General Magic

General Magic
Industry
Founded May 1990 (1990-05)[1]
Founders

[1]

Defunct September 2002 (2002-09)[2]
Headquarters Mountain View, California[1], United States
Products

General Magic was a company co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld[1] and Marc Porat that developed a new kind of handheld communications device they called a "personal intelligent communicator", which was a PDA precursor that stressed communications. During the early 1990s, Joanna Hoffman was vice president of Marketing.[3]

The original project started in 1989 within Apple Computer, when Porat convinced Apple's CEO at the time 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.[4] Porat, Hertzfeld and Atkinson were soon joined at General Magic by most of Apple's Mac 7 team, including Bruce Leak, Darin Adler and Phil Goldman.

The company initially operated in nearly-complete secrecy. By 1992 some of the world's largest electronics corporations, including Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT&T Corporation were partners and investors in General Magic,[4] creating significant buzz in the industry about the mysterious company. Sculley, George Fisher (the CEO of Motorola), Norio Ogha (the chairman and president of Sony) and Victor Pelsen (the Chairman of Global Operations at AT&T) became members of the company's board of directors. General Magic announced its intentions to build an anytime, anywhere communications device and an agent-based network to host it—well before either was ready to ship—at a public event in New York in 1993, a sign of the hubris infecting the company's management. By 1994, the "General Magic Alliance" of cross-industry partners had expanded to 16 global telecommunications and consumer electronics companies, including Cable & Wireless, France Telecom, NTT, Northern Telecom, Toshiba, Oki, Sanyo, Mitsubishi and Fujitsu. Each of the so-called "Founding Partners" invested up to $6M in the company and named a senior executive to the company's "Founding Partner's Council."

In 1992-3, while Sculley was still a director of General Magic, Apple decided to enter the consumer electronics market itself with a project that became into the Apple Newton. The Newton, originally designed as a tablet with no communications capabilities, and which could only send or receive messages using a bolt-on peripheral, nevertheless was marketed as personal intelligent communicator, stealing some of General Magic's thunder. It failed after shipping in 1993, helping to undermine the communicator category before General Magic's partners began shipping their devices. In late 1994. Sony finally launched the wireline MagicLink and Motorola the wireless Envoy, and AT&T launched its PersonaLink network to host the devices.

The company floated an IPO on NASDAQ in February 1995[2] and the stock nearly doubled on the first day, closing at over $26 per share after opening at $32. It was the high point of the company's history, which ended eight years later in bankruptcy. Magic had tried to do too much, too soon, when the technology available was still too immature to make implementing its vision of small, mobile, intelligent, networked devices possible. Nonetheless, the company achieved many technical breakthroughs, including Magic Bus, which was the precursor of USB (and the basis for the USB specification), 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.

Many Silicon Valley luminaries worked at General Magic either at the beginning or early on in their careers, including Tony Fadell (co-inventor of the iPod and iPhone, founder of Nest), Megan Smith (founder of Planet Out, CTO of the United States), Andy Rubin (co-founder of Danger and inventor of Android), Pierre Omidyar (the founder of eBay), Kevin Lynch (CTO of Adobe, VP of Technology of Apple and head of the Apple Watch team), John Giannandrea (head of AI/Search at Google) and Steve Perlman (co-founder of WebTV). Magic's engineering team is viewed as one of the most talented in the Valley's history, and Magic is generally seen as the Fairchild of mobile, social and ecommerce—the fountain from which much of today's smartphone and online communication and commerce technology sprang, just as Fairchild Semiconductor spawned Intel, National Semiconductor, AMD and the rest of the Valley's semiconductor industry.

Magic Cap, Telescript and the Cloud

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. The company 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 a variant of the C programming language with object oriented extensions, 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 could also be written in the new Telescript programming language, 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 was able to migrate running processes between virtual machines. This radical idea defined a robust agent that could serialize its code, data, and state, deploy itself across one or more remote computers, and resume execution at the next instruction with all state intact. For instance, a user might start a Telescript application on their handheld that purchased movie tickets; when they had complete the basic input, the agent would migrate itself over the cell phone network and begin running on the movie theatre's server. There, the migrated user agent would interact with other agents running on the server to perform the actual purchase. The server would complete the transaction, fill out results data in the original agent, and migrate it back to the user's device. The agent might perform days- or weeks-long tasks after the client disconnected, and dispatch updates periodically to the client. The user-end software was tasked primarily with request and 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, and interconnected Telescript engines would form a "Telescript Cloud" across which mobile applications could execute. Stationary, long-lived processes called "places" would run in the cloud permanently and provide services to agents which would "go" from one place to another to access services, collect information, and eventually dispatch results back to the user.

