Remember briefcases?

A long time ago, people would carry important “papers” around with them in small suitcases called briefcases. You would put these papers, sometimes in something called a manila file folder, something that strongly resembles the folder icon used in Windows.

Why did we carry papers around in suitcases? Because we didn’t have storage. Let’s go back to 1985. Computers were expensive and many didn’t have hard drives. We spent a lot of time working on hardcopies because softcopies were inconvenient. We didn’t have email, so if we were sending edits back and forth on a document, we had to print out the document, and send it on something called a “fax machine.”

There were “portable computers” but they were too big for briefcases. They came in their own case. We used the briefcase to carry the floppy disks with data and applications we needed to run the computers. That’s right, we needed two hands to carry our portable computers around. You know something else? In 1985, we didn’t have shoulder bags either. You really should read the MoPR Mobile Minute on portable computers to get the full idea. The bottom line, in 1985, mobile computing meant we schlepped around a lot of stuff, and it wasn’t always convenient.

But one entrepreneur saw real mobility looming on the horizon. Seeing that portable computers lacked portable peripherals, he created a self-contained printer that could fit inside a briefcase. His company was called Ergo Systems (of Menlo Park, California) and the printer was the groundbreaking Hush 80 – available in a parallel, serial and Commodore-compatible models.

When I say self contained, I mean aside from the power cord and printer cable, everything was inside, including a roll of thermal paper. The paper was treated with a chemical to make it heat-sensitive, turning the paper black on the area exposed to heat. A print head with seven heat-emitting dots would sweep back and forth across the paper creating characters in a 5 x 7 dot matrix. Each roll could print just over 100 pages and you never needed toner.

This printer was cool. Aesthetically, it matched the look of virtually every portable computer on the market. It was only 11 ½ inches long and less than three inches tall. Including 100 feet of paper, the printer weighed 36 oz. It was small enough to fit in a briefcase laden with papers and diskettes, and light enough to carry without adding tremendously to the already heavy (relative to today) portable computing load. In fact, the dimensions of the Hush 80 made it the only convenient element of a portable computer setup.

It printed the full 80 character lines. And because it was dot matrix, it also printed graphics.

You could either plug it in the wall or run it off rechargeable batteries – something new in the 1985 world of mobile computing.

The Hush 80 sold between $139 and $159. It’s only been recently that printers have fallen below that price point, and most printers today still cost more. Because the printer never needed toner, the cost of operation was also low.

The printer was well received by reviewers and it seemed that Ergo Systems was poised to launch into an early lead in the nascent mobile peripheral category. But it didn’t work out.

Why?

Well, one drawback was that the thermal paper came in rolls and the Hush 80 had no apparatus to cut pages in long documents. It drew a dashed line every 11 inches and users were required to cut their own pages, or crease them and tear them (which was rather easy, actually). Also, the thermal paper wasn’t the most user-friendly of papers. It curled, it smelled, and it would fade and discolor rather quickly. To preserve documents, people would have to make photocopies.

Although the price point was certainly attractive, it didn’t impact portable computing. The portable computers of the day cost more than $5,000 and were still a novelty in the business world. Today more notebook computers are sold to businesses than are desktops, and a sub $500 price point has spiked adoption of mobile computing in the consumer market. But in 1985, the number of portable computers shipped was still counted in the thousands.

Furthermore, the people laying out five grand for a computer were interested in different features than the Hush 80 possessed. The Hush 80 was quiet, inexpensive and portable. But power users of computers were seeking features like “near letter quality” instead. The 5 x 7 dot matrix Hush 80 had better-than-average print quality for its class, but was not close to letter quality.

The low price point was attractive to a market buying lower priced home and small office computers, but where the portability was of no use. Therefore there was no need to compromise the print longevity of the commonly used tractor-fed fanfold paper (is it too nerdy that I know about this stuff?) for the lighter, more portable but more inconvenient (in this context) roll of thermal paper.

But how many times have you been connected at a place like Starbucks, doing some sort of work and wishing you could print something out? Ergo Systems was a company ahead of its time. The founder and CEO of Ergo Systems was my dad, George Sidline. He understood more than 20 years ago – long before there was a mobility technology industry – that people will desire the ability through technology to have anything they want, anytime they want it, anywhere they are.

Mobile peripherals of course did catch on. Only today, most of these devices aren’t peripherals, they are built right into the computer.

And even though 20 years have elapsed, no one has yet made another high-quality portable printer. Nothing that will fit in my globebox anyway.

