1983 - world's first commercial portable cellular phone from Motorola $3,995

[IcyPeas]

On September 21, 1983, Motorola's DynaTAC 8000X, the world's first commercial portable cellular phone, received approval from the FCC

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[liberal N proud]

1. I have an old bag phone

[brush]

2. The photo don't show the size very well. They were huge...

and even into the early '90s were still the size of bricks and heavy.

[rsdsharp]

3. I passed the bar in 1987. At that time you would see an attorney

named Vern Lawyer (honestly) walking around the Des Moines skywalk talking on one of those. He carried it in his briefcase. I have no idea where he kept his briefs, cause there was no more room with that phone in there.

[Goonch]

4. Martin Cooper of Motorola made the first publicized handheld mobile phone call

on a prototype DynaTAC model on April 3, 1973. This is a reenactment in 2007.

[madamesilverspurs]

5. Knew a guy

who had one of those and the square cinderblock-size battery it plugged into. When he first got it and would be out of the car, he'd leave it in the trunk hooked to a wire that would honk the horn when a call was coming in; he quit doing that when people tried to get into the car to make the noise stop. He got into the habit of taking it in with him, to class or meetings or shopping, he just couldn't strut enough.

Then my nephew gave me a birthday present, a tiny little pocket sized box with half a dozen buttons that produced rather loud sounds when pressed. One of those sounds was a ringing phone. Do I need to describe how much fun I had with that?


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