My first mobile phone was not a Nokia but a Motorola which I still have just like the first Nokia banana
Posted by jpluimers on 2025/04/11
A while ago someone asked on Twitter if people had mobile phones in the early 1990’s.
I bought my first GSM phone in 1995. Unlike my other mobile non-smart phones that were from Nokia, this one was from Motorola.
It was the international GSM version of the Motorola MicroTAC series (see picture below) which by then was way more affordable and smaller than the Nokia devices (see Nokia 2010 – Wikipedia and Nokia 2110 – Wikipedia).
This was in the age that world wide there were various competing mobile phone network standards.
Mobile phone network coverage back then in The Netherlands was way worse than now, and even varied highly by operator. In September 1995, Dutch provider Libertel started and covered the city centers where the main offices of their stakeholders were situated. I happened to do free-lance work at one of them, which had a policy to close down most of their phone exchange system outside office hours in order to prevent abuse. Since I worked outside office hours a lot I wanted to both be reachable and be able to notify home when traveling back.
Later I owned various Nokia models, including the first banana phone (Nokia 8110i, introduced in 1996) of which a modified version appeared in the first movie of The Matrix: it had the spring loading mechanism of the Nokia 7110i (introduced in 1999) retrofitted.
A group photo with various mobile phones I used is below in these tweet series:
- On the MicroTAC (see also [Wayback/Archive] Thread by @jpluimers on Thread Reader App):
- [Wayback/Archive] “@daanwesterink @maartjejan Deze Motorola MicroTAC had ik in 1994 en heb ik nog steeds in een vitrinekast staan naast nog wat andere memorabilia (zoals de 1e Nokia banaan die van voor The Matrix). Bij de Makro met een Libertel telefoonnummer wat ik nu nog steeds heb.”
- [Wayback/Archive] “@daanwesterink @maartjejan Gekocht omdat toen diverse klanten buiten 07:00-18:00 de telefooncentrale dichtgooiden en ik toen al juist vaak na de spits reisde want drukke treinen zijn van alle tijden. Met extra grote batterij zodat je, wanneer je soms in de trein ergens ontvangst had, ook dan kon bellen.”
- [Wayback/Archive] Jeroen Wiert Pluimers on Twitter: “@daanwesterink @maartjejan Oh kijk: ze zijn nog geld waard ook! https://t.co/eL53N0nfbz” / Twitter
- [Wayback/Archive] “@daanwesterink @maartjejan Deze Motorola MicroTAC had ik in 1994 en heb ik nog steeds in een vitrinekast staan naast nog wat andere memorabilia (zoals de 1e Nokia banaan die van voor The Matrix). Bij de Makro met een Libertel telefoonnummer wat ik nu nog steeds heb.”
- On the Nokia 8110i and 7110:
Via [Wayback/Archive] @jpluimers nokia – Twitter Search / Twitter
Related personal history: The calculators that got me into programming (via: calculators : Algorithms for the masses – julian m bucknall).
--jeroen
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 
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