4.87 ounce iPhone? In 1991, the NYT's mobile phone weighed 130 pounds
A 4.87-Ounce iPhone? In 1991, My Mobile Phone Weighed 130 Pounds.
AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTLooking BackSept. 7, 2016Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this piece, Walter Baranger, a senior editor for news operations, looks back at The Times’s use of mobile phones during our coverage of the Persian Gulf War.Earlier today, Apple announced its latest mobile phone: the iPhone 7. It weighs 4.87 ounces — less than a third of a pound.Twenty-five short years ago, though, during our coverage of the Persian Gulf War, The Times’s “mobile” phone weighed 130 pounds.It’s fair to say we’ve come a long way.In the photo shown above, Philip Shenon, a Times reporter, sits with our satellite telephone in a hotel in northeast Saudi Arabia, in 1991. Phil and I carried the satphone from Frankfurt — it was housed in two 65-pound suitcases. We set it up to shoot out the hotel window.The satellite dish and one of the two white suitcases — containing the transmitter and receiver — are on the left. The telephone handset and the controller, along with a Tandy 1500 HD laptop (“one of the least expensive hard-disk notebook computers on the market”), are seen on the desk, under the lamp.The cables alone, seen connecting all the various components, weighed around ten pounds. Modern mobile satellite data units weigh a total of about three pounds, and phones weigh a lot less.Our data speed was a blazing 9600 bits per second, about 97 percent slower than modern portable units — but plenty fast for sending telexes to New York.ImageA closer look at the satellite phone’s components.Credit...Walter Baranger/The New York TimesThe gulf war was the first major conflict in which newspapers used portable satellite equipment that could be lugged by correspondents. We rented ours from Manhattan Microwave in Queens, and demand at the time was high. Phone calls cost up to $10 per minute. The new technology of portable satellite phones was particularly coveted by the military, which left relatively few units available for rent to civilians.John Zelenka, the owner of Manhattan Microwave, recently recalled that in the run-up to the Gulf War he rented other satellite phones to the government, and they ended up on “ships and aircraft carriers.”Shortly after we carried the satphone to Kuwait City, the Emir of Kuwait contacted Manhattan Microwave and bought our unit, effectively ending our ability to report by satellite. (For a few days, ours had been the only working civilian telephone in the city, but as other news agencies arrived our options increased.) By the time we lost the phone, however, we had already filed our stories of the liberation of the city, and were thus saved the painful necessity of hauling 130 pounds of gear back to Europe.Follow Times Insider on Twitter.A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: A ‘Mobile’ Phone, but Barely. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | SubscribeAdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT