Do you know what this piece of technology is? This is the Motorola Dyna TAC. Hubby had to carry this around back in the day. This is the original portable phone, aka the first cell phone, nicknamed the brick. The brick weighed 2 pound and cost $3995 and featured a half hour of talk time when fully charged. (I just found one on E-Bay for $49.99)
Over burdened repair guys had to carry these phones, along with their tools, with them on their calls. Salesmen had them mounted in their cars. Wall street types would cart them along to their martini lunches.
No one had the brick just in case. For just in case, we had pay phones, or friendly businesses that would let you use the phone in an emergency. The brick had no games that could be played while waiting for an appointment. The brick had no Kindle app for reading while you are waiting. The brick had no camera, no pictures, no social media to share with. The brick was used for business only. (Maybe the very rich used the brick for personal emergencies.)
The miniature version we have today, that we can just be slipped into a pocket, owes a debt to the brick.
April's Perspective 
I had a cell phone in 1995 which was about the size of a wireless landline phone today and came with it’s own charger. Who knew how much these phones would decrease in size?
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Who knew the cell would be a real computer.
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Yeah, right, never mind how small it’s gotten! Look what it can do!
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I got my first cell phone in 1997. it was a Motorola gray brick with a flip down. I could store two numbers on it. it was pretty styling back in the day.
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Yes it was, state of the art, top notch. Had to have an important job to have one of those!
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I don’t remember those, but I do remember huge phones and typing on a typewriter. Easier times now!
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Well, the keyboard is a little tiny, and auto correct can be a pain. But I do agree. It is so much easier now.
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Haha, I swear you keep going through my workshop cupboards 🙂
Although we threw our Motorola brick out about three years ago there is an entire collection of analogue and digital phones around here.
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With the brick you didn’t have to worry about your contacts, data, personal stuff kept in the phone We may have to be buried with that stuff! I try to leave everything the way I found it. 😉
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When we got the brick I remember reading in the instruction that it had a 99 number memory. At the time we might have managed to get 20 or 30 numbers in there but they were all landline numbers because so few other people had mobile bricks.
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So true. I don’t know how many numbers Hubby had in his, but they were all business. He knew our home number, so I bet it wasn’t using up storage.
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I remember those! My dad had an Ericson Hotline, I think they were called. They looked the same as the Motorola ones 🙂
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I saw those back then. My former in laws referred to their Motorola flips as car phones well into the 2000s, lol.
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I am indebted to the ‘brick’ which seems to have started it all 🙂
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I too remember the “brick”, it was “spawned” in the 1980s. It was quite a status symbol. Thanks for reading my blog. B
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