Did you have a Hush 80 printer from Ergo Systems? What were your earliest mobility technologies. We’d like to hear from you. Leave us a comment.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

So, we’re spending a relaxing weekend at the beach. I’m working of course, using the hotel’s Wi-Fi connection (that’s how I relax) and my family is enjoying the sunset from the hotel balcony. My kids are listening to tunes from my iPod. Sheryl Crow’s Lifetimes comes on and my daughters both agree, Sheryl Crow is great. So I switch the iPod from playlist to artist mode, and they listen to a bunch of Sheryl Crow songs. All I Wanna Do comes on and they start to dance, telling me how much they love that song.

I love that song, too. I recall the album and the video very well and start trying to place it in time from memory. “It can’t be!” I exclaim to myself. So I Google it (free hotel Wi-Fi rocks!) and it can be. That song came out in 1994.

Whenever I encounter a moment like that, when something that feels like it should have happened just yesterday turns out happened more than a decade ago, I start to wax nostalgic about how the world has changed. This is one of those times.

Today I can get virtually any data I want delivered to my laptop virtually anyplace I am. If I’m sitting at a hotel, I can download and play almost any song ever recorded and pop it into a playlist on my iPod. I can tell my friends about the cool new song I just downloaded using email or instant messaging. And if I want to learn more about the artist, I just Google her. That’s today, in a world being blanketed by 3G and Wi-Fi high speed wireless Internet connections, municipal mesh networks and nearly ubiquitous commercial hotspots, like the one at my hotel. But that’s today.

In 1994 I was listening to music on CDs that I had to buy from a store. If I wanted to create my own playlist, I had to use cassette tapes. In 1994 I had an application called cc:Mail that allowed me to send text-based notes to colleagues (who worked for the same company I did and were inside the same building I was – it wasn’t exactly e-mail). If I wanted to look something up, I had to use something called an “encyclopedia” – a set of leather bound books which alphabetically presented you roughly 10 percent of the world’s important facts. Although my father used to sell these books door-to-door, the closest one to my home was at the public library. In short, I never looked anything up.

1994 was the dark ages.

But I remember something else from 1994: it was the year Metricom activated its first municipal wireless data network in Cupertino, California.

I wasn’t an executive back then, just a mere worker bee. So I could only admire the big boys with their fancy toys and imagine “someday, that’s going to be me.” Toys like the IBM ThinkPad 750 (which came with a built in CD ROM! No, you couldn’t record music on it, but it made installing software SO much easier) and 120 megs of RAM (which was a lot back then, trust me). There was still no email, but if there were, you could now use your notebook computer to send and receive messages using Metricom’s Ricochet MicroCellular Data Network, the first-ever muni wireless network!

It wasn’t cheap. Today Wi-Fi modems are built into notebook computers as a standard feature off the assembly line and you can get free Wi-Fi access in lots of locations, like my hotel for instance. And Wi-Fi can be as fast as 54 Megabits per second (but it’s probably likely that behind the access point is only a 1.5 Mbps DSL line).

But in 1994, there weren’t even that many notebook computers. That was the first year Apple sold the Powerbook. And modems of any kind weren’t a standard feature. If you wanted to connect even over a dial-up connection, you had to insert a card.

But still, the notebook held out the promise of mobility, and in 1994, Metricom wanted to help deliver that promise with a cellular-based data network for portable computers. First, you needed a modem. Metricom sold theirs at a discount to subscribers for the low low price of $495. If you recall cell phones of twelve years ago, they weren’t exactly the tiny palm sized devices we have today. They were big and had thick antennas, and so did the Ricochet modem.

But the modem could attach to the laptop, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. What’s more, it was so obvious you were using a wireless data network, that having that big, clunky box with the thick antenna sticking up actually made you look cool! Remember, only executives and rich people had wireless Internet.

Once you plunked down five bills for a modem, and a sixth one for service activation you had to select a service level. In 1994, there were four:

“Economy” – 2.4 kbps for $2.95 per month; “Standard” – 9.6 kbps for $9.95 per month; “Executive” – 19.2 kbps for $19.95 per month; and “Premier” – Unrestricted bandwidth for $29.95 a month (wonder how fast unrestricted was?).

Okay, let’s stop for a moment for a quick math lesson. 2.4 kbps? Let’s say it’s 1994 and you want to download the MP3 of that hot hit song, All I Wanna Do by Sheryl Crow, over your Ricochet network. The file is about four megabytes. A byte is eight bits. Your Ricochet connection can download 2.4 kilobits per second. How long will it take you to download the MP3 of All I Wanna Do to your computer?

