
Explore Magic Cap, a Smartphone OS from a Decade Before the iPhone - rbanffy
https://learn.adafruit.com/magic-cap-the-smartphone-os-from-the-90s?embeds=allow
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greggman2
The iPhone is a progression of PDAs more than phones. There are plenty of
interesting devices to look at including Apple's own Newton, the Sony
Dynabook, the Palm Pilot and all its versions up through Sony Clie as well as
Windows CE and its many devices. My 1998 Casio CE at some level is very
similar to a modern iPhone. Both have a home screen with a gird of app icons
to tap to launch them.

~~~
imglorp
I think the Palm Treo, predating the iPhone by years, deserves the nod for the
historic, mass market successor of PDAs. The first Treos were around 2002 and
were horrible Palm devices duct taped to a cellphone, but they were enough to
light the future. That integration got better and by 2004, the Treo 650 was a
very capable machine. The iPhone hit the street in 2007.

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wazoox
I had first the Visor Phone, in 2001 or 2002, and it was a revelation. After
that I had a series of Treos (270, 600, 650, 680) and finally a Pré Plus.

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imglorp
I had a Pre also, spectacular device, very usable. Super tiny by today's
standards, with inductive charging, and running WebOS. One of the best apps
was X-Plane, very smooth. In many ways, we have lost ground and not regained
it.

~~~
compsciphd
the problem with the pre was a few fold

1) it was ahead of its time in terms of writing apps in javascript and having
them run in a web browser context. The hardware was not up for it and the
programming environment wasn't up for it (i.e. no webasm and the like)

2) no ability at the start to write apps in native code. This severely limited
one's ability to have graphical games. people use their phones to casually
game, and if those games don't exist, the phones wont sell.

3) as forward thinking as it was, they missed some things. It was just too
small physically for what it was supposed to be. I was a big believer in it,
but it was just too small for my fingers to use effectively to type and the
like. It would have been interesting to see what a pre in a modern size phone
form factor would have been like.

with all that said, I have fond memories of it, especially being part of the
group of people the jailbroke (and I made it happen without even having
physical access to one at the time. thanks god for its debian (or really ipkg)
roots, made it easy to reverse engineer and get code onto it.

The touchpad, on the other hand, was way ahead of its time. I still used mine
till about a year ago when it finally kicked the bucket.

~~~
imglorp
Yeah I was going to mention the touchpad too, own two. Been meaning to
repurpose them as small monitors.

I should probably thank you and the other jailbreakers and hackers for the two
platforms for your contributions making them more useful machines.

Also worth pointing out WebOS lives on!
[https://www.webosose.org/blog/2019/11/20/webos-
ose-2-1-0-rel...](https://www.webosose.org/blog/2019/11/20/webos-
ose-2-1-0-release/)

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notacoward
In a similar vein, people should be aware of the Danger Hiptop/Sidekick. Its
physical design might seem outdated, especially the affordance for a physical
keyboard, but let's remember that this came out a full _five years_ before the
iPhone. _For the time_ it offered an unparalleled convergence of PDA, phone,
internet connectivity, and entertainment value. I had one for a while. It was
far from perfect (writing the entire OS in Java is probably the dumbest idea
that killed it) but I can't help but admire the innovation that went into it.

~~~
smush
> especially the affordance for a physical keyboard,

I'm considering an Fxtec Pro1 or Blackberry Key2 exactly because they have
hardware keyboards.

I still don't have muscle memory with on-screen keyboards, or if I do, it
doesn't work properly due to the lack of physical cues.

~~~
mrguyorama
I'm so pissed that didn't exist one year ago. Cheaper than I paid for my Pixel
2XL (damn name brand tax), physical keyboard, headphone jack, real features I
could actually use.

The worst part is that I just dinged my Pixel's screen, so I could actually
think about getting a new phone, but it's so wrong to me to buy a brand new
phone one year later

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ralphc
If you can, watch the documentary "General Magic". I got it off Showtime.
Hadn't finished it yet, but what I've seen so far is great, if painful. By
"painful", it's easy for a developer to put themselves in their shoes. Imagine
putting your heart and soul into a product, knowing you're making something
great and world-changing, being _right_ , then watching it fail. Then later be
vindicated by other products on the market.

~~~
wmf
Was ignoring the Internet right? Was a Microsoft Bob style interface right?

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mattkevan
Impulse bought a Datarover from eBay a few years ago. The device itself is an
ugly grey box, but Magic Cap is a delight. In fact, if the backlight hadn’t
have died I’d still be using it as a landline phone.

Full of delight, something that modern OSes are sorely missing.

Little touches like being able to drop a little animated worm in the hallway
and watch it crawl about - and it still being there when you come back later.

It’s a real shame that a decade ago, when incumbent phone makers were
scrambling around trying to find a response to iOS, no one dusted it off and
updated it for the modern world. Would have been such a contrast to the
standard grid of boring icons.

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Nr7
LGR has a great video about General Magic, the company behind Magic Cap.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64)

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bogwog
Kind of off topic, but "General Magic" is a really cool name for a company.

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gtk40
I was a user of Maemo before the iPhone came out and it continued to be more
capable than iOS and Android for years afterwards, and is arguably so today.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maemo)

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Camillo
The Internet Archive has classic Mac emulators, right? Someone should upload
the image for the Magic Cap simulator there.

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scottlocklin
It's interesting the various visions that were out there at the time. I was
keeping track of it as I was an enthusiastic user of my HP200LX, and could
tell the general idea of a computer fitting in your pocket and talking to the
internet was a very potent one, even though the internet at the time was
email, usenet and ftp.

General Magic was a big one, as was the Newton, though both were obviously too
expensive to achieve serious market penetration. Geos was another important
one; it was a pretty slick OS that could have beaten Windows or been the birth
of a palmtop OS.

One of the striking things; lots of people really believed the only way to use
a pocket computer was with handwriting recognition. The Palm "graffiti" tool
for achieving this was pretty obviously never going to work (aka teach people
a new form of handwriting) compared to keyboards. The fold away keyboard of
the HP OmniGo was kind of an admission of this.

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moepstar
Also don't forget the Nokia Communicator Series, the 9000, 9110, 9210 series -
you could even send _and_ receive faxes :D

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soapdog
The documentary linked in the article is really good. I managed to grab a
datarover in early 2000s from ebay and had a ton of fun with it but the newton
was still my daily driver back then.

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zitterbewegung
A smartphone thirty six years before the iPhone.

[https://www.geek.com/apple/apples-first-touchscreen-
phone-14...](https://www.geek.com/apple/apples-first-touchscreen-
phone-1453963/)

~~~
rbanffy
It's kind of cute that whoever wrote the article even considers the
possibility it was more than a foam model and that it ran real software.

