First iPhone keynote was eight years ago today
I never had the privilege of watching Steve Jobs do his thing in person. Instead, I watched his public presentations as many of you did: seated before a glowing computer screen, eager for what was about to unfold. The event I remember most clearly took place on January 9, 2007.
Steve took the stage to introduce a product that would change personal technology significantly. I still get chills when Steve does the "These are not three separate devices" bit.
Today we know that the iPhones Steve used on stage weren't fully functional, and the threat of his demo going catastrophically wrong was very real. As The New York Times reported in 2013, engineers found a specific progression of tasks that would work, if they were executed in a precise order on stage:
"The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn't play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called 'the golden path,' a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked."
The fact that Steve's fifteen-minute demo went as well as it did is practically a technology miracle. You can watch the historic presentation below.
