The first walkie talkie I had was the size of a small phone book. IT actually was call a portable radio. It ran on electron tubes and has a few solid state transistors. It was pretty modern for it's time and even had rechargeable batteries.
Motorola made the first "portable radio" which was all tubes, and had high voltage battery packs, and was really a portable radio pack set. It weighed about 10 lbs and was pretty innovative for the time.
Portables like we know them today were first introduced by Motorola. They were two piece units, one unit was a transmitter and the other unit was the receiver. The first real portable was the HT200. It was also called "the brick" and was called because it was about the same size and almost weighed about the same. Now you are probably thinking this was in the 40's or something......sorry 1960....
Now the bad news. The price on these portables were about $1900 dollars. They were only 2 watts, and the battery was $90 dollars. Compare that with the size of the portables that you can by for camping and stuff, they have the same power, are technically more advanced and sell for $39.00 dollars..... something to think about.
Portables for public safety and commercial units by Motorola run starting at 300 and still go up to 2k or more depending on all kinds of stuff that was not available until several years ago. Stuff like scrambling, multiple frequencies and formats, encryption, etc.etc.etc.
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