Even to mid-aged and older people, who lived during the proliferation of cellphones in the late 80's and early 90's, it might come a bit of a surprise how old the technology actually is. Since cellphones indeed became popular mostly in the 90's, most people have the wrong impression that that's when they were invented.
Portable phones, ie. phones that are not tied to a physical landline and instead work through radio waves, are much older, though. (And here we are talking about actual phones, rather than just radio transceivers. In other words, phones that can be used to dial a number and call any other person's phone, at least a landline one.)
The earliest commercially available portable phones were marketed in the late 1940's, mostly for use in cars. They worked like radio transceivers that would contact the phone company that offered the service, which would then redirect the call to the desired landline number as normal.
Such carphones already appeared in many TV series in the 1950's. (Today many people might see such an episode and think it's fiction, but no, it was completely based on real carphones of the day.)
Cellphones that were small enough to be carried around became available in the late 1980's and early 90's, which is when they started being more and more popular, and this is probably the reason why most people think that was when they were first developed.
Another common misconception is the exaggeration of the size of these portable cellphones. Many people think that they were brick-sized well into the 90's. While it's true that they were quite large in the late 80's and very early 90's, they quite rapidly became smaller and smaller. Note, for example, a cellphone depicted in the movie Reservoir Dogs, released in 1993.
