During my research into Mac OS X beta versions, I came across an alpha version of the original iPhone’s system.
Most of the information (and the firmware) comes from this MacRumors thread. It’s from an iPhone prototype whose firmware was directly dumped from the flash memory.
There’s a lot of information in this firmware. It has the codename Alpine, and the build number is 1A420.
Unsurprisingly, this is quite different from the final iPhone, with firmware containing a testing application called SkankPhone. Inside this test app, there’s a surprising image taken from an Apple commercial.
A strange image
It also includes the phone number of an AT&T technical staff member, a photo of an HP laptop, and drivers for FPGA-type processors (programmable, for testing), as well as for Freescale’s i.MX31 — a competitor to the Samsung chip that was ultimately selected.
The photo
Some SMS messages found in the dump:
Hey
Reply: Hey
Third message tests how punctuation impacts the parsing of a message with a phone number .........., URL wap.yahoo.com, and email.
This is a GSM SMS message with embedded phone numbers (...)...-.... and a URL http://wap.yahoo.com with +........... too.
Second test with some LF characters added before the number .......... and after the URL wap.google.com with +.(...)...-.... and wap.yahoo.com also
Fourth is another punctuation test with an embedded phone number (..........), URL
Apple was founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne to sell the Apple I personal computer. They were hand-built in the garage of Jobs' parents, and the Apple I was first shown to the public at the Homebrew Computer Club. The Apple I was sold as a motherboard, not what is today considered a complete personal compute. The user was required to provide two different AC input voltages (the manual recommended specific transformers), wire an ASCII keyboard (not provided with the computer) to a DIP connector (providing logic inverter and alpha lock chips in some cases), and to wire the video output pins to a monitor or to an RF modulator if a TV set was used. Their website is www.apple.com. Random email address: abc123@abc123.com.
Some images, including the SkankPhone application running on an iPhone with standard firmware:
The iPhone
The iPhone
The iPhone
The iPhone
The iPhone
eBay
SkankPhone
SkankPhone
