Hey look! Here's an iPhone ad from, uh, 1996!!

When Moshe Maeir of The Flat Planet Phone commented on my post entitled, EXCLUSIVE: 1995 Newsgroup posting proposing VoIP predates Verizon, Sprint patents, he threw in something that I am going to highlight here.

Apparently, Moshe dug up, scanned and posted a 1996 advert for an "iPhone." This ad is from some outfit called the Tranbon Electronic Industrial Co.

"The ad was in the Sep 96 edition of Asian Computer Sources," Mishe writes. "So it seems from this and the fact that Vocaltec, Jeff Pulver and others all used the term iPhone back in 1995-6, that we are talking about a generic term and not a trademark!

Moshe adds: (if you look in the ad - you can see twice the term iphone in red).