It’s a trick question. There were no MP3s in 1994. But if there were, it would have taken you approximately 3 hours and 42 minutes to download one song. By comparison, if you were staying at the same hotel I am on the Oregon coast, you can download that song in about 35 seconds.

Fortunately, there were no great bandwidth demands in 1994 as there are now in 2006. No one was downloading music. You probably didn’t have email as we know it today, and if you did, probably no one else to whom you wanted to send an email had an account anyway. There was no Yahoo!, no Google, no MySpace, no Amazon.com. There was no World Wide Web (although in 1994 a fellow by the name of Marc Andreesen of a little-known company called Netscape predicted the World Wide Web would become a commercial success). In fact, I’m not sure what you could use the 2.4 kbps connection for in 1994.

Even so, here is how Metricom described itself in that June 1994 press release announcing the Cupertino network:

“Founded in 1985, Metricom is a leader in digital, wireless data communications networking technology. The firm, headquartered in Los Gatos, Calif., has developed a license-free, high performance, low-cost regional data communications network system that can be used in a broad range of personal computer and industrial applications.”

Industrial applications?

Metricom promised 30 regional networks by the end of 1996.

In 1997, by the time I had reached a certain professional status whereby I was issued a notebook, we were light years ahead of where the world was in 1994. I had email accounts at work and at home and there was a commercial World Wide Web (still no Google yet). And it was in a meeting in 1997 where I learned the great value of wireless Internet.

On one end of the table was the CTO of the company I worked for, on the other end his director of network architecture – the only two people at this company to have the Ricochet wireless Internet service. In between were two industry analysts who sat opposite me. Every so often during this meeting either the CTO or his director would tap on the keyboard and the other one would smirk. You see, by 1997, we also had instant messaging. But that will be the subject of another post.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

“Okay, you guys… [ cell phone rings; he pulls out a tiny cell phone ] Hold on. Hello? Yes. Really. Splendid. [ hangs up ] We’re going to the Dolce & Gabbana show. How fast can you have your bags packed for Milan?”

As the boss at Jeffrey’s, Will Ferrell (making his third MoPR blog appearance) demonstrated for America the marriage of fashion and mobility technology. In February 2001, with his super-mini cell phone, Ferrell helped us understand that the glitterati wanted technology compact and gilded; a sort of functional jewelry.

By Fall of that year, the boss at Jeffrey’s was placing a call on a phone not unlike the 1973 model held up in this picture of Martin Cooper, the inventor of the cell phone. “Big is the new small,” Ferrell’s character informs us, after he hangs up from his call with Cami Diaz.

Mobile phones, (aka cell phones and portable phones), began to flourish in the 1980s. But research and development into mobile phones dates back to the 1920s.

Built long before the transistor, imagine the size of the wooden box filled with vacuum tubes used to house the first mobile “phone” (like the one shown in this 1924 picture). Likewise, imagine the size of the batteries used to power it. Walking around with such a phone was not only impractical, it was impossible. So the first mobile communications devices were built into vehicles, primarily for military and public safety use. They also worked on radio frequencies (VHF) and were never part of any phone system.

The technology concepts for true cellular networks were not conceived until the 1940s (see MoPR Mobility Minute: US Patent 2,292,387). With transistors replacing vacuum tubes and better networks becoming available, cellular car phones were introduced – once again battery size keeping true mobile communicators out of the pockets of the glitterati.

By the 1970s mobile phones were portable enough to be carried around like a briefcase. By the mid 1970s, at last a phone that can fit in the palm of one’s hand. Martin Cooper, a former general manager for Motorola, is widely considered to be inventor of the cell phone. Placing the first call over a portable phone — to his rival Joel Engel, head of research at Bell Laboratories, where he began his conversation by saying “Hello Joel, guess where I’m calling from?” — Cooper not only invented the mobile phone, but also the phrase most widely used by people with new mobile phones.

With the cost of cell phones and cell phone calls making adoption prohibitive for most people, many calls were made for only two reasons: first, the person being called had to guess where the caller was calling from; second, the caller had to inform the person being called that a second call would be placed once the caller got to a landline.

