How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

by Brian McCullough

This is a key evolution. In so many ways, over the last twenty years, the web and the Internet have slowly trained all of us to get comfortable interacting with crowds and, often, crowds of strangers.

“Cunningham’s Law,” which finds that “the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”

Back in 1998, Steve Jobs famously told a Businessweek reporter that “a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”

The original, App Store–less iPhone was very much Steve Jobs’s platonic ideal of a closed and curated computing system, a perfect, hermetically sealed device. For several months after the iPhone’s launch, Jobs was actually vocally opposed to the very idea of an app store, refusing to let outside developers infect his perfect creation.