Munich gave the world lederhosen, pretzels, and the BMW. But it also gave us the BlackBerry. And for that, your aching thumbs should probably send a silent thank you to Bavaria.

Here was a device designed for efficiency and getting things done . Yet, it was launched in a city famous for two things: Gemütlichkeit (the deliberate state of relaxation) and Oktoberfest .

The press release, dated August 30, 1999, is a charming fossil of the era. It touted the device as a "wireless handheld that offers easy access to corporate data." The killer feature? Two-way paging.

RIM knew their device—running on the Mobitex network—needed a sophisticated, dense, tech-hungry audience to beta test the "push email" concept. They chose Munich, the Stadt der Geister (City of Minds), home to Siemens, BMW, and a dense corridor of tech startups. The launch event was famously understated. Unlike the Steve Jobs-style theatrical reveals of later years, the BlackBerry 850’s debut was held in a rented conference room near the Munich Residenz.

When you walk past the corner of Prannerstraße and Theatinerstraße today—where that launch event likely took place—you are walking through a ghost of the analog past. In 1999, a handful of German tech journalists held a black plastic brick and learned to type with their thumbs.

While the world credits Waterloo, Ontario, as the home of BlackBerry, the genesis of the always-on, thumb-typing revolution didn’t happen in Canada. It happened in the heart of Bavaria, with the introduction of the . The "Interim" Device That Changed Everything By 1999, Research In Motion (RIM) had already dabbled in pagers. But the 850 was different. It wasn't a phone. It wasn't really an email machine yet. It was a wireless handheld device that looked like a bar of soap that had swallowed a tiny QWERTY keyboard.