Topic 10:

Who invented the Smartphone?

Introduction

Every now and then, a new technology comes along that fundamentally changes the world that we live in, often in unexpected ways. Obvious examples include: the printing press (c.1450), gunpowder (c.904), the aeroplane (1903), or television (1927). But did you know that our cities could not exist as they do, if it were not for the technology of refrigeration, or did you know that it would have been virtually impossible to colonise Australia if it were not for the invention of an accurate clock.

It is very rare for a new invention to involve completely new technology, in almost all cases, a new invention or innovation involves combining a range of existing technologies into new products that are designed to solve existing problems. For example, before the electric light bulb to be successful it needed technology to exist in the area of electrical power generation and power distribution. A very simple example is given below, looking at railways. What other examples can you think of?

An oversimplified diagram showing some of the necessary technologies that had to exist before Railways could exist and then showing some if the impacts of that technology.

Now watch the video of Steve Jobs, announcing the very first iPhone in 2007. (10 mins)

A rotary telephone. This was a common design found in Australian homes in the 1970's and 1980's

The Motorola Dyna TAC was one of the first mobile telephones available in Australia. In 1991, a Dyna TAC cost approximately $2100, which is about $4200 today!

Steve Jobs, announcing the iPhone in 2007

Steve Jobs introduces iPhone in 2007.mp4

If you are at home, you can watch on YouTube here

Was it Steve Jobs?

Steven Paul Jobs was an American entrepreneur, industrial designer, investor, and media proprietor. He was the co-founder of Apple computers. As well as this, he was the majority owner of Pixar.

Jobs is widely recognised as a pioneer of the personal computer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, along with his early business partner and fellow Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.

Jobs was born in San Francisco, California, and put up for adoption. He was raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended Reed College in 1972 before dropping out that same year, and traveled through India in 1974 seeking enlightenment and studying Zen Buddhism.

Jobs and Wozniak co-founded Apple in 1976 to sell Wozniak's Apple I personal computer. Together the duo gained fame and wealth a year later with the Apple II, one of the first highly successful mass-produced microcomputers. Jobs saw the commercial potential of the Xerox Alto in 1979, which the first computer with a mouse and had a graphical user interface (GUI). This led to the development of the unsuccessful Apple Lisa in 1983, followed by the breakthrough Macintosh in 1984, the first mass-produced computer with a GUI. Steve Jobs helped to develop the visual effects industry when he funded the computer graphics division of George Lucas's Lucasfilm in 1986. The new company was Pixar, which produced the first 3D computer animated feature film Toy Story (1995), and went on to become a major animation studio, producing over 20 films since then.

Jobs became CEO of Apple in 1997. He was largely responsible for helping revive Apple, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy. He worked closely with designer Jony Ive to develop a line of products that had larger cultural ramifications, beginning in 1997 with the "Think different" advertising campaign and leading to the iMac, iTunes, iTunes Store, Apple Store, iPod, iPhone, App Store, and the iPad. In 2001, the original Mac OS was replaced with the completely new Mac OS X (now known as macOS). Jobs was diagnosed with a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor in 2003. He died at age 56 on October 5, 2011.

Jobs presenting the iPhone 4 in 2010

Born: February 24, 1955

San Francisco, California, U.S.

Died: October 5, 2011 (aged 56)

Occupation:

Entrepreneur
Industrial designer
Investor
Media proprietor

Years active: 1976–2011

Known for:

Pioneer of the personal computer revolution with Steve Wozniak
Co-creator of the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone, iPad, and first Apple Stores

Was it Jony Ive?

Sir Jonathan Paul Ive, KBE (born 27 February 1967) is a British-American industrial and product designer. Ive was Chief Design Officer (CDO) of Apple Inc., and serves as Chancellor of the Royal College of Art. He joined Apple in September 1992, where he remained until his departure in July 2019. Following several years of designing the interface aspects of Apple products he was promoted to Senior Vice President of Industrial Design in the late 1990s after the return of co-founder Steve Jobs to the company, and CDO in 2015. Working closely with Jobs during their tenure together at Apple, Ive played a vital role in the designs of the iMac, Power Mac G4 Cube, iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and parts of the user interface of Apple's mobile operating system iOS, among other products. He also helped design Apple's major architectural projects, such as Apple Park and Apple Stores.

Born in London, Ive lived there until his family moved to Stafford when he was 12. He studied design at Newcastle Polytechnic, and was later hired by the London-based start-up design firm Tangerine. He began working at Apple in the early 1990s, designing the decade's PowerBooks and Macs, finally taking up US citizenship in 2012 to become a dual British-American national.

Ive has received a number of accolades and honours for his designs and patents. In the United Kingdom, he has been appointed a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI), an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (HonFREng), and a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE). In 2018, he was awarded the Professor Hawking Fellowship of the Cambridge Union Society. In a 2004 BBC poll of cultural writers, Ive was ranked the most influential person in British culture. His designs have been described as integral to the successes of Apple, which has gone on to become the world's largest information technology company by revenue and the largest company in the world by market capitalisation.

On 27 June 2019, in an exclusive interview with the Financial Times, Ive announced he would leave Apple after 27 years to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, together with industrial designer Marc Newson.

