And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

The 55 miles from Campbell to San Francisco make for one of the nicest commutes anywhere. The journey mostly zips along the Junipero Serra Freeway, a grand and remarkably empty highway that abuts the east side of the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is one of the best places in Silicon Valley to spot a start-up tycoon speed-testing his Ferrari and one of the worst places for cellphone reception. For Andy Grignon, it was therefore the perfect place for him to be alone with his thoughts early on Jan. 8, 2007.

This wasn’t Grignon’s typical route to work. He was a senior engineer at Apple in Cupertino, the town just west of Campbell. His morning drive typically covered seven miles and took exactly 15 minutes. But today was different. He was going to watch his boss, Steve Jobs, make history at the Macworld trade show in San Francisco. Apple fans had for years begged Jobs to put a cellphone inside their iPods so they could stop carrying two devices in their pockets. Jobs was about to fulfill that wish. Grignon and some colleagues would spend the night at a nearby hotel, and around 10 a.m. the following day they — along with the rest of the world — would watch Jobs unveil the first iPhone.

But as Grignon drove north, he didn’t feel excited. He felt terrified. Most onstage product demonstrations in Silicon Valley are canned. The thinking goes, why let bad Internet or cellphone connections ruin an otherwise good presentation? But Jobs insisted on live presentations. It was one of the things that made them so captivating. Part of his legend was that noticeable product-demo glitches almost never happened. But for those in the background, like Grignon, few parts of the job caused more stress.

Grignon was the senior manager in charge of all the radios in the iPhone. This is a big job. Cellphones do innumerable useful things for us today, but at their most basic, they are fancy two-way radios. Grignon was in charge of the equipment that allowed the phone to be a phone. If the device didn’t make calls, or didn’t connect with Bluetooth headsets or Wi-Fi setups, Grignon had to answer for it. As one of the iPhone’s earliest engineers, he’d dedicated two and a half years of his life — often seven days a week — to the project.

Grignon had been part of the iPhone rehearsal team at Apple and later at the presentation site in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. He had rarely seen Jobs make it all the way through his 90-minute show without a glitch. Jobs had been practicing for five days, yet even on the last day of rehearsals the iPhone was still randomly dropping calls, losing its Internet connection, freezing or simply shutting down.

“At first it was just really cool to be at rehearsals at all — kind of like a cred badge,” Grignon says. Only a chosen few were allowed to attend. “But it quickly got really uncomfortable. Very rarely did I see him become completely unglued — it happened, but mostly he just looked at you and very directly said in a very loud and stern voice, ‘You are [expletive] up my company,’ or, ‘If we fail, it will be because of you.’ He was just very intense. And you would always feel an inch tall.” Grignon, like everyone else at rehearsals, knew that if those glitches showed up during the real presentation, Jobs would not be blaming himself for the problems. “It felt like we’d gone through the demo a hundred times, and each time something went wrong,” Grignon says. “It wasn’t a good feeling.”

The preparations were top-secret. From Thursday through the end of the following week, Apple completely took over Moscone. Backstage, it built an eight-by-eight-foot electronics lab to house and test the iPhones. Next to that it built a greenroom with a sofa for Jobs. Then it posted more than a dozen security guards 24 hours a day in front of those rooms and at doors throughout the building. No one got in without having his or her ID electronically checked and compared with a master list that Jobs had personally approved. The auditorium where Jobs was rehearsing was off limits to all but a small group of executives. Jobs was so obsessed with leaks that he tried to have all the contractors Apple hired — from people manning booths and doing demos to those responsible for lighting and sound — sleep in the building the night before his presentation. Aides talked him out of it.

Fred Vogelstein is a contributing editor for Wired. His book “Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution” will be published in November.

Editor: Dean Robinson

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

Mondadori Portfolio, via Getty ImagesAt the Solvay Conference on Physics in 1927, the only woman in attendance was Marie Curie (bottom row, third from left).

Last summer, researchers at Yale published a study proving that physicists, chemists and biologists are likely to view a young male scientist more favorably than a woman with the same qualifications. Presented with identical summaries of the accomplishments of two imaginary applicants, professors at six major research institutions were significantly more willing to offer the man a job. If they did hire the woman, they set her salary, on average, nearly $4,000 lower than the man’s. Surprisingly, female scientists were as biased as their male counterparts.

Meg Urry, professor of physics and astronomy at Yale.

The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?

