How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

In the technology world, the ultimate success of a new idea is very much dependent on timing. Even great ideas that are quite obviously “the next big thing” can fail to deliver on their promise because the underlying technology or infrastructure isn’t mature enough yet.

General Magic was an Apple spin-out that Pierre Omidyar of eBay; Tony Fadell, the father of the iPod; and Andy Rubin, the inventor of the Android operating system, all worked at before going on to fame and fortune elsewhere.

The deal Apple would cut with Cingular/AT&T would take a year to finalize, but it alleviated almost all of Jobs’s concerns. In exchange for an exclusive right to an Apple phone on its network, AT&T would grant Jobs carte blanche to design the phone as Apple saw fit. It would be completely Apple-branded and AT&T would have no say in the features or services the phone offered. As icing on the cake, Apple would get a share of the monthly cellular data payments users would have to cough up to use the device.

Automobiles had to evolve for almost forty years until they settled into the standard configuration we are familiar with today.

On their first attempt, the team at Apple managed to stumble upon the perfect form factor, the perfect incarnation of the modern smartphone. Smartphones had, of course, existed for several years previous to the iPhone, but the standard form of the smartphone as we know it today—no physical keyboard, a single slab of screen, a “black mirror” that is both a reflection of, and a conduit for all of our hopes and desires—they nailed it on the first try. And that’s quite remarkable. There’s a very good reason why, to this day, almost all smartphones essentially look like that first iPhone.

IT WAS THE APP STORE that inspired users to adopt smartphones and make them mainstream. Smartphone ownership in America went from 3% in 2007 when the iPhone was announced, to more than 80% a decade later.

One of the true godfathers of the Internet was a man by the name of J. C. R. Licklider. In the 1950s, he worked at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, which would go on to build the computers that were connected to the first four nodes of the ARPANET.

The hope is that, in not too many years, human brains and computing machines will be coupled together very tightly and that the resulting partnership will think as no human brain has ever thought and process data in a way not approached by the information-handling machines we know today.

Men will set the goals, formulate the hypotheses, determine the criteria, and perform the evaluations. Computing machines will do the routinizable work that must be done to prepare the way for insights and decisions in technical and scientific thinking. Preliminary analyses indicate that the symbiotic partnership will perform intellectual operations much more effectively than man alone can perform them.

At its core, the Internet Era represents that “fairly long interim” that Licklider envisioned, where humanity and computers came together in profound ways. First, we connected all the world’s computers together. Then, we uploaded all of humanity’s collected knowledge into the virtual space that networks created. Then, we made all of that knowledge searchable. We tied our commerce systems, our financial systems, even our media and information systems, to the network. We created a world where any good, any piece of media, a...

the course of a decade, we learned how to behave, and then to actually live with this new networked paradigm—to actually exist in this virtual environment. With social media, we connected ourselves together just as comprehensively as we had connected all the computers. And then, we started wearing actual supercomputers on our bodies, taking them with us at every waking moment of our days, to navigate, not only the intellectual, the social, but even the physical space of modern life. And we did all this unbi...

When you see everyone around you hunched over the glowing screens of their smartphones, you’re seeing the fulfillment of the intimate association of ...