General Magic
General Magic was a company that was founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat and dealt with the development of portable data entry devices. The company developed the personal intelligent communicator, a precursor of the PDA.
The first project began in 1990 with Apple. Marc Porat was convinced that the future of IT in the integration of classical computer functions ( spreadsheet, word processing ), communication systems (e-mail, mobile) and consumer electronics ( cameras, computer game ) lie.
Finally, he was able to win Apple's CEO John Sculley for the idea of the development of such devices approved under the so -called paradigm project. The project ran for several months at Apple; However, the management showed little interest for it and pursued the project, therefore, only low priority. Eventually, they struck Sculley prior to spin the work in a separate company, which was done in May 1990.
At the beginning of the company General Magic was provisionally mainly beating the big drum. In 1992, some well-known companies in the electronics industry (for example, Sony, Motorola, Matsushita, Philips and AT & T) could be obtained as a partner, bringing with them the corresponding financial strength. Notwithstanding began at Apple again the development of portable computer, at the end of the Apple Newton stood. For no apparent reason General Magic Apple was sued. Although the process fizzled, the relationship between the two companies but was disturbed sustainable. In February 1995, General Magic went public, the stock price doubled on the same day.
The concept of the General Magic system was to distribute the computational load of typical applications on multiple devices. The developers realized that portable devices have not achieved the performance of normal PCs due to their size and energy supply. So it was impossible to take over the functions of a desktop PC simply 1:1. Instead, the devices were only a minimal operating system - called Magic Cap - equipped, in which all necessary basic functions and a user interface were integrated. The design of the surface did not follow the usual desktop metaphor today, but in a so-called space - metaphor. This meant that office applications such as e -mail and address book were to be found in the "office", games, for example in the " living room".
Applications are generally programmed in Objective C and based on program libraries, which provided the Magic Cap operating system. The installation of the programs carried in packages ( packages) that could be flexibly set plays and removed. For the most efficient use of the limited space was taken into account.
Another programming language was Telescript, which focused on communication. Similar to Java Telescript programs were compiled into platform-independent bytecode. Means Telescript the concept of burden-sharing have been implemented. For example, an application was invoked on the device, then on a server launched another Telescript program. The server program took the brunt of the computing power required, so that the handheld device functioned in principle only as a terminal.
The goal of Magic General was to make Telescript programs widely available. First, above all selected nodes should be (for example, server for mobile telephony) equipped with it, and later desktop PCs, which should make the applications available via the Internet. It should comprehensively mobile agents are brought into use. Magic Cap devices brought from Sony, AT & T, and Motorola 1994 on the market. As a processor of the Motorola 68300 was used Dragon. Unlike other handheld devices that came around the same time on the market, the Magic cap system could no handwriting recognition, and therefore came very quickly behind. Furthermore, the infrastructure was (ie, the Telescript server) scarce. The mobile operators had until then not been installed on only Telescript application on their system, so that the actually intended use option was omitted.
At General Magic developments of the computer market were very applicable foreseen (for example, the proliferation of e- mail or mobile phones ). However, the error was the assumption that all this is based on a proprietary network (owned by AT & T / NTT DoCoMo, mocking the cloud - called "the cloud" ) would happen. The emerging World Wide Web and the Mosaic browser - both freely available - ultimately ensured that the General Magic devices have not been successful.
Sales were so bad that the production was stopped soon. General Magic took several more attempts to revive his concept, most recently in 1999 as a voice message system.
- IT architecture
- Company (United States)
- Personal Digital Assistant
- Former hardware manufacturer