
General Magic is a film about the ‘90s startup that imagined the smartphone - rbanffy
https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/22/17233362/general-magic-movie-review-documentary-silicon-valley-tribeca-2018
======
pixelmonkey
I did a look back at using a Palm V as a young techie back in 1998/1999\. It's
interesting since I still had some records of screenshots from real-world apps
I used on a daily basis back then.

[http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/12/30/mobile-
in-1998](http://www.pixelmonkey.org/2012/12/30/mobile-in-1998)

The Palm V wasn't that far off from modern smartphones, when set up correctly.
Of course, lacked color and cellular connectivity. But, form factor was very
similar to modern smartphones. And use cases have evolved in roughly the same
direction. Plus, due to the grayscale screen and slow clock speed, the battery
life was pretty darn good!

The two major problems that hindered widespread adoption of the Palm V: (a)
The requirement to use Palm Graffiti with a stylus for text and input[1],
which had a steep-ish learning curve. (b) The slow serial port (!!!) sync to
desktop for pretty much all "connected" functionality.

AvantGo[2], in particular, was very ahead of its time, and using it did feel
like "living in the future". And, in fact, I was -- it allowed me to read news
articles and digital web content 'on the go', even in the period 1998-2001.

The iPod would be released in 2001 and the iPhone in 2007. So, it turns out it
was about ~5 years too early for the hardware/infrastructure tech to catch up
to the (conceived) mobile software use cases.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_\(Palm_OS\))

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AvantGo](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AvantGo)

~~~
jldugger
It's easy to overlook how critical infrastructure is in the ecosystem. In 1998
pervasive Wifi wasn't a thing, and virtually all noteworthy apps were desktop
oriented. Generic cloud storage wasn't a thing yet, and household internet was
connected directly to a PC anyways, so a serial connection to a PC for sync
makes sense -- USB was still very brand new, while serial was pretty
universal.

To me the interesting question is, given they had a functional device, how did
they fuck up the next decade? Palm could have easily introduced many of the
same features iPod had, and rescued 3Com/USRobotics from the dialup modem
graveyard. Instead they spun off Palm for a forkload of cash, after driving
away the founders to Handspring. It wasn't until 2004 that they supported any
sort of sound beyond piezo buzzers with the Zire 31.

~~~
amygdyl
I haven't thought of WiFi as a available infrastructure until this year, the
development was so slow to arrive I missed it actually coming.

And this is the City Of London, I live close enough to consider the city home.

Ironically, I only noticed the ubiquity of WiFi in the city as a result of
testing the lowest end phone and prepaid options possible. This is in reaction
to the most ridiculous dispute with my contract network provider, over the
fate of the premium number I've used for a long long time being held hostage.
I only wanted it to move to another account..

I remember the Palms very well. At the time I carried a treasured HP 209LX,
secretly wishing for a Psion 5 keyboard but not their systems environment. (I
had the HP a while if you note the overlap)

I wish I could find the story again, but I think the sadness was just the
classical combination of blunt management and silicon valley egos.

This is the canonical answer for every technological near miss, isn't it?

I mean cost driven aggressive B School management plus idealistic impatient
but always sufficiently talented to change the world software and hardware
Engineers, Always Always Always the same, WHY DO YOU GUYS KEEP DOING IT??!!!

I honestly care about the answer, because I thought this was the past and not
the normal, when I learned to program, oh, thirty five years ago...

As for the infrastructure WiFi...

The Result has been I learned that I am almost entirely independent of any
cellular carrier network for my voice connectivity.

I haven't quite yet, but I actually could drop the Networks out of my life!

The UK is blessed with a ISP called Andrews and Arnold, www.aaisp.net who will
port my (once freed) precious memorable number to a SIM card that resides on
their MVNO. This cuts my recurring payment to merely £2.40pcm! And, as
desired, I can have more lines on that number. I must avoid starting in how
good AAISP really is. If you want to be recognised by voice when you call, and
get enterprise grade services, please mention John owes Phil Boddy one, and
hadn't forgotten...

Oh, and my Networks- free telephonic life?

I am seriously contemplating whether it's worth the hassle of applying to
install a VHF/UHF D-STAR Repeater, which our building management seems happy
to let us do, to cover the Bank / St. Paul's areas.

AAISP let you port your number (any number, cellular numbers are new) to their
VOIP services. I can route them as I please, so apart from the slight lack of
duplex, why not over HAM RADIO? I have figured out how to use a freephone
number to call in and take over the call, from a payphone, and the idea amuses
me greatly. But the fact is, I'd rather carry a dedicated WiFi access device
that provides me with use of a headset and the radio /audio processing power
possible in a shoulder strapped battery and module, than I would carry
another$1000 phone obsolete the moment the manufacturer cares to not update
it.