As one of the first two women to earn a bachelor of science degree in physics from Yale — I graduated in 1978 — this question concerns me deeply. I attended a rural public school whose few accelerated courses in physics and calculus I wasn’t allowed to take because, as my principal put it, “girls never go on in science and math.” Angry and bored, I began reading about space and time and teaching myself calculus from a book. When I arrived at Yale, I was woefully unprepared. The boys in my introductory physics class, who had taken far more rigorous math and science classes in high school, yawned as our professor sped through the material, while I grew panicked at how little I understood. The only woman in the room, I debated whether to raise my hand and expose myself to ridicule, thereby losing track of the lecture and falling further behind.

In the end, I graduated summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa, with honors in the major, having excelled in the department’s three-term sequence in quantum mechanics and a graduate course in gravitational physics, all while teaching myself to program Yale’s mainframe computer. But I didn’t go into physics as a career. At the end of four years, I was exhausted by all the lonely hours I spent catching up to my classmates, hiding my insecurities, struggling to do my problem sets while the boys worked in teams to finish theirs. I was tired of dressing one way to be taken seriously as a scientist while dressing another to feel feminine. And while some of the men I wanted to date weren’t put off by my major, many of them were.

Mostly, though, I didn’t go on in physics because not a single professor — not even the adviser who supervised my senior thesis — encouraged me to go to graduate school. Certain this meant I wasn’t talented enough to succeed in physics, I left the rough draft of my senior thesis outside my adviser’s door and slunk away in shame. Pained by the dream I had failed to achieve, I locked my textbooks, lab reports and problem sets in my father’s army footlocker and turned my back on physics and math forever.

Not until 2005, when Lawrence Summers, then president of Harvard, wondered aloud at a lunchtime talk why more women don’t end up holding tenured positions in the hard sciences, did I feel compelled to reopen that footlocker. I have known Summers since my teens, when he judged my high-school debate team, and he has always struck me as an admirer of smart women. When he suggested — among several other pertinent reasons — that innate disparities in scientific and mathematical aptitude at the very highest end of the spectrum might account for the paucity of tenured female faculty, I got the sense that he had asked the question because he genuinely cared about the answer. I was taken aback by his suggestion that the problem might have something to do with biological inequalities between the sexes, but as I read the heated responses to his comments, I realized that even I wasn’t sure why so many women were still giving up on physics and math before completing advanced degrees. I decided to look up my former classmates and professors, review the research on women’s performance in STEM fields and return to Yale to see what, if anything, had changed since I studied there. I wanted to understand why I had walked away from my dream, and why so many other women still walk away from theirs.

Eileen Pollack is a professor of creative writing at the University of Michigan and author of “Breaking and Entering” and “In the Mouth.” She is at work on a book about women in the sciences.

Editor: Joel Lovell

The Media Equation: TV Foresees Its Future. Netflix Is There.

But Netflix already has.

Netflix knows a little about transformation. It’s worth remembering that it managed to go from the largest user of the Postal Service to the largest source of download traffic on the Web in the span of months, not years. After a big stumble on pricing in 2011, Netflix recovered and then some, using its expertise in technology and algorithms to accrue over 36 million users worldwide, a number that will probably grow when it announces its earnings on Monday. Its stock has already risen more than 200 percent in the last year.

But few would have guessed that Netflix’s software expertise would extend to entertainment produced by top-flight actors, directors and writers. Beginning this year, Netflix streamed four original series — “House of Cards,” “Hemlock Grove,” “Arrested Development” and “Orange Is the New Black.” The shows earned generally good notices, kicked up a great deal of chatter, and, drum roll here, were nominated for 14 Emmys. It was the first time an Internet-only service earned a seat at the big-boy table in television.

The Emmys were the most prominent marker of change, but hardly the only one, in a week full of headlines about what TV is becoming. It’s not their first foray, but if Apple and Google move further into the television space, they are sure to collide with not only traditional players, but Netflix, Amazon, Sony and Intel. And Aereo, which so far is a small but persistent player backed by Barry Diller, won another court victory for its plan to totally upend broadcast networks, by streaming their content without compensating them.

Meanwhile, what were the traditional television players up to? Squabbling yet again over retransmission fees, with a standoff between CBS and Time Warner Cable that could set off a blackout, driving audiences to other ways of viewing. The only constant was steady price hikes on cable bills.

The future of television — a place where cable is not the only answer for average viewers — just drew a little closer.

Netflix has earned its place in that future. It won some victories on the programming side by financing creators and staying out of their hair, an approach invented and perfected by HBO. Given that HBO pulled in 108 Emmy nominations last week, Netflix has a long way to go. But David Bianculli, a professor at Rowan University in New Jersey who blogs at TV Worth Watching, suggests another view.

