According to just about every publication under the Sun, and possibly a few publications outside of the solar system, today is the day that Verizon Wireless will announce the availability of the iPhone on its wonderful network. (Well, it’s a wonderful network until everybody and his mother are trying to tether gigs of data using the iPhone!) It was decided that, since this is such a momentous day in the annals of human history—a communication device that’s been available for nearly four years now available in a slightly different format—we’d look back on what else happened on this day, January 11, in history. Join us.
Note that the following is based on the January 11 entry on Wikipedia. We may be old, but we’re not old enough to remember Matt’s home state of Michigan being made a territory!
Also, all dates are AD (or CE, depending on what nomenclature you want to use)
• 630 Muhammad conquered Mecca, what was to become one of the two holiest cities in all of Islam. If he had a VZW iPhone he wouldn’t be able to call his family celebrating his triumph and still receive e-mail at the same time, such is the limitation of CDMA.
• 1569 The very first lottery was held in England. Today we’re all winners, lol!
• 1805 As mentioned earlier, the Michigan Territory was created. Some 200 years later Matt Burns would be sitting at his computer screen reading John Biggs’ liveblog!
• 1935 Amelia Earhart becomes the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California. Is there an App for that?
• 1949 The very first case of recorded snowfall occurs in Los Angeles. Too bad there was no Twitter for iPhone back then!
So as you can tell, today’s announcement actually ranks fairly highly in terms of “big” things that happened on January 11.