Wow, 1977. Know how mobile phones worked then? You’d talk into the phone, then a little bird would fly out, fly to the person you wanted to reach, and repeat your message in a squawky voice. And if you decided to just drive over and tell him yourself, you had to get this massive stone car moving by pushing your feet against the ground. Man, it sucked.
I briefly worked as a mobile phone operator back in the 1970s. They were not cellular, they were conventional two-way VHF FM analog radios, like those still in use by many taxi companies and police departments. Calls were manually completed through a base station by a mobile operator. You would ask the mobile operator to connect you to a telephone number. It worked much like the telephone in the era before direct dialing. The radios were huge by modern standards, and much more powerful. They were usually installed in the trunk of a car, with a control head installed in the passenger compartment. The closest thing to a portable phone was a battery operated model that was housed in a large briefcase.
To extend upon that, not only are historical commercial analog cellular communications systems different and entirely incompatible with the second and third generation (2G/3G) digital protocols currently in use, there are several different competing (or at least incompatible) standards in use today for voice communications. These can generally be broken into three categories: D-AMPS/TDMA-IS-136 (2G, obsolescent), CDMA IS-95, IS-2000, EV-DO (2G, 3G), and GSM (a large family of protocols using CDMA principle but on different frequency bands) and that covers 2G, 2.5G, 3G, pre-4G). However, this is somewhat misleading, as this covers a series of specific protocols that are not compatible themselves but require processing and switching between networks. Even within the same family many protocols are fundamentally incompatible with one another; for instance, the frequency bands are different between North America, Northern Europe, and the rest of the world. They also use different codecs for encoding the signal, though this by itself is a firmware issue and could hypothetically be updated.
A modern digital cellular telephone would be completely worthless in the 'Seventies for any practical use, and the semiconductor manufacturing technology required would preclude replicating the microprocessors. Of most interest would probably be the low-energy active matrix liquid crystal display, which were nascent at the time, and the compact lithium-ion battery. The actual communictions aspect would be a novelty at best, but you could really wow them with the amazing games that can be played on such a tiny “Atari”. like Breakout and Hearts.
HowStuffWorks.com has a pretty decent article on the topic of cellular telephony and commercial cellular communications.
Stranger
Thanks.
so, when was the first mobile phone that was compatible with the modern network?
The big advances in technology aren’t really all that apparent in the devices themselves. I mean they don’t really tell you much about how they were made. The real technological advances are the manufacturing processes that these things come out of. I’m pretty sure the raw materials in a microprocessor are are nothing, and the marginal cost of producing one more is also nothing too in microchips. It’s just building the fab that’s the hard part. Seeing a mobile phone from this era wouldn’t really tell you a whole lot about how it’s built. That’s where the real magic is. They’ll see that it is possible, but think, “Now…how can we do that?” and then draw a blank.
On the other hand, maybe it would confirm a lot of theories a lot of people had back then. If they could completely analyze how it works and get an idea of all of the working components.
As far as the programming is concerned…yeah…that’s difficult. You’d essentially have to reverse-engineer everything. Look at how much luck people have been having with Microsoft’s APIs over the years. I mean Wine works, but would people from back then be able to reverse engineer stuff without having any knowledge of modern OS design?
The technology worth billions in not in the phone it is spread across the minds thousands of engineers and business people. As Merkwurdigliebe points out the process for building micro chips is not contained in the phone. Also the design of the phone is not really contained in the phone. Modern phone chip have around 100million transistors in them 2/3 to 3/4 are RAM. People 30 years ago would be able to look at the regular structures of the RAM and get a handle on how they work pretty quickly not a whole lot has changed with RAM in 30 years on a conceptual level. A lot has changed on a manufacturing level
The last 25 to 33 million of the transistors will take a lot of people a long time to determine what they do. Then you need an other set of people to figure out the software. Since the processors will only have documentation that is gleaned from the schematics of the phone chips this will be really really hard.
A huge amount of the technology to make cell phones work is not even in the phone at all. The network is huge and very complicated and not much more than the radio interface between the phone and tower is in the phone at all.
Which “modern network”? GSM-2G? GSM-3G/UMTS? D-AMPS? EDPRS? cdmaOne? CDMA2000? FOMA? HSPA? EV-DO? UMB? There are a huge number of different protocols that have at best a limited interoperability with some others.
Global cellular telephony is so incredibly, overwhelmingly complex that even Arthur C. Clarke is probably amazed. Readily available global telecommunications is probably the one aspect of 2001: A Space Odyssey that actually came to some kind of fruition, and the capability today of you to take calls, download songs, and watch video in a device no larger than a pack of cards is the technological culmination of decades of research in such diverse areas as signals processing, encryption, solid state physics, liquid crystal matrix manipulation, missile guidance systems, microprocessor manufacture, battery storage technology, high impact polymers, et cetera. Nobody is going to back that out of a single handset, nor is a handset purchased today going to be able to connect into any pre-digital cellular telephony system like MTS/IMTS/AMTS.
