Technology History | Javits Center — The Marketing Chief Jumped Off a Ledge to Prove There Was No Wire

The demonstration that sold wireless networking to ordinary buyers was a man falling through the air holding a laptop.

On 21 July 1999, at the Macworld Expo keynote in this building, Apple's marketing vice president Phil Schiller jumped from a ledge above the stage while a file kept transferring from the iBook in his arms.

Steve Jobs, still calling himself interim chief executive, had introduced the machine minutes earlier.

It was a rubber-edged clamshell in Blueberry and Tangerine, with a 300 MHz PowerPC G3, a 12.1-inch screen, six hours of battery and a handle, at $1,599.

Apple said it would go on sale in September, and it did, two months after this room saw it.

The wireless half of the morning was the part that lasted.

AirPort put two antennas inside the iBook's screen bezel and a $99 card in a slot under the keyboard, talking to a $299 base station shaped like a small flying saucer.

Both ran IEEE 802.11b at 11 megabits per second, and Apple said up to ten iBooks could share a single base station.

The press release that morning called the iBook the first computer designed for wireless networking from the start, and that qualifier carries the whole claim.

Wireless LAN cards for laptops already existed as add-on PC Cards, slower and sold to offices rather than households, and the AirPort card itself was Lucent hardware in an Apple housing.

Lucent put out its own release the same day.

What Apple changed was the price and the fact that a buyer no longer had to think about any of it.

The keynote had opened with the actor Noah Wyle walking on in character as Jobs, whom he had played in a television film about Apple and Microsoft.

Jobs then came out and took the stage back.

Macworld spent six summers at the Javits Center, from 1998 to 2003, before the New York show was wound up.

The building is still the city's main convention hall, a black space-frame slab running north from 34th Street along Eleventh Avenue.

A visitor cannot see the keynote hall as it was, because the halls are reconfigured for whatever show is in.

The entrance Jobs walked through still faces the same avenue.

Cover: the Javits Center seen from Eleventh Avenue.

Photo: Carlossuarezgonzalez, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.