Early Cell Phone Technology

It seems like only yesterday when I encountered my first cell phone � or should I say, my dad�s first hardwired car phone. I didn�t even know he was having one installed � and quite honestly, in the mid 1980s, I wouldn�t have known what a car phone was in the first place! I was still convinced that wireless home phones with foot long antennas were the height of technology! But here it was, neatly mounted beneath the ash tray in his Chevy Caprice station wagon, just waiting to be used. And wait it did! Back then, minutes were so expensive that the car phones were literally only to be used for the most important of calls. Our family reveled in the technology that made phone calling at an instant a real possibility for another 10 years, through advancements that included being able to store an entire 10 contacts in the phone�s quick reference memory, call waiting and eventually caller ID. The first time my mom answered her phone by saying �Hi, Grace� to her sister, my poor aunt became convinced that mom must be a psychic! My dad was so sold on the technology of the car phone (he was a 12-year-old child when the height of technology was dropping the A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) that he even had one hardwired into my first car � a little Chevy Cavalier � when everyone else was already migrating to true mobile phones � those that could truly go anywhere you go. The biggest technology jump at that point was mobility � the mobile phones of that day were so large � and heavy � that they could be quite unwieldy to use, and in fact came in fairly handy when I first left for college and needed something to threaten off frat boys playing pranks! There were still no such thing as playing a game on a cell phone, and I was excited that instead of being able to save my 10 favorite friends into speed dial, I could now save 20. Rushing on from that rather unspectacular experience that ended abruptly one night when I discovered my phone could not, in fact, ice skate, we arrive at my first truly memorable cell phone � a Nokia that allowed me to not only make calls, but also introduced me to text messaging, online information browsing and mobile gaming! The text messaging blew my mind! And when I took random midnight road trips through the back roads of Pennsylvania I could look up information through a quasi-online site to pinpoint where I was � be it Nesquehoning or Shickshinny � and figure out how to get back home before my 8 AM class! Plus, I could now engage in playing the ever fun game of making the snake eat the apples while navigating through the maze to the next round! Next up, after I moved out of state, came a Sanyo that just blew me away. This handset could do everything the last could, and now it could also keep my calendar, display images on screen and enable three-way calling. It was also an indestructible sucker � too bad I didn�t have it along on my ice-skating incident 4-years prior! But most memorably, this phone made an impression for reliability in my mind that brings me to my present handset, the Sanyo RL-7300. This model, although now almost two-years-old, is so hardy, so smart and so dependable that I�m convinced it knows how to better run my busy life than I do!