Old timey mobile phones: What was the cost?

[Earl_Snake-Hips_Tucker]

I could have sworn that around 1984, asking (just for curiosity) how much it would cost to have a mobile (pre-cellular) phone installed in my car. I was told about $250 to “install it,” and a monthly service charge of about $175. I don’t know if there was any per-minute option, and, needless to say, those prices were a bit out of my reach.

But those memories are two decades old. What were the prices like on the old mobile services? I’ve heard that near the end of the mobile service era, that you could dial direct, and not have to go thru a mobile operator. Is that true?

[Fear_Itself]

This site has some pretty good details on the genesis of mobile phone service:

On June 17, 1946 a driver in St. Louis, Missouri., pulled out a handset from under his car’s dashboard, placed a phone call and made history. It was the first mobile telephone call. A team including Alton Dickieson, H.I. Romnesand D. Mitchell from Bell Labs, worked more than a decade to achieve this feat. By 1948, wireless telephone service was available in almost 100 cities and highway corridors. Customers included utilities, truck fleet operators and reporters. However, with only 5,000 customers making 30,000 weekly calls, the service was far from commonplace.

That “primitive” wireless network could not handle large call volumes. A single transmitter on a central tower provided a handful of channels for an entire metropolitan area. Between one and eight receiver towers handled the call return signals. At most, three subscribers could make calls at one time in any city. It was, in effect, a massive party line, where subscribers would have to listen first for someone else on the line before making a call.

Expensive and far from “mobile”, the service cost $15 per month, plus 30 to 40 cents per local call, and the equipment weighed 80 pounds. Just as they would use a CB microphone, users depressed a button on the handset to talk and released it to listen.