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Comment by evo | Hacker News Reader

I always find these orphaned technological branches compelling, in part, because it's so easy to point to the success story and treat it like it was a singular invention. We hold up the iPhone as a miracle but forget the Newton and PalmPilot.

It's a good antidote to the narrative that either an idea is sufficient for success, or that success is a function of the idea. It's important, sure, but a fair bit of it is having the timing, resources, and luck to throw ideas against the wall until the world is ready for it, either due to cultural factors, missing infrastructure now built out, or other underlying technological evolutions meeting up together.

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I'd even go so far as to say the idea is the easy part. Tablet computers are an old idea, they had them on Star Trek TNG. Engineers have been trying to make the PADD a reality pretty much since the first episode. iPad wasn't the first attempt, it was the last.

It wasn't even Apple's first. And unlike the ones that came before it actually did reasonably well at matching the depiction. It got the relative size, weight and pick up and just use experience.

But nobody at Apple would have known the tech was ready if people hadn't been trying over and over to do it for the previous 20 years.

New tech is almost never an original invention that came from nowhere. The internet was built on decades of research specifically into networking computers together but also built on almost a century's worth of development into the phone network. The experiments that lead to radar date to not long after radio became practical. The Wright bro's weren't the first to try an airplane, they were the first to make it work. and so on.

Its the implementation that matters.

They've been trying to make them since 1972:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

Not just the Newton and palmpilot but the the PocketPC phones that came immediately before it.

When the iPhone came out i had an HTC TyTN 2 which unlike the iPhone could do turn by turn navigation, send SMS/MMS to multiple recipients, and act as a 3g modem for my computer while i was traveling. I also adored the pull out keyboard, which until the advent of swype was by far the fastest input method for a mobile device.

And Blackberry 7200s.

RIM proved that there was demand for smartphones long before the iPhone hit the market.

I had a remaindered tytn 2 as well. Even with a walk through configuring the mobile internet was a bizzare tricky maze. On an iPhone you just inserted a SIM, put in the APN and everything worked? I can see why the iPhone won.

Not to mention the irony that Microsoft quickly abandoned its own platform so the only people keeping it a useable device were Opera, Gmail and Google maps. The Microsoft browser couldn't even cope with the Microsoft website.

The HD2 from around that era was also a stand out. I still remember seeing one for the first time and just being floored by the 4.3" form factor.

Despite the hyperbole in the article characterizing it as the first iPad, this thing is literally a low-budget x86 laptop without a keyboard. I wouldn't exactly call it an orphaned technological branch.

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