Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
An app store before the iPhone
The Touch Screen
The screen was filled with skeuomorphic graphics, icons that visually represent a function. A manila folder opened your files and a floppy disk saved your work, and those ideas already existed. General Magic took them in new directions: click the phone to make a call, the inbox to check messages, or the calendar, the notepad, or the Rolodex.
The door led to the virtual street, which was home to the e-book library and a store where you could buy apps. Nobody called it an app store, and an app store is what it was.
Inventing the Cloud
The team also developed a new kind of interconnecting cable, the precursor to today's USB. They created a programming language called Telescript so portable devices could talk to each other and to a network, for what would later be called social media and e-commerce. They called their portable network The Cloud.
All of this happened in the early 1990s, about 15 years before the iPhone and Facebook, when nobody was using those terms yet.
Why do icons copy real objects?
The desktop metaphor came from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s and reached the market on the Xerox Star in 1981. Folders, files, and trash cans let users carry what they knew about office objects over to an unfamiliar machine. Apple adopted the approach for the Lisa and the Macintosh. Apple's iPhone software kept leather, felt, and wood textures until iOS 7 arrived in 2013.
How did Telescript work?
Telescript let a program, called an agent, travel across a network and run on a remote computer instead of only sending requests back and forth. An agent could carry a task such as a search or a booking to a server and return with the result. Programs ran inside secure sites called places, where the system could limit what visiting agents were allowed to do. AT&T, a General Magic partner, launched PersonaLink, a network service built around Telescript, in 1994.
How did USB end the cable jungle?
Before USB, a computer needed separate ports for keyboards, mice, printers, and modems, each with its own connector. A group of companies including Intel, Microsoft, IBM, and Compaq released the first USB specification in 1996. One port type could connect many kinds of devices and supply them with power. The first version of USB carried data at up to 12 megabits per second.
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