The first iPhone, however, cannot actually lay claim to being the device that finally made the smartphone into the most successful computing device in history. Something people tend to forget about the first iPhone is how neutered it was. It was launched onto the nearly obsolete EDGE network. Cingular/AT&T was still in the process of building out its 3G network, so for that first-generation phone, users had to make do with snail-like data speeds. The first iPhone also lacked a GPS sensor, so even though you could use mobile maps in the first iPhone, the experience wasn’t as seamless or accurate as it is today. The first iPhone couldn’t shoot video, and didn’t even have a front-facing camera, so the era of the “selfie” didn’t come into being until the fourth generation of the iPhone, three years later.
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THE BIGGEST REASON the first iPhone is not the iPhone of popular memory is that it didn’t have the App Store. The first iPhone had the usual suite of PDA-like apps, a calendar, a notepad, a calculator, a clock, a stock ticker and a weather app, all designed by Apple. The only outside apps were the maps provided by Google and YouTube. There was no second screen to swipe to beyond the homescreen—because there were no other apps to put on the homescreen.
The original, App Store–less iPhone was very much Steve Jobs’s platonic ideal of a closed and curated computing system, a perfect, hermetically sealed device. For several months after the iPhone’s launch, Jobs was actually vocally opposed to the very idea of an app store, refusing to let outside developers infect his perfect creation. He told the New York Times: “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”35
But, in fact, Jobs was wrong about that. The iPhone very much was a computer. Back when the bake-off between the P1 and P2 models was happening, there was a simultaneous decision to be made in terms of what software would be used to run the device: a souped-up version of the iPod OS, or a scaled-down version of OS X, the OS that ran Apple’s Mac computers. OS X came out the winner. Right out of the gate, the iPhone was, at least when it came to software architecture, a tiny but fully capable Mac. That meant that developers could write real, actual, full-blooded applications for the iPhone, if only Steve Jobs would allow them to do so.
In the end, the battle to do an app store was a replay of the argument over opening up iTunes to Windows users a few years earlier. Just as before, everyone inside Apple wanted to do it, and Jobs kept saying no. But in the end, just as with iTunes, the result was the same. Jobs finally caved, telling those who had been haranguing him, “Oh, hell, just go for it and leave me alone!”36
The iPhone App Store was launched in July 2008, alongside the second-generation iPhone 3G. As the former Apple employee Jean-Louis Gassée has said, “It was only then that the iPhone was truly finished, that it had all its basics, all its organs. It needed to grow, to muscle up, but it was complete as a child is complete.”37 In the first quarter the iPhone was on sale, Apple and AT&T sold about 1.5 million iPhones.38 In the quarter after the App Store launched, Apple sold 6.89 million, exceeding 10 million total iPhone sales for the first time, and surpassing RIM’s BlackBerry to become the bestselling smartphone in the United States.39
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IT WAS THE APP STORE that inspired users to adopt smartphones and make them mainstream. Smartphone ownership in America went from 3% in 2007 when the iPhone was announced, to more than 80% a decade later.40 At the time of this writing, the iPhone has sold over a billion units and Apple is the most valuable company in the world. Certainly, some of this stratospheric success was due to the hardware designs that Jony Ive came up with, which made each successive iPhone an object of lust and envy. We can also credit Steve Jobs’s consummate showmanship for making the smartphone into the iconic device of the modern era. But more than anything else, we have to credit the App Store for turning the smartphone from a niche category that only appealed to early adopters and on-the-go professionals into a universal computer that appealed to everyone and their mother.
In a larger sense, the iPhone and the App Store were triumphs of software. “Software wrapped in a beautiful package,” was how Steve Jobs liked to describe it.41 Just as Bill Gates had intuited all the way back in the 1970s, software was the key differentiator. Software was what made mobile computers indispensable. “There’s an app for that” was not just a clever marketing concept, it actually reflected how smartphones—via mobile apps—were able to subsume all of the lessons of the Internet Era. Getting the latest news, buying from Amazon or eBay, searching Google, looking up a fact on Wikipedia, listening to an unlimited selection of music (the promise of Napster), watching a YouTube video, streaming Netflix—every single miracle of the web revolution of the previous fifteen years found new life on the tiny computers in our pockets. Thanks to the triumph of software, the iPhone even allowed Apple to create a true platform, an ecosystem that the mobile computing world has to exist within. It was just what Marc Andreessen had dreamed of back at Netscape.
But if we’re being entirely honest, there’s one specific category of app that was crucial to the iPhone taking off when previous smartphones didn’t.
One of the key launch apps on the first day the App Store went live? Facebook.
Social networks succeeded in making the Internet truly a personal experience. Smartphones, combined with social networks, took personal computing and made it almost intimate computing. Where would social media be without mobile computing, without smartphones: the perfect tools, always on hand to record and organize the ephemera of our daily lives? Would Facebook be at a billion users today if smartphones, in the example of iPhone, hadn’t presented the perfect vehicle for social media consumption and production? And if not for the iPhone kick-starting the smartphone revolution, whither Snapchat? Or Twitter? Much less, Uber?
