Scott Forstall was in charge of building iPhone OS, now iOS, for Apple and Steve Jobs. By all accounts, he had a singular ability to distil down a myriad of options to a few he knew, at least one of, Jobs would approve. That skill alone made him invaluable to everyone else working on the the Purple Experience Project.
Now, 10 years after the launch of the original iPhone, and almost five years after leaving Apple, Forstall is sitting down to talk about the creation of one of the most culturally significant objects of our time. And he's doing it at the Computer History Museum:
During 2006, the year before the iPhone was introduced, it seemed that innovation in mobile devices was beginning to slip away from Silicon Valley. Wireless computing was advancing more quickly in Europe than it was in the United States. That all changed abruptly when Steve Jobs stepped onstage at Moscone Center in San Francisco and asserted he was introducing "three revolutionary products" in one package—the iPhone.
How did iPhone come to be? On June 20, four members of the original development team will discuss the secret Apple project, which in the past decade has remade the computer industry, changed the business landscape, and become a tool in the hands of more than a billion people around the world.
Part 1: Original iPhone Engineers Nitin Ganatra, Scott Herz, and Hugo Fiennes in Conversation with John Markoff
Part 2: Original iPhone Software Team Leader Scott Forstall in Conversation with John Markoff
Tickets are sold out, alas, but no doubt the stories they share will echo across the community and the industry. And, hopefully, willl be preserved for posterity.
