We missed a big day yesterday, the 50th anniversary of the FIRST cell-phone call.
Can you remember the first time that you ever made a call on a cell phone? I can...
It was in January 1988. I was in Finland visiting some customers, and one of our local salesmen had driven me to visit a company that we were trying to sell some software to, located maybe 50 miles or so North of Helsinki. On our way back to the city, the salesman called his wife to explain that he would be late getting home as the meeting had gone longer than originally planned, and of course he used his cell phone (Finland was one of the pioneers in cellphone usage). Since he had just talked to his wife, I made the comment that I needed to remember to call my wife when I got back to the hotel, at which point he handed me his cell phone and told me that I should just call her now. I told him that I had never used a cellphone before and he said that now was as good a time as any to start. So I called my wife, of course it was still early in the day back in California, but she was shocked when I explained that I was calling her from a car while on a very dark road (after all, it was January in Finland), out in the middle of nowhere, heading back to Helsinki.
It was years later before we got our first cell phone. Actually my wife got one before I did and only because her Aunt, who lived up in North Hollywood, was ill and my wife was the only family member within a thousand miles and when she was diagnosed with cancer, Barb would often have to drive up there on her own, sometimes late at night and so she got a cellphone just in case of an emergency while on the road. Anyway, in the Spring of 1996 she got a Motorola 'flip-phone' (to this day, our Verizon account is still in her name since that first phone was hers). A few years later, she got me a 'flip-phone' for Christmas. We had Motorola phones for years until 2011, when we switched to a pair of Apple iPhone 4S's.
Currently, she's using an Apple iPhone 13 Pro Max and I've got an iPhone 11 Pro.
OCU
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