First commercially available mobile phone was engineered by Motorola in 1983 called "Motorola DynaTAC 8000X". That mobile set weighed 2 pounds, priced at $3,995 and could offer only half an hour of talk time with fully charged batteries.

Martin Cooper, the head of research and development assigned this project to Rudy Krolopp, the lead designer.

Krolopp, now 74 and retired, still gets a "warm fuzzy feeling" thinking about the DynaTAC and knowing that "a handful of us did something that was really significant."

This brick took over a decade to get to market.

Krolopp was assigned the project by Martin Cooper, who ran Motorola's research and development effort in wireless and was ultimately dubbed the father of the cell phone by then-CEO Robert Galvin. Both Cooper's and Krolopp's names are on the original patent along with that of John Mitchell, former head of the company's communications division.

"Martin called me to his office one day in December 1972 and said, 'We've got to build a portable cell phone,"' Krolopp recalled. "And I said 'What the hell's a portable cell phone?"'

Krolopp and his team were given six weeks to come up with a working model.

"We sprung it on the engineers one day," he said, recalling their surprise at how small it was at the time. "There were only eight guys in the room. Cooper said 'Anybody who doesn't believe this can be done, leave the room."

No one did. But it was another 10 years and a total of $100 million in development costs before the phone was officially unveiled in 1983 -- the delay resulting mostly from the need to build towers and infrastructure.