By the 1990s the cost of phones and calls were making mobile phones attractive to the general population. Today many cell phones, now able to fit easily into the palm of the hand, a small purse or even the pocket of tight-fitting jeans, come free with an annual service plan, and lower per minute rates and prepaid plans make it possible for a much wider swath of the world’s population to enjoy getting their friends to guess where they are calling from.

Now state legislatures are taking up anti-cell phone regulation to keep people from talking while driving and cell phone etiquette guides would become widely available, and widely ignored.

Text messaging allows people from all over the world to send short instant messages from phone to phone and helps people learn to type with their thumbs using only 10 keys. Amazing.

As adoption increases so do features. Sharp Electronics of Japan put a camera into phones in the early 2000s, and now camera phones are included on a very wide variety of cell phones, including those given for free with annual subscription plans. Suddenly people all over the earth were taking pictures of themselves with camera phones to send people visual clues to help guess where they were calling from.

Ringtones helped personalize phones by allowing a ring to sound like your favorite song or to have different rings for different people. For example, when my wife calls my phone plays “Don’t You Love Her Madly,” by the Doors. When I call, the “Darth Vader Theme” rings over hers.

By 2006, with low-cost phones and plans making it possible for Americas teenagers to have their own camera-equipped cell phones, text messaging became a disruptive nuisance in the classroom. Fortunately, the mosquito ringtone was invented, which produced an obnoxious sound like the buzz of mosquitos that adults cannot hear but are audible to obnoxious teenagers. Now these teenagers can text one another in class without disrupting the lecture with rings or buzzes from vibrating handsets.

Okay fine, you kids go and play with your phones and send text messages about how lame the grown-ups are. But in the end, we’ll have the last laugh. Grown-ups are taking over MySpace (subject of a future post).

By the way, our much-beloved Will Ferrell wasn’t the first comic genius to teach us about the marriage of fashion and mobility technology. 35 years before Jeffrey’s opened its SNL doors, Agent Maxwell Smart was placing calls from a shoe.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

Because of the show Rock Star: INXS (soon to be a subject of another post), I started uploading lots of 80s music to my iPod. A friend asked me if I liked INXS back in the 80s, and I responded, “You bet I did! I had all their cassettes!”Cassettes were awesome! You weren’t just restricted to listening to albums, but you could easily record your own playlists, like a real disk jockey! Most of these custom cassettes were recorded one at a time, painstakingly in the order of how we wanted to hear them – at least at the time we made the recording. Remember how cool it was when someone invented the fast-forward feature that could stop in the silence between the end of one song and the beginning of the next? That allowed us to fast-forward over the song we regretted accidentally putting on the tape.

But to enjoy my music collection in my car meant bringing with me something that resembled a suitcase, which I had keep stashed underneath the passenger seat whenever I parked the car. If you had a car in the 1980s, you also had that suitcase – don’t lie, of course you did. We all did. Anything smaller than that suitcase would limit you to some unsatisfyingly small number of cassettes (some older folks remember the steamer trunk sized container of 8-tracks they had to lug around to enjoy their music collection in their vans back in the 70s).

The advent of CDs reduced the suitcase to a “wallet” or even a smaller collection fanned across the back of a sun visor. When CDs became recordable, man that was revolutionary! We still painstakingly recorded songs one at a time to create our own playlists, but at least the music was digital.

The thing is, people have always wanted to bring the entertainment media they enjoy along for the ride. It’s all about having anything you want, anytime you want it, anyplace you are.

Chrysler Motors knew this, even way back when. In 1956 they teamed with CBS to create the “Highway Hi-Fi” – an under-dash phonograph that played vinyl records at a super-slow 16-2/3 revolutions per minute. The slow speed allowed a small disc to pack up to an hour of entertainment on each side. Special mechanical engineering reduced the number of times and distance the needle would skip across the disc as the car drove over bumps in the road.

Technology really didn’t catch up with Chrysler’s vision until the invention of the iPod. The iPod lets you carry with you virtually your entire multimedia library wherever you go.

Now cars come equipped with iPod-ready sound systems. You can control your iPod from the steering wheel as the device sits in the cradle getting charged. Of course satellite radio is there for those times when you grow tired of the 60 megabytes of music you have stored on your iPod. And just in case, the theater-quality surround sound works great with the built-in DVD player (with a cartridge to keep multiple DVDs ready to play).

If only there was a way to listen to INXS in the front while the kids watch Sponge Bob in the back…

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

One of the advantages of growing up the son of an engineer is inheriting castoff computers. This benefit is particularly of value in college.

