Became Vice President
Cooper's Dyna-Tac appeared on the July 1973 cover of Popular Science magazine, and the technological breakthrough helped Motorola achieve its goal of winning FCC permission for private companies to operate a wireless communications network over radio frequencies. The achievement also boosted his profile within the company, and he was made a division manager at Motorola in 1977 and then vice president and corporate director for research and development a year later. In 1983, the same year that the first commercial cellular phone service began operation in the United States, Cooper left Motorola to found his own company, Cellular Business Systems, Inc. This Chicago-area software company handled billing for cellular phone service providers, and was sold to Cincinnati Bell in 1986.
In the earliest years of wireless communication phone service, Cooper and Motorola appeared to have lost their ideological battle with AT&T, as car phones dominated the market. Smaller, lightweight portable mobile phones did not make significant inroads with consumers until the early 1990s. He remained convinced of the practicality of his original concept, however. “A telephone number shouldn't represent a home or a car or a restaurant, but instead a person,” he explained to Peter Meade in America's Network in 1997. “That vision is not complete. That is why I'm still working.” He noted that avid users of mobile phones in Japan, for example, were canceling their residential landline phone service. “Why would anyone want any other phone but one with their own personal phone number? It's the dream of AT&T realized: When you're born, you are assigned a phone number—and if you don't answer, you're dead,” he told Meade.