The iPad was announced on January 27th, 2010, with pre-orders starting on March 12, 2010. The official release was April 3, 2010, when Apple began shipping the Wi-Fi only model. The iPad 3G model followed on April 30, 2010. While the original iPad was only available through Apple stores or Apple's website, it still managed to sell 300,000 units on the first day. The iPad exceeded one million in sales on April 30th, 28 days after originally going on sale.

By way of comparison, the iPhone took 74 days to reach one million units sold.

But where did it begin?

The History of the iPad: Pre-iPad

Apple was playing around with the idea of a tablet as far back as 1979, when they released the Apple Graphics Tablet as an accessory to the Apple II. This original tablet was designed as an aid for creating graphics, allowing the artist to draw on a canvas. And before Apple, we can go back as far as 1888, when Elisha Gray patented the "telautograph", though Gray's invention of sending handwriting over long distances is more of a precursor to the fax machine than the tablet.

Apple's involvement picked up steam in 1993 with the release of the Newton Message Pad. This was during the non-Steve Jobs era of Apple, Jobs having been forced out of Apple in 1985. In 1996, Apple bought Steve Jobs' startup NeXT, bringing Jobs back into the Apple fold in an informal capacity. Job resumed leadership of operations at Apple in 1997, when CEO Gil Amelio was let go by the Apple Board of directors.

Jobs replaced Amelio as interim CEO and the Newton line was ultimately discontinued in 1998.

The discontinuation of the Newton led to the endless speculation that Apple would release a PDA or tablet. But while it is easy to point at the Apple Graphics Tablet or the Newton as the start of the iPad, the real beginning may very well have been the iPod.

The first line of iPods was released on November 10, 2001 and would quickly transform how we buy, store and listen to music. The iTunes music store opened on April 28, 2003, allowing iPod owners to buy music online and download it to their device. The iPod quickly became the most popular music player and helped drag the music industry into the digital age.

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone. In many ways, the iPhone is a simple idea to digest. People love iPods, and people were falling in love with a new breed of smartphone, so the marriage of both was a natural fit. But the iPhone wasn't just a combination of the iPod and the smartphone, in true Apple fashion, it was leaps and bounds above the current smartphones. The iPhone operating system later became known as 'iOS', the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.

The last piece of the iPad puzzle was released on July 11, 2008. The App Store. The iPhone 3G introduced the world to the idea of buying smartphone apps from a centralized digital store. And the release of a free software development kit (SDK) combined with a powerful operating system armed with great graphics caused an explosion of apps, giving Apple a huge lead in the area of software.

The release of the iPod Touch on September 14, 2007 and the second-generation iPhone in 2008 caused an uptick in rumors about an Apple tablet based on the same operating system. By the time Apple released the iPhone 3GS, these rumors had really picked up steam. And when Apple was preparing to announce the iPad in January of 2010, one of the biggest question marks surrounding the tablet wasn't "if" it was going to be released, but "when" and what it would be called, with both "iTablet" and "iSlate" competing with "iPad" as a potential name.

A History of iOS

The iPad Is Released

The biggest "Wow!" moment of the iPad announcement wasn't the unveiling of the iPad itself, though it certainly excited the crowd, or taking the wrapping off iBooks, which was a hot rumor leading up to the event. Trumping both of these high moments was the price tag. Since Steve Jobs second stint with the company, Apple has become synonymous with quality. And with their Mac line of PCs and laptops, they've also become synonymous with high price tags to go along with that quality. While $499 is now considered standard for a powerful 10-inch tablet, and we've seen prices as low as $199 and lower for 7-inch tablets, the idea of a 9.7-inch iPad at $499 was quite a surprise at the time.

Tim Cook, then serving as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Operations, was the architect behind Apple's highly-optimized supply chain. It was this supply chain and distribution network that enabled the iPad to debut with such a low price tag and still turn a profit for Apple. The low entry price also put pressure on other manufacturers to match the price, a task difficult to accomplish and still match the tablet's hardware and features.

The iPad also introduced iOS 3.2. In addition to adding support for the larger screen and higher resolution, this version of the "iPhone OS" (as it was still called) added skeuomorphism, a user interface scheme whereby apps take on the look and feel of physical objects, such as the wooden shelves in iBooks.

Apple wasn't the only company with big news. Netflix announced an app aimed at streaming content from their Watch Instantly queue the day before the iPad's actual release, a capability that didn't become available for the iPhone until later that year and wasn't available on the Android platform until over a year after the iPad was released. Netflix's support of the iPad was a demonstration that the industry wouldn't just port apps to the iPad, but would design them specifically for the larger device, another asset that has helped the iPad remain on top.

One November 22, 2010, Apple released iOS 4.2.1, which added key features to the iPad that had been introduced on the iPhone earlier that summer. Among these features was limited multitasking, which allowed music to be played in the background while using another app among other tasks, and the ability to create folders.

Released in April, the iPad sold 15 million units in 2010. At the end of 2010, the App Store had 350,000 apps, with over 65,000 designed with the iPad in mind.

--- Part 2: The Second and Third Generation iPads --->