// 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.
(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.
