(foto: Johan Wessman, 2008)
#IDEON35 Nils Rydbeck was head of development in Lund for the team developing cell phones at Ericsson here at Ideon. Here he is showing off the Hotline phones; Hotline 900A came in 1986, as did the smaller NMT 900 c, which used battery, contact and charger from the company’s police radio. To the far right you can see the GH 172 which came in 1992 and was Ericsson’s first GSM phone.
The Ericsson lab at Ideon was opened on September 29, 1983. Nils Rydbeck became the head of development in 1985.
“My vision was to create freedom – in every pocket. When others asked how many would use mobile phones, we talked about how many mobile phones each person would have in the future”, said Nils in an interview with Sydsvenskan in 2008.
Mats Lindoff, later the head of technology at Sony Ericsson, offers this description of his first meeting with Rydbeck while Lindoff was a young researcher: “I was working in the computer department at the Lund Engineering faculty and would probably have stayed on there. But then Nils Rydbeck came to see me and a number of other young engineers and showed us the new mobile phone that ERA had developed. It looked like a police radio and was pretty large and cumbersome. ‘In 10 years it will all fit into a matchbox,’ he said. I went in to my professor’s office and said goodbye and thanks for everything. Then I started working in a shed at Ideon along with 25 others.”
More on the story of Ericsson
Slottsmiddagen som gjorde Lund till mobilcentrum (Sydsvenskan, 19 september 2008)