“It took HBO 25 years to get its first Emmy nomination; it took Netflix six months,” he said. In that sense, Netflix is more like Pixar than Hulu, showing that a Silicon Valley company could produce creative, successful programming.

Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, told The New York Times last week that the Emmy nominations solidified the idea that “television is television, no matter what pipe brings it to the screen.”

He’s right. Television used to come over the air or through the coaxial cable. Now it seems to come from everywhere on all kinds of devices.

Both Google and Apple continue to hover around the honey pot of television. Apple’s rumored effort at making a TV set has been like Godot — much anticipated, never arriving — but in the meantime it is in talks with distributors like Time Warner Cable and programmers like Walt Disney to explore collaboration on apps.

Google has been in talks with program providers, including cable channels, about distribution over the Internet, a more complicated approach — the cable systems that distribute programming would be left out of the mix — with a higher risk in execution.

In both instances, the companies are taking the same wine and putting it in a new bottle, creating a new interface to replace clunky remotes while hoping to gain a lot of valuable data in the process. Figuring out how to put a new skin on the same database can be lucrative — Weather.com, a huge business, is built on existing government data — but it’s one thing to present better navigation, and another to produce better television.

Apple reinvented the music industry on its terms and in doing so cut the legacy music business in half. The TV business, which is still sitting on healthy earnings, if not ratings, saw that movie already and wants no part of it.

But Apple is nothing if not relentless. One of its reported approaches is to enable ad-skipping while making a payment to ad-supported networks. “In essence they were saying that they would cut them a check while destroying their business model,” said Craig Moffett, a telecommunications analyst. “How long do you think that conversation lasted?”

Meanwhile Google is selling its ability to make content more visible and searchable; that sounds like the favor Google did for the newspaper business, which, like music, is half the size it once was.

E-mail:carr@nytimes.com;

Twitter: @carr2n

Titanic: Was There Room for Jack on That Raft?

In the final moments of James Cameron's Titanic, we watched in despair as Leonardo DiCaprio's Jack Dawson froze to death as he clung to a makeshift raft solely boarded by his selfish gal pal Rose (played by Kate Winslet). But one can't help but wonder, was there really not enough room for two?

A few weeks ago, IGN asked Cameron this exact same question, to which he replied, "Actually, it's not a question of room, it's a question of buoyancy. When Jack puts Rose on the raft, then he tries to get on the raft. He's not an idiot, he doesn't want to die. And the raft sinks and kind of flips. So it's clear that there's only enough buoyancy available for one person. So he makes a decision to let her be that person instead of taking them both down."

However, MythBusters has recently provided evidence to the contrary. In a recent episode, hosts Adam and Jamie tested a number of different ways in which Jack could have survived. As it turns out, a bit of finagling with the life jacket could have saved our hapless hero's life.

State of the Art: Nook and Kindle E-Readers Let There Be More Light - Review

When you’re a tech critic, though, the state of the art changes monthly, if not hourly. You toil over writing a masterpiece, and it winds up having the shelf life of milk.

It could be worse. Instead of writing about gadgets, you could be stuck with an even worse treadmill job: making them.

Pity, for example, the poor slobs at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, locked in an endless battle for e-reader supremacy. They play an annual game of leapfrog that would exhaust frogs.

“I see your new color tablet,” says Barnes & Noble’s Nook team, “and I raise you one higher-resolution screen!”

“Oh, yeah?” says Amazon’s Kindle team. “Well, you know the Nook with a self-illuminated screen that you introduced in April? We have one with a better backlight. Take that!”

That’s a real example. There are two kinds of e-book gadgets. There are those with E Ink screens (cheap, light, thin, no color, long battery life, great to read in bright sunlight, useless in the dark). And there are those with color screens (heavier, thicker, pricier, great to read in low light, tough to read in sunlight).

People who opt for E Ink rave about the “printed” look of the black text on a light gray “page.” They can also be found spending $60 on a case that contains a tiny flip-up flashlight — or just carrying one around on a keychain — so that they can read in bed or in other darkish situations. E Ink is so much like paper, it doesn’t light up on its own.

In April, Barnes & Noble changed the game: it offered an E Ink e-reader whose background lights up with a soft glow, like a digital watch. With the introduction of that model — the efficiently named Barnes & Noble Nook Simple Touch with GlowLight — the company hacked off one enormous item on the list of E Ink drawbacks. Not only is reading in bed practical, it’s actually superior to reading an actual book, since the gentle glowing screen is nowhere near bright enough to keep a sleeping partner awake.

Your move, Kindle.

Amazon’s response to the B&NNSTGL (now $120) is the new Kindle Paperwhite (same price). The headline here is that the Paperwhite’s lighting is better than the Nook’s.

