In the end, what made VNC so universally adaptable is that it anticipated devices that didn’t exist yet, and ones that are yet to come.
-Andy Harter
The idea was simple, but it promised to revolutionise the telecommunications industry forever. Instead of just calling people on your mobile phone, the device would also become a miniature, wireless computer. Using an innovative touchscreen design, users would be able to buy and download programs via an online store. The “broadband phone”, as researchers speculatively dubbed it, would put the power of a PC into the owner’s pocket, enabling them to take photos, make films, play games, listen to music, and surf the web.
This, though, was 1999 - and the place was not an Apple research lab, but Cambridge, UK. “We knew that the phones of the future would need to do a lot more than just make calls,” Andy Harter, responsible for the broadband phone project, remembers. “Around 2000, we demonstrated it at the famous Sun Valley summer camp for industry moguls. The room was packed with technology luminaries and CEOs. I’m pretty certain that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were there.”
Seven or eight years before Apple unveiled the iPhone, not everyone really got the point of this idea. Mobile companies, not to mention their customers, simply weren’t ready for the type of phone that was being proposed. Expense was a problem, wireless broadband was not commonplace, and there were some technical obstacles to resolve. “There is a saying in the investment community that being too early is a good as being wrong,” Harter says. “but the concepts we mapped out have undoubtedly lived on.”
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Image: Spot the difference: In 1999, VNC technology was used to create a prototype “broadband phone” (left). In 2007, Apple launched the iPhone (right).
Credit: Andy Harter
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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