Retro Techno: Motorola Dyntac 8000X

In 1983 the DynaTAC was responsible for putting the mobile into mobile phones. Before this lithe beauty came along, phone calls could be made from one of three places: inside a building, inside a phone box or, more radically, from inside your car.

It was a pricey piece of gadgetry – the early models cost around $4,000. And so it became the ultimate status symbol for the burgeoning Yuppie elite – a sign of your importance and success.

Here’s how convenient it was: At nearly 800g it weighed a bit less than a bag of sugar and was about 25cm long, not including its antenna. A battery took up to 10 hours to charge, for which you would get just one hour of talk time or eight hours of standby.

If you wanted more you would have to carry around spare sets of batteries. None the less, it is the root of what has become a global phenomenon.

Within a year of its release the phone was available in Britain and 300,000 models had been sold. It is now estimated there are 1.2 billion mobile phone users worldwide.

Posted on July 4, 2009 | Filed Under Tech

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