The Origin of the iPhone: Part One

stuff Works. I thought today we could talk about something that's iconic in today's technology, the iPhone, And it's really a matter of timing. It's important to talk about the iPhone came out ten years ago as of the recording of this podcast. Anyway, if you're listening in the future, it was more than that. But at the time of the recording, we're talking about ten years since the iPhone came out, and we have the tenth anniversary iPhone coming

out right around the corner. In fact, on September twelve, seventeen, Apple is going to unveil the tenth anniversary version of the iPhone, and by the time you listen to this, maybe that's already happened. I don't know when you've when you've subscribed, but this episode should publish before September, and I thought it would be a good idea to trace the history of the iPhone and talk about impact on technology and culture. So I was gonna do an episode

that just kind of went through the evolution of the iPhone. However, something happened. I started researching, and when I really got into the origins of the iPhone, I realized that, holy cow, just that story, just the story of how the first iPhone came to be, is so incredible and so complicated it justified an entire episode. So I concentrated on that, and then I found out that, surprise, surprise, it was such a huge story that it's more than one episode.

This is actually part one of a two part episode about the origins of the iPhone. So this story will continue. In the next episode of tech Stuff. We will conclude the story of the origin of the iPhone. I have a little bit to say about how the iPhone evolved in its impact on technology in general at the end of the next episode. But this story is bonkers, y'all. Now, before I get into it, I've got to give some credit out there, actually a lot of credit to a

particular writer, Brian Merchant. Mr. Merchant is an editor over at Motherboard. That's one of the sites I love to visit. Motherboards a great site. And he's been published by gosh, just about everyone everywhere, and he has a book out now titled The One Device, The Secret History of the iPhone. And I used a lot of different sources when I was researching this episode, but I would say that that

book was my primary source. It's incredible. It's got an enormous amount, an exhaustive amount, you might say, of information about the iPhone and its development, including things like details about the manufacturing process and the materials that go into the iPhone, so not just the story of how it was created, but the actual story of the stuff used

to create it, the physical materials. I'm not going to dive into that part because it's outside the scope of what I wanted to talk about, But if you find this discussion at all interesting, I recommend you hunt down a copy of Brian Merchant's book again, that's uh, The One Device. Check that out because he goes into way more detail than I am going to go into. And I've got two episodes to talk about here. Now, the iPhone origin story is incredibly complex and there are a

lot of different layers involved in it. It's a story of innovation, it's a story about advances in technology, but it's also a story about corporate politics and personality clashes and personal tragedy as it turns out. So this isn't a story about how some guy at Apple cobbled a phone together out of I don't know, shoe polish and dreams.

The iPhone project involved dozens of people, sometimes working at cross purposes toward one another, So you had groups that were trying to compete with each other within Apple in order to produce this iPhone. And really it's it's very challenging to find a spot to begin, I mean, and that's because real history rarely has a clearly cut beginning

or a middle. Really, the only thing that history has a clear cut defining feature is an end, because one day there will be an end to at least human history, I mean, the heat death of the universe pretty spells it out for us. But until that day, whenever it may be, it is hard to find a point where you can have a clear cut beginning it's we like our stories to have nice beginnings. That's just not the

way real history works. So I thought it might be fun to go back and talk about an earlier mobile device Apple tried to launch in an effort to define a new era in computing, because I think it's a great way to compare and contrast the iPhone and I'm talking about the unfortunate Apple Newton. Now, the Apple Newton story is valuable because it illustrates how the iPhone project could have gone really wrong, and the story begins more than a decade before the iPhone project got the official

nod from Steve Jobs. In fact, this story begins back when Steve Jobs wasn't even part of Apple. So if you've listened to my podcasts about Apple, you know that this is part of their story. A right that John Scully, who was brought into Apple to be their CEO, had progressively pushed Steve Jobs towards the outskirts of the company, both figuratively and literally, putting him in a remote part of the Apple campus and giving him fewer and fewer responsibilities.

