From valve radios to artificial intelligence and self driving cars!

Yesterday we had an all company meeting and I thought it would be cool to kick it off with a quiz to keep everyone engaged.

I had been thinking about my parents and reflected on the technology changes that they have witnessed in their lifetime.  They were both born in the late 1940’s, so allow me a few even before their time!

Then, I got thinking about my own children; when they get to their 80s, what will humanity have in store for them? Maybe those flying cars everyone has said we would all have by now!!

These are just the answers, but I had all the questions as multi-choice for the quiz.  I have added extras now after the quiz that are also quite interesting.

1876 – Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call

1879 – Thomas Edison creates the first practical incandescent light bulb

1908 – The Ford Model T was first produced.

1922 – Radio broadcasting begins in Britain (valve radio era)

1929 – First television receiver sold to the public

1946 – First commercial car phone service *

1954 – First consumer colour TV set

1963 – Philips introduces the compact audio cassette

1967 – First countertop domestic microwave oven introduced

1969 – Apollo 11 moon landing: humans first walked on the Moon

1973 – First handheld mobile phone call

1975 – Altair 8800: commercially successful personal computer

1981 – IBM Personal Computer introduced

1982 – First consumer CD player

1983 – First commercial handheld mobile phone goes on sale

1985 – Microsoft Windows 1.0 released

1989 – Nintendo Game Boy released

1991 – World Wide Web publicly available beyond CERN

1996 – First consumer DVD player

1998 – First consumer High-Definition Television sets

1999 – First BlackBerry device

2004 – TomTom GO consumer satnav launches

2005 – Skype adds video calling

2007 – iPhone introduced

2007 – Netflix launches streaming video service

2008 – Tesla’s first Roadster was delivered

2010 – Mainstream consumer 3D TVs launch

2010 – Apple FaceTime video calling introduced

2022 – Artificial Intelligence “AI” ChatGPT released publicly

2024 – Waymo opens its driverless taxi service to everyone in San Francisco

* Yes — a car phone in 1946 is genuinely wild!

The first Bell System mobile telephone call was made in St. Louis on 17 June 1946. It was a proper car-based mobile telephone service, not a handheld phone. The famous description is of a driver pulling a handset from under the dashboard and placing a call via Southwestern Bell’s new mobile telephone system.

It could be used while the car was moving. This was the point of the service: mobile radio-telephone from vehicles, connected back into the public telephone network. But it was primitive by modern standards:  The equipment weighed about 80 lb.  Calls were operator-assisted. There were initially only three radio channels for the whole metro area.  Only a tiny number of people could use it at once. It was more like “radio patched into the telephone network” than cellular mobile service.