Born: Jonathan Paul Ive

27 February 1967 (age 54)

Chingford, London, England

Occupation: Industrial designer

Years active: 1976–2011

Known for:

Former Chief Design Officer at Apple Inc.
Co-designer of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad

Jony Ive, talking about aspects of the design process as he reflects on 20 years as chief designer at Apple

Apple Designed by Apple in California.mp4

If you are at home, you can watch on YouTube here

Was it Sophie Wilson?

Sophie Wilson is someone you have probably never heard of. But people that know her or know of her, call her "The architect of the modern world".

Sophie Wilson designed one of the first British home-build microcomputers, the Acorn System 1 and was the genius behind much of Acorn's software. This led to one of the first microcomputers, the Acorn Atom of 1981. In 1983, Wilson teamed up with Steve Furber to design one of the first RISC processors, which became one of the most successful CPU cores ever.

Hang on....

What is a microcomputer? What is a RISC processor? What is a CPU core and what does any of this have to do with Smartphones?

What is a microcomputer?

A microcomputer is a small, relatively inexpensive computer with a microprocessor as its central processing unit (CPU).

What is a RISC processor?

This is slightly complicated when you get into it, but RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. It is a chip that is the "brain" of the computer, also known and the CPU or Central Processing Unit. The difference between the RISC processor and a regular CPU is that it has a more simple internal structure and uses less power to run. At first, RISC processors were used in microcomputers but soon became essential for Smartphones as it allowed a CPU that was powerful enough to run a small computer to be placed in a device small enough to fit in your pocket and power-efficient enough to be able to run off a small battery.

What is a CPU core?

A CPU core is a processor, which is the "brain" of the computer. In the old days, every processor had just one core that could focus on one task at a time. Today, CPUs have been two and 18 cores, each of which can work on a different task.

A core can work on one task, while another core works a different task, so the more cores a CPU has, the more efficient it is. Many processors, especially those in laptops, have two cores, but some laptop CPUs (known as mobile CPUs), such as Intel’s 9th Generation processors, have eight.

Sophie Wilson today

Modern CPU's

A modern ARM chip for smart phones

Back to the story...

In 1983, Wilson designed the instruction set for one of the first RISC processors, the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), later to become one of the most successful IP-cores (i.e., a licensed CPU core) of the 1990s and 2000s. Acorn's two key design engineers on this project were Steve Furber and Sophie Wilson. Furber concentrated on the hardware architecture, while Wilson designed and refined the instruction set. Acorn's CEO at the time, Hermann Hauser, recalls that "while IBM spent months simulating their instruction sets on large mainframes, Sophie did it all in her brain." After several years' development, the Acorn Archimedes was the first fruit of the ARM project.

As CPU's became more powerful through the 90's and early 2000's, The ARM core became the CPU chosen to power smartphones due to their relative simplicity, small size and economical use of power. Today, there are well over 5 billion devices in use around the world using the ARM core.

So now, what do you think about the statement "Sophie Wilson is the architect of the modern world?"

Was it Dr. John O’Sullivan, Dr. Terry Percival, Diet Ostry, Graham Daniels, and John Deane?

There is an Australian twist to this story, and it started with a problem...

A world weighed down by wires

Back in the 1990s, there were no smartphones, tablets or other wireless devices. If you were browsing online you had to rely on fixed wires.

WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network) - enabling high-speed global connectivity

Radio astronomer Dr John O'Sullivan from Australia led a small but complementary team of scientists to develop the WLAN technology estimated to be used in over 5 billion mobile phones, laptops and other devices.

In the late 1970s Dr O’Sullivan was leading a research group working in radio astronomy. They developed equipment which could make sense of millions of radio signals echoing through the universe, and reassemble these reverberations into a meaningful picture of cosmic events in the distant past.

In 1983 Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO, asked Dr O’Sullivan to come up with practical applications for the technology, so his team began work on improving wireless LANs. The existing systems at the time could handle barely a few 100 Kb per second, but their target was to improve performance 1000-fold. Dr O’Sullivan assembled a truly inter-disciplinary team whose skills ranged from physics and mathematics to signal processing, control systems and network protocols. The team included Graham Daniels, Terry Percival, Diethelm Ostry and John Deane.

To transfer lots of data quickly without cables, it needs to be divided into small portions and transmitted on many different radio frequencies simultaneously, and then re-assembled in the right order by the receiver. When radio signals bounce off walls and floors, or when they interfere, they make the receiver’s job very much harder. The technology developed to screen out galactic noise in radio astronomy was just what was needed to help make sense of WLAN signals here on earth.

A provisional patent application was filed in Australia in 1992, followed by US, European and other filings in 1993, but early attempts to find a commercial partner failed. In 1997 a joint US-Australian firm – Radiata – was set up specifically to commercialise the technology and its related IP under licence from CSIRO. By 2000 Radiata were making their first chips, and in 2001 Radiata was bought by Cisco Systems for US$300 million.

In the late 1990s, the global standards body - the IEEE - incorporated CSIRO’s patent into an industry-wide standard for WLAN, and CSIRO agreed to offer licences to anyone on “fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory” terms so as to ensure interoperability between devices from all manufacturers.

Dr O’Sullivan describes the wireless LAN “as a glorious example” of blue-sky research solving a problem with much wider application. The phenomenal growth in mobile technology, from phones to laptops to game-consoles, would not have been possible without the vision of this radio astronomer.

Did you know....

The CSIRO, Australia's National Science agency has made over $450 million in royalties and other payments from the Australian role in the invention of Wi-Fi!

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