My friend Matt and I were two such lucky college kids. Not only did we get old computers, but they were portable! That meant we could bring our computers to the popular San Francisco coffee houses, libraries, even to classes to take notes.

Um… No, we couldn’t.

“Portable” simply meant that when we had to move out of our respective domiciles at the end of the school year, we had an easier time packing our computer than, say, our stereo.

The year was 1986, and Matt and I each had different portable computers. We frequently debated as to which one was better (nerd alert). Matt had the slightly older Osborne 1 while I had the Kaypro II. There were many similarities but the two computers were vastly different.

Matt’s Osborne 1, built in 1981, sported the Zilog Z80 microprocessor (the very same chip used in Radio Shack’s TRS-80 models II and III) with a super fast clock rate of 4.0 Mhz. It, of course, had 64 kilobytes of RAM. It packed 24.5 lbs of technology into its sleek plastic suitcase-shaped case (the top of which contained the keyboard).

My Kaypro II on the other hand, built in 1982, had a slower Z80 chip, only 2.5 Mhz. It also weighed a heavier 26 lbs and was in a squared off metal case (the top of which contained the keyboard). Fine, the Osborne 1 looked sportier. But drop the Osborne and you run the risk of damaging the inside, while the Kaypro was boxy but safe, just like a 1982 Volvo sedan.

But even more than that, the Kaypro II had dual 195 kb floppy disk drives (way back in the 1980s, computers had disk drives for “diskettes” that were 5 ¼ inches in diameter which were indeed floppy. These diskettes held more data and were far easier to manage than their 8 inch predecessor. Can you imagine carrying around 8 inch disks? No, 5 ¼ inch was the way to go). So my Kaypro II was able to put a program disk in Drive A with software that was up to 195 kilobytes in size. I could also put a second data disk in Drive B that could store up to 195 kilobytes of files.

Matt, on the other hand, had measly dual 91 kilobyte drives. That meant that the word processor he was using, for example, was as much as 100 kilobytes smaller and thus far less powerful than mine.

Matt’s display was also a paltry 5 inches wide and could only display 53 characters across! Whereas the Kaypro II had a 9 inch display that could display 80 beefier characters on the same line. And who says size doesn’t matter? Not only that, but the Kaypro II’s display was green (from electronically charged phosphorous) which, legend has it, was easier on the eyes.

Both computers sold for about $1,700 when they were new. They both used the CP/M operating system (a lot like MS-DOS, but without all the fancy bells and whistles). But I think you will agree with me that the Kaypro II was by far the superior machine.

Of course, the reason that we got these computers was that our fathers got new computers and no longer needed these. I don’t know what Matt’s dad got, but my father replaced the Kaypro II with the state-of-the art in mobile computing: the Compaq Portable II. Understand, that a lot had changed between 1982 when the Kaypro II was made and 1986 when the Compaq Portable II debuted.

The Compaq Portable II was simply a lot more computer that you could also carry around. It cost more too, with prices closing in on $5,000. But you got the latest Intel 80286 microprocessor that had a clock speed of at least 6 Mhz but maybe as much as 8 Mhz! You only got a single 5 ¼ inch double-sided floppy drive, but it held 360 kilobytes of data! It also came with 256K of memory (or as much as 640K!). It still had a 9 inch monitor for 80 character lines, but it had something else that neither the Osborne 1 nor the Kaypro II ever had: a hard drive. An actual drive that stayed inside the computer at all times where you could store all your programs.

The hard drive on my dad’s Compaq Portable II was a whopping 10 Megs! To put that in perspective, you would need just over 51 of the 195 kilobyte floppy disks to store all the software you could on just one 10 megabyte hard drive. Can you imagine carting around 51 diskettes? (Actually, you could, because in order to back up the hard drive, you had to save all the data on 28 diskettes, but that’s beside the point).

You no longer had to use CP/M. It was replaced with MS-DOS (a lot like CP/M, but with fancy bells and whistles).

By the way, the Compaq Portable II weighed 26 lbs, the same as the Kaypro II. But as you can see from this picture, the Compaq Portable II was a quantum leap in mobile computing from the Osborne and Kaypro dinasours it replaced.