I guess I'd just love to be serious about putting my call sign on my business
card!

------
xenadu02
Great technology is not a product.

Let me repeat that: Great technology is not a product!

Founders would do well to remember. If you fail to find product-market fit, if
you're thinking too far ahead, or if your product has too many compromises:
you can invent ground-breaking technology that completely revolutionizes the
industry then promptly file for bankruptcy and walk away with nothing.

Again let me repeat that: You can invent ground-breaking technology, be 100%
correct about the future, and be 5-10 years ahead of everyone else... then
watch your dreams go up in smoke as you walk away with zero dollars and
without even a wikipedia blurb mentioning your accomplishments.

Great ideas without execution are worthless.

Great ideas plus poor execution are a deadweight loss on humanity.

~~~
jamesrcole
> _Great ideas plus poor execution are a deadweight loss on humanity._

That's overstating it. In general, the failed attempt helps propagate the good
idea, and helps that idea find a better execution in the future, as well as
being a cautionary tale.

------
elvinyung
I love the stories of General Magic and NeXT. Even though the businesses
basically failed, the technology and experience from them would go on to
completely change the world :)

For a look at another company in this space around that time, Jerry Kaplan
wrote a memoir about his experiences at GO: [https://www.amazon.ca/Startup-
Silicon-Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan...](https://www.amazon.ca/Startup-Silicon-
Adventure-Jerry-Kaplan/dp/0140257314)

~~~
api
Is there a case where ground breaking innovation resulted in a successful
business? Usually innovation is too costly and the first incarnations lack
mass appeal.

~~~
xenadu02
Most ideas are neither new nor novel. Even if you're the first the odds are
high that you are far too early and the technology won't be ready for a decade
or more.

Even the first toilets were far from successful. Indoor plumbing required a
whole industry and multiple compounding innovations to become successful.

Many people were working on flying machines. The Wright brothers simply got
lucky in timing: internal combustion engines finally got reliable and useful
enough for the idea to work. If they hadn't done it someone else would have
within the following 5-10 years (and many others were in fact trying at the
time).

Many people had MP3 players but none of them managed to design a product
ordinary people would want to use, nor the muscle to make the record industry
play ball with an online store. You can scream until you're blue in the face
that Apple didn't invent MP3 players but that just makes you irrelevant and a
bad potential founder/employee.

I would argue that most truly ground-breaking innovations do not result in a
wildly successful business. Finding a way to pair ideas with execution and
product-market fit are more important.

~~~
pjmlp
The bicycle is yet another example.

------
teddyh
A very nice 10-minute video covering the story of General Magic, the company:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Opcuy-8VO64)

~~~
antoniuschan99
LGR Tech Tales has a lot of these types of videos. Also Company Man. But
Company Man is more general and not all Tech Companies.

------
nickpsecurity
One fad in the 1990's was agent-oriented computing. You'd have scripts that
carried code and data from place to place. For instance, you might send a
bidding agent with your strategies to eBay's marketplace where it would
constantly look for stuff you'd be interested in doing only deals you'd want.
In day and age of 28Kbps links, there were advantages to not having to
constantly move data back and forth. One of most interesting options came from
General Magic:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-
oriented_programming](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent-
oriented_programming)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_lang...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_\(programming_language\))

------
protomyth
Telescript was fun, but those machines were awful buggy and the PC client was
a bit odd. I still think agent oriented programming has a place with large
program organization. We regularly run other people's code on remote machines
every time we visit a web page so one of the objections to mobile agents isn't
exactly different than today.

~~~
rbanffy
The opportunities for emergent behavior (or misbehavior) are abundant. That's
a great approach to make systems that act in completely unpredictable ways.

~~~
protomyth
Maybe, but after all the talk of training and not knowing why decisions are
being made, I really want to keep anything resembling emergent at arms length.
I very much more interested on multi-agent systems effects on resource
allocation and maintainability.

I see your line of thinking as great and interesting, but I'm now in the camp
that sees a lot of people blaming "algorithms" for computer decisions that
have negative effects (banning or denying resources) on people and thinking
that's ok they cannot explain their program's decisions.

------
INTPenis
At the end of the 90s my brother had a Spectronics phone that was amazing. It
was controlled with hidden buttons on its sides, took some practice. But it
had everything a smartphone would have many years later.

Looking at their wikipedia page I believe it was in the TS2000 series.

When did this General Magic stuff take place? The article keeps using the
phrase 1990s over and over.

