The first cell phone, for me, replaced the bag phone

On Oct. 13, the world celebrated the 25th anniversary of the first commercial cell phone call from Soldier Field in Chicago to somewhere in Germany.

That was 1983, just after I had finished graduate school. I had taken my first post in journalism as an intern at WBBM-TV, the CBS owned-and-operated TV news operation in Chicago. It was a big expensive operation, with electronic news gathering galore. There they had a mobile phone that weighed a ton (well, at least 8 pounds) and was carried around in a bag. Hence, it was dubbed the "bag" phone. Somehow, I was put in charge of the bag phone, which was a surprise because I was a complete gopher to everybody else in the newsroom. I answered phones, typed up notes and fetched coffee for just about everybody.

It seemed such an odd decision to put me in charge of the bag phone because I was so green and the phone was fairly advanced and probably cost a fortune. Just about all the camera and sound equipment had to be handled and operated by union TV crews who would also drive union reporters to stories. So, basically, I wasn’t allowed to touch anything since I wasn’t in the union, but apparently the rules didn’t cover using the bag phone.

Typically, a call was made by using the bag phone to call a mobile operator. That operator would make the connection, but it took a while, so it was useful to have a low-paid intern carry the bag, make the connection and hand it off to a reporter.

I distinctly remember my first experience: the reporter who was fluent in Spanish and English yelled out a number as I sat on cables and A/V equipment in the back of a news truck with a fire burning in a South Side apartment building in the background. When he took the handset, connected by a coiled cord to the phone in the bag, he immediately started yelling in English and Spanish to a producer. I am sure as I reflect now that he was yelling because of a spotty signal and not because the producer and reporter disagreed on anything, although I did learn some Spanish terms I hadn't ever heard before.

About that phone: It was probably something from Motorola Inc., but I really don’t recall the brand and now I’m not even sure if it was a cell phone or just a lighter version of a two-way radio. The sound quality was pretty terrible and you’d lose a signal when the news truck turned a corner behind a large building.

It’s amazing how much better the quality is today and how consistent signals are. These improvements have vastly accelerated in just the past two years.

During my tenure at WBBM-TV sometime in 1983, the newsroom moved to newer phone that was a free-standing bagless version with the dial pad on the side. It was white and had a long antenna, and still weighed a lot but much less than the bag phone. It was a big improvement.

That device in the newsroom was the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, the same one (or nearly so) used to make the first commercial cell phone call. It sold for $3,995 and weighed 28 ounces, was 13 x 1.75 x 3.5 inches. It offered one hour of talk time and eight hours of standby time and featured a LED display, according to Motorola.

One big distinction between that DynaTAC and the bag phone was that the newer version allowed the user to make an actual call instead of having to rely on a mobile operator to make the connection for you, as with older technologies.Connections, however, seemed to take forever.

One time, I recall Bill Kurtis, a co-anchor at WBBM-TV at the time and now a producer and documentary maker (and the guy in TV ads who finds the Internet on the North Pole with a wireless card in his laptop) walking toward me with the newer model phone. I assumed he was going to ask me how to use it or to place a call for him, when he came over to where I was seated and said: "I have something very important for you to do."

Instead of handing me the phone, however, he handed me a dish covered with foil. "Go warm this up in the microwave," Kurtis said.

I appreciated that I was regarded as the most capable person to also operate the microwave.

These stories came to mind when the CTIA sponsored a short keynote at its conference in October with cell phone pioneers to celebrate the 25th anniversary. One of the pioneers, Craig McCaw, held up one of the early-model phones, remarking on its weight.He called it a "brick" and it was nice to see how even one of the sponsors of the technology could see that it had plenty of room for improvement.

McCaw reminded me how people thought at the time that the cell phone would always be only a car phone, requiring an installation in a special shop that took at least a day and cost thousands.Executives with car phones would lose the cell calling capability once they sold the car, adding more inconvenience.

Even the early cell phones we used in the 1980s were nothing like those of today.They have shrunk in size and weight (and cost!) so much that I am constantly losing mine in a briefcase or a big pocket or my car.The recent combination of the cell phone and the computer into the smart phone is what will drive the most interest and the most change going forward.

The CTIA ticked off a list of innovations brought about by the cell phone, including how today there are more than 262 million wireless subscribers in the U.S., with 3.3 billion active cell phones worldwide.

As a footnote, it’s interesting to recall that Motorola developed that first cell phone after 15 years of research.Fifteen years. And really, scores of years, if you go back to the origins of the radio.Ironically, Motorola is now about to lay off thousands of handset engineers and designers as it prepares to spin off its handset division.

If all that seems unfair, it might be, but the technology will continue to march onward. The innovators, wherever they are, can still take pride in those extraordinary advances.