The argument could be made that social media finally broke through to the mainstream because smartphones went mainstream at the same time. And a complementary argument could be made in reverse: that the iPhone took off when other smartphones hadn’t because it arrived on the scene just when Facebook was going parabolic.
Rather than too soon, the smartphone+social media represented a moment when two world-changing technologies arrived at just the right moment.
OUTRO
One of the true godfathers of the Internet was a man by the name of J. C. R. Licklider. In the 1950s, he worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which would go on to build the computers that were connected to the first four nodes of the ARPANET. In the early 1960s, Licklider was the head of the Information Processing Techniques Office at ARPA, which would go on to fund the ARPANET. In 1963, he wrote the key internal paper that would plan for, and ultimately make the case for, the development of the ARPANET, the key precursor to today’s Internet.
But like most computer scientists of his era, Licklider was also a theoretical visionary. In 1960, he wrote a paper called “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” which is considered a fundamental text of modern computer science.
In 1960, as today, there were many who believed that true artificial intelligence was just around the corner. Licklider, however, put his money on cybernetics, the idea that man would meld with machine. In “Man-Computer Symbiosis,” Licklider argued that thinking machines many orders of magnitude smarter than humans might arrive someday. They might even be inevitable. But in the meantime:
There will nevertheless be a fairly long interim during which the main intellectual advances will be made by men and computers working together in intimate association.
The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.
. . . Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and
perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them.
At its core, the Internet Era represents that “fairly long interim” that Licklider envisioned, where humanity and computers came together in profound ways. First, we connected all the world’s computers together. Then, we uploaded all of humanity’s collected knowledge into the virtual space that networks created. Then, we made all of that knowledge searchable. We tied our commerce systems, our financial systems, even our media and information systems, to the network. We created a world where any good, any piece of media, any piece of art, any fact or thought, any idea or meme, is available, on call, for the instant gratification of any curiosity or desire. Over the course of a decade, we learned how to behave, and then to actually live with this new networked paradigm—to actually exist in this virtual environment. With social media, we connected ourselves together just as comprehensively as we had connected all the computers. And then, we started wearing actual supercomputers on our bodies, taking them with us at every waking moment of our days, to navigate, not only the intellectual, the social, but even the physical space of modern life. And we did all this unbidden, undirected, unplanned—almost as if we were following a biological impulse, guided by some unconscious evolutionary imperative.
When you see everyone around you hunched over the glowing screens of their smartphones, you’re seeing the fulfillment of the intimate association of man and machine that Licklider envisioned.
But are we better off? Are we truly thinking as no human brain has ever thought, just as Licklider supposed?
That’s the open-ended question as the Internet Era continues.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book began as a podcast called the Internet History Podcast, so my first thanks go to the hundreds of people who have allowed me to interview them and share their stories of making the Internet Era happen. There are too many guests to thank in this limited space, but if you enjoyed this book, I highly recommend giving the podcast a try, to hear the stories that informed this project, and the details and anecdotes that didn’t make it into this volume. My intention is that the podcast will continue for years to come, preserving oral histories of technology for posterity. Check it out at www.internethistorypodcast.com or on your podcast app of choice.
Thanks to three podcast guests in particular. Nancy Evans, thank you for kicking my butt and reminding me this project deserved to be a book. And thank you to Ben Slivka and Chris Fralic for seeing real value in the project at key moments. Thanks wholeheartedly to my agent, Kevin O’Connor, for believing this was a big, important book from day one, and also to my editor at Liveright, Katie Adams, for taking this project on and deftly ensuring that it wasn’t a big, bloated book. Thanks to Fred Wiemer and Amy Medeiros for expert copy editing. Thanks to Phil Marino for being the first one to take a chance on this idea.
Thanks to Bill McManus, for getting my headspace to a place where this project was possible. Thanks to Angelita Sosa for taking care of my family and getting us to a place where this project was feasible. Thanks to Joel Lovell for key advice at the right time. Thanks to Chris Anderson and everyone at TED for making the TED Residency happen, an amazing program that took this project to the next level. Special, loving thanks to all my fellow Residents, and especially Cyndi Stivers and Katrina Conanan, who run the Residency and are truly doing the Lord’s work.
Thanks to the B. Altman Reference Desk at the Science, Industry and Business (SIBL) branch of the New York Public Library. People think everything is online and forever now, but don’t believe it! Libraries are still vital. I would not have been able to source half of this book if not for the physical references preserved from the dot-com era and before. I also want to thank the Manistee, Michigan, public library for giving me refuge in which to write this book, for several summers in a row.
