Scott Forstall speaks about the iPhone at the Computer History Museum

Scott Forstall, the leader of the software development team for the original iPhone and many iOS version afterwards, made his first public appearance in 5 years to talk about the iPhone’s origins. In an event organized by the Computer History Museum with the original iPhone innovators, there were a lot of interesting revelations shared by people who created one of the most popular and revolutionary products of all time. There was a lot to learn about Steve Jobs as well from these people.

The event started off with Hugo Fiennes, Nitin Ganatra and Scott Herz, former Apple employees who worked on the iPhone. They shared their own interesting stories of their time working on the iPhone.

Forstall’s interview started in the second half of the video. The discussion began with his love for theater and he shared how he got the chance to produce Fun Home, a Broadway musical. Fun Home went on to be nominated for 12 Tony awards and won 5 of the including best musical, best book of a musical and best original score. Scott Forstall also drew parallels between startups and doing theater: working with creatives, putting in your money, effort and life in it and displaying it to the public, hoping for success.

A surprising thing that I did not know about Forstall was that he interned at Microsoft and could have become a permanent employee there but he ended up at NeXT. His interview experience was with Steve Jobs at NeXT and they immediately hit it off.

Scott also shared the origins of his fondness of programming and computers, the classes he took in university, his love for design and more.

On his relationship with Steve Jobs, he shared anecdotes about how Steve saved his life when he had fallen sick. There is also a funny story of Steve Jobs ‘scamming’ Apple.

Check out the video of the complete event below. It’s almost 2 hours long but worth the time. Grab some popcorn!