Re:Cool Tool of the Day (1997)
by tobr on Thursday April 22, 2021 @04:35AM
(#26900297)
There’s a tool called “iSeek” listed here, in ‘96. I thought the lowercase “i” prefix began its popularity with the iMac in 1998. Did Ken Segall not come up with it, but just ran with a trend that was already going on? What was the first /^i[A-Z][a-z]+$/ product name?
[ Parent
| on HN ]
iGuide was started in 1995 or 1995 (a Newscorp / MCI JV). Surprisingly no Wikipedia entry for it.
Was intended to be a "TV Guide" for the web.
The i* prefix was popular before the iMac, it was a way to show you were hip and into the Internets much as appending *coin to everything today shows you are hip and into the blockchain.
We had an iPhone before the iPhone around 1995 (?) - Internet Phone was a pretty incredible voip application by VocalTec (?). Incredible that it worked - not so much by today's standards of quality.
Linksys released an "iPhone" in 1998 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_iPhone).
Diebold rebranded their ATM models from MDS to i-Series in 1991, the year I joined Interbold, the Diebold/IBM joint partnership. Prefixing everything with an "i" was a thing.
Aging developer here. That was a Windows application that let you quickly search with Infoseek. I remember using it alongside Altavista, Magellan, and Excite, before Yahoo and Google came to be.