''' *iPHONE* iN iNVERSE '''
BEFORE ANYBODY OUTSIDE Apple was aware of it, the project that
would become the iPhone, was referred to internally by the code name
*Purple*.
No one seems to remember exactly why ; it may have been named after a toy purple Kangaroo that belonged to one of the engineers.
PURPLE
was so secret that even inside Apple hardly anybody knew anything about
it. It was developed in a lab sealed tight behind badge readers and a
metal door.
Employees had to sign N.D.A's for their N.D.A.'s.
The
lab became known as the Purple Dorm because people worked there
around the clock. through weekends, holidays, vacations, honeymoons.
They ate there. It smelled bad.
In fact,
although it would eventually emerge as the gleaming quintessence of the
collaboration between the Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Apple's
design magus, John Ive, Purple could seem like a nightmare of overwork, insoluble technical tarballs and political infighting.
''You
created a *pressure cooker* of a bunch of really smart people with an
impossible deadline, an impossible mission, all then you hear
that the future of the entire company is resting on it,'' Andy Grignon, one of the iPhone's key engineer, has said.
''It was just like this soup of misery.''
The Purple Dorm will no doubt one day be the setting of a taut claustrophobic drama by some future Aorin Sorkin.
If
it does, that drama may well be based on ''The One Device : The
Secret History of the iPhone,'' a new book by Brian Merchant, an editor
at Mother-board, the science and technology division of Vice.
Merchant
does the important work of excavating and compiling large
numbers of details and anecdotes about the development of the iPhone,
many of them previously unrecorded.
It's important because along with being splash, water and dust resistant, the iPhone is resistant to History.
The
iPhone dwells among us, but it looks -it's designed to look- as if it
just moments ago entered our world from some higher, more ideal pane of
existence.
Just as its black face makes no compromise with the contours of the human skull, it's gleaming, lickable surface offers no clues about where and when it was made, or by whom, or how.
You can't even open it with a without a special proprietary screw driver called a Pentalobe.
This is an effect not just of the iPhone's physical design but of the strange culture of reverence and secrecy that Apple has created around its products.
*The iPhone knows everything about us but we know very little about it*.
An example : multitouch, the technology that allows the iPhone's touch screen to track several fingerprints at once -it's why you can pinch to zoom. Where does it come from?
*Jobs always maintained that multitouch was invented at Apple. It wasn't*.
As
Merchant demonstrates, it was actually invented several different
times, including in the 1960s at England's Royal Radar Establishment
and in the 1970s at CERN.
The specific multitouch
technology that went into the iPhone was pioneered around the turn of
the millennium by a man you've certainly not heard of named Wayne Westerman.
A brilliant engineering Ph.D, at the University of Delaware, Westerman worked on the multitouch in part because he suffered from repetitive strain injury which made conventional keyboard interfaces agony,
Apple acquired Westerman's company,Finger Works in 2005 -whereupon
it and Westerman disappeared behind Apple's Titanium Curtain. The rest is, and isn't History.
[Apple wouldn't let Merchant interview Westerman, or any current Apple employee, for *The One Device* Merchant did, with characteristic thoroughness, track down Westerman's sister].
The iPhone is designed for maximum efficiency and compactness. ''The One Device'' isn't.
The
Honour and Serving of latest ''operational research'' on Icon
companies, Technologies and Icon products continues. Thank Ya all for
reading and sharing forward and see ya all on the following one.
With respectful dedication to these great students:
Mariam, Rabo, Haleema, Dee, Seher, Aqsa, Ambassador Malala, Saima, Eman, Sarah, Sameen, Paras, Sorat, Armeen, Areesha, ''Zilli'', Sanyia, Nina, Tooba, Shahbano, Zara-
Hussain, Shahzaib, Haider, Faraz, Ali, Umer, Wajahat, Ahsen, Jordan,Shahryar, Humayun, Bilal, Salar, Zaeem, Hazeem, Furqan, Mustafa, Ibrahim, Faizan, Hassan, Vishnu'India, Toby/China, Reza/Canada/ Shams/Australia, Danyial/UK, Dave/NZ, Rahym/UK, Tam/Russia, Majeed/Malaysia, David/Singapore/ Hammad &
All Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. And
And God's Little Angels : Maynah, Ibrahim, Harem, Maria, Haanyia and Merium
See Ya all on !WOW! -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:
''' Rooftop '''
Good Night and God Bless
SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless
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