Hacker News Reader

Comment by oautholaf | Hacker News Reader

Sort of feel it would really be helpful to replace the narrative of the creation of the modern smartphone ("the iPhone sprung forth from the head of Jobs!") with a picture of the decade+ of efforts made by the computer industry to make consumer electronics.

Note also that this article mentions the Danger Hiptop and folks who worked on it. Some folks who worked on that worked on iPhone 1.0 and some even still work on iPhones!

View on HN

Of course Andy Rubin[0] from Danger (previously also General Magic as mentioned in article) went on to found Android as well - and Android itself owes (in a way) it’s own name to Apple (Andy’s nickname at Apple was apparently “Android”.)

What’s also interesting to me is that the Danger used NetBSD in at least some it’s projects, which is an OS dear to my heart. Always nice to see some of the “alternate takes”, “near misses”, or “could have been…” technologies on the past road to where we happen to be now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin

The original Danger OS was home grown by some of the same folks that later started Zircon!

> Sort of feel it would really be helpful to replace the narrative of the creation of the modern smartphone ("the iPhone sprung forth from the head of Jobs!") with a picture of the decade+ of efforts made by the computer industry to make consumer electronics.

The thing is that many other companies could've made an iPhone before a Jobs-led Apple, just like other people could've run a 4-minute mile before Roger Bannister. But as a hardware + software + marketplace system, it truly was a discontinuous leap.

If you want to read an article that goes the other way and maybe overstates General Magic's contributions, you might also enjoy this oral history: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/general-magic-oral-h...

There are of course literally hundreds of products that led the way, in some way or another.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com