
Telescript programming language - bluerobotcat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescript_(programming_language)
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cwyers
> In 1990, Marc Porat convinced then-Apple-CEO John Sculley that the future of
> computing lay not in desktop personal computers, but much smaller portable
> devices combining computing power, communications systems, and data located
> on network-accessible servers.

Well that was staggeringly prescient.

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krishanath
Here's something few people know: Sun saw Telescript as a threat (because Sun
was all about "the network is the computer" and now Telescript was invading
this space) and started the Java project in response. Microsoft saw General
Magic's social interface and deemed it to be a threat to Windows. Their
response was "Microsoft Bob".

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pavlov
This is probably posted now thanks to the Andy Hertzfeld interview from the
other day [1] where he discussed Telescript as a failure.

The notion of a restricted server-side language for user scripts still sounds
useful and an unfilled niche.

[1] [https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/01-andy-
hertzfeld](https://www.notion.so/tools-and-craft/01-andy-hertzfeld)

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jnwatson
Mobile code was dying before, but the final nail in the coffin is the
Spectre/Meltdown class of vulnerabilities (with new variants coming out
monthly).

It seems modern microprocessors simply aren't designed to run untrusted code.

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pavlov
Couldn’t one run user scripts on separate servers with non-OoO CPUs: low-end
ARM or MIPS or RISCV or whatever?

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jnwatson
Sure, but requiring separate hardware to run code is a pretty high cost.

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fmajid
I actually worked on General Magic circa 1994-1995 at France Télécom. The
whole tech stack was garbage, despite AT&T’s valiant efforts to salvage it.

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dang
It would be much better if you could turn that word "garbage" into a sentence,
or better a paragraph, so readers could learn something. I'm sure people would
be interested to hear your experiences.

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wmf
In retrospect, Telescript and mobile agents were a bet against the Internet;
if you have good connectivity it's easier to use RPC.

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puzzle
I loved this language. I still have all the papers somewhere. Unfortunately,
the announcement of Java killed the few remaining chances it had of outliving
General Magic.

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pmarreck
Was the stack-based assembly it compiled to similar to Forth?

