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Comment by dingo_bat | Hacker News Reader

> Windows 8... probably wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the iPhone.

I highly doubt Microsoft would have given up on new versions of Windows if iphone hadn't been released.

I suspect he means that without of the success of the iPhone and then the iPad the emphasis in Windows 8 of having a "touch" interface might not have been there.

Yes and no, I guess. Yes: iPhone/iPad showed what to do properly with a touch screen on a phone or some other portable device. No: if they wouldn't have done it, I am fairly - if not 100% - sure somebody else would have done it. I had an industrial touch screen PC more than 10 years before iPhone existed. Even then, using it with a non-touch aware OS, I reckoned there was future in it: that thing, but smaller and flatter and faster and fitting into your pocket wasn't too hard to imagine. I'm by far not the most creative and definitely not alone on the planet so if even I could imagine something like my TI calculator but with a touch screen and a mail reader and my GameBoy games, others could as well, and better. So that's what happened, and Apple was basically first. And immediately spot on.

This - so much this.

Touch-screen tech was coming along nicely before the iphone. I worked in a call center around 99 or 2000. We were using something that seemed to be a very powerful, blackberry reminiscent, touch-screen powered computer. Most of the time these were used to grade the rep's phone calls, adding notes as necessary. Smart phones seem like a natural outgrowth of this sort of technology merging with something folks were already beginning to carry with them - mobile phones.

Quite possibly we would have been saved the pain of the start screen, "Metro" apps, and maybe Cortana.

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