In 2007, the co-founder of Apple Steve Jobs kicked off a revolution in the laptop industry when he announced a single device that would combine an iPod with touch controls, a cell phone, and an Internet connection. However, nearly a decade before Jobs took the tech world by storm, a company by name InfoGear he created a telephone, called in turn iPhone, able to help users browse email and connect to the now primitive version of the Internet.
L’iPhone InfoGear del 1998
InfoGear’s Forgotten iPhone originated in a National Semiconductor lab as a skunkworks project, or at least that’s what Brian McCullough’s podcast on Internet History revealed. The company had granted funds to the engineers Chaim Bendelac, Reuven Marko e Yuval Shahar to work on the prototype of a product that could function both as a telephone and as an Internet navigation device.
Their first prototype used an 8-bit processor similar to those found in faxes and combined it with a screen to deliver a rather archaic web browsing experience. The project, called Project Mercury, soon attracted the attention of a venture capitalist, Robert Ackerman, who later explained that he immediately realized he was dealing with a device of the future.
Stunned by this project, Ackerman later had to convince Gilbert Amelio, then president of the National Semiconductor, to replace the three engineers and to sell the Mercury project. This group later formed the autonomous society InfoGear Technology Corporation.
Project Mercury acquired the iPhone name in its early days of development; a name based on the fashion of early techno names, used simply to emphasize the hybrid nature of the device, which was based on the idea of being able to access the network. The iPhone InfoGear was designed to do three things: making phone calls, viewing and replying to emails, and browsing the web easily.
The device came out in ’98 and its initial success convinced the company to develop a better version, which however was a partial failure, which inevitably sealed its fate.