
Diary of a Disaster: General Magic Goes Poof (2004) - protomyth
http://www.grosen.dk/jp/Diary_of_a_Disaster.html
======
keithwinstein
Some more positive memories:

\- Magic Cap came from the early-1990s expectation that the future involved
intelligent agents that would travel around the network, do work (e.g.
searching for the best price on a flight or new shoes), and then report back
when the user was connected again.

In practice, this meant that you could send email to another Magic Cap user
that included executable code, like an animation or a little game, that would
run in a sandbox on the user's device.

Even today, we still don't really have this -- you can't stick JavaScript (or
a Java applet) in an email and expect the receiver to be able to run it.

\- The Motorola Envoy ran on Motorola's low-bitrate, high-power (and now
defunct) Ardis wireless network. It was robust enough to work from within an
airplane!! Because almost nobody had them (in 1995), the flight attendants
would not stop you from sending and receiving email wirelessly while flying.
Of course today, even if Ardis still existed and still worked from 30,000
flight, they would be telling you to put your phone into airplane mode...

\- I did not have a Motorola Envoy, but I did have a Sony Magic Link that I
used for email from 1995-1996. It was amazing! You could leave it by your bed,
and when you woke up in the morning, it would make a (free, local) call to
AT&T PersonaLink to exchange email. I have fond memories of lying in bed in my
PJs in early 1996, having just woken up, and flirting via email with a high-
school friend who had already arrived at school at the computer lab. This all
seemed like an incredible luxury at the time.

Of course "checking email when you first wake up" became much more common with
the end of per-minute fees from major ISPs (AOL ended theirs in December
1996), the rise of laptops and pervasive Wi-Fi (~2001), and eventually the
rise of cellular handhelds with email (~2005).

~~~
Tloewald
> Even today, we still don't really have this -- you can't stick JavaScript
> (or a Java applet) in an email and expect the receiver to be able to run it.

We did have it -- it was called VBScript in Outlook and it was one of the
biggest (actually probably the biggest) security disasters in the history of
the internet.

~~~
blacksqr
And Tcl has had a safe interpreter feature and a sophisticated policy
mechanism from early on. It was used in the Tcl browser plugin, which
routinely downloaded code from the Web and executed it. The plugin is gone but
the safe interpreter and policy interface are still perfectly functional.

Tcl also had several agent extensions back in the 1990's.

------
blacksqr
Wow, brought back a lot of memories. I worked for Motorola on the Envoy team.
It was my first encounter with Reality Distortion Field engineering. I
remember their software engineers were literally called "wizards" as their job
title. They developed a custom fully object-oriented programming language to
write the OS in, and confidently assured us that it was so advanced that the
OS would ultimately be delivered with literally zero bugs. This in the face of
build after build of buggy, unstable, backward-incompatible code. I remember
the change of line terminator from semicolon to colon (or vice versa?) when
the product was already months past its original ship date. Good times.

~~~
mwcampbell
Can you tell us more about the programming language and operating system? For
example, how did memory management work? Was it based on garbage collection,
reference counting, or still manual memory management? And what about
persistent storage? I gather from the OP that fragmentation of persistent
storage was a big problem.

~~~
blacksqr
We weren't allowed access to the OS code itself, just the developer API, so I
can't give detailed info about the implementation. I was the chief QA engineer
for the Envoy team, but I was locked out of bug discussion meetings with the
GM people. Everything was handled at a very high level.

I remember they were very proud of the fact that the programming language was
fully object oriented, and drank deep of the OO kool-aid. So no C-style direct
memory access AFAIR.

------
protomyth
"Steve Wozniak, the cofounder of Apple, has signed away several of his patents
on infrared control technologies to General Magic"

"We find that a phone link is actually faster than IR! The poor IR performance
is particularly wounding to Woz, who signed away his IR patents and technology
to General Magic."

 _a lot of bug discussion and ignoring Woz_

"Wozniak is visibly upset that the product has not been fixed and that the
stock market is so gullible. Perhaps be is also miffed that be was not even
offered stock for his gift of the IR patents some three years ago."