Stranger
Some excellent answers here made me think about it some more. The chips themselves in the phone would remain mildly interesting but fundamentally they’re no different than the integrated circuits of the seventies - just smaller. The real genius is building the increasingly precise machines that can crank the ultra-dense ICs out cheaply, not the chips themselves. The macro-components like LEDs and perhaps the plastics used in the manufacturing, and the chemistry of the battery, will be extremely exciting to 1970s chemical engineers and they have an excellent shot at reverse-engineering.
Tech from 2037 would look the same to us, I guess; a lot of black boxes that remain indecipherable, but the surrounding stuff that lets the black boxes interact with humans will be worth diamonds. Terminator 2 had a similar plot element - the Cyberdyne corportation using remnants of the T-800 from the first movie. The CPU they recovered would likely be unreadable but the robotic arm… that’d be worth studying.
It must’ve scared him halfway out of his houseboy.
Didn’t we have a thread a while back that somebody shit on by making irrelevant, unsupported, unfunny remarks like that about Dr. Clarke? That wasn’t you, was it?
I’ve done some Googling for “1990s inventions” for ideas about something that:
[ul][li]Would be completely reverse-engineerable in 1977[/li][li]Would be immediately useful[/li][li]Isn’t just a 21st century refinement of something invented before 1977 (i.e. I thought about Kevlar, then found it it dates back to 1965)[/li][li]Is portable for our time-traveller (taking hybrid cars and other large machines out of the running)[/ul][/li]
I even though about certain medications, as if the time-traveller could bring back a few hundred pills and have them analyzed and reverse-engineered, but many of them predate 1977 as well, including AZTand Ritalin.
Viagra (a.k.a. sildenafil citrate) might be your best bet, but were the baby boomers old enough to start needing it in huge numbers in 1977, or the climate open enough to advertise it?
Maybe you could do something like the early electric vibrator ads…just say it’s something else, but it just happens to be idealy suited for the purpose you’re not officially advertising. Heck, according to Wikipedia, Viagra itself apparently is or can be used to treat hypertension. There’s your inroad right there—word of mouth and some relevant medical articles on other possible application of the drug should be able to make a place for it on the market.
Of course, this being 1977, releasing a drug that will increase and improve people’s sex lives might lead to some, uh…unfortunate after-effects in the next few years. :smack:
Back to the cellphone issue…you might be able to expand your potential buyers for one, depending on which edition with what language settings you bring back.
The time traveler could probably use their credit card at most places. The 1970s was still the era where there was no electronic verification of credit cards. Sure, it’s illegal, but it’s a way to survive. If they go back to the early 1970s, though, they might have a more difficult time; MasterCard was Master Charge, and Visa was BankAmericard. It’s probably best not to leave your timeline without your American Express card. The card expiration date might also raise some eyebrows.
Allergy medication today is far more effective than back in 1977. The Zyrtec tablet I take every day brings me far more relief than the weekly allergy shots and worthless OTC meds I endured as a child in the 1970s. Today I can pop a Zyrtec, go to my girlfriend’s house, play with her cats for a few hours, and emerge with clear sinuses and dry eyes.
Reliable time-release is another fairly recent innovation in medication. Kids with ADD in the 1970s had to take separate doses of Ritalin through the day. Today, they pop a single Concerta in the morning.
And an Amex Card has “member since” on it. If anybody in the seventies noticed you’d been a member since 1999, there might be issues.
Nah, I doubt it. Credit cards look very different today with pictures, etc. In the seventies, they all had a very boring bank-issued look. A classic green Amex (definitely not the Blue) might work but I don’t thinkanyone would believe a modern Visa or Mastercard was real.
The name change from MasterCharge to MasterCard occured in 1979, and the conversion from BankAmericard to Visa was in 1976. Also, as tremorviolet says, at the time the cards were very plain and had the same logo on them; I haven’t seen a MasterCard or Visa in years that wasn’t either gold/platinum or had some specialty organization artwork on it. And of course back in the 'Seventies you were far more limited with what you could buy on credit; I don’t recall grocery stores taking credit or charge cards until the mid 'Eighties.
Stranger
I’d try ordering the entire Butterworth-Heinemann, Wiley-Interscience, Mosby and Routledge engineering/medical book catalogs, then toting them back in time.
Alternatively, I’d check the precious metals markets…
I think you’re all overemphasizing the phone part of it, and missing out on the computer part of it. A modern cell phone in 1977 would be one of the most powerful computers in the world, if not the most powerful.
I’m having trouble getting exact performance info on some common cell-phone processors, but the ARM1176 (in the iPhone) is in the range of hundreds of MFLOPS. Supercomputers didn’t break 1 GFLOPS until 1984, according to Wikipedia. A supercomputer you could carry in your pocket, that runs off of less than 1 Watt of DC power. Of course there’s a limit to scavenging the technology in it, but it would be worth billions just for use.
Good point. Grocery stores didn’t start taking credit cards until the very late 80’s. Which I remember vivdly 'cause I had just moved to Athens, GA in 1988 using the last of my cash and only had a credit card to buy food until my first paycheck, a couple of weeks away. The only place I could use it was the convenience store attached to the gas station. I got very tired of Doritos and crappy cheese dip.