First commercial cell phone call made 25 years ago today

A certain Bob Barnett placed the fateful call—to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, no less—on October 13, 1983, over a $3,995 Motorola DynaTAC that was practically the size of his head.

Barnett, who was then president of the old Ameritech Mobile (which was eventually absorbed into Verizon Wireless) made the call at Soldier Field, the Chicago Sun-Times reports, with a foot-long DynaTAC cell phone that tipped the scales at nearly two pounds.

It was quite a day for the budding wireless industry as a whole and Ameritech Mobile in particular, which (as the Sun-Times notes) signed up a whopping 12,000 wireless subscribers by the end of 1983—or about a fifth as many people who attendend the Colts-Ravens game at Lucas Oil Stadium on Sunday.

By contrast, consider this: Today, there are about 262 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. alone, according to wireless trade group CTIA, with a mind-bending 3.3 billion "active" cell phones in use around the world.

Cell phone hardware has sure changed a lot, too. The AMPS-based Moto DynaTAC 8000X, for example, had an LED display, a two-inch flexible antenna, 30 (count 'em, 30) speed dial numbers, and just 35 minutes of talk time. No camera, no GPS (please), no Web browser (after all, there wasn't a Web yet), and no text messaging. Hey, the mere fact that you could hold the thing in one hand was considered a breakthrough in cell phone technology.

And if you think your carrier's ripping you off, try this on for size: Ameritech Mobile's 1983 service plans for the DynaTAC started at $50 a month and 40 cents per peak minute, or 24 cents/minute during off-peak hours (again, this from the Sun-Times story). Free nights and weekends? Wrong decade, pal.

For more, check out this photo gallery of old cell phones from the L.A. Times, or this illustrated cell phone timeline from Gizmodo.

Related:
25 years of cell phone service [Chicago Sun-Times]
Motorola's Hot New DynaTAC [Yahoo! Tech]