1985 Cellphone In Your Pocket

The world's first pocket cell phone, Technophone PC105 explored inside and out.
This phone is a piece of history and a work of art.

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In 1985, surface mount electronics technologies were brand new. This phone has densely packed surface mount components on a dual sided, twelve copper interconnect layered main board. A stunning piece of engineering for the time.

Historic Tech - The Story of Technophone & The World’s First Pocket Cell Phone

VHS effects made using real VHS equipment
Video and images from various Telecom Australia archive materials

Bloomberg - The First Cell Phone Call Was an Epic Troll

Images

Music
Engineered Vibes - SPACE BOUND
Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio - Androids & Sentient Beings

[nevarDeathEHW]

This video was BRILLIANT! The title card you made was spot on. So simple and yet it fit perfect! I love that one of the ladies said "the most intelligent mobile phone" she didn't call it a smartphone, but still :)

I don't know if you care about this aspect, but when you said "I'm even more excited" after discovering the eeprom, you did not sound convincing. Since I was also excited, I'm certain you were too, just didn't sound like it.

I have never heard of this phone or brand. Everybody skips from the Motorola brick phone to the startac usually. I was surprised just by seeing the title honestly. I didn't think there was a mobile made in the 80's that was pocketable. For reference, I am the same age as this phone. The effort you put into this video really shows. Just the research you must have done, wow! Then you presented it very well.

Did you figure out the mystery of the solder across those processor pins? I was afraid something bad would happen when you connected the battery. I'm very shocked the phone still works as well as it does. Thank for sharing this true marvel of 80's era electronic engineering!

[olatron]

I was 14 in '89 and went to a police auction and ended up buying one of these for £5... I couldn't get it activated but used to flex and walk around with it. This was when a mobile, especially in the hands of a child, would still turn heads. Little did I know, they were all thinking 'what an idiot' 😂

[AndyPevy]

I was the engineer that designed one of the application specific chips used in the PC105 series pocket phones, both AMPS ad TACS variants. I went on to be the worldwide software support engineer for the AMPS variant.

[johnclifford]

This video brought back some memories. I was a very junior engineer at Technophone back then; I left in 1989. The back lighting wasn’t great but it worked better than on your example - maybe that’s something to do with age! The battery pack comes off much more easily if you unclip the front cover first.

[MrMegaManFan]

Even as “the first pocketable cell phone” it’s still somehow the most 1980’s thing imaginable. It’s like a walkie talkie crossbred with a phone born in a Radio Shack store.

[LibertyMonk]

The sheer engineering behind this thing is incredible. I can see why Nokia would be proud of this acquisition.

[haraldwelte]

excellent video, thanks a lot! In case you're not aware yet, the osmocom-analog project allows you to build open source SDR base stations for a variety of analog cellphone systems, including AMPS, TACS, MTS, IMTS, NMT, ...

[marvinochieng]

Youtube is not giving this man the number of views he deserves.

[HonestAuntyElle]

The second that sticker came off with the window visible I gasped and started panicking the eeprom was getting erased. Glad to hear it needs a focused UV light.

[chillzwinter]

I used to fix these back in the late 1980's. I still have that exact model on display in my office (just for fun - to show visitors). I also have half dozen old eproms in a black UV proof case (try to keep yours out of any light sources or the data may get corrupted - hence the funny characters you are starting to see on yours). The eproms could be programmed with anyone's phone number and their ESN, then you could make phone calls on their account. A huge cyber security risk by today's standards, allowing technicians that kind of power. But getting hold of the ESN/phone number pair that the carrier had allocated to a specific device was difficult (unless you worked for one of the carriers, or maintained a register of peoples data). I recall all the one's I worked on had that eprom socketed, so it was easy to test the phone on a working account by simply popping in a 'test' eprom with a registered esn/phone number pair. I still have the charger with mine as well as a charger stand where you could pop the phone into the stand like a modern looking Qi charger, but I haven't pulled the phone apart since the 80's so I imagine the PCB has leaked batteries all over it by now. This was back in the day when you could still fix mobile phones at a component level - but that only lasted another 3 or 4 years, then we started doing board replacements in the early 90's and simply threw away the faulty PCBs.

[robertstratton]

Thank you for a lovely engineering history perspective. The 12 layer PC board blew me away.

Just a tip, if you ever get a chance to acquire an Oki 900 handset, it truly was the hacker's/phone phreak's handset of the AMPS telephony era. The bottom connector of the phone exposed a LOT of the bus. I think it even carried some of the CPU lines. The internal service menus were superbly comprehensive. Some people reflashed them with custom firmware, but there was an almost turnkey plug-in integration with the HP 200LX MS-DOS palmtop and some scanning software that turned it into an impressively powerful and portable scanning platform.

[microdesigns]

I worked on cellphones I'm 1987 to 1990. I can't imagine how many uv eproms I erased and burned. This is how we set the phone number and carrier information like the ESN (yes the electronic serial number), kind of like a SIM card.

That circuit board is amazing for 1985. Incidentally, 0.6 watts is still a lot of power for a portable, way more than a modern phone.

[HonestAuntyElle]

The found footage you show in each video continues to amaze me. How long do you spend searching for this stuff.

[johnnyjohnn]

“Upgradeable software to ensure non-obsolescence…” 80’s advertising blurb for a now obsolete phone. There’s a lesson here for everyone perhaps.

[icakinser]

It's simply amazing how everything was modular and so easy to take apart!

[simonjones]

Fascinating. My first experience of having a mobile phone was covering a renal unit in 1994. They had been around for a few years by then but they were still exciting to use in public.Within four years I had one of my own, and have kept the same number until the present day (2023). Weird to think they have been part of my life for almost half my entire existence. They are actually getting to be quite an old technology, and I may be part of the last generation to have proper, adult, memories of what the world was like without them.

[MarvLthe]

Those 37 years old handwritten stickers are so wholesome 😊

[LightTheUnicorn]

What an incredible thing this is, a real feat of miniaturisation for the mid 1980's that I'd never heard of before now.
Thanks for showing off these things and giving a demo of not just their insides, but also the work you put in to bringing them back to life as well.

[cocusar]

OG HD44780, what an amazing thing to see! everything is modular, and it's really small compared to the other phones of that era, just incredible!

[LEXMICHDEKAMMERA]

If not already, you should really read "Ghost in the Wires" by Kevin Mitnick. He hacked several companies to get the source codes of some of the earliest mobile phones. It really blew my mind how that stuff worked back in the day and I think it will fascinate you too. Thanks for putting up these videos!