Jobs had alienated Scully, and he was notorious for his managerial style, which I think we could generously describe as difficult. So Jobs left Apple in nineteen five. Effectively he was forced out, and Scully turned his sites to finding a new product to transform the computing space. Now. Scully became enamored with this idea of a tablet like computing device that would rely upon artificial intelligence to help users navigate

and complete tasks. And it was a really far out futuristic idea that would turn out to be a bit beyond the technological grasp of Apple or anyone else for that matter at that time, and it just couldn't take on a format that would be consumer ready, but it did set in motion the events that would lead to the Apple Newton. Scully's version of this device was called

the Knowledge Navigator. Apple even created a concept video to show off what the Knowledge Navigator would one day be able to do, and you can find this on YouTube, and it's fascinating if you watch this. It is an amazing piece of of a video because it has a lot of prescience about where technology was going to be headed over the next couple of decades. It took a couple of decades to get there, but you can see ideas that are now becoming commonplace. In that concept video.

The actual knowledge navigator in that video was like a magazine. It was actually a folded over computer. You could unfold it like you would a magazine as if you were opening it, and it had screens on both sides where images and show up. It could talk to you, so it had a voice capability, and it it had a touch screen and voice activation system, so you could either use touch commands or talk to it and make it do things like add in scheduling, UH conflicts or anything

like that, or just schedule events on your calendar. You might hear a message and say, hey, put a note in my calendar surprise birthday party tomorrow. So it was really incredible because it incorporated features that later on we would see in actual real world devices like the iPad or things like Amazon's Echo or Google Home. But it was very much in that concept phase back in the nineteen eighties. There was no way to really make this at that point. It was just sort of a dream

that Scully had. He just wanted to see something akin to that. And one person who was brought over to Apple around this time who saw the potential in creating a handheld computing device was Jean Luis Gassy and I also talked about Jean Luis guess Ay in those Apple episodes I referred to earlier. Guess A worked with a guy named Steve Sikaman who used to work for HP, and he really wanted to create special new technology, but

no one over at HP was interested. So then he came over to Apple and for a while he was trying to work that over at Apple. Didn't get a lot of headway there either, and was about to leave the company when he and guess A got an amazing opportunity. Guess A got permission from Scully to work on a project without actually telling him what that project was. He essentially said, I have this idea. I think it could

be incredible. I need your go ahead for me to to bring some people over into this project and work on it, and then I'll have something to show you in the future and maybe it's something we can move on as a product. And Scully said, all right, I trust you, go ahead. So guess And and Segament began to work on a project check that would eventually become

the Apple Newton. The idea was that segment. He had a real interest in handwriting recognition technology, and so they were talking about making a handheld device that would have a stylists and a writing surface, and you could write on the device and it would translate it into digital text, among other things. And so they started work on this and it would evolve into the Apple Newton. And even back then, Segment said there were very early problems right

out of the gate with the Apple Newton. Big one of those problems was that Guess didn't really set any restrictions on what should go into the device. He didn't have any hard and fast rules about that. So you get a bunch of engineers together and you tell them your general idea, you don't set restrictions on it. Everyone immediately starts to brainstorm different features and functions that quote

unquote should go into that device. And then it just becomes a Morga's board of people adding in functionality, making the device more and more complex over time, and it became bloated with features as engineers kept thinking of other

stuff the device should be able to do. The more features they gave the Newton, the more power it was going to require, and the more expensive components it would require in order to do this sort of processing, and the more strain on its battery it would create because you're requiring more power. So, in other words, it was just making the whole thing more complicated and more expensive,

and it was strangling the development of the project. So in those early designs, before they had anything really to show for it, the team determined that the size of the Newton would be about the same as a four standard paper size. At Secondment felt it was already getting

bigger than it was supposed to be. He wanted a smaller form factor, and the projected price for the gadget, based upon the elements that they were brainstorming at that time, was looked at it about six thousand dollars six thousand dollars for a handheld device, essentially a personal digital assistant or p d A that could read your handwriting. Six grand and we're talking nineteen eighties money here, so if you adjusted for inflation, you're talking about ten thousand dollars

in today's cash for this device. Ten grand. I mean, Apple was known for selling premium products at a high price. But come on, well, Guessa and Sigaman would both end up leaving Apple before the Newton was finished. They would go on to found a new company called be Incorporated.

