Today RIM announced the BlackBerry Torch 9800, which is even more chock-full of amazing technology than the model before it, which was itself ahead of its predecessor, which was…

This has been going on for a long time, but it reminds me that the sequence did have a beginning – yes, there was a first BlackBerry, which had perhaps appeared, fully formed, from the primordial chaos…

I collect items from the History of Computing, and I have a sample of that earliest BlackBerry, the model 950, introduced in 1998, which you see in this photo.

The interesting thing is that this model precedes the addiction that has earned its successors the nickname “CrackBerry”. It had a unique usage model: it was really an advanced pager, not a telephone, and its primary use was to page people in your organization, not to process email. It did have email, but the tiny screen tended to limit its use to urgent stuff only. The text based paging, however, was quite useful: I remember on the very day that I was given one of these – as an early adopter – I left my sweater in a conference room and rather than

backtrack across campus I could text a friend in the room to collect it for me. The use of such real time communication-on-the-go, at a time before cellphones became ubiquitous, became immediately evident to me. The tiny keyboard that gave the device its imaginative name (the keys look like the bumps on a blackberry fruit) and the thumb wheel for scrolling were already present, and remained hallmarks of the RIM devices for years; that thumbwheel was extremely natural and easy to use, and I still regret its passing…

Of course, the tiny screen was soon replaced with the full size we expect today: the model 957 in the photo at right is from the year 2000 (Y2K, remember?) and allowed one to process email comfortably, opening the door to the email addiction I help companies fight these days. The pager function would soon disappear and cellular telephony would be added in 2002, giving us the smartphone paradigm we’re so used to these days.

But it all started as a humble pager with a tiny screen…