General Magic

General Magic was an American and co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Marc Porat at Apple Computer and spun off in May 1990. Based in Mountain View, California, the company developed precursors to "USB, s, small touch screens, touchscreen controller s, s, multimedia email, networked games, , and early notions." After announcing it would cease operations in 2002, it was liquidated in 2004, with purchasing most of its patents.
==Products and technology==
===Magic Cap===
General Magic's main product was , an operating system which allowed users to "set their own rules for message alerts and acquiring information" on personal digital assistants (PDAs). The basic idea behind the system was to distribute the typical computing load across many machines in the network using Magic Cap, which was a fairly minimal operating system that was essentially a UI. The UI is based on a "rooms" metaphor; for example, e-mail and an address book can be found in the office, and games might be found in a living room. User applications were generally written in Magic Script, a utility language variant of the with object oriented extensions. General Magic had planned to release Magic Cap software development tools with Metrowerks by the summer of 1995.
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Magic Cap was implemented in the Sony and Motorola PDAs, released in 1994 and 1995, respectively. Both were based on variants of the Dragon microprocessor. The launch suffered from a lack of real supporting infrastructure. Unlike Apple's Newton MessagePads and other PDAs being introduced at the same time, the Magic Cap system also did not rely on , putting it at a marketing disadvantage. Partners ended production of Magic Cap devices by 1997.
===Telescript===
Its other software, , was "software-agent technology that would search the Web and automatically retrieve information such as stock quotes and airline ticket prices." The script was introduced with the intent of creating a "standard for transmitting messages among any machines that compute, regardless of who makes them."
The Telescript programming language made communications a first-class primitive of the language. Telescript is compiled into a cross-platform in much the same fashion as the , but is able to migrate running processes between virtual machines. The developers saw a time when Telescript application engines would be ubiquitous, and interconnected Telescript engines would form a "Telescript Cloud" across which mobile applications could execute.
==Legacy==
The company achieved many technical breakthroughs, including software modems (eliminating the need for modem chips), small touchscreens and touchscreen controller ASICs, highly integrated systems-on-a-chip designs for its partners' devices, rich multimedia email, networked games, streaming television, and early versions of e-commerce. According to former General Magic employee Marco DeMiroz, it was the "Fairchild [Semiconductor] of the 90s."
A documentary film about the company opened at the on April 20, 2018. It was later shown at the Festival in San Francisco on November 3, 2018. The company founders had hired filmmakers including to document their development process in the 1990s, and Kerruish included some of that original footage of General Magic's offices in the film. The film includes interviews with Tony Fadell, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Marc Porat, and Megan Smith.
A new company bearing the same name and similar logo emerged in 2016, offering a map product called "Magic Earth" that utilizes the dataset.
==Videos==
GENERAL MAGIC – Exclusive Clip - 'Welcome to the Valley'
GENERAL MAGIC - Official Trailer
General Magic - Q&A from the Silicon Valley Premiere
==References==
==External links==
*General Magic official site (archived 2002-11-28, 2001-02-23, 2000-03-01, 1998-12-12)
*General Magic at the Internet Movie Database
*General Magic at Logopedia
* and at Wikipedia
Category:Defunct companies
Category:1990 establishments