He talks about General Magic, which shipped basically an early smartphone in 1994:
I co-founded a company called General Magic, we wanted to make personal communicators that would be intimate devices, with you all the time... we wanted to do something smaller that would be in your pocket and with you all the time, and we failed. We really couldn’t - the components were too expensive, there wasn’t a good capacitive touch sensing that you could do gentle swipe...
And the meteoric rise of the Internet drew the attention away from it and all our partners kinda went to work on the Internet. And yeah, they were right to do so.
We were just ahead of our time. I’m pleased to see some of the ideas that we had bore fruit in the long run, and that’s really what I saw, and the first iPhone was hey - somebody’s finally done the personal communicator.
The lecture also has one of my favorite lines from any lecture I've attended: You know, I’m not like advocating that every software designer should go out and take LSD, but it worked for me.
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