Kirkpatrick's article details Jack Dorsey's new company, Square, which has created a way for individuals to accept credit card payments with the aid of a cell phone attachment. (Image by Joi Ito.)

An explanation for how Twitter was created, from David Kirkpatrick’s smart Vanity Fair article about Jack Dorsey, the company’s founder and deposed CEO:

“Little Jack Dorsey was obsessed with maps of cities. He papered his walls with maps from magazines, transit maps, maps from gas stations. His parents had resisted joining the emigration to the suburbs, and their shy, skinny son supported them by becoming a passionate proponent of city life. He was mesmerized by locomotives, police cars, and taxis. He would drag his younger brother Danny to nearby rail yards, where they waited just to videotape a passing train.

When their father brought home the family’s first computer that year—an IBM PC Jr.—Jack immediately took to it. He had a talent for both math and art, and began to design his own maps using a graphics program. Soon, he taught himself programming to learn how to make little dots—representing trains and buses—scoot around the maps. He spent hours listening to police and ambulance radio frequencies, then plotted the emergency vehicles as they moved toward an accident or a hospital. As he evolved into a talented teenage programmer, he came to an oddly poetic view of this precise, orderly urban grid. ‘I wanted to play with how the city worked, so I could see it,’ Dorsey recalls.

His obsession with cities—and with programming—never abated. By early 2006, having dropped out of N.Y.U. and bouncing between jobs, he found himself working for a San Francisco software start-up called Odeo, which was going nowhere. One day he proposed an idea to his boss based on a notion that Dorsey had been noodling over for years. He was fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio. Dorsey suggested that his company create a service that would allow anyone to write a line or two about himself, using a cell phone’s keypad, and then send that message to anyone who wanted to receive it. The short text alert, for him, was a way to add a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.”

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Jack Dorsey’s first computer, the IBM PC Jr.