Finally, everyone thanks their spouse when they write a book, for enduring the distraction and absences (physical and mental) that writing a book requires. But truly, my wife, Lesa Rozmarek, deserves unending credit and gratitude for supporting a side project/hobby/distraction that has, unplanned and unexpectedly, become a second career. Lesa, your completely unshakable and bottomless belief in me, while unfathomable at times, is welcome and cherished. I love you.
NOTES
INTRO
1 Susannah Fox and Lee Rainie, “The Web at 25 in the U.S.: Part 1—How the Internet Has Woven Itself into American Life,” last modified February 27, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/27/part-1-how-the-internet-has-woven-itself-into-american-life/.
2 Google Answers, “Q: Personal Computer Penetration in US,” posted July 28, 2004, http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=380304.
3 Google Groups, posted August 6, 1991, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/alt.hypertext/eCTkkOoWTAY/bJGhZyooXzkJ.
1. THE BIG BANG: THE MOSAIC WEB BROWSER AND NETSCAPE
1 Molly Baker, “Technology Investors Fall Head over Heels for Their New Love,” Wall Street Journal, August 10, 1995.
2 William Stewart, “NSFNET—National Science Foundation Network,” Living Internet, accessed August 18, 2016, http://www.livinginternet.com/i/ii_nsfnet.htm.
3 Internet History Podcast, Episode 8: Aleks Totic, of Mosaic and Netscape, March 16, 2014.
4 Internet History Podcast, Episode 9: Jon Mittelhauser, Founding Engineer, Mosaic and Netscape, March 27, 2014.
5 Patricia Sellers, “Don’t Call Me SLACKER! Meet America’s Top Talents Under 30. They Are Unorthodox, Rebellious, and a Challenge to Manage,” Fortune, December 12, 1994.
6 Internet History Podcast, Episode 10: Rob McCool, Founding Engineer, Mosaic and Netscape, April 2, 2014.
7 Ibid.
8 John Naughton, A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2000), 239.
9 “Html & Emacs,” e-mail message, November 16, 1992, accessed August 18, 2016, from the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, http://web.archive.org/web/20021225141741/http://ksi.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/archives/WWW-TALK/www-talk-1992.messages/292.html.
10 George Gilder, “The Coming Software Shift,” Forbes ASAP, August 28, 1995.
11 Internet History Podcast, Episode 8: Aleks Totic, of Mosaic and Netscape.
12 James Gillies and Robert Cailliau, How the Web Was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 241.
13 Matthew Gray, “Web Growth Summary,” Internet Statistics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, accessed August 18, 2016, http://www.mit.edu/~mkgray/net/web-growth-summary.html.
14 Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 242.
15 Tom Steinert-Threlkeld, “Can You Work in Netscape Time?” Fast Company, October 31, 1995.
16 Robert Reid, Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days That Built the Future of Business (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 12.
17 Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), 418.
18 Gillies and Cailliau, How the Web Was Born, 242.
19 Gilder, “The Coming Software Shift.”
20 Woods Wilton, “1994 Products of the Year,” Fortune, December 12, 1994.
21 Reid, Architects of the Web, 17.
22 Internet History Podcast, Episode 6: Mosaic and Internet Explorer Engineer, Chris Wilson, March 10, 2014.
23 Gilder, “The Coming Software Shift.”
24 John Markoff, “Business Technology; A Free and Simple Computer Link,” New York Times, December 8, 1993, D5.
25 Internet History Podcast, Episode 8: Aleks Totic, of Mosaic and Netscape.
26 Jonathan Weber, “Computer Sales Suffered a Rare Drop Last Year,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 1992.
> 27 Tim Ferriss Show, “163: Marc Andreessen—Lessons, Predictions, and Recommendations from an Icon,” https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/.
28 David A. Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 231.
29 Jim Clark and Owen Edwards, Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-up That Took on Microsoft (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 32.
30 Adam Lashinsky, “Remembering Netscape: The Birth of the Web—July 25, 2005,” Fortune, July 25, 2005, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/index.htm.
31 Internet History Podcast, Episode 9: Jon Mittelhauser, Founding Engineer, Mosaic and Netscape.
32 Internet History Podcast, Episode 8: Aleks Totic, of Mosaic and Netscape.
33 Internet History Podcast, Episode 10: Rob McCool, Founding Engineer, Mosaic and Netscape.
34 Clark and Edwards, Netscape Time, 58.
35 Internet History Podcast, Episode 8: Aleks Totic, of Mosaic and Netscape.
36 Jon Mittelhauser, “[IAmA] Co-author of the First Widely Used Web Browser, an Early Owner/Evangelist/Investor for Tesla Motors, and the Guy Who Ran the Launch of OnLive (a Reddit Trifecta?) AMAA,” Reddit, posted July 8, 2011, accessed August 19, 2016, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ik5mk/iama_coauthor_of_the_first_widely_used_web/.
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