I worked there for 5 years, and I maintain some historical artifacts from the time, including a gallery of Magic Cap handheld devices and some interesting concept art from Magic's very early days:
Always loved your site, and my DataRover thanks you too. I have a couple 840s and one of the original Sonys. There was nothing quite like these devices, and they were way ahead of their time.
I have one of the CodeWarrior dev kits with the Mac emulator around here somewhere too.
Thanks! Glad you found the site useful. Unfortunately, we were too far ahead of the time in lots of regards--processors were slow, screens were bad, battery technology iffy, no mobile data service that normal humans could afford... These days an iPhone costs just as much as a Magic Cap device did, and you can definitely see that that's what we were trying to accomplish, but there was no way for General Magic to stay in business long enough to see it realized.
This certainly wasn't the mantra in 1990 when the company was founded. This was a thing in the years after the dot-com boom. Definitely not in the early 1990s.
The first isn't always #1 but often fails before later companies enter the market, learn from the example, and mature it into a real business (see Friendster->FB; Palm->iPhone; search engines; Netscape; Atari - although these are the still-somwhat successful 'failures' which is far better than most which you've never heard of).
> The Magic Link’s slogan — “It Clears Your Desk, It Clears Your Mind” — perfectly encapsulates the irony of hindsight.
Reminds me of that quote from Fredrick Pohl: "A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam."
I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. Renewable energy? Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Self-driving cars? Electric vehicles?
> I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future.
One approach I use in thinking about this is where we go from scarcity to abundance. If you're on the scarcity side, abundance seems like utopia, but it brings its own problems.
An obvious example is food. For most of history, too little food was the problem. It still is for a too-large chunk of humanity, but for a lot of people the problem is now too much.
In my youth, my big problem was too little to read. Now I use all sorts of tools to manage the abundance and limit my exposure so I still at least occasionally read as deeply as I did.
Connection is another one I think about. In the age of the letter or telegram or long distance call, people were desperate to build and maintain connection. Now with ubiquitous connectivity, we get abundance phenomena like FOMO andalways-on work culture. And of course, we've made it easy for maladjusted people to connect and self-reinforce their awfulness, leading to more things like the Santa Barbara and Christchurch shootings.
Most of those already have known downsides from initial early adopter programs. Dams = disrupted fisheries, solar = rare earth mining pollution, wind = dead migratory birds, UBI = lazyness, universal healthcare = long waiting times, self-driving cars = nobody to blame when they crash, electric vehicles = battery disposal.
It's like how we knew that the Internet obsoletes privacy long before Facebook came out, and have known that burning fossil fuels causes global warming for at least 30-40 years, and knew that there was shit in the meat since The Jungle came out in 1906, and knew that heavy industry causes pollution for about 150 years. We didn't care because the benefits to us were greater than the future drawbacks. As time goes on, we take the benefits for granted, but the drawbacks loom ever larger.
And of course UBI = laziness is a moral judgement, not a rational argument about how humans should spend their time in a highly automated planetary economy.
If you research the source material for these points, the rhetorical slants are obvious.
The first is to encourage emotive responses ("bird strikes are bad and windmills cause them") while taking them out of context ("windmills kill far fewer birds and cause less migratory change than many other human activities").
The second is to exclude important contextual information and cherry pick figures to make a point.
E.g. Canada's public health care system has long waiting times - which are clearly bad. But it's misleading to compare them directly with the shorter median waiting times in the US - because that excludes the >500,000 families bankrupted by the health system in the US every year for whom the waiting times for future treatment are effectively infinite.
Decades of these kinds of distortions have made informed public debate very difficult. Building up a contextual and robust picture of the trade-offs of any activity takes a while, and the picture is only useful if it compares like for like across as many dimensions for as many competing possibilities as possible.
That rarely happens in public debate - and it should.
One of my points is that you can't separate the emotive response from the consequences of new developments. There's a cognitive bias that humans have (novelty bias) where when there's a great new technology or social change, we usually only see the positives, unless you're zooming in very closely and examining the development with a specifically critical lens. As the technology becomes more familiar, we become blind to its benefits and just take them for granted. Instead, our emotions zoom in on all the downsides - those little details that are insignificant in the bigger picture, but which become very annoying when everybody's using the technology every day.
This is why life continues to suck despite 400 years of solid technological progress, even though nobody realistically wants to go back to the Middle Ages.
Life doesn't suck. Relatively few people are dying from starvation or infectious diseases relative to historical percentages. That's a huge improvement no matter how you look at it.
The trouble is that human happiness is mostly based on how well we're doing relative to others. So if your neighbor's circumstances improve a lot while yours improve only slightly then it feels like the situation is getting worse even when you're objectively better off.
I think the greatest danger to a UBI program is something like easy student loans made tuition more expensive. It will just make the basics more expensive and you are back to square one.
You would need to break the regulatory capture that artificially make housing & healthcare expensive before you can implement a UBI program successfully.
