Bell Labs is the place or one of the places where MANY modern technologies were born. Cell Phone technology probably being one of the most colossal of all. Bell Labs is headquarted in Murray Hill, New Jersey although is has research laboratories throughout the world. Originally called AT&T Bell laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories it is the research and development organization of Alcatel Lucent, which was previously owned by Atlantic Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T). Bell Labs has been at the forefront of many new technologies including the transistor, the laser, C++ programming language for computers, and the UNIX operating system which runs the computer I “m using to type this paragraph. Bell Labs has been awarded seven; count them, seven Nobel Prizes. TDMA and CDMA technologies were patented by Bell Labs in the 1980s. TDMA stands for Time Division Multiple Access it allows several users to share the same frequency channel by dividing it into different time slots. It was used in digital 2G cellular systems such as GSM. CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access, which allows users to share bandwidth of different frequencies a concept called multiplexing. Besides being used in cell phones CDMA technology was applied to GPS. Both CDMA and TDMA were new technological developments used in cell phones and still are. In the 1990s Bell Labs once again revolutionized communications and technology by developed the first wireless LAN network, a technology that is as commonplace as a toilet nowadays. Bell Labs has been the birthplace of many innovations that are now considered “normal.” Some of these innovations have been become so embedded in our everyday live that we look back in bewilderment at the days before they existed; thinking to ourselves “how did we live or function before this?” Bell Labs was influential in the development of mobile technology but the ideas developed there opened the floodgates for the future. Since then many other hugely influential companies have built on the technologies first developed at Bell Labs so many years ago. Companies such at AT&T, Motorola, and more recently Apple who has practically changed the way these devices we call mobile phones are used. Mobile phones have become much more than a device to make a receive phone calls.
References
- Author unknown, History of Mobile Phones, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mobile_phones. April 7, 2010
- Author unknown, Bell Labs, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2010,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs. April 7, 2010
- Author unknown, Code Division Multiple Access, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDMA. April 7, 2010
- Author unknown, Time Division Multiple Access, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2010,http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_division_multiple_access. April 7, 2010
- Author unknown, Cellular Network, Wikimedia Foundation Inc., 2010, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_network. April 7, 2010
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