Unveiling of iPhone was a marketing gimmick. And please look outside America before talking about human history, and indeed computer.
I really don't want to sound rude but this kind of vanity gets to me.
You're too harsh on the OP. As Doug Engelbart discovered himself at some point: "One of the basic things you soon learn is that after a certain degree of quantitative change, you almost invariably go into qualitative change." (http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/histsci/ssvoral/enge...).
Before Apple put everything together for the initial version of the iPhone nobody else other than technology enthusiasts (or masochists) were using their mobile phones as windows into the world. Not 10 years have passed and now I can see 12-year kids chatting with their friends on their iPhone5s while I'm taking the tramway home, or 20-something lady-drivers checking their Facebook while they're waiting for the green light.
If it matters I live half a globe-away from the States, and while I do own an iPhone 4 I still fondly remember how I used to write Python scripts for a Nokia N73 that would somehow try to pair the images I was taking with said phone with the geo-coordinates recorded by an external GPS device, both of them (the GPS device and the phone) connected through bluetooth.
People were emailing each other and secure IM'ing in 1999 on BlackBerries, I think you forget there was "internet phones" before the iPhone in 2007. This wasn't some "geek machine" it was something every wallstreet, government employee and exec had.
You did happen to notice how much the world transformed after the iPhone came out along with the rest of us, didn't you? You do remember that to paraphrase Alan Kay it was a few inches short of someone finally realizing the Dynabook? (And you do know that the iPad came before the iPhone, likely from this very inspiration?)
I find it bizarre that you somehow conclude that saying the iPhone was a very transformative product for the world is somehow "vanity." Strange.
...er, what?
A mish-mash of other technologies available on the market? I don't doubt that it had a an impact on technology but it wasn't some epiphany, just a good iteration.
I think you need to dedicate the next 1.40.53hrs of your day to watching The Mother of All Demo's, it truly is one of the most amazing human technological feats - to even conceive these things let alone manage to produce and develop them and then demonstrate to a large audience and record the whole thing still blows my mind. Pretty much everything you are doing today on your laptop harks back to Dougs boundless imagination and execution, he deserves total utmost respect - not comparison. There is none, let alone with a phone.
The iPhone brought a lot of new smartphone users into the market, and it brought an even larger injection of cash into the market. That, in turn, facilitated a massive acceleration of R&D into mobile device technology and software. And that acceleration will have a direct impact on something that is still in progress and hasn't happened yet: the majority of the population of the developing world gaining access to computing technology and the internet, which I believe will be one of the defining events of the 21st century.
1. Telefunken was selling a mouse several weeks before this demo -- http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Auf-den-Spuren-der-de...
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And I think both the original and my reply were about the demos themselves not about the mouse specifically or Apple in general. My point was that a technology demo of a research prototype and a product introduction are radically different things. I suspect that Engelbart's demo itself must have been a very early, (the first?) large-scale, live demonstration of interactive computer technology. They had to borrow an Eidophor from NASA to do it, which gives an idea of how unusual it was for the time. It's not like they showed up and plugged a coax cable into the projection system of the convention hall. That's one, among many reasons why one of these things is The Demo and the other a demo.
Teletypes had been commercially available for decades, and minicomputers (PDP-8) for about four years. It seems glass terminals started appearing only a year before this demo, though.
With this in mind, I will claim that the iPhone demonstration is similar in that it's the first case of a phone being connected to a big screen projector to demonstrate its functions live before a large audience.
One is a demonstration of new technologies, previously unseen by many in the audience. The other is the introduction of a new product integrating many existing technologies. You could buy an iPhone a few months after that introduction. Computers with mice didn't become generally available to consumers till 1984. You're either underestimating the impact of Engelbart's demo, overestimating the importance of the iPhone or both.