General Magic

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

General Magic was a company founded by Bill Atkinson , Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat that was involved in the development of portable data entry devices. The company developed the personal intelligent communicator , a forerunner of the PDA .

The first project started at Apple in 1990 . Marc Porat was convinced that the future of EDP lies in the integration of classic computer functions (spreadsheets, word processing), communication systems ( e-mail , mobile communications) and entertainment electronics (cameras, game computers).

Finally, he was able to win Apple's CEO John Sculley for the idea, who approved the development of such devices as part of the so-called Paradigm Project . The project ran for a few months at Apple; the management showed little interest in this and therefore only pursued the project with low priority. Ultimately, they suggested Sculley, working in a separate company spin off , which was done in May 1990th

At the beginning of the General Magic company, it was mainly about beating the drum. In 1992, a number of well-known companies in the electronics industry (for example Sony , Motorola , Matsushita , Philips and AT&T ) were won as partners who also had the necessary financial strength. Regardless of this, Apple began again to develop portable computers, at the end of which was the Apple Newton . For no apparent reason, Apple was suing General Magic. The process fizzled out, but the relationship between the two companies was permanently disrupted. General Magic went public in February 1995 and the share price doubled on the same day.

The concept of the General Magic system was to distribute the processing load of typical applications over several devices. It was clear to the developers that portable devices could not achieve the performance of normal PCs because of their size and power supply . It was therefore impossible to simply take over the functions of a desktop PC 1: 1. Instead, the devices were only equipped with a minimal operating system - called Magic Cap - in which all the necessary basic functions and a user interface were integrated. The design of the surface was not based on the desk metaphor still in use today , but on a so-called space metaphor . This meant that office applications such as e-mail and address book could be found in the “office”, for example games in the “living room”.

Applications were generally programmed in Objective-C and were based on the program libraries provided by the Magic-Cap operating system. The installation of the programs carried out in parcels ( packages ) that are flexible up-played and could be removed. This allowed for the most efficient use of the limited storage space possible.

Another programming language was Telescript , which focused on communication. Similar to Java , Telescript programs were compiled in platform-independent bytecode . The concept of load distribution was implemented using Telescript. For example, an application was called on the device, which then started another Telescript program on a server. The server program took over the main load of the required computing power, so that the handheld device basically only acted as a terminal .

The goal of General Magic was to make Telescript programs widely available. First of all, selected nodes (for example servers for mobile telephony) should be equipped with it, and later on desktop PCs, which should make the applications available via the Internet . Mobile agents should therefore be deployed across the board . Magic Cap devices were launched by Sony, AT&T, and Motorola in 1994. The Motorola 68300 Dragon was used as the processor . In contrast to other handheld devices that came on the market around the same time, the Magic-Cap system could not recognize handwriting and therefore fell behind very quickly. Furthermore, the infrastructure (i.e. the Telescript server) was hardly available. The mobile network operators had not yet installed a single Telescript application on their system, so that the intended use was no longer available.

General Magic foresaw developments in the computer market very accurately (for example, the spread of e-mail or cell phones). The mistake, however, was the assumption that all of this would be done on the basis of a proprietary network (owned by AT & T / NTT DoCoMo , mockingly called the cloud - "the cloud"). The emerging World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser - both freely available - ultimately ensured that the General Magic devices could not establish themselves.

The sales figures were so bad that production was soon stopped. General Magic made several attempts to revive its concept, most recently in 1999 as a voice message system.