Communications of the ACM
What Happened to General Magic?
General Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 with much of the original Mac team on board, and a bold new product idea.
Credit: John Harding
Chances are that you've never heard of General Magic, but in Silicon Valley the company is the stuff of legend. Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 with much of the original Mac team on board and a bold new product idea: a handheld gadget that they called a "personal communicator." Plugged into a telephone jack, it could handle e-mail, dial phone numbers, and even send SMS- like instant messages—complete with emoji and stickers. It had an app store stocked with downloadable games, music, and programs that could do things like check stock prices and track your expenses. It could take photos with an (optional) camera attachment. There was even a prototype with a touch screen that could make cellular calls and wirelessly surf the then- embryonic web. In other words, General Magic pulled the technological equivalent of a working iPhone out of its proverbial hat—a decade before Apple started working on the real thing. Shortly thereafter, General Magic itself vanished.
Andy Hertzfeld: The Macintosh had a great launch; it was really successful at first. Steve laid down a challenge at the introduction, which was to sell first thousand machines in the first hundred days, and it exceeded that. But then starting in the fall, sales started dropping off.
Steve Wozniak: It just didn't have any software at first.
Fred Davis: MacPaint and MacWrite were like demo programs. They weren't real tools that you could use to do stuff.
Steve Wozniak: The Macintosh wasn't a computer—it was a program to make things move in front of Steve's eyes, the way a real computer would move them, but it didn't have the underpinnings of a general operating system that allocates resources and keeps track of them and things like that. It didn't have the elements of a full computer. It had just enough to make it look like a computer so he could sell it, but it didn't sell well.
From New York Magazine
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