Happy birthday: The mobile phone is 25

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While Motorola may get a bit of a bum rap compared to other mobile phone makers right now, we should all be saying thanks to the company.

For yesterday marked the 25th birthday of the humble mobile phone. A quarter of a century ago, Motorola gave birth to the DynaTAC (DYNamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) 8000X portable mobile phone. Although it wasn’t that portable – at around two pounds - and had the hefty price tag of just short of $4,000.

While after almost a decade of research and development it was given the FCC green light in September 1983, the first call was made on the brick-like device on October 13 1983 at Soldier Fall by Ameritech Mobile.

Interestingly, the first call was made by Ameritech employee Bob Barnett, who chose to call none other than the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell - the brains behind the telephone.

“Creating the first wireless portable cell phone in the world was an enormous challenge. No one had ever seen one before, so there was nothing to compare it to,” Motorola said on a web page marking the special milestone.

"We called it a shoe phone, because it sort of looked a little bit like a boot," Motorola's industrial design director, Rudy Krolopp, recalls on the site.

However, building the prototype device was just one of many hurdles the company had to overcome.

“It was an incredible achievement for the Motorola team. But they faced another challenge: designing a commercial large area system that would enable the portable phone to operate,” states the site.

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