Apple’s engineers were faced with a big challange when developing the original iPhone since they had to work almost “blindfolded” on the software that was to revolutionise smart phones. Here is what one of the developers recollects of the ongoing work at the time: “There was the UI that you got if you were knighted by Steve to see these glorious pixels cause they’ll blow your eyes out. And then there was this other UI that we called Skankphone for testing. It was this awful UI that allowed you to make phone calls and text, but it was these hideous red buttons and boxes.”

Two teams of developers at Apple worked completely independently of each other. One team worked with the real user interface using clunky hardware, while the other team worked with real hardware using clunky software.

This led to extreme situations from time to time. On occasions, when the two teams of engineers had to work together, they sat down side by side, but they were separated by a curtain in between while doing the coding.