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The launch of the original iPad on January 27, 2010 saw pundits guaranteeing its failure, some Apple fans disappointed, and Steve Jobs turning out to be right. Again.

Steve Jobs unveils the original iPad

In the last few months before the much, much anticipated iPad was launched on January 27, 2010, competitors had been talking up their own tablets. Then suddenly it was rumored that Apple's one was going to be called the iSlate and competitors such as Microsoft were calling everything they could 'slate PCs.'

Three days before the iPad was announced, Microsoft's then-CEO Steve Ballmer even unveiled three such slate PCs. He did so in his typical hesitant, clunky style and launched a video that was over practically before he'd introduced it. 

Given that and the way he belabored that all the slate PCs he showed were prototypes, it all felt a little desperate. Apple was coming, it seemed to say, and rivals were afraid.

Microsoft, for one, should really have been feeling chagrin. As far back as 1996, its founder Bill Gates wrote in his book The Road Ahead that "in the future lots of people will be taking handwritten notes on computer tablets rather than paper."

True, by then we'd already seen the Apple Newton so Gates's book wasn't as visionary as it seemed to think. However, Microsoft had done more than talk about tablets, it had released Microsoft Windows for Pen Computing in 1992. Then by the early 2000s, companies were making Pocket PCs. 

Microsoft had tablets long before Apple. Many, many companies had tablets. It was just that nobody was buying them. 

So this is where we were in early 2010. The entire computing industry was waiting for an Apple tablet, the world's press was going to cover its launch. And then, as now, Apple didn't say a word about what was coming.

The earliest official indication of something, anything, happening came on January 18, 2010, when Apple issued a press invitation to the launch. It was less cryptic than usual as it blatantly said: "Come see our latest creation."