When Silicon Valley Realized It Could Put Computing in Your Pocket
A quarter century ago, two young computer engineers, Tony Fadell and Andy Rubin, worked immediately next to each other at General Magic, a much ballyhooed Apple Computer spinoff, which was advertising itself as the future of computing.
They were each hardware hackers in the best sense of the word. Fadell was obsessed with consumer gadgets and Rubin was an early robotics hobbyist. In 1991, at General Magic, they were instrumental in jumpstarting a shift in Silicon Valley away from the desktop computer to a computer that you could hold in the palm of your hand.
It was a transition that would take almost three decades from the first glimmer that it might be possible to put a powerful computer in your pocket to the arrival of the iPhone in 2007. Yet that simple idea has done more than any other recent technological innovation to transform the way the world computes. Tracing the roots of the smartphone captures the era when computing went from being personal to being intimate.
General Magic itself would become one of the Valley’s more notable failures, but Fadell and Rubin would go on separately to lead the teams that built the first iPhone and first Android smartphones. Today the vast majority of the world’s smartphones have evolved from their original hardware designs.
Now that there are more than two billion smartphones in the world, it is difficult to grasp how extraordinary it is that it can all be traced to a single office cubicle in Mountain View, California.
Fadell and Rubin were part of a small “Band of Brothers” in Silicon Valley — they were almost all male — who, beginning in the mid-1980s, would form the nucleus of a generation of engineers that reshaped both the modern computing world and Silicon Valley’s culture.
They were friends, enemies, competitors, and co-conspirators, and they shared a passion for a Silicon Valley ideal that went beyond either computer hacking or venture capital greed. They came of age in the wake of Apple’s Macintosh project, a romantic crusade by a “pirate” team of engineers led by Steve Jobs.
The Macintosh had exploded on the world in 1984. Yet for all its impact on popular culture it made an even deeper impression on the young group of engineers who came to believe they could build computers that would change the world.
Together they would come to personify a new culture that took hold in the Valley based not on starting companies, or going public, but rather upon the ideal of “shipping” computers that would reach hundreds of millions or even billions of people.
It was something that Steve Jobs had drilled in to them: “Real artists ship,” he intoned at an early Macintosh team off-site.
They had been seduced by the allure of the Macintosh experience that led them to believe that all they needed was one good idea, and they in turn could design the Next Big Thing.
Yet the Macintosh was not an immediate commercial success, and in 1987, Steve Jobs was forced out of a company he had founded a decade earlier with his high school friend Steven Wozniak. While what was arguably the first computing appliance had not succeeded financially, it captured the romantic ideal of a small team of engineers acting as a rebel alliance struggling against the empire — at the time personified by IBM.
In 1985 the Macintosh appeared to have failed, and over the next half decade, in groups of twos and threes, the young engineers set out on their own.
The first era of handheld computing would be defined by four efforts — Apple’s Newton, the General Magic Communicator, Go. Corp, and Palm Computing. All would eventually fail in one fashion or another, but their collective failure would become an essential bridge to our modern computing world.
Today smartphones — internet-connected, pocket-size supercomputers and tablets — are now so ubiquitous that they are taken for granted. In the almost decade since the iPhone was introduced in 2007, smartphones have fulfilled Arthur C. Clarke’s dictum that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
However, until the mid-1980s, Silicon Valley had been principally driven by the idea of desktop personal computing. It was an idea that emerged from the three computer science research laboratories that had been established around Stanford University in the 1960s and 1970s.
There had been early outliers. Computer scientist Alan Kay, who began demonstrating a mockup of a tablet computer he described as a “Dynabook” beginning in the late 1960s was first. His insight broke from the original concept that Doug Engelbart and J. C. R. Licklider had shared in the early 1960s. They had conceived of a computer that would be something that you would use to “drive” through the network world, which had then not yet been named cyberspace by science fiction author William Gibson. In contrast, Kay was the first to grasp the concept that computing was instead a universal “media” in its own right and that it in turn would transform all other media — the printed word, sound, and video.
Yet Kay envisioned a slate computer that would be mocked up in Apple’s famous Knowledge Navigator video in 1987. It would take one more step to move computing from the lap to the palm of your hand. That shift emerged steadily during the late 1980s. One of the people who drove it was a young former Palo Alto political activist, Marc Porat, who stumbled upon Daniel Bell’s The Coming of Post-Industrial Society in the Stanford University library. He decided he could put Bell’s rambling ideas into practice. His doctoral dissertation coined the phrase “information economy.”
Then he took his ideas a step further. Not a technologist in any sense of the word, in 1988 he brought the notion of a “Pocket Crystal” to Apple and became a crusader for the idea inside the company. He had been thinking deeply about the idea of an information economy for more than a decade, and before arriving at Apple, he sat one day in Café Un Deux Trois on 44th St. near Times Square and drew three overlapping circles on a sheet of paper. One was labeled content, another was communications, and a third was computing. It was an epiphany that computing would provide an information utility you would hold in your hand. It would be a “Pocket Crystal.” Soon thereafter he would take the idea to Larry Tesler who was running Apple’s Advanced Technology Group.
Similar ideas were bubbling up all over Silicon Valley. The idea of handheld computing took hold among the young generation engineers who had grown up in the wake of the introduction of the Macintosh, and simultaneously elsewhere in the Valley.
A similar thought hit Jerry Kaplan, an artificial intelligence researcher who was then the chief technology officer of Lotus Development Corp., on a flight aboard Lotus founder Mitch Kapor’s corporate jet. Kapor had an unwieldy “luggable” Compaq Computer, and he was entering information from an array of yellow sticky notes that were plastered everywhere. The idea of “pen computing” was an obvious one. Soon thereafter Kaplan founded Go Corp. and eventually ran the company into an epic clash with Microsoft — which he lost.
But the idea of a handheld device with the power of a personal computer was taking deep root all over the Valley beginning in the late 1980s. At Apple it led to political intrigue as chief executive officer John Sculley attempted to sort out all of the competing ideas. The Pocket Crystal group, including Porat, talented engineers like Rubin and Steve Perlman, and Mac software veterans Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, were ushered out the door to form General Magic. The company set out to build Porat’s handheld communicator but never succeeded.
Inside Apple another young engineer, Paul Mercer, had begun building his own prototypes of handheld devices merged with Macintosh software. He gave them code names like “Swatch” and “Rolex.” Separately, Steve Sakoman brought his experience inside Hewlett Packard’s calculator division and came to Apple with the idea of the Newton after a brief flirtation with Kapor and Go. Mercer’s efforts were shelved and he joined the Newton project. Later he would leave Apple and start Pixo, a small software development effort. Tony Fadell would use the Pixo software to help develop the original iPod.
It soon became a deluge.
Although women were largely absent, there were notable exceptions. Donna Dubinsky left Apple’s Claris subsidiary in 1991 and the following year co-founded Palm Computing with Jeff Hawkins. And in the Newton Project, Donna Auguste, a UC Berkeley–educated engineer became a key member of the team.
They were part of what would become Silicon Valley’s most important generation. Collectively they sensed that computing was something that would literally disappear. A decade later the iPod and the iPhone would be the first two consumer devices to successfully embody the ideal. Silicon Valley was on its way to what Xerox PARC computer scientist Marc Weiser had identified as “ubiquitous computing” — a world in which computing literally disappeared into everyday objects — and they would become magical.
“When Silicon Valley Realized It Could Put Computing in Your Pocket” was published in the Computer History Museum’s 2017 issue of Core magazine.
