Tomorrow’s World: Mobile Phone 13 September 1979 – BBC
From the BBC Archive ‘Tomorrow’s World’ collection: www.bbc.co.uk Michael Rodd makes a call with an experimental cordless mobile phone. It’s 1979 and time for the telephone to go mobile. In this report from a longer programme, Michael Rodd (pictured above) examines a British prototype for a cordless telephone that allows the user to make calls from anywhere. Also included at the end of this item is a rather nice out-take as Rodd also experiences the first mobile wrong number.
Will it support Apps? or wireless fidelitiy?
good times! work, cars, sex!!!! i would go back right now and not miss a thing! (except for internet porn!!!!!)
Wow… now they can take pictures, and send videos to other people of some person getting slapped in the face in the a schools public toilet.
@saundersd I bet you thought you were sounding so smart when you wrote that comment.
If it takes longer than 3 minutes, it gets cut off lmao
dont waste the air waves!!
quality.
bring back raymond baxter!!
Fascinating!
Good old analog radio – nice and easy to listen in on.
the original alan partridge
They’ll never catch on i’m sure of that!
And yet another british invention of which the powers that be could not see the potential .
Ahh man, Id love to get me a “walkabout phone” I hate being plugged into the wall
A land line would have been so funny. He’s talking and as the cable stretches it trips up tea ladies and eventually snaps cutting him off.
This isn’t really a modern mobile (cell) phone, it’s an add-on accessory for a standard radiotelephone, which in 1979 would still have been useful. I worked for a company at the time making similar radios and these add-ons were being researched. However, as stated it looked as though it would be held back through lack of legislation/regulation so it wasn’t pursued. But a white paper giving the go-ahead for cell-based networks was only a few years in coming which was really a lot more advanced.
@Scruffmuck The same happened with the Colossus computer… the britsh government kept it quiet, while the americans announced th ENIAC and moved on.
Great old footage.
I can’t wait till they bring them out! I’ll be the first to get one (even though I am only 3 in 1979 hahah)
Is that tie made of wood?
now, we have a cell phone
Early mobile phones in the late 70s
Early mobile phones in the late 70s they have come a long way since then.
They left out the part where he sends the first sext.
WOW That’s amazing… just imagine if this device caught on and in 30 years time people are using miniature hand held telephones with colour screens and sophisticated extras such as ‘texting’ from a QUERTY keyboard… I bet some audacious company would even dare to claim that he’d be able to take your picture too… Wild I know, but I have one hell of an imagination!
They were worried about wasting airwaves back then???
Wow, and in just 31 years we’ve gone from “The post office are not keen on the idea”, and the phones themselves cut off after 3 mins and must weigh 2kg, to, the powerful computer/cameras/phones they are today with so much advertising and contracts that the post office must be laughing all the way to the bank trying to deliver it all to people’s homes.
We’re all suffering from Future Shock. Alvin Tuffler was correct, and Orson Welles was poignant.