They were "CrackBerry" addicts — fans so devoted to the BlackBerry that being without it caused withdrawals.

Madonna confessed on TV to Oprah Winfrey that she slept with her BlackBerry smartphone. Corporate leaders were equally passionate.

"No one else had what they offered," said Jack Gold, principal of research firm J. Gold Associates. "They fundamentally changed the handheld market.

BlackBerry (BBRY) was founded in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, as Research In Motion by a pair of Canadian engineering students: Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin. They made wireless point-of-sale systems, pagers and modems. Research In Motion, which changed its name to BlackBerry last year, plodded along until striking gold on Jan. 19, 1999, with the first BlackBerry device, the 950.

The handheld — though not a phone — was the first device to provide mobile users with a wireless connection to their desktop email. The 950 had a qwerty keyboard, calendar, address book, calculator and alarm. Though primitive by today's standards, it was cutting edge at the time for the simple reason that it could send and receive emails, a task no other portable device could handle.

"Wall Street was just waking up to the power of email at the time," Lazaridis told IBD.

Leapfrogging The Pager

The most popular portable communications device then was the two-way pager, which could send and receive only short bursts of data. Through ingenuity and intense R&D, BlackBerry leapfrogged every other portable communications device with its proprietary method of managing data.

"It separated us from all our competitors," Lazaridis said.

To promote awareness of the BlackBerry 950, the company gave them away to some powerful executives in New York and their assistants.

"No one gave them back," Lazaridis said. "It was a new way of conducting business, superior to an executive having to call an assistant to have email read over phone, which is how it was done back then.

BlackBerry orders started rolling in.

The 950 was followed by a succession of more advanced products. Not only was demand for the devices strong, so was the desire to own BlackBerry stock, which would go on two major runs.

From October 1998 through February 2000, BlackBerry stock would run up 5,437%. And its second stock advance, from 2002 into 2008, nearly doubled that performance.

At its June 2008 peak, BlackBerry stock stood 27,902% higher than its level just before the 1998 move. That made it one of the great stocks of the past three decades.

The first run-up was during the era of personal digital assistants. The PDA was a handheld information manager. The term PDA was coined in 1992 by Apple (AAPL) CEO John Sculley, referring to the Apple Newton. Nokia (NOK), Palm, Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) and IBM (IBM) also cranked out early PDAs.

But BlackBerry prevailed. No one could match its wireless messaging performance and data security.

The secret sauce was the BlackBerry Enterprise Server middleware software, which managed the messaging features, software apps and data encryption. It also connected to the widely used Microsoft Exchange email system, among others.

With its business booming, BlackBerry had the financing available for its next big invention — the BlackBerry handset, arguably the first-ever smartphone.

On March 4, 2002, BlackBerry introduced the 5810, the first BlackBerry with cellphone capability. BlackBerry was now going head-to-head with Nokia, Motorola and the other cellphone leaders, many of which had huge marketing budgets. But BlackBerry had the killer app.

"In the early days BlackBerry was not a good voice phone," Gold said. "But they still had what people wanted most, portable email, and that is what BlackBerry was very good at.

It got better. In 2003, BlackBerry introduced a succession of improved smartphones, including the first BlackBerry with a color screen, the 7210.

"We were facing fierce competition against very large gorillas and we were just a small startup," Lazaridis said.

But when the company announced results for the three months ended Aug. 30, 2003, it had 711,000 BlackBerry subscribers, up from 96,000 in the year-earlier quarter. Its revenue jumped 73% that quarter, to $126 million. That Dec. 23, BlackBerry joined the Nasdaq 100, the index of the exchange's premier companies.

CrackBerry addiction intensified. In 2007 came the BlackBerry Pearl, aimed at consumers. That was followed by the powerful and classy BlackBerry Curve.

Celebrity Chic

BlackBerry tapped into the celebrity obsession by staging the rollout of the Curve at a posh party in Beverly Hills attended by such celebrities as Donald Sutherland, Paris Hilton and Jessica Alba. By then BlackBerry was in 135 countries, sold by 350 carriers.

Jim Balsillie, who joined the company in 1992, explained his view of BlackBerry's success in an interview with IBD in May 2008, when he was co-CEO.

"We don't think of BlackBerry as a cellphone," he said. "We think of it as a smart appliance, and we've defined the category and the value proposition around that.

All along, BlackBerry maintained its iconic qwerty keyboard with scrolling keyball.

The BlackBerry became the top-selling smartphone in the U.S. for several reasons. It was widely used by governments, the military and first responders. The BlackBerry, with its enterprise-grade email, was also the favored device of senior executives, who used their sway to make them more widely used in their companies.

"BlackBerry had a very loyal following in the executive ranks and made it very easy for companies to buy these devices," said Gold.

BlackBerry made it easy because it had the best security. The company also worked closely with tech departments of large companies, providing the help needed to quickly integrate BlackBerry's email into a company's infrastructure.

The end of BlackBerry's stock run came not long after Apple rolled out its first iPhone, in June 2007. From October 2002 through June 2008, the stock recorded a 10,557% surge, but it couldn't match Apple's technology, which put smartphones in a whole new league.

"When we looked at the iPhone, we realized Apple had compressed its Macintosh into a handset," Lazaridis said.

It wasn't a rapid wipeout. In 2010, BlackBerry still had the leading share of the U.S. market. But Apple had redefined the smartphone, and Google (GOOGL) followed with its Android operating system for mobile devices, which Samsung, among others, embraced.

With iPhone and Android, the smartphone market had shifted, requiring BlackBerry to make major changes. But BlackBerry was unable to turn the battleship fast enough.

"We had to make a wholesale platform change, which very few companies are able to do successfully in a short period of time," Lazaridis said.

In 2012, with the major overhaul of the BlackBerry platform complete, Lazaridis stepped down from his co-CEO role.

In March 2013, Lazaridis and his BlackBerry co-founder Fregin established the Quantum Valley Investment Fund, in Waterloo, to provide financial and intellectual capital for the development and commercialization of quantum physics and quantum computing breakthroughs.