General Magic was a company co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat that developed new kind of handheld communications device they called a personal intelligent communicator , which was a Personal digital assistant precursor that stressed communications.

The original project started in 1990 within Apple Computer, when Porat convinced Apple s CEO John Sculley that the next generation of computing would require a partnership of computer, communications and consumer electronics companies to cooperate. Known as the Paradigm project, the project ran for some time within Apple, but management remained generally uninterested and the team struggled for resources. Eventually they approached Sculley with the idea of spinning off the group as a separate company, which occurred in May 1990.

The company started to generate some buzz during that year, and by 1992 some of the world s largest electronics corporations, including Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT&T were partners and investors in General Magic. Apple also decided to re-enter the market with a project that eventually developed into the Apple Newton, and they decided to sue General Magic for no obvious reason. The lawsuit eventually went nowhere, but the bad blood remained.

The company went public in February 1995 and the stock doubled on the first day.

The basic idea behind the General Magic system was to distribute the computing load of a typical user s tasks across many machines in the network. They felt that handhelds would always be lacking power in comparison to the desktops and servers they would communicate with, so that making a clone of a desktop machine in a handheld form would be doomed to fail. Instead, the devices would be based on a fairly minimal operating system known as Magic Cap, which was essentially a UI and the most basic services needed to run the machine. The UI was based on a rooms metaphor; e-mail and an address book could be found in the office, for instance, while games might be found in a living room.

User applications were generally written in the Objective C language, calling the set of objects that made up the Magic Cap OS. These programs were installed in packages that were quickly loaded and unloaded as needed in order to conserve space. These applications, and interactions between them, could be scripted using the utility language, Magic Script.

Programs were also written in a new programming language, Telescript, which made communications a first-class primitive of the language. Telescript was compiled into a cross-platform bytecode in much the same fashion as the Java programming language, but interestingly were able to migrate between platforms. For instance, a user might start a Telescript application on their handheld, which would then in turn start a Telescript application on a large server accessed using the cell phone networks. The two applications would then interact to provide a complete application, with the user-end software tasked primarily with display.

The developers saw a time when Telescript application engines would be widely available across various communications systems, first the cell phone networks and desktop machines, and later the internet. Eventually Telescript would become ubiquitous.

Sony, AT&T and Motorola all introduced Magic Cap devices in late 1994, based on the Motorola 68300 Dragon microprocessor. Unlike other PDA s being introduced at the same time, the Magic Cap system did not rely on handwriting recognition, which meant it was almost an afterthought in terms of media coverage when Apple introduced the Newton. From that point on every PDA discussion was about the quality of the recognition, and the Magic Cap systems were basically ignored.

The systems also suffered from being introduced with no real infrastructure behind them. Since the cell carriers were not yet running any Telescript services, the entire distributed system was reduced to running applications on the handheld. Users were never able to see the system the way it was meant to be used.

General Magic was nearly clairvoyant in their ability to predict the way people would use technology (predicting things such as ubiquitous email, everyone owning/using cell phones and devices, etc). The big, and fatal, assumption was that it would all happen on a proprietary network owned by AT&T/NTT commonly referred to as, the cloud. The World Wide Web and Mosaic were just firing to life and these free-and-common answers to the same problems swept General Magic under the carpet.

The system was received with a dull thud, and sales were so low that partners were soon ending production. General Magic tried to re-invent itself several times, eventually in 1999 as an integrated voice messaging system.

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