Gizmodo is a web site that specializes in announcements about the newest hi-tech goodies. But for this one particular case, they decided to set the calendar back to review the technological wonders of the dim ages of (gasp) 1983. For example …
Cellphones
Motorola DynaTAC 8000X cellphone
From Motorola, the first commercial portable cellular phone to receive FCC approval. The DynaTAC 8000X, which weighs just 28 ounces, works on the new Advanced Mobile Phone Service that’s being rolled out, and has an LED display, memory to store thirty “dialing locations,” and enough battery life for 30 minutes of talk time and eight hours of standby. Retail price: $3,995.
Yeesh …
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Heh! Did you ever see the X-Files ep that showed how the Lone Gunmen came to be, circa 1988-89? Mulder had one of those old, klunky cells that were completely impractical.
Heh! Did you ever see the Aughts ep that showed how the Crankies came to be, circa 2002-04? Mustapha had one of those old, external “cell” links that were complete impractical …
   — Katherine Hill, 10-Jun-2018
[chuckle]
I worked as a technician on even less portable cell phones in 1982. The “phone” consisted of three 2 foot by 4 foot circuit boards and went in a car trunk. I was the lone digital guy amongst the analog wonks. Had to make sure I didn’t plug my 5V digital logic into their 15V supplies. Ah, the smell of burnt silicon in the morning!
The cell phone work I did should have been 1981, not 1982. While we are going back down memory lane, I did CAD software for the first SCSI chip for NCR in 1982. See the Smithsonian article on it, here. A particularly funny quote from the internal NCR newsletter was this:
What is this marvel? Well, it’s smaller than a breadbox—in fact it’s about the size of a fingernail, and it contains 15,000 (that’s right-thousand) transistors in addition to a lot of other complex circuitry. It could potentially save the corporation $40,000,000.00 in manufacturing costs, besides all the residual advantages of such technology.
My more famous contribution to the effort was the pronounciation of the acronym, “scuzzy”. There was a flurry of memos saying thou shalt not pronounce it “scuzzy”. But it was too late.
Heh. “Acronym pronunciations happen.”
Yow. I really like my old Sharp PDA phone, but its battery life sucks almost as much as that Motorola. Just like computers, I guess. Well be talking to our pens before long…
techinacally you can “talk” to your pen. There is a store in Colorado Mills Mall, in Denver Colorado that sells a pen that can memorize over 40 pages of notes that you write, you plug it into your usb port on your pc and can download your notes to print in legible text,