Our last teenager turned 19 yesterday

Ian turned 19 yesterday and is here prepared to attack the cake.

Congratulations Ian!

20 years of GSM phone calls

Today, 20 years ago Mr Harri Holkeri, then PM of Finland made the first official call in the first working digital GSM mobile phone network in the world, that of Radiolinja (nowadays Elisa) in Finland.
The call was made from a car, both parked and in motion. as described here.

Photo by Lehtikuva/Sari Gustafson

The first "handheld" GSM  phone was the Mobira (later Nokia) Cityman,big as a brick and nicknamed "Shoephone" :

In Finland (in cooperation with the other Nordic countries) we already had an anlogue network called NMT, working on 450 MHz and later also at 900 MHz which in fact was reserved for digital communications already back then in the early eighties.

Those early "mobile" phones were big as military backpack radios and cost even more than the car that they usually were installed in.:)

The discussions in Europe regarding the upcoming digital mobile phone network went on for most of the eighties but in 1987 all the the standards and communication protocols for the new digital mobile network were in place and the rest is history.

Many of my friends who knew me as a radio communications Geek wondered why I never jumped on the NMT-900 bandwagon which allowed for really neat handheld analogue phones in the beginning of the nineties  but as I knew what was waiting round the corner I did not make my move until 1994 when I bought my first real cell phone and it was a digital GSM phone of course. A Motorola 5200

The price was then 3400 FIM or 570 EUR which would  be something in excess of 1000 EUR today taking the inflation into account! Horrible... But I could send and receive text messages, the problem was that there wasn't anybody I knew to send messages to until Ingelas' mom bought one. :)

Today you get a top of the line Iphone for the same amount of money and you can be online surfing the web  nearly everywhere in the world!

Subtropical weather for some days now resulting in a violent thunderstorm as I write and this afternoon I'm going on summer holidays for four weeks! Yay!