We bought our house early in the summer of '91; but a couple of months before that, when we were shopping for a house and a realtor was taking us to see a particular one, my wife said she was going to have to find a phone booth to call someone, and the realtor offered her the use of her cell phone in the glove compartment. It was the size of a walkie talkie, not a shoe-shine kit like Underdog used which were earlier. This was April or May of 1991. There was an episode of The Andy Griffith Show (with Barney, Opie, Aunt Bea, etc.) where a businessman came through and had a car phone. To make a call, he had to talk to an operator first. It was basically just a two-way radio and the operator made the phone connection and probably had to listen in to know when to hang up.

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http://WilsonMinesCo.com/ lots of 6502 resources
The "second front page" is http://wilsonminesco.com/links.html .
What's an additional VIA among friends, anyhow?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_Mobile_Telephone
I used one of these (our company only had the one..) in the late eighties. I needed it when I drove across a mountain range going to Sweden. And yes, I had a connection all the way. 450MHz is easier that way (later there was also NMT900). The portable phone had a whip antenna, but I would normally, when driving, remove the antenna and connect a cable to a car roof antenna which had a magnetic foot.

With a "one-operand" device, reverse subtract might open up a can of worms, although I suppose that Read-Modify-Write instructions like INC DEC ASL LSR ROR ROL fall in the same ballpark. I have experimented with "complement and add" and "complement and add with carry", and had some satisfying results. Even more flexibility is gained when the carry flag is promoted to a full-width register, but that's another story ...

But, my response to the original post would be to find a way to convince the designers of the time that the idea of an 8-bit byte is a bad choice, and should be discarded in favor of a 9 or 10-bit byte. Everything opens up ... op-code space, addressing range, literal range ... good things just happen, almost automatically.

Mike B.