's radiotelephone service..it was an FM system..i got to talk on my uncles in the mid-1970's you had to turn the car off (side note the transciver sucked battery power so your car battery would go dead if you talked too long ..other option was to run the car and put up with the static) to reduce the static and it took 5 minutes for the radiotelephone operator to complete the call..the sound quality was very staticy but i could understand what my mom was telling me over the phone in the car exciting stuff at the time...and if i remember it was EXTREMELY expensive to make calls..

There was an episode of The Andy Griffith Show that had it, too.

Do you remember the episode where Jethro put a phone into the truck? He said "Watch, Uncle Jed! I drive down to the front gate and call you! " He takes off, and Jed sees a big roll of phone cord unraveling beside him. He says, "I wonder if that boy's measured out enough cable. " Tye cord completely runs out and pulls a phone socket right out of the wall. Jed says, "Nope, I guess not. " 😆

Thinking the same thing. HD voice didn’t exist in 2000, let alone 1977.

@@mrmister8039 Sure they meant comparatively, to land lines of the time.

Yes you are. But it must be hands-free. In my car, most of the phone interface is muted above 5mph. (dialpad, contacts, etc.) Voice command works pretty well these days. There are buttons on the wheel to answer and hangup.

filter4now That’s a Lincoln Mark V, not a caddy!

bwill140 lmao

@7:18. You are welcome.

That’s why he didn’t want people listening in!

@Richard Conte very true. I didn’t even think about that

Can confirm "Sent from my mobile device" 😆

White Crown I'm still picking pubes out of my teeth.

You mean '70 and '80.

@@seanseanseanseansean no, 70 foot and 80 foot were obviously the best

Probably a lot. They weren’t being tracked back then. People are just gonna keep dying because of using cell phone while driving. Humans are our own worst enemy.

they did.. and the phones got blamed for accidents back then like they do now.. somewhere in the late 80s a couple companies started to release lower cost bag phones and car-mounted phones.. service prices around 1990 began to come down so more and more people got phones.. but the costs were still hgih enough that most people didnt just yack.. a cell phone was a ..call up, hang up pretty quick endeavor with daytime rates still in the 30-50 cents a minute range.. somewhere in 93/94 a couple companies started offering bigger buckets of minutes and unlimited nights / weekends... thats when people began to yack.. Motorola releasing 'Nextel' with unlimited 2 way radio between any phone in the mid 90s really started the drop in cell costs and by the late 90s unlimited plans were popping up everywhere as well as sub $100 phones that didnt way a ton... this also began the era of Texting in ernest...

$1000 for a smartphone? I'm sure you can pay that much if you really want to. On the other hand, you can get a cheap one for under $100 (without a contract or shit like that, just the phone).

as if you can make it better

Faggatron And you think YOU can make it better?

@@SPCmuncie what part of my sentence makes you think I can do better? I didnt go around critizing the polygons in this video. Idiot

@@aktan4ik Well you did kinda say "And you think you can do better?" to the other guy.

@@SPCmuncie And how does that imply that I could do a better job creating these 3D graphics??

when the network is only 30 people large im sure the 99% was accurate, you decrease connection reliability when you increase the network.

Yep those were the times when can use my modified Kenwood HF transceiver to make calls even yes other people could hear that were listen to that repeater tower but didn’t care at the time as did the same and then the hours of enjoyment hearing the crazy stuff at times like prostitution, arguments and of course the common drug deals going on? Then my good old realistic pro scanner that was great for listening to pretty much everything had my antenna could receive back then. Still have now p25 Phase 2 TDMA Uniden scanners which are great especially for taking to air shows and listening to security and police but nothing like the old days.

when i was a teen in the mid 80s, i used to monitor the cell tower that went up near my house.. used a VCR that had the fine tuner UHF dials on it.. you could tune in the cellular channels and listen to calls.. it was great entertainment back then...

@@eldoradoboy did the VCR go up to channel 83? Older TVs went up to channel 83 which included the cellular frequencies in the 800 MHz band. The FCC took away channels 70 to 83 and reallocated them for cellular and trunk radio. So yeah TVs and VCRs made before 1983 could pick up cellular phone calls.

Does these networks actually still exist? You can dial out on it?

@@Mrcaffinebean Another comment I saw said that AMPS service was put to rest in 2011. Sad.

Overload and crash coming

Lies. You know you love your that beautiful piece of technology you used to make that comment. And you wouldn't trade it for nothing.

Thanks both of you for going back to memory lane with me.

Everyone had a car phone

At least white people lol! Whites get the best stuff

@@briankelly9347 In Atlanta in the early 90's, several black people had car phones, mostly in Mercedes. My uncle had one in his Cadillac.

***** Exactly what I thought too...

billy jean king

Maybe an overweight imposter...but that guy not even close to Joe DameWith.

Damn me too

I worked for ATT Wireless during the transition from analog to digital cell..we had to carry 2 phones constantly ...the digital cell connection sound quality was terrible ...of course only a few towers had been converted so we used the analog cell for reliably to make the call....

OKI was huge in the telecom industry back then.. they came out with one of the first Digital PBX phone systems.. it never really gained market in the USA but it was big in japan.. so to hear OKI was instrumental in cell development isnt a surprise

junkdeal And it's been down hill since

Don't touch my bag phone! I actually had that thing hooked up with AT&T up until 2011 or so when they finally killed off the AMPS service altogether! These digital phones suck!

I was too young in the early 80's (like 10 yrs old....) but being that I'm pretty rural I remember it still being a "WOW!!" thing in the 90's when it first became available here. It was a Motorola bag phone. It had an antenna. it was analog. I still think that analog phones would work better in this area. Less secure but not enough towers! I remember it was 45 minutes a month. I don't remember the price but I'm thinking maybe $30 - $40 per month?? They may have been low-tech by today's standards but at least the damn things worked in rural areas! Yes I know this post is 2+ years old but something I saw on TV got me on here looking for the "first cell phone call".

I know it's a stupid question but I can't seem to ask it right for Google to get me answers so maybe you can help me. How did these old cell phones work without a sim card? What was there to prevent anyone from buying just the phone and just connecting to the network without paying the comm provider?

@@NikHYTWP Phones back then had an ESN number that was programmed into the billing system.

It's entirely possible the car didn't have seatbelts. (they weren't required by any laws, and were an optional extra in many cars. I remember my dad's GTO they were an add-on option, and lap belt only.)

nope still 1000s of dollars

Videotape has always been 60fps, even in the black and white era.

Hed just be old you dumbass that's someones,grandpa now