[yellowapple]

Seeing what looks like a full iPhone attached to it (I know it's just the screen, but the inclusion of a taped-over home button is interesting) gives me kind of a "Thinking quickly, Dave constructed an iPhone using a circuit board, some tape, and an iPhone" vibe.

[sjwright]

That's likely a ex post facto hack, as a production iPhone's front piece was likely attached to make this prototyping board more complete.

The engineers back then certainly wouldn't have seen the iPhone-shaped screen assembly, they would either use the video out to a regular monitor (sufficient for most hardware testing and kernel development) while the developers responsible for making the touch screen work might have gotten a screen unit that wasn't iPhone-shaped.

(This particular board might have been assigned to someone who was only ever expected to use the video output ports.)

[95014_refugee]

These dev boards were modular, so that engineers without a need-to-know for e.g. the screen or radio didn’t get one. But this is not a retrofit; if you needed a display or touch then this is what you got.

The video out ports were only used for the 30-pin video out, the main display never ran on them (could not run on them).

iPhoneOS kernel developers could hardly care less about the display; everything was done with the serial port and JTAG (I don’t recall whether Ethernet debug was ever supported).

There are a bunch of other errors / misconceptions in the article sadly. These boards were pretty cool & highly functional and it’s sad not to see justice done to them.

[sjwright]

I'm not saying you're wrong—I'm just some random person on the internet. But I find it surprising that they'd even have that many pieces of iPhone shaped glass attached to working touchscreens early on in the process.

Of course people working on developing the UX would want to see and touch a contextualised screen so I suppose the configuration we see here would make sense for them.

[95014_refugee]

This board’s not from “early on in the process”. Making touch work well was once of the major undertakings, and there had been various iterations of display around for literally years at this point. By the time this board was made, the display / touch was largely a done deal and they were being built in respectable volume.

Likewise the UX development started years before, some of the earliest hardware was just a handheld display & touch tethered to an old G3 PowerPC Mac (to get the performance constraints about right). The purpose here was to get representative displays into the hands of relatively large numbers of engineers.

[mav3rick]

That's how most prototype boards are. The idea being you can do develop / do bring up and see the graphics / boot etc.

[augustl]

I was also curious about that. In other stories I've read, I've heard it referred to as a big ugly box with a touch screen embedded on top of it, which is what I imagined most people worked on. But this just looks like a normal iPhone with a large breadboard connected.

[95014_refugee]

Since the iPad display is much larger than the phone display, sitting it on the board like this wasn’t practical. There was an iPad dev board that looked a lot like this, but there were also ‘acrylics’ - chassis made from cnc’d Acrylic sheeting - that supported the screen connected to the board by a flex.

Most engineers wanted nothing to do with the display units; they were bulky and relatively fragile and desk space is always at a premium.

[ianhowson]

I always imagined that the iPad came about because some engineer had a Retina iPhone prototype on a standard 72dpi screen and figured it might work to replace a laptop.

Take the old eMac software, and bam, iPad.

(100% speculation)

[saagarjha]

I believe “iPad” was actually being developed prior to iPhone and was put on pause while multitouch and other technology was lifted from the project to support iPhone.

[sjwright]

That's how Steve Jobs tells it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5f8bqYYwps&t=2233

[rvense]

The iPad was actually conceptualized before the desktop workstation was common:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook

[ddalex]

The iPad was conceptualized as a thin touch screen no-keyboard slate since at least 1992 in Star Trek TNG [0]

[0] https://i1.wp.com/www.techdigest.tv/star-trek-tablet.jpg?res...

[joezydeco]

The iPad was also conceptualized in 1988 as "Tablet", the winning entry in the Apple Computer "Design the Computer of the Year 2000" contest.

https://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/academic/tablet-...

One of the members of the winning team was Stephen Wolfram.

[monocasa]

How about 1960s, with 2001: A Space Odyssey.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/did-st...

[mercutio2]

DynaBook was long, long before STtNG.

[joezydeco]

That’s this (earlier) development system.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/03/exclusive-super-earl...