14 DAY TRIAL // As an interesting tidbit to chew on before you go an pop open the champagne, I thought it would be great to remember the humble beginning of the iPhone through a small photo that speaks more than a thousand words.
Greg Christie, a senior engineer at Apple, presumably supplied this image when he told the story of how the very first iPhone OS came about. Steve Jobs was fanatical about the project, and he set up a team that he constantly harassed to get the OS done. They used this particular setup – a plastic touchscreen connected to an old G3 Mac with wires dangling everywhere, a landline phone (for God knows what), and other stuff meant to simulate the iPhone-hardware-to-come.
It was around that time that Christie invented the iconic Slide to Unlock animation that pops up on our iOS screens to this day signaling that the phone is waiting to be unlocked for accessing apps and services.
Christie was backstage when Steve Jobs was preparing to unveil the original iPhone at Macworld, when he saw a huge image of the iPhone's home screen projected onto a screen in the dark room. In an interview with the WSJ, he said, “It was glowing in this huge space. My heart skipped a beat and I thought, ‘This is actually happening’.”