This Week in Technology - The Debut of the iPhone

This Week's Historical Theme: Technology

 

9 January 2007

 

A significant event throughout the history of technology that occurred in January was the debut of the iPhone by Steve Jobs. This occurred at the Macworld convention in San Francisco, where Jobs called the new invention a "revolutionary and magical product that is literally five years ahead of any other mobile phone." Six months later, when it went on sale in the United States, thousands of customers lined up at Apple shops across the country in order to be among the first to ever purchase an iPhone. By November, more than 1.4 million had been sold, and it was named by Time magazine as the invention of the year.

 

With its launch, the iPhone joined a list of other innovative Apple products, such as the Macintosh and the iPod portable music player, that became part of everyday modern life. The App Store was later launched in 2008, which allowed people to download software applications that included games, social media, travel planning, and many other activities. The launch of the iPhone helped Apple transform into one of the planet's most valuable corporations, even after Jobs' death in 2011. In 2012, more than 200 million iPhones had been sold.

 

Want to find out more about the debut of the iPhone? Click here for more information, or here for more about Jobs' original plan for the iPhone.

Steve Jobs

Following on from today's assembly, here are some further articles about Steve Jobs that you may find of interest.

• RIP Steve Jobs - The article from the Onion's AV Club which refers to him as the "Designer of Modern Life".
• Apple's Visionary Redefined Digital Age - The New York Times' extensive obituary.
• Seven Lessons from Apple's Founder - from the Guardian
• A Man of Contradiction and Genius - also from the Guardian
• Has the iPod made us Anti-Social? - from the BBC, published just before Jobs' death

Finally, here is the video of Jobs' speech from Stanford University that was quoted at the end (YouTube link)

QR Code

Nonsuch HP now has its own QR code. If you have a smart phone with a QR code reading app, you can point it at the code and our blog's home page will load automatically - this should also work from the plasma screens that the our blog is regularly displayed on. If you know of any other interesting codes or uses for them, please let us know.

Famous First Words

Today is the fifth anniversary of the first Twitter Tweet. Not the most momentous of anniversaries perhaps but it is still impressive to see how much progress Twitter has made in such a short space of time. If you were wondering what the first tweet was, it was "just setting up my twttr", whilst the first words mentioned on YouTube were, "Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants." (At the time the founder of YouTube was standing in front of an elephant at San Diego zoo.)

There are more of these in this BBC article, including "Come here Mr Watson, I want to see you" (First telephone message, 1876 - Mr Watson was Alexander Bell's assistant), and "Merry Christmas" (First text message, 1992). Can you remember your first text / email / phone call?

First DotCom

Today also marks the 25th Anniversary of the first ever "dotcom" domain name being registered. It was "Symbolics.com" and it still exists. You can find out more about this here and a list of the first 100 sites here.

PS: It's Science Week this week at Nonsuch and the theme this year is "The History of Science", marking the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. There is a super timeline of significant scientific milestones here and the more about the Royal Society here. Watch out for events across the school!

Mussolini on iPhone

Der Spiegel reports that an iPhone app has been created that has 100 of Benito Mussolini's speeches. This has caused controversy in Italy where people feel it could promote the fascist dictator's views. Its creator says he didn't intend to glorify Mussolini, but believed it was another useful way to access evidence from the past. What do you think? If you find any other useful historical mobile apps, let us know!

Fronter Link

You may have spotted that there is now a link to Fronter at the top right of the page. Please use this to access information and news specific to your classes. You will just need your email login and password to get to the site.

Facebook Group

Nonsuch HP now has a Facebook Group. If you would like to join, or encourage your friends to join, search for "Nonsuch History and Politics Blog" and you'll find it. We would like to thank Miss D'Souza, our "Facebook Coordinator" for setting this up!

RSS Feed

Nonsuch HP now has an RSS feed - the link is on the right hand side of the site. If you would like regular updates for your homepage (eg iGoogle) click on the link and then copy and paste the web address to where you want it.

Historical Tweets

This site is quite amusing - what would historical figures have written if they had access to Twitter?

Here's one from Johannes Gutenberg

and here's Abraham Lincoln asking for speech-writing advice

We're on Twitter

Nonsuch HP has tentatively established a presence on Twitter. We're known as nonsuchhp and you can find us here. We will initially use it to send updates about the blog but if you know of other useful ways to use Twitter, please let us know!

Do you remember the Walkman?

This article from the BBC, comparing an iPod to a Sony Walkman from 30 years ago, may seem an odd choice for a history blog. However the author (a 13 year old boy) treats the Walkman at first as if it is some archaeological artefact from the middle ages. It is interesting to see how rapidly technology changes but also how quickly people become ignorant of their immediate past - not necessarily the big political events but the small details that seemed important to our culture at the time but are quickly forgotten. What other forgotten items deserve to be reconsidered?