Hacker Cinema
General Magic
2019 · Film · documentary · 92 min
Directed by Sarah Kerruish, Matthew Maude
A tale of how the great vision and epic failure of General Magic, the "greatest dead company in Silicon Valley", changed the lives of billions.
28 positive2 negative10 neutralfrom 40 commenters
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42 comments on Hacker News
This headline isn't great. It's an interview with Tony Fadell who invented the iPod, iPhone, and Nest thermostat. Before the iPod, Fadell worked at failed PDA maker General Magic. The interview doesn't get into other 90s attempts like the IBM Simon, Palm Pilot, or Apple Newton.
There's also a documentary about General Magic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek
Someone named Ashley Blewer did such a deep dive on this show that she produced a full online course and syllabus centered around it.
https://bits.ashleyblewer.com/halt-and-catch-fire-syllabus/
It allows people to form a "watch club" around the show, similar to a book club, and have plenty of extra reading materials to understand the different tech eras covered in the show.
I think this show -- combined with the documentary "General Magic" and the book "Fire in the Valley" -- is a great way to be immersed in the techno-optimism of the early tech industry around the time of the desktop PC revolution and early internet.
For me, that sort of techno-optimism has stuck with me even if modern tech has more dystopian elements with which one has to grapple. It is still an amazing industry, all things considered.
p.s. total aside that Apple TV sells a digital "box set" of this show for a pretty low price these days. I am usually not a fan of "buying" a show from a streaming service but might be worth it in this case since it's around $16 USD for every episode across its 4 seasons, Apple has a good track record honoring digital purchases, and watching the show is a commitment.
1. Bill Cunningham New York
2. General Magic(2018)
3. The Armstrong Lie
4. Icarus (2017 film)
5. Man on Wire
6. Baraka & Samsara
7. BBC Planet Earth
8. Finding Vivian Maier
General Magic (movie)
Halt and Catch Fire (series)
Silicon Valley (series)
That is a great documentary, but it's about General Magic, not Magic Leap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap
The General Magic movie/document (2018) is amazing and underrated. Always getting teardrops while watching it (watched it ~3 times). A true old-school startup story. And the soundtrack is also beautiful.
Plenty of interviews will Bill on YouTube. Example: https://youtu.be/dhlKTRU--VA
Also, perhaps the General Magic documentary is a fun watch too: https://youtu.be/JQymn5flcek
If you haven't, check out the documentary[0] on General Magic which Bill co-founded in 1990. Among the more remarkable scenes in there is when a member of the public seems perplexed by the thought that they would even want to "check email from Times Square."
An unthinkable future, but they thought it. And yet, most folks have never heard of General Magic.
0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek
I recently read the story of the Magic Link: https://commoncog.com/c/cases/general-magic/
> When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars). It offered futuristic features like a touchscreen, downloadable apps and animated emojis — the first of its kind. Fadell thought it would be revolutionary — people could now carry a personal computer with them wherever they went. But nobody bought it. In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold, and mostly to family and friends.
There's a documentary too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo
I remember reading about this and then finally I got to see some devices on sale in stores. By then though there was no hype and everyone had moved on.
The fall of Magic Cap (there's "General Magic the Movie") seems similar to the similarly named Magic Leap. They both thought they were onto something huge, and were the ones to do it first, do it best, and do it the most completely--in secret until the unveil. They were building the entire ecosystem in a vacuum. It's important to test your reality bubble with the real world sometime before you've made everything to production quality.
Apple's 'limited success' for the Vision Pro was a better business outcome than the much longer development cycle of either Magic Cap or Magic Leap 1. Of course if it had been wildly successful it could have been the exception--their time & money, their risk choice.
About 2001, I don't know, but Blackberry, SuperPumped, and General Magic are three other things I'd recommend watching in this general area.
For anyone else amazed by General Magic, the recently released documentary is available for free (legally) on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JQymn5flcek?si=zm-PJtQExOHol7r-
While it is not what you are looking for exactly, if you have not seen it, the General Magic documentary is extraordinary. It might make you cry.
https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
Tangentially related; as covered in The Blue Factory documentary[1], one of the challenges with the EB110's design was its flat sides. Curved body panels provide greater strength and importantly, reduces vibrations.
