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On October 13, 1983, David Meilahn placed the first commercial mobile call on a Motorola DynaTAC from his 1983 Mercedes-Benz 380SL to Bob Barnett, who then placed a call from inside a Chrysler convertible to the grandson of Alexander Graham Bell.
The Motorola DynaTAC 8000x was the first commercial handheld cellular phone. It weighed just under a kilogram, stood 33cm high, stored 30 numbers, took 10 hours to recharge and offered 30 minutes of talk time. At launch it cost $3,995 (roughly $10,000 in today’s terms).
DynaTAC is an abbreviation of “Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage.”
