Timeline of The Telephone - 1970 To 1999

1970 To 1999

• 1970: ESS-2 electronic switch.
• 1970: modular telephone cords and jacks introduced .
• 1970: Amos E. Joel, Jr. of Bell Labs invented the "call handoff" system for "cellular mobile communication system" (patent granted 1972).
• 1971: AT&T submitted a proposal for cellular phone service to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
• 3 April 1973: Motorola employee Martin Cooper placed the first hand-held cell phone call to Joel Engel, head of research at AT&T's Bell Labs, while talking on the first Motorola DynaTAC prototype.
• 1973: packet switched voice connections over ARPANET with Network Voice Protocol (NVP).
• 1978: Bell Labs launched a trial of the first commercial cellular network in Chicago using Advanced Mobile Phone System (AMPS).
• 1978: World's first NMT phone call in Tampere, Finland.
• 1979: VoIP - NVP running on top of early versions of IP
• 1981: The world's first fully automatic mobile phone system NMT is started in Sweden and Norway.
• 1981: BT introduces the British Telephone Sockets system.
• 1982: FCC approved AT&T proposal for AMPS) and allocated frequencies in the 824-894 MHz band.
• 1982: Caller ID patented by Carolyn Doughty, Bell Labs
• 1983: last manual telephone switchboard in Maine is retired
• 1984: AT&T completes the divestiture of its local operating companies. This forms a new AT&T (long distance service and equipment sales) and the Baby Bells.
• 1987: ADSL introduced
• 1988: First transatlantic fiber optic cable TAT-8, carrying 40,000 circuits
• 1990: analog AMPS was superseded by Digital AMPS.
• 1991: the GSM mobile phone network is started in Finland, with the first phone call in Tampere.
• 1993: Telecom Relay Service available for the disabled
• 1995: Caller ID implemented nationally in USA
• 1999: creation of the Asterisk Private branch exchange