The year is 1959. A young executive is on a guerrilla reconnaissance mission for his employer, a scrappy electronics company. He approaches the gleaming headquarters building of his largest customer, an implacable firm, the biggest in the world, with one million employees. The bosses in the giant firm treat him like a poor relation, a pauper begging for a gold coin. One of the bosses is even named "King."
The young executive is Marty Cooper, an employee of the Motorola corporation, the client is AT&T, then the world's biggest company, and the mission is to find out what AT&T's next big project is and how Moto can clinch the deal.
You just can't make this stuff up. Cooper's memoir of his years at Moto, Cutting the cord: The cell phone has transformed humanity, which goes on sale Tuesday[1], reads like the best Netflix show you could ever want to see.
You can feel the Jet Age at mid-century as Cooper approaches the modernist, Eero Saarinen-designed glass box building in Holmdel, New Jersey that houses Bell Labs, a division of AT&T and at that time the intellectual center of the technology universe.
You can feel the arrogance of the old guard as a director at the Lab, Dr. King Edward Gould, tells Cooper in no uncertain terms how insignificant Motorola is to AT&T. The brains of a new wireless service AT&T is setting up will be made by another vendor. Motorola's contribution, the