"We had built what amounted to a cell right in the middle of New York, right next to the Hilton Hotel and went out onto the street to test out this equipment. And I dialed a phone number, happened to be the number of my counterpart at AT&T, who was in charge of building the AT&T version of this system, a guy named Dr. Joel Engel. And I called Joel up and told him Joel, I'm calling you from a real cellular telephone... and it's portable and I'm walking down the streets of New York."
The next time a phone rings in a movie theater, you'll know whom to blame. Cooper says AT&T had been focusing on building cell phones that weren't portable, that could only be used in vehicles. From that point it took a decade for the first commercial cell phones to arrive... at a pretty steep price...
"When commercial service service started for cellular, a portable cellular phone cost 35 hundred dollars."
Cooper today is chairman and CEO of ArrayComm, a San Diego based company developing systems to deliver high speed wireless Internet access. Bloomberg Boot Camp, I'm Fred Fishkin.