Cellular phone is 40 years old (reflexion).

So it was on the April 3rd 1973 that the first call from a «portable» cell phone was made.

From Wikipedia:

Martin Cooper, a Motorola researcher and executive... made the first call on a handheld mobile phone on 3 April 1973 to his rival, Dr. Joel S. Engel of Bell Labs.

The new invention sold for $3,995 and weighed two pounds, leading to a nickname "the brick".

End of quote.

Personally, I don't own a cell phone (no real need for it), but it is obvious there is no such thing as going back to a world without it.

The Cell phone is no longer just a cell phone, more or less a mobile computer or a mobile Internet access device and often a portable camera.

There are huge benefit (if your car break down, etc.) but there are also drawback (driving and texting/talking, radiation?, but I think the worst is how much some people are totally isolated (in their bubble) even if they falsely think that they are connected to the world). We all know people who reach their cell phone a 1000 times a day, just to see if they received anything.

One day in a grocery store I saw a man talking to a cell phone asking (to his wife, I supposed) if this brand of cookies what the right brand. Few aisles down, I heard a woman also taking on a cell phone asking a similar question about another type of product, so far so good.

But few minutes after I realized, at the cash register, that they were husband and wife and they had split the task of doing the grocery.

So I guess radiations must affect the brain after all, LOL.

IMHO, grocery blitzing and honey-do lists are two of the few useful tasks you can do with a cell phone.

It saves a lot of time, and I hate shopping anyway, so anything that gets me out of there faster is good.

Hi op

Do you know what makes me laugh the most

That red indians were signaling from several km away
and was more reliable than a cell phone

Originally posted by davesmart
Hi op

Do you know what makes me laugh the most

That red indians were signaling from several km away
and was more reliable than a cell phone

Was it now? tell me the last time they sent you a picture of their new born Sat-on-The-Rock-That-Moved through smoke signals...

Originally posted by FraternitasSaturni

Originally posted by davesmart
Hi op

Do you know what makes me laugh the most

That red indians were signaling from several km away
and was more reliable than a cell phone

Was it now? tell me the last time they sent you a picture of their new born Sat-on-The-Rock-That-Moved through smoke signals...

You sound skeptical

But that's not why I responded. Every time the subject of the awesomeness of cellphones comes up I'm reminded of a few odd things I've seen over the years because of them. For example, I drove through a parking-lot one evening and saw 2 couples leaving restaurant--one couple in front, the other slightly behind. The woman of the couple in front, and the man of the couple behind talking intently on their cellphones (presumably not to each other) while the alternate husband and wife walked silently along beside.

One morning I watched a high-school girl walk by the house, cellphone to her ear. She got to the school up the block and met up with her friends--all intently talking on their cellphones while ignoring each other.

Drove by a Safeway one day--one of those that has a Safeway gas station. A car had stalled and 3 guys were pushing it into the gas-station lot ... all while talking on their cellphones--including the driver, with the front door open operating the steering wheel.

As for myself, I have a minimally capable Nokia X2. It has a camera, capable of both stills and video, that I never use. It's Internet-capable, but I have a T-Mobile prepaid account that doesn't include Internet; nor does it include GPS, because I refuse to be tracked everywhere I go. I put an 8GB memory card in it so I could download TV episodes to watch while I wait for the wife in the Costco or Walmart parking lot. Other than that it lives in the door-pocket of the van in case of emergency....

reply to post by Ex_CT2


They can track you buy it by using co-lateration, GPS or no.

However, I agree, my work phone is as nothing as you can get. I don't carry my cell phone most of the time, because I hate it. Not that it's a bad phone, I just hate phones. If I'm on call I have it, otherwise it's in the drawer.

I have seen people ride motorcycles with a cell phone shoved into the helmet. My God.

Trivia: you have to pay major bucks for a 'SCIF-approved cell phone' that has no storage, no camera, and no ports. Otherwise, the SO should, if they're not lazy scum, confiscate and destroy any cell phone that enters the restricted area. I crunch some up nearly every quarter during the hard drive disposal event. Even if you tell people outside the vault door that they cannot go in with a cell phone and keep it, some always try. When that phone tries to ping for a tower inside the SCIF, the detector goes off and it's friskin' time.

I bet these cellphones would be good skipping stones, sometimes I just want to sling them across the pond just to see how many times they'll skip. Tell me your not curious to find out how far you could skip your phone lol


Posted Via ATS Mobile: m.abovetopsecret.com

Originally posted by Bedlam
reply to post by Ex_CT2

 

They can track you buy it by using co-lateration, GPS or no.

