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Collecting "vintage" cell phones

Started by McHeath, December 13, 2009, 01:45:26 PM

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McHeath

Well it has begun, someone is now got a web site up and running that is offering old cell phones:

http://www.vintagemobilephones.com/

And some of them are truly pricy, check out the Motorola 8000x for 899 pounds sterling.

LarryInMichigan

If it exists, someone will collect it.

gpo706

£899 for a brick that won't even work?

This bloke is extracting the urine.

At least our "lumps" we can plug in and use fter some mods and TLC,I feel rather more sane now.
"now this should take five minutes, where's me screwdriver went now..?"

Bill

#3
He's working only with hand-held cell phones - relatively recent. Cell phones were available earlier, first in vehicle-mounted versions, and then as "bag phones".

My wife worked for Ma Bell when cell phones first became available to the public, and she got one. As I recall, the retail price was around $2000, but as an employee, her cost was substantially less. The handset was not too different from a 500-series handset, but with a flat spot on the handle where a keypad was located. It was held in a snap-lock cradle mounted somewhere within the driver's reach. The electronics box, about the size of a cigar box, was mounted "elsewhere" - in our case, in the trunk. There were two big cables that had to be snaked under the carpeting from one to the other. I finally threw this thing away about two years ago. Wish I hadn't - imagine its value to a collector today!

Incidentally, the cellular network was pretty crude in those days. I remember that the network had no way to figure out where the phone was physically located at any given moment. If you were on a landline, and wanted to call someone on a cell phone, you had to know where that person was located. If the phone was more than a very few miles from its home location, you had to dial a "roaming code" before the cell's phone number. The phone company provided a printed list of roaming codes, and if you didn't have your list handy, you were out of luck.

Progress in the field was amazingly quick. Of course, that was in the days when Bell Labs was the world's premier communications development lab, and with a huge budget and the brightest minds in the world, there wasn't much they couldn't accomplish.

Bill

gpo706

"now this should take five minutes, where's me screwdriver went now..?"