Yeah, I think inflation's the biggest risk. It hasn't shown up in any studies so far because they've been too small. If 1000 people have an extra $2k/month it doesn't measurably affect prices; if 100,000 people have an extra $2k/month suddenly everything becomes more expensive.
Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply. Build more houses and the price of housing comes down. Train more doctors (or nurse practitioners) and the price of health care comes down. Both of these industries have strong institutionalized cartels, though.
> Ultimately the fix for everything is more supply.
I always thought this was the biggest problem Obamacare (well intentioned though it is) left unaddressed. It looks like the ACA lacks the reforms that would allow supply to grow to meet demand.
Yes the bottleneck in producing more licensed physicians is currently the number of open residency slots in teaching hospitals. We need more funding for those. Every year some students graduate from medical school but are unable to actually practice medicine because they fail to get matched to a residency program.
Which early adopter program for UBI illustrated laziness? I'm actually opposed to UBI because I think everything is relative and it's really just upping the baseline, but from everything I've read it hasn't produced laziness in practice.
It should also be noted that the same studies showed general increases in health (particularly mental health) and in education, so this is not an unambiguous loss. My point is that usually when you fix one metric, you introduce losses in other metrics. There's no free lunch (and if there were, people wouldn't work as hard to feed themselves).
Improved mental health while doing less work should not be described as laziness!
Individual have a sustainable workrate, and can exceed that for short or medium term periods, but at the cost of long term health. Calling "not exceeding your long term sustainable rate" "lazy" gives you something like the Japanese salaryman culture.
>I wonder what aspirational thing we hold dear today will in retrospect become something more the opposite in the future. Renewable energy? Universal basic income? Universal healthcare? Self-driving cars? Electric vehicles?
Self driving cars for sure.
They remove the largest barriers to car use; that is, the costs of ownership, parking, and licensing. This latter fact means that they expand the total set of possible car drivers.
All of this means that the amount of cars on the road is likely to explode, which will dramatically increase congestion.
My expectation is that cities, which are already trying hard to shift people away from car oriented transportation options, will take a dim view of autonomous cars, and continue their efforts to shift away from the car.
The dystopian aspect I think will come from them being not self-driven, but Waymo-driven (or Tesla-driven, or whatever). You're not in charge, the corporation and the state are. That's not inevitable but it sure seems plausible. I remember when airline travel in the U.S. respected freedom of movement and even privacy.
If you look at simple polls, maybe, but with the magic of gerrymandered and electoral college politics, majorities can lose, and with the power of Citizens United and superpacs, voting can be twisted by massive established industries fighting for their existence against the natural self interest of the vast majorty.
> In 1990, Porat wrote the following note to Sculley: "A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object . . . It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it's not being used... Once you use it you won't be able to live without it."
I am looking forward to seeing the movie, but this article is strange. It seems to be grasping at straw in order to throw doubt on the "fail often, fail fast" (foff) philosophy. My take on foff is that it recognizes that the fear of failure can keep us from taking the risks needed for success. This seems orthogonal to concerns of privilege or the adverse effects of technology. I do think we in technology need to think about the adverse effects our work may produce, although I don't think the General Magic folks could have foreseen the smartphone issues we are dealing with now, no matter how hard they had tried.
yeah exactly. The privileged already know that they can fail often and fail fast. The point of being vocal about it is to help the slightly less privileged also adopt that mentality (because, honestly, they'll probably be okay too), which theretofore was one of the unspoken ingredients of success for the privileged.
General Magic is still one of my favorite logos. Its a great example of the "playfulness" that was common in (or at least commonly branded in) software business in the 90s.
It feels like it was one of the last start-ups that was fueled by the same hobbyist-computer idealism of the 70's and not fueled by a desire for money and profits.
I am sure there are more you just don’t know about but pen computing in the 90s was super exciting and fun. Maybe 3D printing is in a similar state where the little guy still can make a dent.
I so wanted something like Telescript to succeed even though it wasn't quite software agents like described by Dr. Yoav Shoham[1]. At this point some form of RPC over HTTP won, but I still think there is a place for mobile software agents given the way we spin up and down VMs.
Telescript, and their concept for agents was the reason I was looking for a job there. I went to the first dev conference they had (I think). But this side of the business didn’t seem to have the required commitment by the management, compared to the handheld devices, but more of an afterthought. But I have no real insight to what actually happened.
One thing I really admire about General Magic is how gutsy they were. In comparison most of the companies today look like cowards, cranking out nearly-identical glass sandwiches with only internal specs and the occasional odd camera design to differentiate them.
The analog of General Magic is not a smartphone company 12 years post-iPhone. It would be something more forward-looking, but hardware wise I am not sure of the next big idea that would have that same magnitude.
It was good, if a little cursory. At times it sort of felt like a trailer for itself or for a multi-part series. Didn't have the same depth of say Triumph of the Nerds or Pirates of Silicon Valley. The ending was rather fluffy.