Sony and Motorola introduced Magic Cap devices in late 1994, based on the Motorola 68300 Dragon microprocessor. Unlike the Newton and other PDAs being introduced at the same time, the Magic Cap system did not rely on handwriting recognition,[1] 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.[4] Since the cell carriers were not yet running any Telescript services, the entire distributed system was reduced to running applications on the handheld. Further, the World Wide Web and Mosaic were gaining rapid acceptance, and met users' needs well enough to obviate demand for General Magic's walled-garden solutions. Partners ended production of Magic Cap devices by 1997.

Later developments

Portico: Dr. Steve Markman was brought in to run the company in 1996 and hired Kevin Surace to head up a new telephony group. This new team of 60-70 people set out to create a voice recognition-based personal assistant service that would be as close to human interaction as possible. The first service delivered was Portico (was code named Serengeti in development), and the interface was called Mary, named after Mary McDonald-Lewis, who voiced Portico, Serengeti and GM's later version, OnStar (www.marymac.com). Mary could understand some 20 million English phrases and speak several thousand different phrases herself (in addition to the Text to Speech engine). Portico synchronized to popular devices such as the Palm Connected Organizer and Microsoft Outlook and handled voicemail, call forwarding, email, calendar etc., all through the user's own personal 800 number.

The system was also scaled back and sold through many partners including Quest and Excite, as well as a free advertising supported service from General Magic called MagicTalk. At its peak, the system supported some 2.5 million users. General Magic was the first company to employ a large number of linguists to fine tune the human interaction and make it seem very real. "Mary" even had multiple responses for phrases spoken by the user so the user would often hear something slightly different from her. General Magic (inventors Kevin Surace, George White and others) applied for and were awarded several key patents in the voice recognition and artificial personality arena.

Icras: While Portico ran its voice portal business, the original handheld group was spun off in 1998 as Icras. The new company sold the Magic Cap OS as hardware named DataRover. The company focused on vertical market systems.

Microsoft: General Magic announced a major licensing deal with Microsoft in March 1998, including an investment by Microsoft. This gave Microsoft access to certain intellectual property, and gave General Magic the ability to work closer in integrating Portico with Microsoft products. It also brought much needed recognition to General Magic.

OnStar: The OnStar Virtual Advisor was developed at this time as well for General Motors.[2] That service is still in wide use today (2016). The service is offered in many cars and trucks free for the first year of ownership. Like Portico before it, the service can handle email and certain call requests. It has a much more limited vocabulary, but still uses the original "Mary" as the voice interface.

With Onstar, Portico, MagicTalk, Excite, Microsoft and other partners, revenues began to rise and so did the stock. GMGC had traded below $1 in 1997 and rose to $18 by 2000.

The New Millennium: Most of the management that was involved in bringing Portico to market left by early 2000 to pursue other interests with Internet startups. A new team was brought in led by Kathleen Layton. The new team took the company in the direction of turning its voice services into enterprise software offerings. Unfortunately, the tech market began to crater, taking telecom and enterprise software with it. After 12 years in existence and at least 3 lives, the company announced it would cease operations on September 18, 2002.[2] The OnStar assets were turned over to EDS to run for General Motors. The patents were auctioned by the court, and mostly purchased by Paul Allen.

See also

Filmography

Set to be released in 2017, General Magic is a feature-length documentary which tells the story of the Magicians and how great vision, epic failure and total redemption went on to change the world as we know it. It is a Spellbound Production. [5]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 Levy, Steven (April 1994). "Bill and Andy's Excellent Adventure II". Wired (2.04). Retrieved 2015-02-10.
  2. 1 2 3 4 Kanellos, Michael (2002-09-18). "General Magic calls its quits". CNET. Retrieved 2015-02-10.
  3. ↑ Hertzfeld, Andy (2005). Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the MAC was Made. Oreilly. p. xxii.
  4. 1 2 3 Kanellos, Michael (2011-09-18). "General Magic: The Most Important Dead Company in Silicon Valley?". Forbes. Retrieved 2015-02-10.
  5. ↑ http://generalmagicthemovie.com
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