The mobile phone turns forty (to be exact, tomorrow). Indeed, it was March 6, 1983 when the American Motorola launched on the market a bulky – compared to today’s standards, it was 25 centimeters long and weighed 800 grams, while the latest iPhone models are about 13 cm long and weigh less than 200 grams – mobile phone, the DynaTAC 8000X, the progenitor of smartphones that we all cannot do without today (just look at the withdrawal crises of desperate people with empty mobile phones). With its long stiff black antenna, almost a funny plume, it looked like a walkie-talkie. But it had a rich keypad, it allowed for thirty-minute conversations (a great relief on public transport, where today one is plagued by talkative earphones), it could memorize thirty numbers and, left on standby, it took ten hours to fully charge. It cost $3,995 and 300,000 were sold. In the famous 1987 film about financial sharks, “Wall Street” by Oliver Stone, the character of the very bad and very greedy Gordon Gekko, played by a Michael Douglas with his hair smeared with gel as was the norm in that decade, did and he undid his brokers’ careers by issuing orders and sentences from his DynaTAC 8000X. This mobile phone, which has now become a collector’s item for fans of vintage technological gadgets, had had a first incarnation even ten years earlier: in 1973 a working prototype was created by Martin Cooper, an American engineer working for Motorola. Obviously, and as many of the older ones will remember, in 1983 very few owned this mobile phone.
The mobile phone turns forty (to be exact, tomorrow). Indeed, it was March 6, 1983 when the American Motorola launched on the market a bulky – compared to today’s standards, it was 25 centimeters long and weighed 800 grams, while the latest iPhone models are about 13 cm long and weigh less than 200 grams – mobile phone, the DynaTAC 8000X, the progenitor of smartphones that we all cannot do without today (just look at the withdrawal crises of desperate people with empty mobile phones). With its long stiff black antenna, almost a funny plume, it looked like a walkie-talkie. But it had a rich keypad, it allowed for thirty-minute conversations (a great relief on public transport, where today one is plagued by talkative earphones), it could memorize thirty numbers and, left on standby, it took ten hours to fully charge. It cost $3,995 and 300,000 were sold. In the famous 1987 film about financial sharks, “Wall Street” by Oliver Stone, the character of the very bad and very greedy Gordon Gekko, played by a Michael Douglas with his hair smeared with gel as was the norm in that decade, did and he undid his brokers’ careers by issuing orders and sentences from his DynaTAC 8000X. This mobile phone, which has now become a collector’s item for fans of vintage technological gadgets, had had a first incarnation even ten years earlier: in 1973 a working prototype was created by Martin Cooper, an American engineer working for Motorola. Obviously, and as many of the older ones will remember, in 1983 very few owned this mobile phone.