Neither Apple nor Samsung, much less Huawei or Xiaomi. None of the current leaders in the mobile business manufactured phones at the end of the last century. Some had not even been born and others were distracted in their affairs. Altavista was the fashion seeker and smartphones were in elementary school. In Italy, a lineage of telephones composed solely of a plastic casing triumphed, to be worn on the street as if they were authentic. Not only was he allowed to appear with them in the car, but doing so was rewarded with envy at traffic lights.
The real mobiles cost six months of minimum interprofessional salary. Just to have a line, you had to pay the operator a registration fee equivalent to 150 euros, which comes to about 270 euros now after applying the inflation corrector of the last 25 years. In addition, it was necessary to contribute with another 50 euros updated monthly fee. It was priced in pesetas per second, rounded up to the minute, at a rate of 42 euro cents (71 pesetas) between call establishment (20 pesetas) and the first minute or fraction (51 pesetas).
The smallest terminals weighed a quarter of a kilo and were used to make and receive calls. The monochrome screens measured two fingers and the camera was science fiction. The most diligent learned to memorize the contact list and to send short messages, with four letters and signs on each key. The ’emoticons’ were yet to come, just like the ‘ringtones’, ‘polytones’ and the applications… which were reduced to a clock and a calculator. Then the snake game would come and even the FM radio with the headphone cable as an antenna. To know the autonomy of the battery, little lines are used, and with five it was enough to be ‘general captain’ for several days. Especially since those artifacts were rarely used given the rates and quality of service.
The antennas were extendable up to 9 centimeters in length, hunting for always scarce coverage. Each call cost the same as a coffee in a luxury hotel and the question “Can you hear me okay?” It abounded in the conversations of the time. Missed calls were the language of a generation, the 2G, experienced in communicating with touches and rings. The most modern incorporated the infrared connection (ir-DA), mother of Bluetooth and grandmother of WiFi Direct. The Mobile World Congress was held in Cannes, with Nokia, Motorola, Ericsson, Sony and Siemens as kings of the roost, accompanied by many others such as Nec, Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Alcatel, Telyco and Indelec. BlackBerry and Palm would later arrive, but without a trace of the iPhone or the Galaxy.
In the second half of the 1990s, when the current ‘bosses’ of Spanish telecommunications began their careers, mobile phones only resembled the current ones in their incipient ability to gradually become essential in their pockets. They were embarrassed to talk to them on the street.
Those same first swords of the Spanish subsidiaries of Telefónica, Orange, Vodafone, MásMóvil, Ericsson and Lenovo have now answered Status’s call to remember their first contacts with mobile telephony. Getting nostalgic was almost an obligation. None of the highest executives in the sector suspected that this little invention would become in a few years the most addictive machine in humanity.
Emilio Gayo, president of Telefónica Spain, discovered those gadgets in his own home. His father had a car radio workshop and was also a telephone distributor. Therefore, from a young age, Gaius lived with that technology relatively naturally. The first cell phone he remembers was a Motorola MP 450, it was carried in a briefcase and cost half a million pesetas at the time. That was a lot of money. His father later gave him a Nokia 2110, something like a brick turned into an object of desire, from 1995. Later he changed for the elegant Motorola StarTac, weighing just 110 grams, which already allowed him to send text messages. The battery had 500 milliamps, almost ten times less than contemporary high-end. The SIM card memory allowed to store 110 contacts, as well as the last five calls sent and received. The shell design and the possibility to choose between tone (French, English or German) and vibration marked an era.
The price of calls was not a problem for the Gayos, since Telefónica at that time gave its distributors and family members a SIM card with a free call bar. Unlike other Spaniards, Emilio could talk to his father, mother, and sister. “There are a lot of mobile numbers that I know by heart because those devices didn’t have address books. That was much later, so right now I remember all the numbers of friends and family who had phones at that time,” he says.
Laurent Paillassot, CEO of Orange Spain, does not clearly remember the model with which he discovered mobile telephony: “It could be a Nokia, but from today’s perspective I remember that the use of the adjective ‘mobile’ was more an exercise in technological optimism In fact, those huge telephones were not very mobile, neither because of their weight – almost half a kilo – nor because of the poor coverage and quality of the network in the early 90s. my country – took a leap in quality thanks to the GSM standard developed by French manufacturers, engineers and researchers”.