At top brightness, it’s much brighter. More usefully, its lighting is far more even than the Nook’s, whose edge-mounted lamps can create subtle “hot spots” at the top and bottom of the page, sometimes spilling out from there. How much unevenness depends on how high you’ve turned up the light. But in the hot spots, the black letters of the text show less contrast.

The Kindle Paperwhite has hot spots, too, but only at the bottom edge, where the four low-power LED bulbs sit. (Amazon says that from there, the light is pumped out across the screen through a flattened fiber optic cable.) In the middle of the page, where the text is, the lighting is perfectly even: no low-contrast text areas.

The Kindle’s screen also packs in 212 tiny dots an inch, compared with the Nook’s 167, for visibly sharper text.

Both models have touch screens, which is a real joy; you can tap lightly to turn the page or bring up a panel that controls type size, font choice, margins and line spacing. But on the Kindle’s screen, you can use two fingers. That’s primarily useful when you want to adjust the type size (most of us will, in fact, be over 40 at some point); you can just spread two fingers apart, as on an iPad, without having to open some settings screen.

When viewed side-by-side with the Nook GlowLight, the Paperwhite is much more comfortable to read. You could argue that that’s an important factor in a reading tablet.

The Kindle Paperwhite and Nook are about the same height (4.6 inches), but the Kindle is 0.4 inch narrower and slightly thinner. Thin is great — you can cradle the entire thing in one hand; on the other hand, the Nook’s soft-touch back panel has a gentle sculptured ridge that makes one-handed holding comfortable and secure.

All right, the Paperwhite has superior lighting and sharpness. The Nook, however, has some persuasive counterarguments of its own — starting with the value.

App Smart: Apps That Recall a Time Before There Were Apps

Now, an app on your smartphone or tablet is that time machine.

Today we’re all playing casual phone games or epics like Skyrim. But if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember the era of home computer games fondly.

Commodore 64 fans will spot the $5 Commodore 64 app in the iTunes App Store with glee, because it even gives you a chance to type in Basic programs. It has a few reproductions of classic games, and more are available as an in-app purchase. The free Android app Frodo C64 is a little simpler, but it requires you to find the original source code for games elsewhere online.

If you were a fan of the ZX Spectrum computer, you’ll love the $9 iPad app 100 Greatest Hits. It has classic 1980s-era 8-bit games from Elite, with more available via an in-app purchase. Everything is emulated nicely, including some of the quirky sound and graphics of the Spectrum. Marvin on Android is a similar free app that goes even further because it emulates the Spectrum’s interface — though again you have to find your own game files.

Atari game fans can download the free Atari’s Greatest Hits app for iOS. This official app contains the classic arcade game Missile Command direct from Atari’s own files and 100 more games via in-app purchase.

Instagram’s retro photo filters are well known. But there are other apps that do the same trick for the higher-resolution photos stored in your phone. For a great app to add a dash of yesteryear’s sepia to photos, try Photo Editor by Aviary, free on iOS and Android. It’s a powerful app, but simple to use. If you spend $1 on its in-app nostalgia pack you can apply some classic effects (and defects) to your photos, even layering them on top of one another.

For a different type of retro effect, I love the $1 iOS app 1-Bit Camera. This generates black-and-white pixilated images like those from the early days of the Macintosh computer. For an even more geeky imaging effect, check out Image to ASCII Lite, free on iOS, or AsciiArt Booth, free on Android. Both are simple apps that turn photos into an array of letters that, from afar, look like the original image.

If you’re nostalgic for vintage films then 8mm Vintage Camera — a very successful $2 iOS app — will be right up your street, thanks to its easy-to-use interface and the great blurry clips it generates. I love its comedic effect when I record my children’s antics on video.

The free Android app Videocam Illusion may actually be a more powerful app because it lets you add different layers of effects, including the 8mm effect. But I found that it was a bit more complex to operate, and the maker warns that some effects will really challenge the processor in less-powerful Android devices.

The app VinylLove, $1 on iOS, tries to bring back some of the old magic of vinyl records. The app’s interface is designed to let you search through your MP3s as if they were stored in a record crate. It places an emphasis on playing and listening to albums in track order, which is a fast-disappearing habit. It’s fun, and if you’re a vinyl fan you may appreciate its visual aesthetic. The static noise effect of dusty records is also rather endearing.

For a different nostalgic sound try out Nostalgic Phone Ringtones, free on Android, which will let your 21st-century smartphone ring with some distinctly 20th-century sounds. (The ads are a bit irritating, but you won’t spend much time in this app.)