If they treated Woz they way this article says, then I cannot help but think
they were probably going to fail. Its a true shame because I still think
agents would be a very interesting way to organize programs even though the
remote communication part has been taken over by http-based APIs.

------
mwcampbell
I'm surprised that such a buggy piece of software was developed by Bill
Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld, who made QuickDraw and the original Macintosh
Toolbox work in even less RAM (128K, soon upgraded to 512K). I wonder what
caused the later project to go so badly.

~~~
Aloha
See the "Second System Effect" in the mythical man month.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-
Month#The_sec...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-
Month#The_second-system_effect)

~~~
Esau
That explains IPv6 and uEFI/EFI.

~~~
Aloha
I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on both of those things - I've considered
IPv6 to be elegant even, as elegant as v4 - EFI I don't know enough about to
have a strong opinion.

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mrpippy
Here's a developer introduction to Magic Cap from 1995:
[http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.11/11.05/MakingM...](http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.11/11.05/MakingMagic/index.html)

~~~
mwcampbell
So the persistent storage was _RAM_? How did anyone think that was a good
idea? Was flash just too expensive?

~~~
Gibbon1
My memory (heh) fails me somewhat. But I think the only Flash available in
1995 was NOR Flash. So very slow, expensive, unavailable in reasonable sizes,
only limited numbers of writes. When I said very slow I mean glacially slow. I
have worked on systems with battery backed RAM. Works fairly well, however a
naive reliance on it will result in data corruption and tears. (Hint reset or
a program crash can come at any moment)

------
pavlov
Here's a Feb 1994 article from Byte that offers some additional insight to the
General Magic product, and has some screenshots too:

[http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/justlikemagic](http://www.guidebookgallery.org/articles/justlikemagic)

------
smacktoward
_Oct. 7, 1994 - By this time, the magic is wearing thin, and Woz has gone from
exhilaration to borderline disgust. Ten days ago, he was euphorically calling
the Magic Link the best computer consumer product ever made. Today, be fears
his friends have made horrible engineering mistakes. I watch as Woz goes out
to buy still more Magic Links to try to discover the source of the problems so
he can help his friends fix them._

One more story to add to the "Woz: a real mensch" pile.

~~~
protomyth
Woz, Jay Miner, and Seymour Cray were my first computer heroes. It still is
amazing reading stories like this to get a feel for their abilities and
determination.

// ok Apple WTF are we doing trying to autocorrect Woz to Wiz?

------
fernly
A good story. Pity it is marred by a number of uncorrected OCR errors: many
"h" scanned as "b", 1/0/5 scanned as I/O/S.

------
Esau
I remember they also offered a Magic Cap application for Windows. I never used
it though, so I can't comment on how well it worked.

~~~
protomyth
It was about par for the course for applications at that time (a couple of
crashes when connecting), but it didn't really do a whole lot either. I used
it for two months then they announced the shutdown.

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thoughtsimple
No mention of the disastrous "cleaning up" bug when you pulled the PCMCIA RAM
card. That was the final straw for me. It could take 30-45 minutes before you
could use your device again after pulling the card.

~~~
blacksqr
Ah, yes. Also, if you yanked the Envoy battery the wrong way before proper
shutdown, total data loss. (The Envoy battery was not internal, but an
integrated part of the case.)

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joezydeco
Anyone else remember the pivot afterward into a voice recognition product?

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dools
"Early Summer, 1995 - I advise a major brokerage house not to invest in
General Magic. They invest anyway. I hope they don't wind up losing a large
chunk of cash."

Isn't that insider trading?

~~~
lmm
"Insider trading" is a loosely-defined phrase, but the regulations most people
think of only apply to publicly traded stocks.

------
stretchwithme
How amazing is it that nearly every problem encountered with those early
devices has been solved in the intervening years?

~~~
smacktoward
Given twenty years and the combined engineering budgets of every major
technology company during that time, General Magic could probably have solved
them all too :-D

~~~
stretchwithme
I don't know about that. Many competitors trying out often conflicting ideas
probably makes things go a lot faster than one company could ever go.