That's b E. They created the b box platform. But a side note here segment would eventually rejoin our story because he would come back to Apple in two thousand three as vice president of Software Technology, so he would actually play an important role in the development of the iPhone later on, but his role in the Newton had come to an end. He and guess A left, So even though they got the project started, they left before

it was finished. But by then Scully was completely behind it and the ball was rolling and there were there was a team hard at work trying to make this become a reality. Now on the software side of things, the Apple Newton pioneered some really cool technology, including elements of that assist of AI that Scully had been dreaming about. The software could search through text, and it could identify

names and cross reference that with a context list. It could identify phone numbers, It could send hyperlinks for email addresses and more and make it more useful by recognizing these elements within text. And it could also pull up scheduling information based upon text within messages about meeting times. So short it had early versions of the features you find in a lot of email apps and smart devices

out there. So, for example, if I get an email that uh confer arms that I've purchased tickets for something and it's going to my Gmail account, that will put in a Gmail entry in my out or my my Google calendar and say, all right, well, because I've got this message and because it had this time and this time, this date on it, I can put in an entry in that calendar. Well, the Apple Newton had a rudimentary form of that technology in it, which was years ahead

of anyone else at that point. It also had the infamous handwriting recognition algorithm. Now, the algorithm was designed to learn over time how to recognize specific characters written onto the message pad, but it wasn't terribly accurate right out of the gate, and that would end up causing some

major major problems for Apple. The development process was stretching on for years, and Scully eventually put his foot down and demanded that the team produced a Newton device that would be ready for consumers by April second, and he

wanted it to cost less than of teen hundred dollars. Meanwhile, within the teams that were about three different models that were being proposed for the Apple Newton and They ranged from the bare bones version that would be the cheapest to a full featured version that would be more than seven thousand dollars. Teams broke out in support of those different models, and the two teams that had the most support were the extreme ends. You had the junior end

on one side and the senior end on the other side. Uh, and it became a battle of wills, and apparently it got a bit heated. The senior version of the Newton was way more feature heavy and included some stuff like

the ability to network with other Newton's. The problem was the way it networked was through infrared communication, and the infrared sensors did not work well under fluorescent lights, which led the junior team to jokingly state that the only way you could use the Newton networking function in the senior model would be if you turned all the lights off inside your office, which seems a bit counterproductive. So is this kind of sniping that was going on back

and forth. The junior version, like I said, was not quite so latent with features and would cost less than a thousand dollars, and eventually it became the front runner among all the models, but it didn't get there without a lot of arguments on all sides. April came and went and the team still didn't have a Shippa Bowl product yet, though they had performed a few successful demos, so Scully was assuaged a little bit, although he kept on setting new deadlines so that the team would have

something to work toward. He laid down the law again and kept creating these deadlines, saying pressure the team, he said, produced some results for me, and it caused a great deal of problems among the team and likely contributed to one absolute tragedy. One of the programmers on the project was a guy named Ko who moved from Japan with his wife to be part of the programming community in Silicon Valley and joined Apple. On December twelfth, Iszono went

home after work and he committed suicide. The assumption is that the intense pressure at work to create the Apple Newton led to this breakdown. Now, that was the absolute worst of the tragedies associated with Newton's development, but it was not the only one. There was another event that happened where one of the developers had some sort of mental breakdown and assaulted his roommate and was charged with assault and sent to jail as a result, so John Scully would not be in charge by the time the

Newton was finally ready to debut. He stepped down as CEO of Apple on June seven. That was two months before the Newton went gold, so it's just too much shy of the Newton actually launching. He was effectively forced to resign by the board of directors, and he became the chairman of Apple, but his position was reduced to being largely ceremonial, which was an that was somewhat ironic because Scully had effectively done the same thing to Steve Jobs a decade earlier when he was forced out of

the company. Michael Spindler would step in as the new CEO of Apple and he would oversee the launch of the Newton. The team did finish the Newton, and it shipped in August, I should say, but the handwriting recognition was faulty, as you probably know if you've ever heard anything about the Newton, and since the handwriting feature was supposed to be the core feature of the Newton, it led to massive criticism and ridicule. Steve Jobs was fuming

over it. He was not part of Apple, but he was furious to see a product make Apple the laughing stock of the tech community. He hated seeing this company that he had co found and held up to ridicule, and he had made no secret of his disdain towards Scully throughout Scully's tenure as CEO. Of course, a couple of years later, Steve Jobs would rejoin Apple, and what

happened was that Apple acquired Jobs as company Next. So Jobs that created a company called Next Computers, and Jobs had failed to produce a commercially successful computer with his next company, but uh, and it was because that computer was incredibly expensive and a lot of people thought it was limited in what it could do. But mostly it was the cost of the computer that made people bulk.