FWIW The Blue Factory had the same kind of charm as the General Magic documentary
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6301490/
Yes people imagined that. There's a movie about the company General Magic where you will see people filmed at the time imagining just that.
BTW, there is an excellent documentary on General Magic out there that is readily available on several services. I just watched it this weekend because I was one of those people fascinated with what they were building and disappointed that it took another 15 years for it to come into being (though realistically they were way way too early; the hardware and software just didn't exist yet).
You should watch the General Magic documentary and see the interviews of his former/current self
Related, the documentary "General Magic" is quite good, and mentions how Apple's Newton sort of undercut the proto-smartphone being developed by apple veterans at General Magic. So many people saw the future but the tech wasn’t quite there.
Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy and other places:
- The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage... school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects.
- We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of WWII.
- Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good one.
- There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science, than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model.
- "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about the early days.
- There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I think, where they are designing an operating system via paper terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the memory/storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07PhW5sCEk
- The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
- The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well. Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself Fortran.
- The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the meeting between MS and IBM as the deal of the century. We also watched a "Berkeley in '68" doc on Kanopy to set the stage before this one. Interesting, but a tangent.
- The "8-bit Guy" is also great, he dissects and rebuilds old home computer hardware from the same era, and teaches their history as he does it. Even his tangential videos on why there are no more electronics stores (besides Apple) in malls is great.
- There are good docs on the "dead ends" of the industry as well, such as "General Magic" and "Silicon Cowboys."
- "Revolution OS" a doc about the beginnings of FLOSS and Linux.
The documentary on General Magic.
Worth watching is the documentary on General Magic:
https://youtu.be/uTdyb-RWNKo
General Magic (2018) absolutely captures the essence of running & working at a startup doing innovative work on products that were well ahead of their time. Marc Porat is an incredible speaker, and he sheds a ton of light on what struggles they went through (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RaTIF6st4c), and the thought process behind bringing Magic Cap to market. The soundtrack alone (done by Benji Merrison) makes the film worth watching, and it's my go-to album for when I need to get focused. Highly recommend. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/
I watched the General Magic documentary couple years back... I'm sure it was just my perception, and maybe the video editing, but by what I recall it looked like they mostly goofed off and it was more a think-tank than actually building stuff. It's possible the video was cut this was to align with the "fun, silicon valley" narratives. Perhaps others felt the same who saw the documentary?
If you're interested in computing history and the relevance of General Magic, go watch "General Magic, The movie" [1].
It's a fantastic documentary on the life of the company and its brilliant founders and employees, many of whom went on to do great things at Apple, Nest, US Gov, and more.
https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
You should watch General Magic https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/
‘General Magic’ was pretty interesting. It was especially fun to learn about all the influential companies and technology people that emerged from that one company. It definitely re-enforces the idea that sillicon valley isn’t just about a handful of big companies but a community of folks that influence each other. At least at the time of the documentary’s story.
Also Valley of the Boom [0] by National Geographic focusing on Netscape, Pixelon, and a couple others.
And General Magic [1] - a documentary about the startup General Magic with interviews with early employees who went on to Apple, Google, etc
And Silicon Cowboys [2] - documentary about Compaq in the early days, pretty much the real story version of Season 1
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_the_Boom
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6849786/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4938484/
Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary "General Magic"? If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the point one could consider it an Apple "side story", though there are also future Googlers and people who built Android.
Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo
I found it interesting. There is a bit of hagiography going on, though (and note the trailer seems way more antagonistic towards Sculley than the documentary actually is.)
One thing I found striking is that none of these people seem to need or care about money. They say so explicitly, "we didn't care about the money", and that it was all about the vision and passion. Yet somehow they managed to remain clothed and well fed. If that's not the definition of privilege, I don't know what is!
I'd like to see a NeXT documentary produced by anyone. The General Magic one was great.
"General Magic: The Most Influential Silicon Valley Company No One Has Ever Heard Of" is a 2018 documentary about General Magic, the company behind the Magic Cap OS.
You can stream the documentary for free on Kanopy (with a library card from a participating library) here:
https://www.kanopy.com/product/general-magic
As someone who lived through the General Magic era and got to try the device, I found the movie a total bore. It's talking heads. They skipped the most interesting part which is the device's novel UI. That and the application service frameworks were the real innovations and both were to early for their time, but there's no coverage of that in the movie.
