| By :
Paul Wise
Cell phones are an important part of everyday life now, but they were very exciting upon their debut. The first ones made were very large and bulky, clunky and quite heavy - and still, the people who could afford them eagerly waited for the chance to buy one. The first cell phone authorized for sale in the United States was the Motorola Dynatac, granted a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) license in 1983. The Dynatac weighed a pound and cost consumers roughly three and a half thousand dollars - and that's 1980s dollars, bear in mind, a time when a dollar bought a lot more than today! The very next year, however, Motorola introduced another Dynatec model, the 8000X, which cost even more, at just under four thousand dollars. Prices would remain high until further advances in technology allowed for the kind of miniaturization that we are familiar with today. It would be another decade or so until the early 1990s when the million-subscriber milestone would be reached. With such an installed user-base, economies of scale could be bought to bear and costs brought down for more and more people to enjoy the benefits of telephony on the go. In 1991, Motorola released their Microtac Lite for "only" a thousand dollars. Interestingly, AT&T and its famous Bell Labs department also had cell phones in the works, but they were not first to market with any. This was surprising because AT&T was a telephone behemoth, and at one time had a virtual monopoly on all phone service in the United States. Its Bell Labs was responsible for many technological breakthroughs; the inventors of the silicon transistor were originally Bell Labs employees and had developed many of the principles of the modern microchip there. Apparently, the FCC was slow to grant AT&T its license, which was a necessary step since cell phones are really just little radio transmitters and receivers and the FCC governs all such communications in the country. This delay seemed to have been in some part due to the then-ongoing breakup of "Ma Bell," the original AT&T leviathan that the government busted up in order to bring some competition to telephone services after around a century of monopoly. By the first years of the 21st Century, however, AT&T would become a company that only provided services, and not the hardware as well. And one of the manufacturers providing cell phones for its wireless network would be Motorola, with its wildly popular Razr lineup.
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