Hello And Thank You To Pioneer Of The Mobile Phone: Thai Editorial

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EDITORIAL
Hello and thank you to pioneer of the mobile phone
The Nation

A tip of the hat to the man who, 40 years ago, made a telephone call that would change our lives

BANGKOK: -- If you are under 40, it must be hard to imagine the time before mobile phones. It sounds ridiculous that families once had to wait months, if not years, to get a landline connection for their telephone, which was such a rare commodity that you could "sell" your "number" for Bt200,000 or more. Yes, there was a time when a household's only telephone sat in the middle of the living room and a teenager had to sneak out of his or her bedroom at 3am to talk "secrets".

SMS text-messaging was unimaginable. The concept of using a wireless phone the size of a cigarette case to take a photo and send it immediately to someone in Alaska would have been laughed at. And the idea of seeing a chat partner in real time on a mini-screen? It would have sounded like the stuff of science-fiction movies, and even in the films of the genre made a few decades ago, the screens looked amusingly large and old-fashioned by today's standards.

Last week marked the 40th birthday of the mobile phone, an innovation that has turned everyone's life upside down. The website www.dailytech.com recalls how it happened: "It was a spring day much like this one when Martin Cooper used his Motorola DynaTAC cell phone prototype to place a call in downtown Manhattan. The year was 1973 and it was the third day of April. The call lasted about 20 minutes and, much like today's users, Mr Cooper suffered a familiar problem - a drained battery."

The first mobile phone weighed over one kilogram and the battery life was just 20 minutes, which Cooper jokingly said was just about right because you wouldn't be able to hold it much longer anyway. He must be proud to see the current miniature sizes of that phone's great-grandchildren, how long today's batteries can last and, last but not least, what else the new generations of mobile phone can do in addition to placing calls.

It used to take this newspaper three days to get an interview with a southern Army chief to our readers. One day for painstaking appointment and arrangement for the interview and travel to Songkhla, another day for a car ride from Songkla to the jungle and the writing of the story, and another day for faxing the story back to Bangkok, where the printing process would lumber on.

Nowadays the gap between such a story's conception and reading online is about two hours. A journalist can call the southern Army chief on a mobile phone and use the same device the write the story and upload it for readers, who can in turn use their phones to access it and view photos and video and listen to the interview as recorded. And this is the mobile phone serving conventional journalism only. What's next? The possibilities are endless.

For people who experienced the pre-mobile-phone age, it's easy to observe how drastically life has changed. There are those who miss the old days, when a vacation was free of email from the boss pressuring them about a project, when romance carried the "charm" of distance, and when "connections" meant anything but digital activity.

Mobile phones shrank the world and led to countless other innovations. The day Martin Cooper placed his first call marked the end of an era and ushered in a new one. Landline phones that cost hundreds of thousands of baht 40 years ago are now just a reminder of a bygone era. The telecom industry is the world's new economic driving force, making a great number of people extremely rich and causing serious political conflicts in countries like Thailand.

Surely, so far, we have only witnessed a small fraction of the potential of mobile-phone technology. That, however, only amplifies the importance of the baby step taken four decades ago by one Martin Cooper, now 84 years old.


-- The Nation 2013-04-09

[JetsetBkk]

Slow news day at The Nation?

[sunshine51]

Definitely must be a slow news day....however...here's a couple links

to Mr. Coopers baby that are quite informative regarding something

we all take for granted today.

http://inventors.about.com/cs/inventorsalphabet/a/martin_cooper.htm

http://www.dailytech.com/Happy+Birthday+The+Mobile+Phone+Turns+40/article30269.htm

[slapout]

Just thru observation of the number of people in the workforce who are either playing games??? watching video??? or talking to someone while on the timeclock for work. I can think of no device whose personal use/ownership, seems to have done more to reduced productivity of labor, students, etc, than the mobil phone, which is opposite to its orginal intent..

The devices back then and today can have a very positive/time saving use for indivuals and companies when used as intended.

[BrianCR]

Which Western Company introduced it and helped set up the infrastructure here in Thailand? I know, i worked for them, do you?

[Songhua]

In the early nineties I was based in BKK but was required to travel all over Thailand. I had to carry a phone similar to the one in the pic - the girls all wanted to play with it but I thought it was an absolute pain in the a$$ (it rarely worked properly anyway)

I later upgraded'' to one of these:

[IMA_FARANG]

My particular peeve with people using the blankety-blank cellphone is this.

I'm 67 years old, slightly impaired in walking about, and therefore I must watch carefully where i am going.

Especially on stairs or escalators I need to plan my path carefully.

I have a problem with Thais on the cellphones who are NOT watching where they are walking, just talking to someone far away with that blank "I'm on my cellphone" look in their eyes.

They will walk right into you and appear to not see you....their attention is on that d-mned cellphone.

So I DON'T have any love for cellphones.

[BrianCR]

IMA_FARANG, on 10 Apr 2013 - 18:43, said:

My particular peeve with people using the blankety-blank cellphone is this.

I'm 67 years old, slightly impaired in walking about, and therefore I must watch carefully where i am going.

Especially on stairs or escalators I need to plan my path carefully.

I have a problem with Thais on the cellphones who are NOT watching where they are walking, just talking to someone far away with that blank "I'm on my cellphone" look in their eyes.

They will walk right into you and appear to not see you....their attention is on that d-mned cellphone.

So I DON'T have any love for cellphones.

Carry a loudhailer around with you and broadcast a personal conversation they'll notice you for sure and by the way it's not just Thai's but Westerners as well!

[BrianCR]

Songhua, on 09 Apr 2013 - 22:50, said:

old_mobile_phone.jpg

In the early nineties I was based in BKK but was required to travel all over Thailand. I had to carry a phone similar to the one in the pic - the girls all wanted to play with it but I thought it was an absolute pain in the a$$ (it rarely worked properly anyway)

I later upgraded'' to one of these:

2e50e_634401482104070066.jpg

The girls still want to play with "it" but they've all got their own phones now - have a nice day!