Harvesting the BlackBerry: An Insider's Perspective / Graham Tubbs, Terry Gillett

In the mid-1990s, almost nobody knew what the Internet was. The few businesspeople and hardcore geeks who used electronic mail had to hunt for telephone connectors so they could hook up their laptops on the move. Cell phones were bulky and expensive. One-way pagers delivered only short messages. Texting didn't exist.

One of the driving forces behind the wirelessly connected world we take for granted today was the emergence of the BlackBerry. In 1995 a tiny company from Ontario, Research in Motion, conceived of an e-mail device that users could wear on their belts. To reduce the amount of space required by the electronic components, RIM needed to partner with a semiconductor company that could integrate the different functions into one microchip. Enter Intel.

Though the BlackBerry's success seems like a foregone conclusion today, both operations faced enormous challenges. Harvesting the BlackBerry offers an insider's perspective on how the world's number one semiconductor company and an unknown start-up overcame technical obstacles and internal politics to produce one of the most ubiquitous computing devices of our time.