The first ever smart phone was really chunky and way overpriced.

Boy, have we come a long way.

See that shiny gadget in your hand right now? That feat of engineering genius? That constant drainer of our concentration and free time?

Our extra limb smartphones have come a long, long way from it’s creation.

In fact, yesterday marked 21 years since this life altering bit of genius came on to the market for the very first time.

One Reddit user posted this revelation online yesterday, “TIL [today I learned] in 1994, IBM released a cell phone with touch screen and e-mail. It could also send and receive faxes, work as a pager, and was considered the world’s first smart phone due to its features and capabilities.”

According to it’s Wikipedia page, the IBM Simon Personal Communicator was a handheld, touchscreen cellular phone made by International Business Machines Corp.

All those fancy words basically mean it included all of the features which we take for granted these days, but at the time were the first of it’s kind.

This bad boy would set you back $1423 AUD when it first came out, and it sold around 50,000 units.

Compare that to the estimated 2 billion smartphone users in the world today.

But the really important question is — did it have snake?

If you want to take a further trip down memory lane here are some other classic retro phones…

Want more? Try these:

What happens to your body and brain when you check your phone before you go to sleep.

The time of the phone call is over. Goodbye, phone calls.