Apple engineer shares what it was like to work on the first iPhone

The original Apple iPhone has now gained iconic status as a device that has changed the mobile landscape. It was the first time that a touch-based device was this innovating and well integrated. The secrecy behind how the iPhone was developed is a fascinating tale in how Apple as a company functions to this day partly because, helped in no small part by Steve Jobs’ paranoia.

According to a  report by BGR , Steve Jobs assigned Scott Forstall to assemble a team to make the iPhone with one condition; that the team was not to hire anyone outside Apple.

The project was to be kept a secret and the lengths of the secrecy were partially disclosed during the patent lawsuit with Samsung in 2012. Forstall detailed that he could not tell engineers and prospective team members that he could not say what they would be working on and instead they were told that it’s an ‘incredible new product’. They were told that they would have to work hard, give up nights and work on weekends for years if they were willing to join the team.

Apple iPhone development was internally named as “Project Purple”, and the team took one of the Cupertino buildings and locked it down. One floor was full of badge readers and cameras. Terry Lambert, the engineer who worked on the original iPhone team, explained that he joined the team later in the cycle to debug the kernel. He had previously worked on the Mac OS X kernel, writing about 6 percent of the kernel, which amounted to about 1,00,000 lines of code a year. iOS uses the same kernel.

Lambert further detailed in his Quora post that he was taken in as the shipping date neared so the company had relatively relaxed the secrecy around the product. He was taken to an area where everything was covered in black cloth. He explains that the black cloth-shrouded projects are almost like wilful blind spots. You don’t look at them, you pretend they don’t exist. All he learnt was that they were working on an ARM-based system. He joked that if anyone needs a clever Halloween costume, they should buy a black sheet, cut eye holes and go as a “Secret Project”.

He went on detailing that he signed an NDA (Non-disclosure Agreement) and then he signed another NDA with the project code name on it. One interesting thing was that Apple gave different code names to different groups of people. This ensured that people didn’t get to know if others around them were working on the same project. After the NDA, the company gave access to the “Secret Lab” which was inside the general lab and you would not see the form factor as in the initial stages “it was all prototypes on plexiglass.” Last but not the least, he ends by adding that the cables used for the pre-production units while working on “Project Purple” were indeed “actually Purple.”

It’s an interesting tale and make sure you head to the links above for a more detailed picture.