How far has mobile computing come in the 20 years since the Compaq Portable II hit the market? The Dell notebooks used by Mobility Public Relations weigh less than 5 lbs and have Intel’s Core Duo T2400 microprocessors with a clock speed of 1.83 Ghz (somewhere in the neighborhood of 230 times faster than the Compaq’s chip, but the chip actually processes data far faster than that), comes with 2.0G of memory (roughly 3,125 times the amount of memory the Compaq could max; but the Dell can go to 4.0G), and has an 80GB hard drive (which holds 8,000 times more data than the Compaq’s). That’s important because Microsoft Word is 11.5 megabytes (that’s 1.5 megabytes larger than the Compaq’s hard drive and about the size of 60 floppy disks on the Kaypro II).

The display on the Dell is a 14.1 inch wide-screen set at 1280 by 1024 pixels with four bazillian colors or something like that (as compared the two colors of the Compaq) which means the Dell can do one more important thing that the Compaq, Osborne and Kaypro never could: play video games!

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

The patent for “Secret Communications System” was granted August 11, 1942 to H.K. Markey, et al. The patent is often referred to as the “Markey-Antheil” patent for the two principal inventors.The primary purpose of the invention was for the remote control of torpedoes from aircraft. The problem it solved was the jamming of radio frequencies that could disrupt communication between an aircraft and the dirigible craft (torpedo) it was guiding.

The technology applied to overcome radio jamming is called signal hopping. Both the remote craft and the guiding craft had radios that were synchronized using a paper roll, not dissimilar from the paper rolls used in player pianos such as the Pianola. Eight different frequencies were coded onto the paper roll, and as it turned it caused the radio signal to switch frequencies simultaneously at both ends of the transmission.

This particular patent was never built into a product, and the patent eventually expired in 1959. However, the technological concepts of the patent continued to inspire engineers. In 1957, engineers in Sylvania’s laboratories replaced the paper roll with electronics and created a more advanced means of transmitting signals over multiple radio frequencies. This time, the technology was used for secret communications, utilized on US Navy ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis as just one example.

Today, more than 1200 patents refer to this original patent, all based on “signal hopping” or, as it is better known today, “spread spectrum.” The technology originally meant for military application to send a single data stream over multiple radio frequencies is now used to break data up into small packets that can travel on multiple frequencies or even multiple networks. US Patent 2,292,387 contains the basic technology for such everyday modern mobility technologies as digital cellular phone systems like CDMA (code division multiple access) and Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) wireless Internet.

Who was H.K. Markey? Markey was her married name (one of her six married names). The inventor of spread spectrum technology was actress Hedy Lamarr (1913 – 2000). Co-inventor George Antheil (1900 – 1959) was a concert pianist and composer; hence the paper roll resembling one in a Pianola and eight different frequencies like the eight notes in an octave.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations

Three names are associated with Walkie Talkies. Alfred J. Gross (1918 – 2000), Donald Hings (1907 – 2004) and Paul Galvin (1895 – 1959). But it appears that Canadian-born/American-raised inventor Alfred Gross built the first portable radio device in 1938 (Canadian Hings built his portable radio for the Canadian military in 1942). Gross, who has a number of US patents for mobile radio technology, once demonstrated his invention to a secret classified meeting of the FCC in 1944. The demonstration inspired FCC Commissioner E. K. Jett to write an article, “Phone Me By Air,” published in the Saturday Evening Post in July, 1945:

“Now, for good or evil, comes the Walkie-Talkie for civilians. Just radio, ‘Bring home an extra lamb chop,’ or, ‘I want to report a strange man’ – You can keep quiet, if you wish – but you probably won’t.”

The era of mass mobile communications predicted by Jett was still decades away, however.Paul Galvin’s company, The Galvin Manufacturing Company (later renamed Motorola), mass produced the Walkie Talkie for the US Military in the lead up to and during World War II.

The journeyman Walkie Talkie was the SCR-300 made by Galvin’s company, which delivered nearly 50,000 for Allied Forces in both the European and Pacific war theaters. When we think about Walkie Talkies today, we think about small handheld devices. But in the late 1930s and early 1940s, Walkie Talkie equipment was fitted into backpacks and weighed approximately 35 pounds.

By 1942 the first handheld radios — or Handy-Talkies — were deployed.

Communications devices were becoming more portable. But these devices used radio frequencies in the same way radio stations do. A broadcast of signals from the transmitting device to any receiver within range. Not exactly private or secure. And not without other problems, too. For example, military radios were often jammed by the enemy to disrupt communications. Network-based communications was still to come.

More information on Walkie-Talkies and Handy-Talkies can be found on the US Army Signal Center online museum of Fort Gordon, GA.

Reposted with permission © 2006 Mobility Public Relations