Eight years before the iPhone, people could already read email and news on a cell phone, through a browser from a company most of them never heard of. Phone.com wrote the UP.Browser, a tiny program that fit inside basic handsets with a few lines of text on screen. Carriers ran its UP.Link servers to feed those phones. When the Redwood City company went public in June 1999, the mobile web was a few lines of monochrome text.

From Pen Computers to Phones

Alain Rossmann had run EO Corporation, which made an early pen-based handheld computer. In December 1994 he started the company that became Unwired Planet, renamed Phone.com in April 1999. His bet was that the cheap phone in everyone's pocket would beat any special device for getting online. To make that happen, Unwired Planet formed the WAP Forum with Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia, and much of the WAP standard was based on its technology.

Openwave and After

Phone.com priced its IPO at $16 a share on June 10, 1999, and traded on Nasdaq as PHCM. It became one of the hottest stocks of the boom as investors bet on the wireless internet. In 2000 it merged with Software.com to form Openwave Systems. Smartphones later made its products obsolete. Openwave sold its product lines in 2012 and became Unwired Planet, a patent licensing company, and later Great Elm Capital Group.

Cover: Savoy Pigeons, James McNeill Whistler. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for pigeons (messages carried through the air).