Tony Fadell built two iPhones. Everyone knows about the second one — Steve Jobs revealed it in a 2007 keynote; that device changed the world forever — but few people know about the first.
This part really fascinated me “The alliance had an unintended side-effect: it locked them into developing a private network powered by AT&T, just as the internet began to gather steam. At the time, there were multiple competing networks — with the Internet one option amongst many. General Magic employees mostly ignored the alternatives.”
I dont know much about this early history of the Internet. I have heard before that there were private alternatives being developed which lost out.
Did any of these have a real shot? Is there an alternative universe where the Internet didn’t happen fast enough and instead we all use MicrosoftNet (or similar?) because it got an early network effect lead?
I would be fascinated if @cedric or anyone knows of a good history of the Internet vs. its competitors.
I don’t have access to it right now, but I do believe The Dream Machine contains a brief history on this period (it of course covers way more than this — it traces developments in computing all the way back to Licklider, who had a massive impact on multiple branches of networking technology).
A more fruitful angle to approach this might actually be histories of Microsoft. Microsoft very famously backed alternatives to the Internet (‘The Information Superhighway’), before turning on a dime and backing the Internet (and destroying Netscape, etc etc). That should probably lead to other sources.
Steven Sinofsky’s Hardcore Software is no longer free, but he touches on this period here and here.
Thanks @cedric those are some great rabbitholes to dive down!
The General Magic movie is great. And a friend of mine is in it, as she worked there at the time…
There were a lot of internets and internet like things.
Minitel Minitel (havent read book) was the French one, although many other countries had telco driven systems like this.
AOL - this was a whole walled garden before the real internet took off
the online communities such as The Well - before websites most of the web was more chat like stuff (plus Gopher)
Blackberry had its own network in the US
universities had whole ecosystems, eg MUD1 - Wikipedia
Pretty much everything appeared on these networks, even if unintended, I used to peruse old copies of the academic journals about the UK Prestel system, and ecommerce and porn appeared even though they were not supposed to, in the same way that platforms get reused for all sorts of things (I once overheard someone saying she set up meetings with her drug dealer on Tinder as “dates”).
ANother fun alt history of the internet is How Not to Network a Nation about the Soviets obsession with cybernetics and computerised central planning.