But the operating system innovations that his company had created were undeniable, and Apple was really in need of that innovation. So Apple acquired Next, and Jobs came along with the company, and before long he was able to maneuver the board into making him the interim CEO, and eventually he became the permanent CEO of Apple. So that's the Newton's story, and I'll talk more about how that impacts the iPhone story in just a moment. But first let's take a

quick break to thank our sponsor. You know, the reason I spent so much time on that story of the Newton in a podcast about the iPhone is to set that stage and explain why the iPhone was such a big risk for Apple. The company's reputation had already been damaged. The Newton was literally a punchline. I distinctly remember a Simpsons episode that used it as a throwaway joke. And again I mean that literally, as Nelson throws a Newton

away after it misinterprets handwriting. So trying to get a new type of computing device out the door was going to have big obstacles, not just from technology but also from a corporate culture standpoint. And Steve Jobs was, as I'm sure many of you are aware, a notoriously difficult person to work for. He had very strong convictions, very strong opinions, and he was not terribly concerned with how

they came across in his interactions with other people. Uh he would he could be incredibly blunt and sometimes extremely critical, and it was a tough environment. Now, in the early two thousand's, before anyone had even proposed a formal phone project, at Apple, employees were talking about how cell phones were a potential opportunity for the company because there was a general consensus that cell phones kind of stunk at the time.

They had really bad call quality, many of the handsets were not good at holding onto a signal, you would have calls dropping left and right, and the internet features were anemic. But while there was a general desire to look into developing a cell phone under Apple's brand, it remained mostly wishful thinking, including among people who had worked

on the Newton project and who were still at Apple. Meanwhile, Apple was launching a device that would revolutionize electronics as well as an entirely different industry, namely the music industry. I am talking, of course, about the iPod, and I've done a full episode about that device, so I'm not going to retread it here, But the iPod it wasn't a home run right away. The two thousand one iPod

had some hefty limitations. Now. The biggest limitation was that it was only compatible with Mac computers, and that was a problem because at the time, Max represented a very small percentage of the overall computer market. The overwhelming majority of computer owners were using Windows based devices, and so the iPods customer base was limited by that compatibility issue.

Now Tony Fidell, who sometimes is referred to as the pod Father, oversaw the development and launch of the iPod, and he thought that Apple should make the iPod work with PCs, which would mean developing iTunes software that could run on Windows based machines. Steve Jobs was really reluctant. Actually,

that's too gentle word to use. Steve Jobs refused to do this for a long time, but after a couple of years of lackluster iPod sales, Jobs had to admit that they needed to explore other options if the iPod were to be a real success. Now, Luckily, in this case, Fidel had kind of gone behind Steve Jobs back and he had been working with a group of people to develop iTunes for Windows machines without Jobs being aware of it.

So once Steve Jobs actually came around to this idea of a Windows compatible iPod, Fidel already had the iTunes build ready to go essentially, and once Apple allowed for this connectivity, iPod sales exploded. It suddenly became extremely popular because now it was compatible with the overwhelming majority of computers out there, and by two thousand four, the iPod sales accounted for fifty percent of all revenue for Apple.

So Apple was no longer just a computer company. Had a new mobile product that was in just as much money as their computer sales were bringing in. So this was revolutionary, and that revolution would of course ripple out to affect the entire music industry as well. It really changed the way the music industry works. So you have Fidel and he starts thinking about this possibility of making a phone similar to the iPod, so would essentially be an iPod with a phone kind of glommed onto it.

And I've got a lot more to say about that in this episode. But as I mentioned earlier, there had been talks at Apple about phones and phone like devices, but no definitive move to develop one. No one had actually launched a project in Apple to do this, though. There were a lot of different proposals out there, and some of those talks involved not building a phone, but rather acquiring a handset manufacturing company, one that was already

in the business of building phones. So in two thousand three, Apple executives were seriously considering the possibility of making a move on Motorola, but ultimately they decided that the cost of the acquisition would be too high, the payoff was too uncertain, and so they decided they couldn't go forward. They abandoned the idea to purchase Motorola, but they did

see another way that they could partner with Motorola. So Steve Jobs really like the design of a Motorola phone called the Razor are A z R. This is a feature phone and it was pretty popular back when it was released. I know a lot of people who held onto their Razors well into the smartphone era, even though the Razors really more of a feature phone than a smartphone. And so Apple and Motorola had some discussions and decided

to partner to develop a new phone. Motorola would build the device and Apple would incorporate some iTunes functionality on the phone, and this would become the Motorola Rocker R O c k R I guess we really hate final vowels in Motorola products. Singular would become the partnered carrier for this phone. So you really have three big companies all working together to create something new. You had the

hardware and the operating system coming from Motorola. You had the iTunes functionality coming from Apple and the service coming from Singular. Now. The Rocker was meant to be a bridge between phones and m P three players, but Apple developers didn't really want to give Motorola too much, so they purposefully designed the iTunes functionality with limitations so that