With a view to the future, the chief executive of Orange Spain, Laurent Paillassot, is convinced that if we look back at the past in a decade, “the technology we use today will seem as outdated as my old Nokia from the 90s. Today we are only beginning to glimpse the possibilities of the 5G network and the hyperconnected society”
Paillassot considers that those “first contacts with mobile telephony were somewhat disappointing in everyday use, but instead they made us feel that we were part of a revolution whose true dimensions we could barely imagine.” He adds that there were so few users of this service “that talking while walking down the street was even uncomfortable, because the pedestrians we passed looked at us with a mixture of astonishment and disbelief. However, what happened at the end of that The decade and early 2000s confirmed all of our hopes for that then-nascent technology.
That enthusiasm of the end of the last century is still alive, according to Paillassot, “thanks to the unstoppable evolution of mobile telephony”. “If a few years ago we were surprised by touch screens or 4G networks, today we are only beginning to glimpse the possibilities of the 5G network and the hyperconnected society,” he adds. With a view to the future, the chief executive of Orange Spain is convinced that if in a decade he looks back at the past, “the technology we use today will seem as outdated as my old Nokia from the 90s”.
Antonio Coimbra, executive president of Vodafone Spain, points out the three great milestones that, in his opinion, changed the way in which “we communicated, worked and did business”. Thus, “in the 80s, there was the arrival of personal computers, in the 90s, the irruption of mobile telephony, and in 2000, the massive arrival of the Internet”. In this scenario, Coimbra goes back to October 1992, in Portugal, to remember his first cell phone, which he still has. “It is a portable Motorola 1000, weighing approximately one kilo and the size of a shoe box. The first thing that comes to mind are various anecdotes related to people’s reaction to seeing you appear with that kind of device in a ‘briefcase’, and therefore portable, but a long way from today’s smartphones”.
“Once, while we were doing some coverage tests in the center of Lisbon, on a café terrace, a person approached with a strange expression, staring at the huge Motorola that he had on the table and with which he had just made a call. He told me that it was impossible for him to be talking to someone, since the device had no cable and he couldn’t make calls without cable, and therefore, I was kidding him. He noticed that what I had in my hands was a walkie-talkie. He did not quite believe my explanation and asked me how far he could talk. When I told him that there was no limit and that, for example, he could talk with people from other cities from Portugal or from other countries, I could not convince him Seen now, from the distance of almost 30 years, the technological evolution of the mobile phone is relentless, a device without which we could not now understand our work, entertainment or communication. personal cations”.
Meinrad Spenger, CEO of MásMóvil, goes to his smartphone to search Google for the image of his first mobile. “It was a 1999 Motorola with an extendable antenna, which I bought at a The Phone House store on Calle Serrano, in Madrid. I was 24 years old. I was in Spain, without a landline phone at home and with my girlfriend in Austria. Therefore , I needed a phone to talk to her and my fellow students. It was a prepaid phone that I had to top up every week”. From those years, Spenger not only noticed how useful a cell phone could be, but also how “immensely expensive” it was to maintain it, not to mention the “terrible” customer service. “I think that initial experience was one of the reasons why I returned to Spain, in 2006, to create MásMóvil. Before arriving, I thought that mobile phones were a thing for ‘snobs’, for rare people who were not ashamed to talking on the street. But above all, I didn’t understand how the Spanish could put up with a level of service as bad as that of mobile telephony at the time”.
José Antonio López, president of Ericsson Spain, remembers two cell phones from those first contacts with mobile telephony. The first was the Motorola 8,800 X, a hulk of 800 grams – not including its briefcase-sized case – that López was in charge of buying in Europe and selling in Asia. “At the end of 1992, I was working for a mobile phone importer-exporter. It was selling very well there since having the number 8 repeated was very lucky in Asia. It was no joke. In fact, later I found out that the Olympic Games of Beijing started on the 8th of 8th 2008 at 8 hours, 8 minutes and 8 seconds”. That mobile measured 30 centimeters, plus another 12 centimeters of antenna. “It seemed that you were going to fish, because there was nowhere to put it. In addition, the battery lasted 30 minutes, so it was impossible to have a mobile experience like we can now think of. More than a phone, it was an exhibition object, in addition to being very few people had a cell phone to talk to and there was very little coverage”,…
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