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I had an iPhone before Steve Jobs

// by Pavel Gitnik

It was around 1996 -- we were living in a suburb of Tel-Aviv called Ramat-Gan at the time, and my dad brought this odd product home from work he said they were testing out.

It was called an iPhone.

A flat white phone with a screen, a stylus, and a keyboard that slid out.

InfoGear iPhone GEN 1

(PICTURED: iPhone GEN 1 by InfoGear, CIDCO Version - via Wikipedia)

You could do phone things on it -- but it also had a modem built-in that connected to the internet -- browsing, email, and nudie pictures that loaded super slowly on a black and white screen.

My dad worked on testing the first model and then developing GEN 2.

The company's name was InfoGear, a small Israeli-American startup that was later bought by Cisco. (In 2000, Cisco moved us from Ramat-Gan to Cupertino -- that's how we ended up in the States.)

A few years later, Cisco licensed the iPhone trademark to Apple.

My mom still uses the 2nd generation iPhone (Black) in her kitchen.

You can read more about the original iPhone here and here.



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