Mobile: 50 years ago ‘brick’ started the technological era – 01/04/2023 – Tech

The story of more than 15 billion cell phones in the world began 50 years ago, on April 3, 1973.

Martin Cooper, an electrical engineer at the then Motorola car radio company, called a rival working at AT&T’s Bell Labs to report that he had won the mobile phone race.

“I’m calling you from a cell phone, but a real cell phone, folks, that fits in your hand,” Cooper told competing engineer Joel Angel. Before the turnaround, AT&T was leading the charge with its cellular wave transmission system.

The notion of a cell phone that fit in the hand was different from the current one. The first DynaTAC weighed 1.4 kg and was 25 cm long. A 19 cm long hollow brick weighs an average of 2.2 kg. Cooper himself, now 94 years old, said in an interview with AFP on Thursday (30) that it was impossible to hold the device for more than 25 minutes – the time that the battery of the device lasted.

Still, Cooper released the car phones. AT&T devices were attached to automobiles.

To put the first mobile phone on the market, Motorola took another ten years. Only in 1983 did it start selling the DynaTAC 8000x, for US$ 5,000 (US$ 15,400 in current values, or R$ 78,000). That’s because it needed to develop, with US$ 100 million, an analog radio transmission system capable of supporting the new clientele, also called DynaTAC.

The notion of what a cell phone was has changed over this half century. Devices started playing mp3 tracks, sending emails, accessing internet browsers and downloading applications. Prices have also dropped. In the United States, an iPhone 14 Pro costs from US$ 999 (about R$ 5,100)

The last revolution in telephone devices came with the minimalist design of Apple’s iPhone 2G, launched in 2007. The feat consolidated the already great fame of businessman Steve Jobs. The multitouch functionality, which allows you to select two points on the screen at the same time with your fingers, guarantees the experience of using mobile devices that we are used to today.

In an interview with Motherboard, a specialist technology vehicle, ten years ago, Martin Cooper went further. The engineer who idealized the first mobile phone thought of the future of technology as a chip implanted behind the ear, with access to a computer network. “It would be a great voice phone.”

“The concept of applications is all wrong. The ideal would be to have an artificial intelligence capable of meeting our requests, ideally more intelligent than us. It would be a portable servant”, said the creator of the cell phone, well before OpenAI launched ChatGPT , which has impressed people with its textual capabilities.

In Thursday’s conversation with the AFP, Cooper lamented that people are consumed by their smartphone screens. “When I see someone crossing the street looking at their phone, I feel terrible. They’re not thinking.”

In excess, cell phones can cause sleep and posture problems, irritability and a sedentary lifestyle. These side effects can be worse for children, who don’t have the socio-emotional capacities of an adult, according to professor at Uerj (State University of Rio de Janeiro) Evelyn Eisenstein.

According to the 2022 IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) ICT Kids Online survey, 96% of young people aged 9 to 17 already have a cell phone in Brazil.

In June 2022, the country already had 242 million smartphones, according to data from the survey “Use of Information Technologies in Brazil”, by FGV (Fundação Getulio Vargas). The country has more than one device per inhabitant since 2016.

Evelyn Eisenstein recalls that, in 1990, when the first cell phones arrived in Brazil, access was difficult. “We used the device in hospital emergencies. It was a heavy object, which we kept in a special belt.”

She is referring to the Motorola PT-550, which soon gained the nickname “brick” in the country. The model, counting the external antenna on top, reached 22.8 cm in length. The cell phone’s design was innovative for its hinge that protected the keys from dust. Abroad, the device cost US$ 3,000 and had phonebook and caller ID functions.

Anyone who wanted to use the cell phone line still had to pay up to US$ 20,000 for the state-owned Telerj — and there was a queue. The transmission system was still analog, like those in the United States in the 1980s.

Former deputy Eduardo Cunha, who presided over the Rio de Janeiro telephone company between 1991 and 1993, usually says that he led the implementation of mobile telephony in Brazil. These first lines were prefixed with “982”. The state-owned company was later privatized, like the other subsidiaries, and came to give rise to the company we know as Oi, today in its second judicial recovery.

The state-owned São Paulo company Telesp only brought the service to the state in 1993. In 1997, in Brasília, it began operating the first digital cellular service in Brazil. In the 2000s, the country began to adopt the European standard system, GSM.

With the advancement of technology today, it is possible to buy a prepaid chip at any newsstand. Some devices were once again foldable, such as the then innovative “brick”. A top-of-the-line device, such as the iPhone 14 Pro Max, starts at R$9,499 in the official Apple store.