On July 21, 1999, Steve Jobs did something remarkable at Macworld New York: first he went to Apple.com, then to “CNN Interactive”, then to Disney.com. That wasn’t the remarkable part: what blew the crowd away was when he picked up the just-introduced iBook and walked around while waiting for Disney.com to load. The crowd went wild at the lack of wires:

I’m not going to quote this entire product introduction, but I’ve clipped the whole thing for your enjoyment; here are a few pertinent parts of Jobs’ introduction of what he called “AirPort”, and what the rest of the industry called “WiFi”:

There is one more thing.

The main point of this keynote was the aforementioned introduction of the original iBook:

This meant that “one more thing” was in fact not just an extra unexpected product, but an explicit addition to the primary product’s feature set.

No wire. What is going on here? We are really excited to announce, in addition to iBook, AirPort wireless networking…It’s a wireless LAN.…