We almost had a smartphone in the 90s. Why did it fail?

This message comes from Capella University. That spark you feel, that's your drive for more. Capella University's FlexPath learning format lets you earn your degree at your pace without putting life on pause. Learn more at capella.edu. This is Planet Money from NPR. Okay. How many times have you sat and thought about how much more you could accomplish if you had more, more time, more money, more resources. Like how good your project could be if you had just one more day. Or a bigger budget or more help. Well, this is the story of a company that did have all of that, and they were making something amazing, something most of us touch every day, a smartphone. But, and this is the part that is bonkers, this was happening nearly two decades before the iPhone came out. Before the Internet, before Wi Fi, before mobile data, before cell phones even. Tony Fadell was employee number 29 at that company. Before even email really existed for people, before anything like Amazon or e tailing existed, before downloadable games or downloadable music existed, all of that stuff. We were creating all the technology that would later become what the iPhone was. Nowadays, Tony is a businessman. He's always been a computer geek. His words, not ours. I was making fake IDs on a Mac in high school because he had a laser printer. And a laser printer was like, oh my god. I could replicate things in the world. So I was making fake IDs on a laser printer. He must have been very popular. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I made a lot of money too. Tony was brought up in the seventies and eighties to build things. I was fixing things. I was changing electrical sockets. You're describing yourself as kind of being like a shop class kind of kid. Yeah. My grandfather taught shop class. Oh, seriously? A shop class kid. Okay. He always had the mantra, if a human made it, a human can fix it and build other things too. Tony's favorite thing to tinker with was computers. It was your own world. You could make anything you wanted. And around the time Tony was in high school, mid eighties, computer geeks actually started to become cool. In Rolling Stone, there was a huge article by Stephen Levy about the original Mac team. And I was like, oh my god. There's computer guys like me, guys and gals like me, building this thing that I love, the Macintosh, and they're in a rock and roll magazine. I'm like, superstars. He's 15, and he became obsessed with these computer engineers. Oh, I could be like that. So they were my heroes. And so I would just track them obsessively. Yes. Stalking, you could say. Tony went to college, launched a few startups, and he kept reading tech magazines. And then one day, he saw something buried in the gossipy type pages in the back of one of those …