Maybe less of an obit than a testimony to my long friend the Analog Mobile Phone System. In technology, 25 years is a reasonably long life. In 1979 I was a sprite young engineer working on the first microprocessor based 800 mHz trunking and cellular systems for Motorola. I was there when AMPS was born. I helped deliver her. It was a painful delivery. In the summer of 1979 I invented a way to identify where software glitches caused pops and clicks when you talked on radios and cellphones. Then I would debug the code. A 4 bit microprocessor called the COPS 410 followed by an 8 bit micro the 6801/6301. Most of the programming was in assembly and machine code - every nybble helped.

AMPS was enabled by the microprocessor. It provided the technological and cost reduction necessary for mass adoption. Price elasticity. Waltz me around again Matilda.

I remember contemplating starting a Cellular company with Jay Gurley, and Bill Werner. Most entrepreneurs are forced into it. Life at Mother Mo was too good. Perhaps if we would taken the leap this blog would have been posted from an island in the Caribbean (or for me a private Robot Laboratory).

I had dinner with Ed Comer the inventor of the Bellsouth system Cellemetry cellular control channel system the other night. We toasted to AMPS demise. The most successful deployment of CCC arguably was the GM On-Star system. CCC On-Star customers were disabled on Dec 31, 2007. There still are 1 million analog phones used in alarm systems. These will go dark quietly. In the famous words of the prophet Monty Python - “I’m not dead yet, it’s only a flesh wound.” Certainly some carriers will continue to support AMPS (for a short while)- but the efficiency of digital channels - economics - prevail, and, the digitization of the airwaves continues. It is fitting that during our bereavement, we are in the middle of one of the most important spectrum auctions in history - especially for M2M. The 700 MHz spectrum reclaimed from television is up for bid. No one knows who is bidding it up, but it has surpassed the financial threshold for open access - perhaps it is Google.

I never had a Betamax. But with Wal-mart’s announcement last week, Toshiba announced just a few days later that HD-DVD would be abandoned. The market speaks again.

Technology marches forward and backward compatibility is a difficult and sometimes impossible task.

A microsecond of silence for our long friend AMPS.