This item is a cellular phone integrated in a single housing with a pocket computer, which was designed with business applications in mind. The purpose of the device was to perform simple office tasks, such as agenda management, document editing, viewing simple webpages, or handling faxes and emails. Although the word was not in use at the time of the Nokia 9000 launch, the device may be considered as one of the first ever smartphones on the market, making it one of the most significant designs in the history of information and communication technology.
At first glance the design resembled a standard mobile phone, albeit a large one even by the standards of the 1990s. When unfolded, however, it offered the user access to a monochrome display and a full QWERTY keyboard, which could be used to access the device’s advanced functions.
This telephone came into existence as a result of the development of second-generation cellular networks (GSM), which, apart from voice calls, also offered the function of digital data transfer. This possibility was usually implemented with the use of a portable (laptop) or pocket (palmtop) computer tethered to a cellular phone. The product of the Finnish Nokia company was an early attempt at combining the two functionalities in one device, creating a trend that was to become a standard in the first decade of the 21st century.
The Nokia 9000 was controlled by the Intel i386 CPU running at 24 MHz – a chip used in standard PC computers just a few years earlier. In that respect it differed from modern mobile devices, which usually use energy-efficient chips from the ARM family.
The device gave rise to an entire family of Communicator telephones, predominantly targeted at business users.

The Wilga reel-to-reel tape recorder, whose production was launched in 1960, was designed to record and play back sound. It is a portable device whose mechanism is enclosed in a leather suitcase with a built-in oval GD 18-13/2 speaker. The electrical system of the device is based on a set of three vacuum tubes and an electron ray tube tuning indicator (the so-called “magic eye”). It was the only tape recorder manufactured by the Tonsil loudspeaker factory in Września, which specialised in the production of speakers and microphones. The clear leader in production of tape recorders at the time was the Zakłady Radiowe im. Marcina Kasprzaka w Warszawie. After the Melodia tape recorder, produced by that enterprise, the Wilga was the second reel-to-reel tape recorder sold in Poland. The Tonsil factory operated from 1945 as Polskie Radio – Fabryka głośników we Wrześni, and from 1946 as Państwowa Fabryka Głośników, then in 1950 as Zakłady Wytwórcze Głośników, before finally being given the name Tonsil in 1960. After 1989, due to the rapidly changing realities of the market and the ensuing increase of competition, the enterprise was transformed into a company that, despite many organisational and financial disturbances, still exists, as one of a few in the Unitra union.
Wilga is a mono, two track reel-to-reel tape recorder. It uses a layout of two half-track heads: a dual-purpose (recording/deleting) head and a deleting head. For that reason, recording and playback of the track can be done in one direction – on one half of the tape in one direction. In order to record on the second track, the reel has to be turned over to the other side. Recording and playback is done at one of two tape speeds: 19.05 cm/s or 9.53 cm/s. The tape recorder is controlled using switches and knobs. A recording and rewinding lock protects against the accidental deletion of a recording. Due to the limited access to musical recordings, the state-owned radio stations operating in Poland broadcast records of selected bands in their entirety, thus allowing listeners to record them in breach of the relevant copyrights. To do this it was enough to connect the tape recorder to a radio receiver and tune it using a special signal transmitted before the broadcast. For the same reason, the tape recorder could also be connected to a gramophone.

Authors: Piotr Turowski, Filip Wróblewski