However, I agree, my work phone is as nothing as you can get. I don't carry my cell phone most of the time, because I hate it. Not that it's a bad phone, I just hate phones. If I'm on call I have it, otherwise it's in the drawer.

I have seen people ride motorcycles with a cell phone shoved into the helmet. My God.

Trivia: you have to pay major bucks for a 'SCIF-approved cell phone' that has no storage, no camera, and no ports. Otherwise, the SO should, if they're not lazy scum, confiscate and destroy any cell phone that enters the restricted area. I crunch some up nearly every quarter during the hard drive disposal event. Even if you tell people outside the vault door that they cannot go in with a cell phone and keep it, some always try. When that phone tries to ping for a tower inside the SCIF, the detector goes off and it's friskin' time.

I have nearly no idea what any of that means. I'm not familiar with "co-lateration," but if it means that they can track everywhere I go even with the phone turned off in the door-pocket--well, then, I guess I have to live with it. I'm too old and too domesticated these days to get up to anything radical anyway. Age and world-weariness have their advantages....

reply to post by Ex_CT2


I don't know what he means by co-lateration either - as far as I can tell, it's not even a word..

I suppose though he means they could triangulate your position based on cell tower info. Your phone will identify itself to the nearest tower and using that info, they can narrow down your position to a few hundred metres.

Originally posted by stumason
reply to post by Ex_CT2

 

I don't know what he means by co-lateration either - as far as I can tell, it's not even a word..

I suppose though he means they could triangulate your position based on cell tower info. Your phone will identify itself to the nearest tower and using that info, they can narrow down your position to a few hundred metres.

It's a term for finding the distances from each nearby cell tower to the phone, based on signal strength. You also see it written multilateration, or just lateration. From "co" with, together, and 'lateration' meaning length measurement. The cell network uses many towers together to determine the location.

You'll get a lot more google hits on 'multilateration' but they don't necessarily refer to cell towers, I've never heard co-lateration mean anything but cell towers.

reply to post by Bedlam


Thanks

I have seen the word lateration and multilateration, but not with the pre-fix "co".. Thanks again..

Remember back in the olden days when a phone was a phone?

reply to post by kudegras


Haha, aye....Showing our age here now!

I have a Google Nexus phone and, for the most part despite all it's features and apps, it gets used for texting/calling only.

Originally posted by kudegras
Remember back in the olden days when a phone was a phone?

I do. I'm also old enough to remember the first time i heard someone say that, it was many years ago now.

I am also old enough to remember when a "computer was a computer", a "car was a car" and a "plane was a plane".

Hope this is of some help.

Originally posted by Ex_CT2
I have nearly no idea what any of that means. I'm not familiar with "co-lateration," but if it means that they can track everywhere I go even with the phone turned off in the door-pocket--well, then, I guess I have to live with it. I'm too old and too domesticated these days to get up to anything radical anyway. Age and world-weariness have their advantages....

I think if you disable the wireless mode like you need to do on airplanes, that might disable it, but if that doesn't, removing the battery should disable it, I think.

Other tricks that might work are wrapping it in foil, though that may not always work on some phones.

They even sell pouches that are supposed to isolate the phones. This item is obsolete but you get the idea:

www.aliexpress.com...

It just needs to be wrapped with conductive material to make a mini-"faraday cage" which blocks the signals, and makes the phone unreachable.

A lot of old stuff still carries this "new" air about it.

People still fight for cell phones, still marvel at computers that have been around just as long.

Last week I heard some guy on the radio complain about kids baggy pants. A style that has, for some inexplicable reason, remained constant since 1992.

For the most part the world has been relatively static in movies, music, fashion and tech for at least a quarter century yet old things still come off as "new" to so many and I dont understand why.

Hah! I am older than cellphones!

I can remember when every phone had a handset, and a round rotary dial. That you dialed in a circle with your finger:



But this one.....

Just when you thought that old school Bluetooth headset was the coolest... here's the 100% retrofitted rotary MOBILE phone! What the guys at SparkFun Electronics do is take an old rotary phone and through some genius-level electronic hocus-pocus, hook it up to an (internal) mobile phone - SIM card and all! Everything works properly, including the metallic call bells and dial tone!

Originally posted by davesmart
Hi op

Do you know what makes me laugh the most

That red indians were signaling from several km away
and was more reliable than a cell phone

Once the Europeans brought over booze, the Indians started to get transmission and reception problems also.

reply to post by Druid42


If you lived way back in the sticks like we did, this would have been modern!

I have a very dim recollection of picking up the phone at about 4 years of age, and speaking to the operator. The manual exchange operator. Prior to having dials.

By the time I was old enough to use the phone, we had dials, but were on a three party line. You had to count the rings to tell if the call was for you or the neighbors.