If it wasn't for the T-Mobile Sidekick, Microsoft probably wouldn't have had to buy Nokia.

Here's the story:

I worked on the infrastructre for the predecessor to Android, the Danger Hiptop, AKA "The T-Mobile Sidekick." (This is my real name, you can see when I worked on it on LinkedIn.)

The "Danger Device" as everyone called it, had cloud storage and a full web browser before Android and before iPhone.

In fact, the first Android basically looks like the successor to the T-Mobile sidekick, because many of the people that worked on Android, including the founder, were from Danger.

*Here's the funny part:*

This is hearsay, so please do not sue me Microsoft. I once saw an article online that confirmed the following story, but the article is long gone (this was more than 20 years ago.)

Again: Don't sue me Microsoft. I am telling a story here, that I heard through the grapevine:

*Microsoft blew up the entire "Sidekick" project.*

But they didn't blow it up intentionally. Basically, Danger ran on Sun Solaris, and when Microsoft bought them, a great deal of the infrastructure was trucked over to Microsoft. As I understand it, nothing was ported, they basically just plugged the gear in.

At some point, the backups failed.

Keep in mind: ALL THE USERS DATA WAS IN THE CLOUD. Nobody was doing this at the time, not Android, not Apple. Just Danger - and then Microsoft.

While restoring from backups, someone was feeling the heat for the mobile devices being down for so long. It takes a long time to do a restore.

One thing led to another, a decision was made... and they lost all the data.

*poof*

Gone forever.

The death of the Sidekick has been documented in various articles, but there was only ONE that got the story correct, and it was nuked over a decade ago. Here's one of the (partially correct) details: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/sidekick-disaster-shows-data...

I've got a story about the first big celebrity hack too, that was the Sidekick also. (And likely was possible because of the Sidekick's cloud storage.)

I found a PDF that confirms the story I heard, and also has information I wasn't aware of until today:

https://availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0411/sidekick...

Details are on page 3.

* The Sidekick servers were moved to Microsoft, and I believe they were moved from where I last saw them, which was at T-Mobile's data center in Washington.

* There weren't a heck of a lot of Solaris experts at Microsoft at that time.

* According to the PDF above, someone had posted a job ad for a database administrator for the project, two months before the database blew up.

So if we connect the dots (this is speculation Microsoft, don't sue me):

It seems possible that the database for the Sidekick service was the responsibility of someone at T-Mobile or Danger, until Microsoft acquired Danger. My hunch is that it was probably TMo, because the founder of Danger left to go start Android in 2003. By the time Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, a lot of the original Danger folks were working on Android.

It sure seems like the outage was most likely caused by an inexperienced DBA taking responsibility for a database that had been the responsibility of the same DBA (at Danger, or more likely, TMo) for over half a decade.

And that ONE database outage probably changed the entire course of mobile phone history. IMHO, Microsoft wouldn't have purchased Nokia in 2014 if Danger hadn't blown up in 2008. And Danger was way ahead of the iPhone and Android in 2005.

In some alternate universe, there is no Android, there is just Microsoft Sidekick and Apple iPhone.

Wasn't the Sidekick the phone in the Paris Hilton hack? Man, that was a long time ago.