A well-known tech news magazine. A cell phone called Simon was the thing in question. It was the result of a partnership between IBM and cellphone carrier BellSouth. Like all smartphones from 1994, it was huge and brick-like. Newsweek was interested in it, though, because it was a small computer. It had a tiny touchscreen that let you check and send emails, handle your calendar, make notes, and, whoosh! Send faxes. A lot of my story was about how bad Simon was, like how its touchscreen QWERTY keyboard was hard to use (you had to turn the phone 90 degrees to type) and how slow it was (sometimes you had to wait 10 seconds for something to happen). But I kept an open mind and called the phone that is also a personal digital helper "unique." I also came to the conclusion that "adventurous mobile workers" might find it useful. I just wish I had been smart enough to see that it was the first product in a new category that would one day be more important than the PC in terms of changing the course of history: the smartphone. That's how 1994 was. Personal technology was changing very quickly in many ways. There were times when the return was clear and quick, and times when it would take years or even decades to happen. In other cases, events that seemed important in the past didn't really go anywhere.
In general, 1994 was just plain interesting in ways that were fun to experience and are still fun to think about now
We recently talked about possible themes for a set of Fast Company stories about history, and we chose to look at some of the products, technologies, and schemes that made the year what it was. We're in the middle of our 1994 Week and have already put out four stories:
My look at the biggest new medium of the year: CD-ROMs, not the still-new World Wide Web.
It's David Zipper's story of GM's EV1, an early electric car that someone once said might have made Tesla obsolete if GM had stuck with it. (That person was Elon Musk.) Some senators tried to get Chris Morris to talk about why 1994 was the big year for the video game business. A 2004 story by Jared Newman about what it's like to surf the web with a pre-release copy of Netscape Navigator, which was once the most popular browser in the world. Two more stories from my coworkers Jessica Bursztynsky and Alex Pasternack will be out in 1994 Week soon. The topics will be a surprise, but you can find them here, along with the rest of our schedule. That year, 1994, there were so many events that we could have printed three times as many pieces. In that year, Iomega's Zip disk, the QR code, the web banner ad, and the browser cookie were all first used. You could order pizza from your web computer, which was a big step forward for e-commerce in its early days—at least if you lived near a Pizza Hut in Santa Cruz, California. Intel found that its Pentium chip had a strange bug that sometimes caused math errors. This was one of the first times that a broken piece of technology made the news. And Jeff Bezos started a business called Cadabra, which he changed its name to Amazon before it started sending books to customers the next year. I could keep going. I'll go back to the Simon phone instead, though. It turned a tech demo made by IBM employee Frank Canova into a product. The demo was first shown to the public at the COMDEX trade show in Las Vegas on November 24, 1992. (I went to the meeting and wish I could say I saw Canova's prototype, which was called "Sweetspot.") IBM worked on the idea for almost two years, but software bugs slowed them down.
The product finally went on sale in August 1994 at BellSouth stores
For more information on all of this, including some papers from inside IBM, check out this cool Simon history site. People didn't use cellphones all the time at that point, at least not in the U.S. I was still surprised by how many people I saw using them while I was in London the next year. It was way too ambitious to try to turn one into a networked computer. IBM had to make a user interface that would fit on Simon's small but tall screen. Of the tools it had to choose, only a calendar made the cut (a spreadsheet did not). It had to send emails over a 1G network, which was a long time before email services were made to work with wireless connections. The company even came up with an early form of predictive typing to make it easier to type words. IBM put some parts of the project on hold. Reading my review again, I see that I gave the Simon device a bad grade because it didn't have cut-and-paste, which I thought should be standard on any computer platform. At that time, I didn't know that for the first two years after it came out, even the iPhone would not have that feature. I wasn't supposed to give points for sheer audacity because I was reviewing the gadget for InfoWorld, a business magazine. We also did not make an exception for IBM and BellSouth because they had to deal with very strict rules. I had no idea at the time that smartphones would one day have color screens with high resolution, PC-class processors and storage, and more cellular data than they knew what to do with. Did I mention that it has many cameras, sensors like GPS, and all the other features we normally see on phones?
It is said that BellSouth sold 50,000 Simons before it stopped making the phone in February 1995
In today's world, that might sound like failing. (IDC data from 2023 shows that Apple sold that many iPhones every two hours.) Still, since the $899 device is so cutting edge, it doesn't feel like a total failure to me. It's too bad there won't be a Simon II. IBM started working on a smaller second-generation model, code-named "Neon," but stopped before it could be released. At this point, it's clear that Simon would have had to go through several generations before he could have made a hit. IBM even left the PC business it helped start, so it's hard to see them putting that much money into a new type of gear. Instead, two other well-known companies from before the 1990s got the world ready for the start of the smartphone boom. One was Palm, whose PalmPilot personal digital assistant fit in your pocket, didn't cost much, and was great at getting work done that could be done well at the time, like syncing contacts and meetings with your desktop PC. BlackBerry was the other company. They made email into a pager-style device with a QWERTY keyboard that was surprisingly easy to use for how small it was.
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