Apple wouldn't go and create its own product rival. It wouldn't make sense for Apple to help Motorola create a product that would complete compete directly with the iPod, and so the iTunes functionality was severely limited as a result. Fidella essentially confirmed this when he talked with Merchant during

interviews for that book. I was mentioning earlier in the episode that this was pretty much the planet Apple all along, that they had purposefully nerfed the iTunes functionality so that they could avoid cannibalizing their own sales and also possibly

set up a phone project at Apple later on. And when Steve Jobs finally debuted the Motorola Rocker, which some were calling the iTunes Phone, and this happened in two thousand five, he was visibly not into it and there were some glitches during his presentation that did not help, and so Jobs did kind of a pivot during the event.

He was also there to talk about the iPod Nano, that particularly small version of the iPod with some limited functionality that at a lower price point than the other iPod lines, and he kind of buried the Rocker, and he kind of talked about how the Nano could hold just as many songs as the Rocker could, and Motorola executives were not thrilled by this, to be honest, they

were a little steamed about it. Fidel, on the other hand, was pleased as punch because he figured he could get jobs to back phone projects at Apple so that the company could show how to do phones the right way and not depend upon a partner for the hardware. And

for that was right about that. The Rocker turned into a flop, and at a return rate six times higher than other phones on the market, which means people were six times more likely to return their Motorola Rocker in exchange for something else than they would any other phone, which is not great. But now I got a backtrack just a bit, because I was just talking about two

thousand five. But again, this is a complicated story, and a lot of stuff is happening at around the same time or a little bit earlier, So while the Motorola deal was kind of forming within Apple before it was actually created. Around two thousand four or so, you had different groups with an Apple all getting more serious about actually developing a phone for Apple itself, and they were taking very different philosophical pathways towards this goal. Meanwhile, Steve

Jobs was showing reluctance to get into that industry. He had publicly said that smartphones were problematic because carriers tend to get really intrusive, the carriers being the companies that provide the cell service to phones, and as such, they have high demands regarding the capabilities of handsets that run on their respective networks, and Steve Jobs bristled at the thought of some other company coming in and dictating which features he could and couldn't include in his phone, and

he didn't really want to deal with that mess. He preferred to be the master of Apple and not have other people tell him what he could and couldn't do. And on top of that, within Apple, not publicly, but within the company, Jobs said he wasn't really keen on smartphones because he thought they only would appeal to quote

the pocket protector crowd end quote. So essentially he was saying only nerds are gonna want smartphones, it's not really a viable industry, And honestly, at the time he was saying this, he was mostly right, because smartphone of that

era were clunky. They were chunky, they were burdened by physical keyboards and controls, They weren't easy or intuitive to use, They had limited functionality, and even with features like email and web access, they were limited in what they could actually display or how you could interact with those Internet features. And the only people who are really willing to put up with all of that nonsense in return for a smartphone that was typically incredibly expensive were either executives or

bleeding edge techno buffs. Jobs felt the market just wouldn't support a smartphone, at least not to the level where it would be profitable. Still, all that being said, Fidel wanted to give it a go, and other groups did too, and Jobs eventually gave his permission for preliminary development to begin at around two thousand four. This was around the

same time Apple was working with Motorola. Now, these early days were blue sky, and by that I mean no one was really sure what form the phone would ultimately take, what the user interface was going to be like what sort of operating system it would have, what features it would support, or really anything about it. Now, Jobs was holding conversations with various carriers and exploring options at this time,

and initial conversations with Verizon we're going nowhere. Jobs felt that Verizon just wanted too much input in the development of the phone. Project Singular seemed a little more favorable. The carrier said that in return for exclusivity, they would place no demands or restrictions on the phone. Now, eventually, Apple would end up partnering with a T and T and an exclusive deal that lasted a few years here

in the United States. Now, the story behind that is so complicated that I might actually have to do another episode about that specifically in the future, But for now, let's just acknowledge that when the phone finally did debut, a T and T was the carrier partner in the United States. So Fidel and team began working on an idea that would eventually really turn into the iPod Touch as opposed to the iPhone, because he was thinking about adding radio frequency capability to an iPod, but in this

