The press release, dated August 30, 1999, is a charming fossil of the era. It touted the device as a "wireless handheld that offers easy access to corporate data." The killer feature? Two-way paging.
You weren’t looking at a mirage. You were looking at the future. blackberry 850 introduction location munich germany
Imagine that. Today, we expect the universe in our pocket. Back then, the magic trick was that you could reply to an email without a laptop. The press release, dated August 30, 1999, is
If you had been sipping a weissbier in the English Garden on a crisp autumn day 25 years ago, you might have witnessed a peculiar sight: sharply dressed businesspeople staring intently at a tiny green screen, their thumbs moving faster than a Bavarian accordion player’s fingers. You weren’t looking at a mirage
They didn't know it yet, but they had just downloaded the first virus of the 21st century: the addiction to always being on .
While the world credits Waterloo, Ontario, as the home of BlackBerry, the genesis of the always-on, thumb-typing revolution didn’t happen in Canada. It happened in the heart of Bavaria, with the introduction of the . The "Interim" Device That Changed Everything By 1999, Research In Motion (RIM) had already dabbled in pagers. But the 850 was different. It wasn't a phone. It wasn't really an email machine yet. It was a wireless handheld device that looked like a bar of soap that had swallowed a tiny QWERTY keyboard.