Marty Cooper, inventor of the cell phone, talks about the future of apps and more

Just in case you are ever asked the question on a television quiz show, the acknowledged father of the cell phone is a gentleman named Martin Cooper. What Cooper did was invent the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X. From that point forward, the world was never the same. Motherboard taped an interview with Cooper, which you can find by clicking on the sourcelink.

Cooper discusses how AT&T originally came up with cellular telephony and threatened Motorola's two-way transceiver business.  Motorola believed that putting a mobile phone in a car was the same as trapping people in a house or apartment with a home phone. "We believe, and still believe today," said Cooper, "that freedom means that you can talk from anywhere." Thus, the first personal portable telephone was invented.

On April 3, 1973 Cooper is walking the streets of New York with a journalist and decides to roll the dice. He takes his personal cell phone and calls AT&T's Bill Engel, whom Cooper calls his nemesis. When Engel picks up the phone, he quickly is told that he is being called by a personal cellphone, leading to a few moments of silence. "He probably was gritting his teeth," Cooper says of his rival.

There is no question that Marty Cooper knows how important the cell phone has become. He puts it up there with the invention of the wheel and says that it will take a couple of generations before the cell phone shows all that it is capable of.

The man who invented the cell phone is no fan of apps. He says having a million apps is useless. Instead of sorting through all of those apps and deciding which ones to install, Cooper believes that the best solution would be an Artificial Intelligence driven servant that would know which solutions you need. Those solutions would be called apps. "Instead of looking for the apps, the apps are gonna find us," he says. Still thinking about the future, Cooper asks if it wouldn't be better to make apps obsolete "by making something that creates the app for you.?"

As crazy as that sounds, no one in 1972 could imagine that everyone walking the streets of every major city would be preoccupied by a small screen on a small device that fits in the palm of the hand.

source: Motherboard (1), (2) via Gizmodo