case that our ff ability was WiFi, not cellular service. Uh, that's ultimately what would come out of Fidel's group. Fidel's team began to work on this and started with existing iPod design. So this is before the iPod touch. It was back in the old user interface of the iPod. I'm talking about that click wheel design of the old iPods. So yeah, the first iPhone sort of had a rotary dial on the front of them in a sense. Because it had that click wheel, you would navigate the phone's

features using the clickwheel. Now, jobs ultimately would feel that this was not a particularly good user experience, but Fidel's team really went for it, building out the operating system and user interface to support the click wheel navigation system. Fidel's approach was much more conservative than what the iPhone would turn out to be, not just because of the

user interface and navigation, but also in its features. The Fidel version was really an MP three player that was all so a phone, So it wasn't a pocket computer or an Internet connected device in the way the iPhone is. It really just had two modes of operation. It had iPod mode and in that mode. Eventually, once they settled on a particular user interface and an appearance, the screen would turn blue and you could listen to your music.

If you switched it to phone mode, the screen would turn kind of an amber color, and then you can make calls. Meanwhile, there were other people like Michael Bell, who were arguing for an entirely different approach to phone design. Bell felt that the future was in convergence, with devices like the iPod, telephones, and computers all merging into a single form factor, and Bell and Jobs had numerous discussions

some might call them arguments about this. Bell used some of Johnny i'ves designs for future iPod models as leverage. He said, don't think about the way mobile devices look right now. Take a look at some of these design for future iPods and imagine a Mac style device, something running a Mac operating system in this warm factor. It would be a surefire hit. And it's definitely where things are headed anyway. And if we jump on it, if Apple becomes the company to make this, we could be

pioneers and lead the space. Steve Jobs was not immediately convinced of this. He actually held out for a while, but he did get broken down by Michael Bell's arguments, and Bell insisted that there was value in developing a product that could merge the qualities of a phone and NB three player and a network computer, and Jobs would allow Bell to work on this idea. He agreed to

it on November seven, two thousand four. And thus you had two different groups trying to go in two different pathways to create the same in the goal a phone, but they were taking very different pathways to get there. And that began the rate mystery at Apple. You can kind of think of it as like a murder mystery in a way, because employees were disappearing left and right, only they weren't getting killed, they were getting cherry picked

for one of these two different projects. Uh Fidel's team, which would become known as P one, started to try and create their iPod phone, and then the team that Bell argued for and Scott Forstaul would end up working with, was trying to create this new piece of merged technology. They became known as P two. So had P one and P two, and both teams began rating Apple talent. Now.

Jobs was incredibly paranoid about this phone project. He insisted on the utmost secrecy, and he forbade anyone from recruiting from outside the company, so instead teams were free to pick and choose among existing Apple employees. But there was a big catch. Those employees could not be told they would be working on until after they had already agreed to do the work. I've got a lot more to say about that, but before I jump into it, let's

take another quick break to thank our sponsor. So the secrecy did not end just in this whole process of picking members for your team. Bit by bit, sections of Cooper Tino's offices were being converted over to development rooms for the iPhone project. Now, a very early version of this was a room where the Human Interface team went, or the HI team as they were called. They were in a unique position and that they worked with both the P one and the P two teams. They helped

both teams out. They were kind of in between these competing groups, and their office was a room that had no windows, and the only real thing it had inside of it was a white board and apparently, according to Merchant,

a poster of a chicken for some reason. And they would put up their ideas on the whiteboard, and anything that was considered a really good, strong idea that was going to be the one of the central pillars of the Human Interface components of the phone project would stay up on the white board, and then other ideas they would erase if they figured that they weren't that important, pertinent or whatever, and they ended up seeing also increased

security around the campus. An entire floor of one of Apple's buildings eventually became the home of the various teams, and to get there you had to have a badge. You had to have a specific security badge to be able to access that part of the office, and according to some people, you had to go through as many as four different secure doors before you could actually get to anything remotely related to the iPhone, and janitorial staff

wasn't even allowed in the space. Job did not want any information about the phone leaking out, even to other Apple employees until he was ready to pull the trigger on it now. One of the people who worked on the human interface team was Greg Christie. He actually was one of the leads on this team, and he had also worked on the Newton back in the day. Steve Sackelman also got involved again. Sackeman he he was the guy who had worked on the Newton with Guessa back

