Consumer Tech for March: Where the iPod and iPad really Came from
By Richard M. Sherwin, Robert Plunkett and the staff of Digital Family Advisor How Dell, HP and others missed the tablet boat. Around 20 years ago, in a cafe about two blocks from one of the biggest newspapers in the country, two feature reporters with very little tech savvy were peering through clouds of cigar and cigarette smoke when a PR lady from Compaq Computer, a slightly eccentric looking engineer scientist from Sony and a local disk jockey from a popular radio station came sashaying into the semi private meeting room in the back of the bar. They showed us a device the size of a transistor radio, perhaps a little bigger, that was playing what seemed like prerecorded top 40 hits. But there was no tape and the device was very light weight, almost as if there was nothing inside. The device had an AM-FM radio and
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