If you have time, energy and some technical knowledge, you can rediscover iPhone OS 1.0. A Dutch developer has indeed managed to run the ancestor of the current iPhone operating system. In a long technical talk, Martijn de Vos explains how he managed to run the software on a Mac, in a virtual machine.
The source code of the OS being closed, the engineer explains that he used a good dose of reverse engineering to achieve this feat. To simplify the task, Martijn de Vos decided to tackle the version of iOS planned for the first models of iPod touch: emulating certain components of the iPhone in order to run the OS properly proved even more complex than relying on the version intended for digital music players from Apple. The first versions of the OS also embed far fewer security mechanisms, it was easier to attack the project from that end.
The difficulty of emulating a closed system
“It is the first emulated Apple product that is not only open source but also comes with full interface and multitouch system support“, explains a first blog post published in October 2022. To achieve his ends, Martijn de Vos used OpeniBoot, an open source replica of the boot booter for iPhone OS. The tool, which is no longer developed for some time, “was essential to understanding the workings and logic of iBoot.“
“The hardest part of this project was emulating the many hardware components included in the iPod touch. The characteristics of most of these components […] are proprietary and undocumented, which sometimes makes it quite difficult to emulate them correctly“, explains Martijn de Vos. The system is still functional and completely usable via keyboard and mouse. If you want to dive back into the history of modern computing, a step-by-step tutorial is available.