~~~
pronoiac
There's a Wired article (April 1994, their fifth issue) with more background
and some timelines: [https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-
magic/](https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/)

~~~
INTPenis
Ok. SO it's interesting to note that 5 years later a Swedish company had a
finished product. Even though the Spectronics design was very unique and not
at all adopted by anyone else in the later smartphone era.

------
j45
This reminds me of my Palm Pilot Pro from ~97. It came with a modem add-on for
dialup internet. It was a smartphone, otherwise.

Handspring, an offshoot by Palm's creators created the first cellular addon
(Springboard) for PalmOS shortly after. Worked OK.

PalmOS, on a Treo 90 (color touch screen in 2002), with Datebk6 remains the
most productive device I've ever used by a wide margin. Touchscreen, and
keyboard in one form factor cut down on grafitti use.

The best part? One shortcut key (fn+calendar) took the device from power off
right into a cursor in to add a task. When horsepower didn't exist,
productivity made up for in oodles. It had a usable keyboard, well before
blackberry showed up. Nothing today touches this.

The Palm Treo 600 came along in 2003 to me were the first real, usable
smartphones. No app store, but apps could be synced from the computer. It
combined a physical keyboard with a touchscreen on a smartphone to boot.

------
mattkevan
I bought a Datarover from eBay on a whim a few years ago.

The device itself is a brick but Magic Cap is a delight: well designed,
intuitive and fun in a way modern systems are not.

If the backlight hadn’t fizzled out I’d be using it regularly as an over-
engineered landline.

~~~
soapdog
I also did that some years ago. I used to be a heavy newton user and then,
later in early 2000, I decided to check out some other old PDAs, so I
purchased a data rover and some others. Magic Cap is a very good surprise. I
wish we had more stuff like that these days instead of the boring stuff we do
have now.

~~~
maxxxxx
I agree. Using the Newton was fun in a way the modern devices simply aren't.
The same happened with desktop operating systems. The original Mac was more
fun than what we have now.

------
maxxxxx
I look forward to seeing this. There was a lot of exciting and creative stuff
going on in the 90s around handhelds.

~~~
swiley
The palm pilot is still probably the best series of PDAs ever.

Although maybe nostalgia is fogging my memory.

~~~
privacypoller
Early palms had a lot of issues - I remember swapping AA batteries _very_
frequently for example - but the products and company showed an incredible
balance between technological vision and practical reality. The glyphs are a
great example; most of the letters mirrored the English alphabet but a few
were quite different. With a little practice you could write accurate notes
quite quickly. Compare this to the oft-mocked Newton. Sync also worked quite
well. I wrote a number of apps that hooked into the sync process and uploaded
data to web-based systems. I still find it kind of incredible that in ~2000 I
could take notes on my palm and then dock, sync and view it in a web portal.
Pretty underwhelming now but not when most websites were still geocities
homepages!

~~~
maxxxxx
For me my Pilot was a better organizer than any current phone. It was lean and
very fast. The Newton 2000 was also very good.

------
chaoticmass
Back when I was a kid in the late 90's I followed the emerging .COM boom and
stock market avidly. I kept a virtual stock portfolio of companies I'd invest
in if I could. General Magic was in there. Like many promising companies at
the time though, it didn't survive the crash, so my stock pick turned out not
so good (good thing I was only playing pretend). Nice to see they weren't
completely forgotten though.

------
mietek
_> Some inventions seem genuinely prescient, like a collection of animated
proto-emoji stickers. Some are impractical but fascinating, like a “town”
computing interface with buildings for apps._

I wonder how many other have never heard of Apple’s eWorld.

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

~~~
jhbadger
These sorts of interfaces were very much of the atmosphere of the mid 1990s.
Another somewhat better known one (although known as a flop) was Microsoft
Bob.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob)

~~~
LeoPanthera
A friend of mine recently developed robert.js, a library for manipulating
Bob's datafiles.

[https://github.com/Treeki/robert.js](https://github.com/Treeki/robert.js)

For example, here are the Bob rooms, rendered in your browser:
[https://wuffs.org/bob/room.html](https://wuffs.org/bob/room.html)

------
kerng
The COMPAQ iPaq was in many ways ahead of its time. If they would have
invested in a better OS, or convinced Microsoft to build something more
"mobile", they could have beaten Apple possibly by 3-4 years.

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

~~~
kickingvegas
FWIW, everybody in the PDA space was influenced by General Magic. Two others
that come to mind were Rex
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_5000](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REX_5000)
and Geos
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(16-bit_operating_system)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_\(16-bit_operating_system\))

~~~
kerng
Oh, cool. I haven't heard about the REX. Thanks for sharing.

