Reader Forum: Looking back before looking ahead

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but maintain some editorial control so as to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at:[email protected] [email protected].
Our video, ”The Growth in Mobile” got me thinking on just how far this industry has come, since I was in school.
I’m going to reveal clues to my age here, but in the mid-to-late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when I was in high school and college, we did not have the technology available to students of today. Certainly, today, a laptop and now tablets are practically a requirement for students of today – from elementary through high school. I know I’m going to sound like my grandparents used to sound …“In my day, things were … uphill … both ways,” etc.
In those days, “connectivity” was the household land-line telephone. If you were really lucky, there was a “children’s phone.” Mobile devices were barely conceived of (although the communicators of the original “Star Trek” fame were a forecast of things to come). Entertainment was television, radio, 8-track tapes, and the local drive-in theatre. There was no Internet, no texting, no Google Inc., no Microsoft Corp., no personal computers, no Excel/Word/PowerPoint/Visio, no Skype Ltd., no mobile anything. There were HAM radios (still are), CB radios (still are), and seatbelts (still are). Believe it or not, I can remember, growing up in the 1960’s that we only needed to dial five digits to reach a local telephone number. I also remember that my grandparents in rural east Texas still used party lines.
My very first computer programming class was in 1977 – a BASIC class, where we would write programs on a dumb terminal, connected to a CDC mainframe at the university where I attended a summer seminar for incoming seniors in high school. We typed in the program, compiled it and sent it as a batch job on the main frame. We then waited for our printouts (on the big, wide, lined green computer paper) to be placed in our bins. Also in 1977, a little-known company, offering some circuit boards for hobbyists, called Apple Computer Co. was just getting started. In fact, the computer spreadsheet was invented during 1978 – the year I graduated high school. Remember Visicalc? For a while, early in the late 1970’s at college, we used punch cards for FORTRAN programming. Later in college, I used acoustical coupler style modems to be able to reach our computer labs at school. At the time, we thought it was quite high-tech.
In the 1970’s, mobile phones were behemoths – mostly bag phones and heavy car phones. AMPS wasn’t even born yet. In Europe, Nordic Mobil Telephone was not launched until 1981. The first United States cellular network was launched in Chicago. Ameritech Mobile Communications L.L.C., a Bell operating company, launched the service in 1983, which over the years migrated from AMPS, to CDMA, to TDMA, to CDMA. This first and original network was later sold to GTE and is now part of Verizon Wireless. Ameritech still exists today doing business as AT&T Mobility.
Today, children in school have no concept of days without internet, PCs, laptops, tablets, iPods, digital music, Facebook, smart phones or texting. It has not been that long since texting was not a mainstream phenomenon. In the United States, text messaging did not become mainstream with youth until 2004 and 2005. After that, it quickly grew. A key reason was the implementation of cross-operator interoperability in late 2001 by the company that became Sybase 365 – InphoMatch. Since that time, we’ve processed well over 1 trillion messages and overall, global traffic continues to grow. The United States has caught and passed the rest of the world in overall messaging traffic even though much of the world had a head start from the late 1990’s due to the ubiquity of the GSM networks.
The roots of our almost trillion dollar mobile economy were, in most cases, anchored in the 1970’s. In fact, I would venture to say, we’ve gone well beyond the 1960’s “Star Trek” communicator (too bad, we haven’t made such strides as teleportation and warp drive). Today, we are innovating even faster. Texting is pass