The £3,000 brick phone - mobile phones in the 1980s

Let's look at one of the world's first mobile phones - the Motorola 8500x - released in the mid 1980s for £3,000. That's over £7,000 today!
In this video I'll explain what the 1980s was like as far as phones went, and we'll look inside this massive brick phone - does it still work? Will it switch on? What's inside it anyway?
Phones today are so common you're more likely to get funny looks if you don't have one. But that wasn't always the case. Mobile phones had been thought up, but they worked more like CB radios. You had to follow radio rules to use them and have a licence.
There's this fantastic old Tomorrow's World episode you should go and watch. Especially the bit where his call goes wrong and some random
person cuts into the call.
One thing I want to get across is just how insanely expensive owning a phone was back then. A similar model - the 8000X - was £3000 back in 1985 which is a thoroughly meaningless £7,503.49 in today's money. The average wage for the type of person who would have used this - a male between 30 and 39 - is £236 a week, or just over £12,000 a year. That's £30,000 in today's money.
There's no way your average worker would spend three month's wages on a phone, especially when nobody else had one. This is the era where phonecalls cost money. Talk was expensive, so you did it at prearranged times and made sure you had something to say.
So it's an expensive yuppie status symbol, like a sports car or private jet. If you owned one yourself, you were loaded.
If you had a company one, you must have had some high up executive job that warranted you being given one, along with your company car.
Or you were some sales guy living out of his car selling washing machines and needing the phone.
It's completely analogue. There's no 3G, 4G, it doesn't even do GSM. So what did it do? Well it's called 1G because...
it was the first generation.
There were several systems known as TACS for Total Access Communication System, and ETACS, created by Vodafone, Ericsson, and Cellnet.
Yes, these are all the same names that exist today. Although interestingly Cellnet used to be called Telecom Securicor Cellular Radio Ltd.
It was formed from the security company Securicor (who have now been absorbed and mutated into G4S) and British Telecom. If you were a
Cellnet user, you'll have noticed at some point it turned into BT Cellnet, and then O2.
The network was all analogue, and used frequencies between 935 and 949 MHz for the cell towers, and 890 to 904 for the handsets.
SIM cards didn't exist, the handsets had their identifying numbers programmed into them.
This wasn't a fashion phone to upgrade every year.
Could you do anything beyond making expensive phone calls? No. That was it.
And that's how important these devices were. Normal people used payphones. Normal British people didn't even have pagers.
Making phonecalls in the 80s from outside your house was awful. Having a magic box to carry about must have been amazing.
Merely owning one was enough. It didn't need to do anything else.
So there we go, a look inside a 1980s yuppie status symbol. Feel free to tell me about your stories of mobile phones in the comments.
You know, I remember seeing some guy on the bus in the mid 90s on his phone and I remember thinking "what a showoff". And then in 1997
pay as you go came along, Nokia plopped out successive cheap iconic handsets and seemingly overnight everyone had a phone. It happened
so fast, I've never seen anything like it.
Noticed how in science fiction stories we alway miss mobile phones being a thing? Sure, we have the idea of personal communicators in
Star Trek, but they were more like 2-way radios. Or you might have some sort of pager device, but nobody seemed to predict the entire
planet owning a personal phone number as if it was completely normal.
Blog Post: ncot.uk/electr...
Twitter: @ncot_tech
Chapters
========
00:00 Intro
02:03 Disassembly
06:44 About the phone
10:03 Inside the Motorola Brick Phone
14:55 How expensive was the phone?
16:38 Inside the Motorola Brick Phone
20:54 What we used them for
22:25 More Insides
24:27 Battery Life
27:22 Reading the eprom
29:41 Outro
Attributions
============
Rotary phone - Video by Andrew Kota: www.pexels.com...
BBC Tomorrow's World - • Tomorrow's World: Mobi...
1986 Ferrari Testarossa - Mr.choppers, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommon..., via Wikimedia Commons
1980 Learjet - Stanley Howe / A private jet at Blackbushe (1980)
Richard Croft / Vandalised phone box
www.dailypost....
Motorola Pager - Thiemo Schuff, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommon..., via Wikimedia Commons
rarehistorical...

[@andreweastland9634]

As a service engineer back then the first mobile phone I used was one of the in car type that we built into an old leather briefcase along with a motorbike battery to power it and a speaker fitted to the lid, we all shared it as needed. Then we all got the Motorola bricks and thought we were well off. I don't remember the handsets being quite so expensive but I think the calls and rentals were more expensive. And yes you did have to pay for incoming calls. The reasoning was that the caller didn't know it was a mobile number so was charged the standard trunk rate and the mobile user picked up the remainder of the call cost.

[@nigeltrigger4499]

I worked for a company in 1988 that gave me access to a mobile phone that had a huge battery pack as a separate unit, connected via a curly cable. I was very much amused ringing up the pub I was in to order my drinks! There is no fun in that anymore!

[@trizedlyza]

The contacts are for some debug testmode. You can saw the top of the battery case off near the contacts because there's nothing in that part of the battery and you need to short some pins to the antenna/ground. Later flip-phone models can enter testmode with just key presses. You can check signal strength as a number not just a 5 bar meter, maybe listen on some channels, all temporary stuff. Too this day I setup my iPhones to show signal strength in numbers too.
The "Made in USA" wasn't just a joke on the sticker, I think (but can't find references online) we really had manufacturing lines in the USA making phones, like chips and soldering all sourced in the country. Moto had old military ties so they liked making things in the country and keeping patent secrets internal. This would've been for those really old analog phones. I would guess into the mid 90's. There's articles online talking about the MotoX ending in 2014 but that was "assembled" not made in USA. Thanks to Covid-19 supply chains (TSMC), political threats and mistrust of foreign chipmakers, the US started talking about chip fabs again around 2022, not just for military.

[@MsLostboysforever]

Great video, I remember seeing someone on the train with a brick phone, I had never seen a mobile phone before, it was amazing, I couldn’t stop watching this guy making a phone call while being on a train. It was like science fiction to me! I never would have believed in my lifetime we would all be walking around with sophisticated computer/phones in our pockets and watches that we can make and receive calls on. The future is here!
Ps what’s the amstrad?

[@eugenemckinney8736]

Ah yes, those brick phones were totally outrageous in the 80s, and I feel whoever had those phones in the house, car or even in their room should bring them back to life.
In Birmingham Alabama, we used to have a phone company by the name South Central Bell 🔔 in order to get the phone person to connect with the communications wires.