Cell Phone Technology

The next time you talk on the small bluetooth headset you bought for your cell phone, pause for a moment and think about how tiny that device is. Then think about how large the first such device was... no not the first bluetooth headphone, I mean the first phone you could carry down the street with you and talk to someone.

Known as The Brick, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X was introduced in 1984 with a cost of $3,995.00 and offered half an hour of talk time for each charge, at a cost of about a dollar a minute. The Brick weighed in at 2 pounds and was not exactly the kind of phone you just slipped into your pocket.

I remember my mom had one, in fact, even up to a month before she passed away in 2008 she was commenting that if the phone company would have let her she would have reactivated the Brick rather than get one of those new tiny phones. I still have it around here somewhere, packed away in a box.

Technology has come a very long way in the last 25 years... where is it going to be in another 25 years? Another 50? What will our great grandchildren be seeing when our great grandparents rode in wagons and tapped out messages on the latest technology - the telegraph line.

(Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street with The Brick cellular phone)