The company General Magic was before my time as a mid-30s developer. I thought the documentary was great because there was a lot of history I was not familiar with. I recommend it.
ADVrider was started by Chris Macaskill who went on to found Smugmug and Cake.com. You might have been him interviewed in the General Magic documentary. A great guy.
Thank you for this post. It reminded me of the one line in “General Magic” where Marc Porat tells the documentary producer that the reason he agreed to make himself very available and open for the film was so that his (presumably somewhat estranged) children can get to know him and the story and the work they did, better.
Terribly sorry for you and your friends and colleagues’ loss. Thank you and everyone else for doing this for his children.
I've been reading/watching a lot about Apple history lately. The two or three threads by Chris MacAskill on Cake that have been linked here recently, some audiobooks, podcasts and the documentary 'General Magic'.
It's interesting how much of these personal accounts directly contradict each other. I don't think much, if any, of the contradictions are in bad faith... just an interesting window into the collective human ability to tell stories to suit our perceptions after the fact.
I'm surprised that this article doesn't mention General Magic for context. It's really crazy how much of this was invented and reinvented but the infrastructure and performance just wasn't there during the 90's in a way to support mass adoption. It was close enough to build something, but all of those somethings failed until WiFi, cell technology and Moore's law supported small enough gadgets. If you haven't watched it yet, I highly recommend the documentary on General Magic. https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com/
There is documentary called General Magic which used old footage and interviews to describe their rise and fall. In one scene, Bill is said to have written a big chunk (don’t remember exactly what but I was in awe) of it very quickly. I saw it on a plane when browsing through Emirates’ catalogue.
This is a great reminder. I was impressed by the recent documentary "General Magic" by how much smart people seem to congregate around new ideas. The old Mac team was the same one trying to create the smartphone 10 years before it was possible, and it was that core of folks who ended up doing it at Apple and Android later anyway.
There was a twitter video that comically showed their marketing demo of the whale and then the real life example of the product (with related music).
It appears to have been scrubbed from the internet though because I was trying to find it a while back to show someone and I searched for a while, but couldn't find anything.
Magic Leap seems like a case study of how not to release a product, but maybe they were more focused on raising money?
Either work on your thing in public, shipping units (Oculus/FB) or work on it entirely in secret (Apple), but don't loudly and continuously talk vaguely about how amazing your thing is with no real public examples for years. This plus all the fake marketing video demos - if you're going to do this you better be as good as you're pretending to be.
Someone that good probably wouldn't need to show marketing videos, they'd just show the product itself.
I finally did get to play with one (friend who personally knows an investor had one) and it was pretty disappointing. AR seems likely to be the next computing platform, but the hardware is not ready yet.
Magic Leap reminds me a lot of the General Magic documentary - crazy hype, right general idea, but too early and bad product.
I'm not sure if they have the same talent General Magic had though.
If you can, watch the documentary "General Magic". I got it off Showtime. Hadn't finished it yet, but what I've seen so far is great, if painful. By "painful", it's easy for a developer to put themselves in their shoes. Imagine putting your heart and soul into a product, knowing you're making something great and world-changing, being right, then watching it fail. Then later be vindicated by other products on the market.
Interesting timing for this article and documentary to emerge, while a modern company with so many parallels, Magic Leap, is apparently releasing their device in the coming days. As General Magic was an ambitious and visionary precursor to the iPhone, so it seems Magic Leap may be the ambitious and visionary precursor to a mainstream spatial computing headset of the not-too-distant future.
With recent leaks of the 40 degree FOV and headset footage, it seems that Magic Leap, like General Magic, has not yet been able to deliver the technology necessary for widespread appeal. This time around, at least Magic Leap has raised a war chest so large, perhaps they can move forward with a far improved version 2 and continue operations and development, given only modest sales.
Hopefully Magic Leap can learn a lesson here and avoid becoming a General Magic (although, if it does, it was still a worthwhile effort to push the field forward, as General Magic did).
A film was made about General Magic that was a pretty big hit at this year's Tribeca Film Festival. There was a showing in a big theater in San Jose last week but it sold out. They have another showing at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View this Friday. Let's hope it gets on Netflix.