The iPhone is now 18 years old, and it’s easy to forget life before it. I used mobile phones before iPhone, and the difference was night and day.

Over the years, we’ve heard a lot about how competitors put their heads in the sand when the iPhone was first announced. My favorite is the story about Blackberry not believing it was true, that Jobs had somehow faked everybody out with non-existent technology.

However, in a recent data release by Nokia, it’s clear that they took it seriously. Nokia immediately started shifting direction with its products in development, recognizing the value of the multi-touch user interface. People now say that the iPhone innovation was inevitable and that if Apple hadn’t done it, somebody else would have devised a smart phone with a flat slate of glass. But looking at contemporaneous documents, it sure doesn’t seem like it. (via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball.)