>While the documentary is about the specific emotional journey of General Magic and the psychological impact of defeat, there’s a fair bit to unpack when we think more broadly about tech culture’s attitude toward failure. Who cleans up the mess? Who gets to fail and bounce back?
This strikes me as needlessly philosophical. People who take risks sometimes fail, and people with talent and money usually bounce back, especially if they don’t have kids. These are choices that very few are in any position to make, and this life is only for a very very small portion of motivated and a bit crazy people.
I saw it at a screening in London earlier this year. It's really terrific: it wasn't so much about the downfall of General Magic as how a sort of gleeful "yes, and" culture took hold of a group of people.
"Against this backdrop, the luminaries who do succeed dramatically change our lives, which could be seen to vindicate tech’s mythology of itself. After all, we _feel the impact of those successes with every stroke of the keyboard, every block of a troll_."
Uhh, what!? The success of the technology industry is that we use it to segregate society? That it's as natural as typing?
Is that really the narrative, or is this journalist using their platform to push their viewpoints while they report news?
If the ultimate vindication of the technology industry is that we can use it to completely filter out people we dislike from our lives, then we should take all of this and smash it right now. We should focus our energies into building connections between people, not tearing them down.
You're putting words in my mouth. Not only did I not say that, but your interpretation isn't any better either. Blocking is pretty much final.
I mean, why do we imprison and try to rehabilitate people instead of you know...killing them?
"Blocking trolls" (by this I specifically mean denying them access) is mob justice. In fact, there's even a supreme court ruling preventing the government from denying people access to social media. This isn't okay.
Feeling good about who gets punished doesn't make the form of punishment any better.
Being blocked on one out of hundreds of platforms is hardly equivalent to being killed, more like being banned from a mall after defecating on a bench. Being blocked by an individual user is an equivalent of stern stare, disapproving shake of a head and never getting any party invitations again. All justifiable for intentional trolling.
As I mentioned in the other comment, I am not equating the two, I am merely stating the case that punishments that are final/irreversible are bad news.
Also, in the comment you responded to, I had already stated that I am specifically _not_ referring to individual-to-individual interactions.
As for your mall analogy, maybe if said mall is the one that 1/6 of the human population shops at, the nearest competing malls only have 1/20th of the people/stores/stuff and there's only 1-2 competing malls where the shopkeepers speak the same language as you.
Actually, after thinking about it, I do agree with you on platform-wide permabans, they just encourage trolls to find ways to create throw away accounts.
Timed bans (with exponential increase for reoffenders) or permabans with a process to lift it are better. Then trolls who can be beaten into submission would be, those who can't will get effectively permabanned eventually and public places can be kept one step away from being toxic cesspools they would otherwise turn into.
With blocking, you could ask someone who knows you both to at least plead for your reinstatement.
With capital punishment, no amount of pleading by friends will help.
With blocking, you still have access to the entire rest of the world, other than the one person who blocked you. (Yes, if it's Google/Amazon, that's a big and massively inconvenient someone, but still).
With capital punishment, you have no access to anything you ever had or ever would have had in your life.
Those are massive differences.
At the very least, although there maybe a superficial sameness, it is a horribly broken analogy.
You're bringing up a person-to-person case that I have _three times now_ stated that I am not talking about.
People are doing that because that's what "block" in the social media context usually means. Sites ban, users block. And that's what the journalist probably meant too, so your position rather sounds like an attack on a strawman.
OK, for the sake of discussion, let's say that you actually said "permanent irrevocable ban by the host of a major service" and not "block", which usually applies to users.
The lack of appeal is indeed egregious.
However, it is NOTHING like being killed / capital punishment. It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.
Mostly, I'd suggest putting more thought into your arguments, and being a bit more gracious when readers notice your lack of clarity or precision. I used to make those kind of arguments too, and I found that everything got better once I figured out it was a waste of time, and I was better off saying, 'oh, I didn't make that clear enough, here's what I meant to say..."
> However, it is NOTHING like being killed / capital punishment. It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.
So you acknowledge that I stated I wasn't making that comparison but you felt the need to state the same as everyone else anyway?
> It is a ban from a single service, and nothing else in the world. If that service is such a large part of your life that you might as well be dead without it, you REALLY need to get a life.
You do realize that there are certain businesses/industries that _entirely_ depend on your access to social media, right? In a great many cases, losing that access is losing your income stream with possibly no hope of recovery.
The insidious part about that is that I'm not talking about people who make video content to be shared. If you work in Infosec, Twitter is your primary industry networking tool. It's literally required. If you buy and sell car parts, you are literally dependent on access to certain Facebook groups for customers and inventory. If you play Legacy format in Magic the Gathering or you're a card dealer? A lot of that business these days happens over Facebook. Most of you may not believe me when I say this, but it's the truth. And those are just the first three cases that I can think of that I have direct awareness of.
http://joshcarter.com/magic_cap/