My family & I have been connected 7x24 since 1974. More on how & why in a moment, but you can imagine I have a sense of what today’s modern kids and adults feel as they grow up always being able to reach everyone.
It has ever thus been so for me.
How were we well-connected nearly 50 years ago? And why?
We have a family construction company, and my dad discovered how being always connected was so much more efficient for everything he did in business. And it made daily life a lot easier, as the world discovered decades later.
Thus, in the early 1970s, he invested tens of thousands of dollars in radio equipment, the same as police and fire departments use. Later he’d build and run his own radio towers to provide communications for ourselves and others in our area (a lucrative business today).
This meant that our house, workshops, and every vehicle we owned each had a private radio system installed. And my dad carried a portable radio on him nearly every waking hour of every day.
Thus our family, our employees, and our key vendors could communicate any time from anywhere — the system had a 50–100 mile range, covering central Maine. Just like you can now call everyone in your family any time, we were doing it decades ago.
A Mobile Phone
To connect even more about 1980, Dad upgraded & installing one of the first available long-range portable phones in his truck, right next to his radios. An ultra-modern duplex system (IMTS), shown above, it weighed 50 pounds, cost about $2500 plus $100+ per month to use.
Only two people could talk in the whole state at the same time due to frequently limitations — imagine that, a total capacity of two calls over thousands of square miles and a million people (and you could listen in to others calls; that was fun in itself, especially late at night).
But imagine calling your father or your team, in a town 50 miles away, by just dialing the phone — 40 years ago. More importantly, by connecting to the PSTN (normal phone network), anyone could call him and he could call anyone —just like today’s cell phones.
So the idea of contacting dad to bring home a gallon of milk, which was novel even in the ’90s, was routine for us in the mid-‘70s. It made me feel very modern and helped me focus on efficiency, planning, and communications. It especially made real-time coordination a key skill, almost like military teams work in today’s battlefield, moving resources around, scheduling, etc.
Pagers & more
Later, as a manufacturing engineer, I carried a pager so teams could reach me 7x24 for factory emergencies, and also to find people on sprawling factory floors during the day.
I still feel naked without something clipped to my belt or if people can’t reach me, so like a true geek, I carry my cell phone in a belt holster. After all, I’ve had a device there almost continuously since 1988.
In 1990, I bought my first cell phone; it weighed 10 pounds and came in a big bag, but it had a battery and was indeed portable. It was very cool, though quite expensive and it sat in my car all the time, as it was too heavy to carry (I still had the pager, too).
Modern Times
Only in the last decade or two has the family company finally moved on to cell phones, finally shutting down the expensive private radio system for good. But our spirit of connectedness lives on, and now everyone lives this way, all around the world. It’s amazing how far we’ve come, and yet, for us, not very far at all.
My family and I have been über-connected now for nearly 50 years, always being on and in touch, all the time, every time. Does that make us any different or did we learn any lessons?
I’m not sure, but I can’t imagine living without it, then or now.
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Steve Mushero is a global technologist based in Shanghai & San Francisco.