In 1973 Motorola researcher Martin Cooper was watching an episode of Star Trek when the communicators they used gave him an idea, he decided Motorola would invent a wireless personal communicator that you could use anywhere.
In April 1973, after months of testing by Motorola engineers Cooper made the first ever mobile phone call, to a rival company, then spent ten years perfecting the device which was released as the first commercially available mobile phone, the DynaTAC, in 1983 with a charging time of ten hours. For that, and a $3,500 price tag, you got to talk to someone for half an hour.
Yes, back then being an early adopter was costly and not always useful. But in that respect times haven't changed, early Plasma tv's for example could cost upwards of $10,000 yet could break within months.
Fortunately for early adopters, or perhaps unfortunately depending on your point of view, the next invention of the modern age went almost three deacdes before becoming the popular enough for people to buy en masse.
Oddly enough the first picture taken with it was not the worlds first digital image. That honour falls to Russell Kirsch who, in 1957, used a drum scanner to scan a photograph of his three month old son and then store it electronically. It had just 30,976 pixels but it was the first instant of a digitally created image.
Intel, yes the now famous chip maker, made the worlds first single chip micro processor in 1970. Called the Intel 4004 it packed what was for the time a staggering 2,300 transistors, and as much computing power as early computer Eniac (which took up three thousand cubic feet of space) into a chip that measured just three by four millimetres. The 4004 started what we now think of as the age of the modern computer.
A year later IBM produced the first commercially available removeable storage medium for computers. Known as the floppy disk, this eight inch medium was reduced to five and a quarter inches a few years later and went on to be the storage medium of choice for decades, helping drive the home pc boom of the nineteen eighties and nineties with its ability to store and retrieve data quickly and reliably on a small portable medium that could be easily shared.
Of course many of these home pc's would be less useful without the now obligatory ethernet port (even today most computers and even laptops still have one built in). It became a standard when its inventor Robert Metcalfe left Xerox in 1979 to convince a number of companies including Intel and Xerox to push ethernet as an industry standard but was developed over a number of years during the mid nineteen seventies though officially the date of its invention is 1973.
What is ethernet? In case you really don't know this one it's best known today as the connection used for connecting modems and routers to computers but is specifically the hardware connection used to connect several computers together using the well known ethernet cable.
It was in the seventies, 1970 itself to be exact, that the modern lcd was made and patented. While lcd technology had been experimented with in the late nineteen sixties it was only in 1970 thanks to the work of James Fergason that the lcd display became a practical reality and in 1972 Westinghouse made the worlds first active matrix lcd display, the active matrix part refers to the addressing system used in modern lcd displays.
At the same time a number of other computer related inventions were made, such as the first laser printer in 1975 and the first inkjet printer in 1976, that would help "give birth" to the modern day home computer era we now enjoy.
And there we have it, the not so well known fact that the age of mobile phones, digital cameras and home computing actually began back in the nineteen seventies and, surprisingly, the very first all in one home computer (keyboard, storage and screen) is also from the same decade (it went on sale in January 1977) , that computer being Commodores PET which was followed six months later by the Apple II computer from, as the name suggests, Apple.
The early eight bit home computers gave rise to the worlds first sixteen bit home computer in 1979 helping to seal the nineteen seventies place in history as the start of the digital age we now live in and, of course, setting up the perfect future for what some lovingly call the geek.
