9 January 2007 · San Francisco

The device that only worked along one exact route on stage

Jobs demonstrated a phone that did not yet exist as a finished product. The engineers in the hall were drinking whisky, because they knew that doing things in the wrong order would freeze it on screen.

There were few prototypes and none worked reliably. Memory ran out, calls dropped, apps crashed. The engineers worked out a sequence of actions the phone could survive to the end of the demo and called it the “golden path”: send mail, then go online, then make a call — and only in that order.

There was no signal either: a portable tower was installed in the hall, and the display was hard-coded to show five bars regardless of real reception. Several units lay backstage to replace whichever died.

Jobs got through all of it without a single failure, and nobody in the hall suspected a thing. The clock on screen read 9:42 in the morning.

The chart of that minute

The Sun is in the eleventh house. The eleventh is communities, networks, the thing that belongs to many at once. The Moon is in the seventh, the house of whoever is opposite you: the hall, the audience, the other side of the conversation.

And separately — the Moon stood at 29°43′ Virgo. Seventeen arcminutes remained before it left the sign, about half an hour of travel. A little longer and the event chart would have been a different one. There is no better illustration of the rule about degrees: same day, different chart.

How this reads

The Two of Wands is a person standing with a map of the world in hand who has not set out yet. Not the result but the moment before it: the decision is made, the scale is already visible, and there is more work ahead than behind. The phone shown that day did not go on sale for another five months.

The card came from the same code the app runs. The numbers can be checked.

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