Before General Magic there was Paradigm (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Before General Magic there was Paradigm (2018)

joshcarter.com

47 pointstobr29 comments

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?

I got the same impression, although just from a few scenes. It's impressively bad that the Newton was a "clone" of General Magic yet it shipped years earlier.

While acknowledging the influence of General Magic on Apple's Newton work, I think it's inaccurate to characterize it as a "clone".

A brief use of Magic Cap and Newton OS reveals in my opinion very little in common in the shipped products.

Agreed.

Magic Cap was more like Microsoft Bob than it was like the Newton.

I wouldn’t be that pejorative about it — the Magic Cap UI was actually useful — but yes, that’s closer.

Both Magic Cap and Microsoft Bob had a user interface with a room based metaphor.

You would select an object in a picture of a room to launch applications. You would navigate from room to room to find other groups of applications.

That's not pejorative. It's descriptive.

My impression was that they were high on their own supply and there was no adult supervision at all, which I think aligns with your impression.

Sort of feel it would really be helpful to replace the narrative of the creation of the modern smartphone ("the iPhone sprung forth from the head of Jobs!") with a picture of the decade+ of efforts made by the computer industry to make consumer electronics.

Note also that this article mentions the Danger Hiptop and folks who worked on it. Some folks who worked on that worked on iPhone 1.0 and some even still work on iPhones!

There are of course literally hundreds of products that led the way, in some way or another.

Of course Andy Rubin[0] from Danger (previously also General Magic as mentioned in article) went on to found Android as well - and Android itself owes (in a way) it’s own name to Apple (Andy’s nickname at Apple was apparently “Android”.)

What’s also interesting to me is that the Danger used NetBSD in at least some it’s projects, which is an OS dear to my heart. Always nice to see some of the “alternate takes”, “near misses”, or “could have been…” technologies on the past road to where we happen to be now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Rubin

The original Danger OS was home grown by some of the same folks that later started Zircon!

> Sort of feel it would really be helpful to replace the narrative of the creation of the modern smartphone ("the iPhone sprung forth from the head of Jobs!") with a picture of the decade+ of efforts made by the computer industry to make consumer electronics.

The thing is that many other companies could've made an iPhone before a Jobs-led Apple, just like other people could've run a 4-minute mile before Roger Bannister. But as a hardware + software + marketplace system, it truly was a discontinuous leap.

If you want to read an article that goes the other way and maybe overstates General Magic's contributions, you might also enjoy this oral history: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/08/general-magic-oral-h...

General Magic also had some really dud ideas. They went to great lengths to spec out software "agents" that would actually travel to some other location and then execute there. Just imagine the security implications of that.

It's not hyperbole to say that they missed the Internet, and this was at a period when the Internet was beginning to catch on. This is the real reason you may not have heard of them.

Telescript was definitely a bet against the Internet, although I don't know if Magic Cap even included Telescript. Palm and Newton didn't bet on the Internet either because mobile Internet may not have even existed at the time, but they didn't explicitly bet against it.

Palm did quite well for a while with no wireless connectivity to speak of, other than sync'ing with your PC.

Yeah, Palm didn't force people to pay for ridiculously expensive wireless hardware/service and they didn't try to invent their own alternative to the Internet.

Palm had mobile data on the Palm VII in 99.

Apple and NewtonOS supported a variety of different mobile networks (eg. ARDIS/DataTAC and CDPD) in the time before the Internet and TCP/IP became dominant. But it's fair to say that the OS was not built with networking in mind.

Later releases of NewtonOS included a TCP/IP stack that worked with dialup PPP (over PSTN modems), wired Ethernet, and early releases of what became WiFi (at that time, WaveLAN).

The devices' IR "beaming" hardware meant that NewtonOS had an inbox/outbox concept that allowed users to exchange email, documents, software, etc. This was adapted to work with always-on Internet connectivity, but it was clearly a retrofit (much like MacOS and Windows at the same time).

"Agents" where the new hotness when General Magic was doing it's thing. CS depts everywhere were writing about agents, "everybody" imagined them as the future. It wasn't just GM that got this, uh, wrong.

Did they get it wrong? I've always viewed IFTTT, "function as a service" offerings, many of the automation systems we use for building and testing and deploying software, and others as applications of those ideas. Maybe not as full-featured or ubiquitous as we imagined at the turn of the century, but certainly still in the vein of software agents.

I think they did get it wrong. The current role of what we might (Just about) call "agents" could have been described without the 90s terminologies and conceptions. But that period's agents were supposed to be something quite different from RPC (and really, even from AJAX when it eventually arrived). It turns out that we mostly just got a slightly fancier version of RPC that has allowed us to build some cool services, but the 90s part of it has mostly dropped away.

I was working at UWashington CS&E during that period, and the air was buzzing with the idea of "code objects" that would actually "go out on the internet and book your next trip for you". Sure, we ended up with Expedia which is pretty great, but it's not at all what was being imagined back then.

We have quite prevalent “code objects” too, tweets etc. we sent out on the internet to solve our problems. They do act as agents though, and are sometimes not successful. And you do not code for operations but for virality in an execution machine that is being optimised for this operation via specialisation of its components to be collaterally, obsessively specifically extremist.

We had "tweets" in the 1980s. They were called "usenet posts" and they were not restricted to 280 chars.

The core/key idea of agents in the 90s was that the agent would actually interact with services on your behalf, and reduce the level of interaction you were required to engage in without reducing the specificity of the interaction. That has not happened.

Instead we got the reverse. Agents are 'your code executing on someone else's computer' and now there is 'someone else's code executing on your computer'.

There is Ethereum.

Or indeed still “operating on someone else’s computer“, but we’re calling it “the cloud” now.

Always liked the name "General Magic," although I like "Industrial Light & Magic" more.

Yeah, reminds me of Niven's Puppeteer's "General Products".

It’s such a good name. I like any company name with ‘general’ in, it’s such a humblebrag, but General Magic especially so.

‘So, er what do you do?’ ‘Oh, you know. General Magic.’

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