To capture the dulcet tones of the Stylophone, and bring back memories of Kraftwerk’s music, check out the $3 Synthophone iOS app. It recreates the look and sounds of that old electronic pocket instrument. For an even older electronic sound try the free Accelerophone app on Windows Phone. It’s not hands-free like a theremin, but it uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope so waving it about is fun.

Enjoy your trip down memory lane!

Quick Calls

New on the iTunes App Store is the $2 app Eisenhower. It’s a “getting things done” app that uses a novel system for organizing your tasks — the Eisenhower matrix. This helps you by timing you during priority events. ... The social Q. and A. Web site Quora — always handy when looking for an informed answer to a question — is releasing its free Android app this week. It comes with neat features like voice search using Android’s built-in system, and it will let you pin some of its content to a widget on your home screen.

App Smart: Apps That Recall a Time Before There Were Apps

Now, an app on your smartphone or tablet is that time machine.

Today we’re all playing casual phone games or epics like Skyrim. But if you’re of a certain age you’ll remember the era of home computer games fondly.

Commodore 64 fans will spot the $5 Commodore 64 app in the iTunes App Store with glee, because it even gives you a chance to type in Basic programs. It has a few reproductions of classic games, and more are available as an in-app purchase. The free Android app Frodo C64 is a little simpler, but it requires you to find the original source code for games elsewhere online.

If you were a fan of the ZX Spectrum computer, you’ll love the $9 iPad app 100 Greatest Hits. It has classic 1980s-era 8-bit games from Elite, with more available via an in-app purchase. Everything is emulated nicely, including some of the quirky sound and graphics of the Spectrum. Marvin on Android is a similar free app that goes even further because it emulates the Spectrum’s interface — though again you have to find your own game files.

Atari game fans can download the free Atari’s Greatest Hits app for iOS. This official app contains the classic arcade game Missile Command direct from Atari’s own files and 100 more games via in-app purchase.

Instagram’s retro photo filters are well known. But there are other apps that do the same trick for the higher-resolution photos stored in your phone. For a great app to add a dash of yesteryear’s sepia to photos, try Photo Editor by Aviary, free on iOS and Android. It’s a powerful app, but simple to use. If you spend $1 on its in-app nostalgia pack you can apply some classic effects (and defects) to your photos, even layering them on top of one another.

For a different type of retro effect, I love the $1 iOS app 1-Bit Camera. This generates black-and-white pixilated images like those from the early days of the Macintosh computer. For an even more geeky imaging effect, check out Image to ASCII Lite, free on iOS, or AsciiArt Booth, free on Android. Both are simple apps that turn photos into an array of letters that, from afar, look like the original image.

If you’re nostalgic for vintage films then 8mm Vintage Camera — a very successful $2 iOS app — will be right up your street, thanks to its easy-to-use interface and the great blurry clips it generates. I love its comedic effect when I record my children’s antics on video.

The free Android app Videocam Illusion may actually be a more powerful app because it lets you add different layers of effects, including the 8mm effect. But I found that it was a bit more complex to operate, and the maker warns that some effects will really challenge the processor in less-powerful Android devices.

The app VinylLove, $1 on iOS, tries to bring back some of the old magic of vinyl records. The app’s interface is designed to let you search through your MP3s as if they were stored in a record crate. It places an emphasis on playing and listening to albums in track order, which is a fast-disappearing habit. It’s fun, and if you’re a vinyl fan you may appreciate its visual aesthetic. The static noise effect of dusty records is also rather endearing.

For a different nostalgic sound try out Nostalgic Phone Ringtones, free on Android, which will let your 21st-century smartphone ring with some distinctly 20th-century sounds. (The ads are a bit irritating, but you won’t spend much time in this app.)

To capture the dulcet tones of the Stylophone, and bring back memories of Kraftwerk’s music, check out the $3 Synthophone iOS app. It recreates the look and sounds of that old electronic pocket instrument. For an even older electronic sound try the free Accelerophone app on Windows Phone. It’s not hands-free like a theremin, but it uses your phone’s accelerometer and gyroscope so waving it about is fun.

Enjoy your trip down memory lane!

Quick Calls

New on the iTunes App Store is the $2 app Eisenhower. It’s a “getting things done” app that uses a novel system for organizing your tasks — the Eisenhower matrix. This helps you by timing you during priority events. ... The social Q. and A. Web site Quora — always handy when looking for an informed answer to a question — is releasing its free Android app this week. It comes with neat features like voice search using Android’s built-in system, and it will let you pin some of its content to a widget on your home screen.