The mass adoption of cell phones didn’t really begin until the late 1990s, but some people had them as early as 1979 in Japan. How many cell phones would you guess existed in the world in 1985? I know in Japan they had already been commercially available for 6 years so I would imagine it was already in the millions or at least hundreds of thousands.
A quick Google search shows there were 340,213 cell phone subscribers in the U.S. in 1985. That’s more than I would have guessed.
This graph shows the increase in cell use over time.
That’s about what I would would have guessed.
By 1988 at least half of all self-employed person who had to work outside the office had one. Tradespeople, real estate agents, landscapers, lawyers etc. Even in my small town there were dozens of the things. For the cost of a phone, you could dispense with having to pay a secretary in addition to all the other advantages.
So one phone for every 1000 or so people a few years earlier sounds about right.
Yeah I think they were too clunky and expensive until the late 90s/early 00s for them to be adopted by say, teenagers or retail workers. But you could get one if you wanted to in the 80s, most people just didn’t have a need there was a payphone on every corner and many people viewed them as yuppie toys even as late as 1995-96. Like when the movie Clueless came out Silverstone’s character Cheryl’s phone was a symbol of her affluence.
I had an internship tracking selling expenses for a large business services company. Specifically I was tasked with auditing telephony costs.
The lowest end sales reps ($12k salary, maybe $30k total comp) would not have cell phones. They had to use pay phones or ask to use customer’s office phones with their company issued calling cards.
The mid level guys would have cell phones for use in an emergency.
The high level sales reps (say $35salary, $75k total, serious money back then) and the sales managers had phones that they used more routinely.
But everyone had to document the purpose of every single call. Five minute calls would be $2 or $3. Someone using 30 minutes a month was a “heavy user” and might get a warning.
This was not a tin pot little company. $10B in sales and 50,000 employees.
In 1992 I went to work at the same company full time. Cell phone use was a lot more widespread.
I don’t remember seeing a cell phone until the early 90s. In the late 80s some people had car phones. The earliest “portable” phone I saw in the late 80s came in a brief case. One had to open it up and extend the antenna to receive information.
Yeah, that’s important to know. When we say “cellphone” nowadays, we think of something that fits in a pocket. My first phone (1988? Radio Shack, $1500 on sale, marked down from $2000) was a carphone, and there was a large brick under the back seat, plus an antenna on top of the car. The handset alone was three times as big as today’s entire phones.
I think car phones have actually been around since the 50s/60s, but probably only in a few cities like New York.
What about the shoe phone?
The earliest car phones weren’t cellular; there was only one radio tower per city, and the phone had to be powerful enough to communicate with that tower throughout the metro area. Channel capacity was limited, so the service was quite expensive.
Cellular car phones rolled out in the US in 1982. The service was still expensive, but way cheaper than non-cellular car service. The earliest ads were targeted exclusively to type-A business persons who wanted to work during their commute or while driving to sales calls.
Handheld cellular phones rolled out gradually in the mid-to-late 1980’s. The earliest ones were large and clunky, and service was spotty and by today’s standards expensive. But, they enabled personal use and not just business use.
I began working in the cellular business in 1992, and in that year mobile devices were becoming more numerous than vehicular devices for the first time.
Remember when people put fake cell phone antennas on their cars as status symbols?
It’s surprising you paid that much. By 1988 there were several models of truly portable phones on the market in that price range and car phones had come down in price dramatically.
While none of these portables would fit in a pocket, they would all fit in a shoebox and didn’t need to be car mounted.
I could be wrong about the date (1988), but it had to be after 1985, as that was the model car I had then. When Radio Shack dropped their model to $1500, I had to have it. A few years later, when the “bricks” became a little slimmer, but before the flip phones, I got two[sup][/sup] of those, and donated the car phone to a local minister.
[sup][/sup]Two, because few other people had even one, and I wanted to communicate with someone on the shore from my boat in an emergency. So I would give one phone to a friend when I went out on the water.
Haha, yes! I had a girlfriend in high school whose mother had a fake antenna attached to the roof of the car and a non-working cell phone the size of a lunchbox between the front seats. She claimed it was to scare off muggers in a parking ramp or whatever. We always thought it was to impress passengers.
Tangential question: Is there a current technology/device that is in a similar position as the cell phone in 1985?
I remember when these http://img.wonderhowto.com/img/00/66/63440148210407/0/from-backpack-transceiver-smartphone-visual-history-mobile-phone.w654.jpg were state of the art. Folks in restaurants would ostentatiously set it in the middle of the table or bar so everybody knew they were a bigshot with a phone.
So I got a toy that looked just like one. But each button on it played a different nonsense electronic noise. One of which sounded just like the real ones ringing. It was great for deflating the pompous.
Smart watch?
ETA: The iWatch needs to be paired with an iPhone currently. But I can see stand-alone devices in the next decade that completely supplant smart phones.
Maybe Canada was different, but portable cell phones were available in the US in the early 80s.
As I said in the BttF thread:
nm