What were you doing on 1st January 1985?

That was when the mobile phone network in the UK started (with Cellnet and Vodafone). Twenty five years later, Cambridge Wireless are running a “Celluar 25” event. Looks to be a great event and line-up of speakers - more details are linked from http://www.nminet.org/events/cellular-25.

I first used a ‘mobile’ phone in 1988 – as a post-finals student earning extra money at a celebrity tennis weekend near Bath (Ilie Năstase was the star attraction), we had a couple of units (I can’t call them handsets) to keep the workers in touch with the main house so that the flow of champagne and strawberries was maintained. Of course, they were the size of large shoeboxes – and you had to remember to push a button to start/end the call; putting the handset back on the cradle didn’t work - as we learned the hard way.

Over the years, the best “early days of mobile” story I heard was of a senior manager carrying a stack of telephone directories around in his car so, depending on where he was in the country, “he would know which local area codes to dial”.

Anyone got any other stories?