in the day and then left Apple before the Newton debuted. Well, he came back in two thousand three and he found it inspiring to work on the phone project. So the P two team, you know, the P one was trying

to make the iPod phone. The P two team became known as the Next Mafia because it included a few of the engineers who had worked with Steve Jobs over at the Next Company, and they had come over to Apple along with the acquisition, and they were known for being really secretive and doing what they had to do in order to accomplish goals, so kind of like legendary mafioso types, the P two group had some enormous challenges. So unlike the iPod group, the P one group, they

did not have a set method for navigation. Like the iPod group, they knew they were going to use the same functions of the iPod in order to move around on the phone features. But the P two group, it was more wide open. So they wanted to explore the possibility of using multi touch interfaces. And Apple likes to boast it invented multi touch. It's certainly patented approaches to multi touch, but it's not really true that the company

invented it. There had been multi touch interfaces in various stages of development at different places, including Xerox Park for more than a decade, but no one had created a multi touch tool that could work in a small form factor in a commercial consumer product. Now, Apple had acquired a company called finger Works that was founded by a

man named Wayne Westerman. Westerman wanted to create an alternative two keyboard interfaces because he had a repetitive strain injury and that made it really painful to use a keyboard for any kind of extended time. So he began to pioneer work in multi touch interfaces alternatives to keyboards, and he became an important key player in the technology that

would allow for iPhones revolutionary interface. Another group that worked on this touch screen technology was the Q seventy nine group, and originally they were trying to build a multi touch tablet, although that ultimately didn't pan out, at least not in its initial form factor. They had been working on multi touch since two thousand three with an Apple and Bass Ordering was one of those engineers b A. S O R. D I N G. And he played an important role

in developing the technology used in the iPhone. These engineers reached relished this challenge rather of scaling the technology down so they could fit inside the form factor of a mobile device, although most of their initial work was with full size computers, and then they were saying, well, worry, We'll worry about making it smaller later. Let's just worry

about making it work right now. Ordering had been told by Jobs that the goal was to create a phone that would have no physical buttons and relied solely on touch screen gestures, and Ording was intrigued and at the time wasn't really sure if this was going to be possible, but he felt it was a worthy challenge, and so he joined the iPhone project, and it was Ordering who created a few of the features that became standard in

touch screen navigation. So, for example, if you've ever used an app that had a bit of a rubber band effect whenever you got to the end of a page, whether it was the top or the bottom, that was

Ording's idea. The Ording was using a touch interface with his Mac for testing purposes and found out that if he navigated a page, he would often find that once he reached the top or bottom of the page, he'd be misled for a few moments into thinking that his interface had broken because he'd get to the end and he'd be trying to scroll end up would happen, and

you think, oh gosh, it's broken. And then he figured, oh, wait, no, no, no, I just got to the end of all the text or all the images or whatever it might have been, and he decided there needed to be some sort of visual representation that you had reached the end, and that way you wouldn't think that the scrolling was just broken. And so it had this rubber band effect where it would it would come down as if you were continuing to scroll, but as soon as you let go, it

would snap back up. His team also created the momentum effect of scrolling on the iPhone, so that's when you flick your finger down or up the screen and the scrolling continues for a bit before it slows to a halt, which makes it feel like the virtual pages you're looking at are obeying the laws of physics, as if the stuff you're seeing is actually a physical object. And it seems totally obvious now, but someone actually had to come up with that, and then they had to build it,

and that was Ardings Group. Now there's a ton I need to talk about with this iPhone. But I am running out of time for this episode. So what we're going to do is we're going to conclude this episode today. We will rejoin at this part in our next episode, and we're gonna have our part two of the Origin of the iPhone. If you guys have suggestions for topics you would like me to cover in future episodes. Maybe it's a specific technology, maybe it's a person in tech,

maybe it's a company, let me know. Send me a message. The email address you should use is tech Stuff at how stuffworks dot com, or drop me a line on the facebooks or the twitters. I have the handled tech Stuff hsw for the show at both of those locations. And remember you can watch me stream live as I record these episodes and stumble all over myself and occasionally spill coffee on myself, entertaining things like that, but you can only see it if you go to twitch dot

tv slash tech Stuff. I typically stream on Wednesdays and Fridays. You can go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff and you'll see the schedule there and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,