Voice  communication  became  possible  when  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone on March 10, 1876. His experiments with his assistant Thomas Watson finally proved successful  when  the  first  vocal  sentence  was  transmitted: “Watson, come here; I want you.” The telephone was demonstrated to the world at the  1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and led to the creation of the Bell Telephone Company in 1877.

By 1906 American inventor, Lee De Forest, invented a three-element vacuum tube that revolutionized the entire field of electronics by allowing amplification of signals, both telegraphy and voice. The first radio broadcast in the United States was made in 1906, and within four years the first broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera House was transmitted.

Wireless voice communications using amplitude modulation (AM) was a reality. The ensuing years of the 1920s saw tremendous growth in radio station broadcasting that brought the possibility of real-time information to the public. Society changed forever…again. The radio became a necessity for people to communicate information and ideas over vast distances without wires.

Of course, wires still had their place because radio was not always the most reliable medium. The environment, weather, time of day, and man-made interference could interrupt communications.  Telephone  technology  advanced  steadily,  and telegraphy still found a place in data communications in the form of the telegram.

Radio technology advanced throughout the 1930s with the notable invention of frequency modulation (FM), which provided better sound quality and was more resistant to interference than the older AM broadcasting system. One of the first applications for FM was police radio; it was ideal for mobile communications. Commercial FM broadcasting did not develop until much later in the twentieth century. It should be noted here that FM technology became the cornerstone of the analog cellular system launched in 1983.

World War II accelerated the advancement of radio communications and electronics. Transatlantic cables between Europe and North America improved but we were still limited to realtime communications by copper cables or high-frequency (HF) radio spectrum under 30 megahertz. Data was still limited to telegraphy or some analog signals representing data. This was acceptable because demand for data was also low.

However, the post-war period saw an explosion of innovation with the development of the transistor (December 1947) and the birth  of  the  computer.  In  the  Moore  School  of Engineering, ENIAC, the world’s first electronic, large-scale, general-purpose computer, was activated at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946. Unfortunately, the computer preceded the transistor so ENIAC contained about 18,000 tubes. This was much to the chagrin of the graduate students who had to replace the burned out ones—often! Some refer to this as the Birth of the Information Age, but we like to think of it as the Re-Birth of the Information Society. Computers provided a tool for people to process data, lots of data; now we needed a better way to move that data faster.

The 1950s had many “Ages” to ponder, the Atomic Age, the Information Age, and if that was not enough, another almost 100 years after the first transoceanic cable, another society-altering event occurred, one that changed the way we communicate and, perhaps even more so, the way we think globally. The Space Age began with the launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik on October 4, 1957. Satellite communications provided reliable long distance communications by augmenting or replacing cables. This created the demand for reliable, anytime, anywhere communications. The beginning of an idea for a truly mobile, global society was planted; the capability to link people around the world with nearly instantaneous voice and data communications was a reality, but it was still fixed point-to-point communications.

The Space Age brought changes to the way we think and the technology we create. It brought us integrated circuits, fiber optics, photonics, ceramics, freeze-dried food, and ultimately digital electronics. Digital technology enabled the creation  of  computers,  as  we  know  them  today,  and  the transmission of data at higher speeds. It also provided wireless, high-bandwidth communications. Communications satellites and transoceanic cables—including technologically advanced fiber  optic  cables  with  high  bandwidth—continue  to  be installed around the world.

It took almost 26 years after Sputnik before cellular communications  brought  mobile  voice  communications  to  the masses (at least those who could afford $4,500 for a mobile phone in December of 1983). Mobile data took a couple more years to become common, but speed and reliability remained issues to its success. Outside the military, access to large databases of information was still limited to commercial and educational institutions with their internal mainframe computers. (Because sharing this data over wireless connections has been impractical,  data  networks  have  remained  mostly  wired.) During the 1980s, no compelling need for wireless data transmission existed. That was about to change…