April 1, 2003
Cell Phone turns 30
On the 3rd of April 1973, thirty years ago, Dr Martin Cooper, today a trim, white-haired dapper septuagenarian who holds eight patents, most of them in wireless communications technology, made the first cell phone call, in a demonstration outside a Hilton Hotel in New York, that became the first step towards a massive change in the way we communicate. As reported in Dan Gillmore's Sunday Column for the Mercury News.
Some other mobile birthdays of note:
-- Text Messaging was 10, December 2002. On December 3 1992, an engineer called Neil Papworth sent the first text message saying "MERRY CHRISTMAS" to his colleagues at Vodafone, from a PC to a mobile phone on the Vodafone GSM network in the UK, according to the BBC. But it wasn't until 1999, that text messaging really took off, when mobile phone companies allowed users to send SMS to people signed up with other networks.
According to Cor Stutterheim, of Anglo-Dutch information technology firm CMG, who lays claim to creating SMS in the first place: "It started as a message service, allowing operators to inform all their own customers about things such as problems with the network. When we created SMS (Short Messaging Service) it was not really meant to communicate from consumer to consumer and certainly not meant to become the main channel which the younger generation would use to communicate with each other."
-- First commercial ringtone service will be 4, July 2003. In July 1999, 23 year old James Winsoar, was the first to realise that a feature built by Nokia into their cell phones, allowing mobile phone companies to add their logo and ringing sounds, could be exploited and allow anyone the freedom to customise their mobile phone with graphics and music. He set up My Nokia service in July 1999, the world's first commercial ringtone service.
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