So… Three things: A widescreen iPod with touch controls. A revolutionary mobile phone. And a breakthrough internet communications device. An iPod… a phone… and an internet communicator… An iPod, a phone… are you getting it? These are not three separate devices. This is one device! And we are calling it iPhone.”

Steve Jobs, January 9, 2007

Those words have become so famous in the history of technology that I imagine a large percentage of readers have them memorized. Ten years ago this Monday, January 9, Steve Jobs stood on stage and announced the iPhone to the world. It was the crowning achievement in the career of the greatest technologist of our time, the moment that the modern era of computing began.

On the ten year anniversary of the birth of the iPhone, this is the story of that moment and the history of that device which can take a rightful place alongside the original Macintosh, the first IBM PC, the Apple I, the Altair 8800, the DEC PDP-8, the IBM System/360 and the ENIAC as one of most important machines to have brought computing into everyday life.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of an Internet History Podcast special episode marking the 10th Anniversary of the iPhone. You can listen to the full episode here:

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Keep reading below…

The Roots of the iPhone

At the beginning of 2007, Apple was a company on a winning streak. Its flagship Mac line of computers was growing in market share at the expense of traditional PCs. The iPod, introduced a little over five years earlier, had transformed Apple from a niche company that made high-end personal computers into a company that made the most sought-after gadgets in the world. And yet, despite this success, few (outside the company, at least) would have been brave enough to predict that Apple was about to release the gadget-to-end-all-gadgets—the most transformative (and most personal) computer of the modern era.

The Newton MessagePad

Apple was famously (or, infamously) one of the pioneers in handheld computing. The Newton MessagePad was the first PDA (a term Apple coined) to generate broad mainstream appeal when it was released in 1993. The Newton had many details that eerily echoed what would come later: the device measured 4.5″ x 7″, had a touchscreen in lieu of a keyboard, was priced at $699 (about $1129 when adjusted for inflation), sported a 32-bit ARM CPU and it even had a Siri-like feature called the Newton Assistant.

But this was 1993. The web had not yet gone mainstream. There was no such thing as ubiquitous cellular data networks or wifi hotspots. And crucially, multi-touch technology was not available. Users interacted with the touchscreen via a stylus, not their fingertips, and input information via text-based handwriting recognition software. Problem was, the handwriting recognition wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, as the comic strip Doonesbury and the tv show the Simpsons lampooned endlessly. The Newton became a joke and sold less than 50,000 units in its first four months. A few years later, when Steve Jobs returned to Apple and famously streamlined the company’s bloated product line, the Newton was discontinued. But in the meantime, it had pioneered the PDA market that Palm and others would exploit to great success in the later 90s, and would set the functional template for smartphones in the 2000s.

This experience beyond traditional computers, disastrous as it may have been for the company, nonetheless planted some residual ideas within Apple’s corporate DNA. And after Jobs returned to save the company from extinction, memories of pocket-sized devices resurfaced to take Apple into a new era. The iMac might have been the product that saved Apple as a company, but the iPod was the product that transformed it. Released in 2001, the iPod reached beyond Apple loyalists and became a bonafide mainstream sensation. Eventually, the iPod was responsible for 45% of Apple’s total revenue. It also captured 70 percent of the MP3 player market.

This is something that has been a bit glossed over in recent histories of the company, but stop for a minute and imagine how momentous a change the iPod engendered within Apple itself. This was a company that, for nearly 30 years, had been a personal computer company. The blue sky thinking that allowed Apple to make a stand-alone MP3 player—to enter a mature market as an outsider and believe it could dominate—also engendered the sort of fearlessness that made it possible to break with other long-standing Apple shibboleths. The iPod eventually worked with Windows machines, even at the risk of cannibalizing Mac sales. iTunes eventually worked with Windows machines. Apple (gasp) made a Windows app! As Phil Schiller told Walter Isaacson in his Steve Jobs biography: “We felt we should be in the music player business, not just in the Mac business.” It was this conceptual leap, this strategic bravery (just as much as a penchant for good design and reliable manufacturing) that would be responsible for Apple’s success in the 2000s.

Apple was no longer just a computer ...