(WABI) - Today marks 50 years since the first cell phone call was made.
It happened in Midtown Manhattan.
An engineer with Motorola placed the call from a handheld device to the headquarters of Bell Labs in New Jersey.
Related Articles
10 years later, the first portable phone was put on the market. It cost nearly $4,000 and weighed more than two pounds. The Motorola DynaTAC 8000x, as it was called, provided users with 35 minutes of talk time within a limited coverage area.
"Typically you had to program the device in order to connect with which towers you wanted to be able to leverage," says Tabatha McKay, Area Vice President and General Manager for USCellular. "And so as you moved into different parts of the country, you might actually need to connect to different bands."
Here's some more fun facts-
The first text message was sent in 1992- it was "Merry Christmas."
Sharp launched the first cell phone with a camera at the turn of the century.
And, Apple's first ever iPhone came out in 2007.
Copyright 2023 WABI. All rights reserved.
