Motorola DynaTAC 8000X

DynaTAC is a series of cellular telephones manufactured by Motorola, Inc. from 1983 to 1994. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000X commercial portable cellular phone received approval from the U.S. FCC on September 21, 1983. A full charge took roughly 10 hours, and it offered 30 minutes of talk time. It also offered an LED display for dialing or recall of one of 30 phone numbers. It was priced at $3,995 in 1984, its commercial release year, equivalent to $9,952 in 2020. DynaTAC was an abbreviation of "Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage." The Motorola DynaTAC 8000x was very large compared to phones today. This first cell phone was very expensive when it was released in the US in 1984. The DynaTAC's retail price, $3,995 (about $10400 in 2020, ensured that it would not become a mass-market item (the minimum wage in the United States was $3.35 per hour in 1984, which meant that it required more than 1192 hours of work, or more than 7,45 months - just working for the phone, without taxes); by 1998, when Mitchell retired, cellphones and associated services made up two thirds of Motorola's $30 billion in revenue. The DynaTac 8000X, due to its resemblance in size and weight to a standard clay-fired brick, was nicknamed the brick phone by users, a term later applied to other brands as a contrast to smaller handsets appearing in the 1990s. While it might be considered extremely unwieldy by modern standards, at the time it was considered revolutionary because mobile telephones were bulky affairs installed in vehicles or in heavy briefcases. The DynaTAC 8000X was truly the first mobile telephone which could connect to the telephone network without the assistance of a mobile operator and could be carried about by the user.