Magic Cap, from the Magic Link to the DataRover and the stuff in-between

Oh man, the madness of desktop literalism in GUI design in the mid-90s. The more "subtle" metaphors of files and folders blown far past skeumorphism and into immediately literal graphic representations of a "desk" with a "phone" and a "rolodex". These guys went full-in and represented buildings and cities.

It was such a transitional time, people who had never had personal access to a computing device suddenly trying to figure out how nested file structures work, saving documents, and running software all were mind-blowing concepts for the average adult moving from a world of paper. The term "paperless office" was tossed around as a far future goal.

For those who never worked in an office in the 80s or 90s, the amount of paper and paper handling tools needed to function at even a basic level was absolutely unreal. https://weare.guru/office-life-in-the-1980s-vintage-photos/

Ignore the computing tech in the pictures and look at the tons of fire-hazard ready paper literally everywhere.

It didn't die in the 90s either. I remember getting a demo from a vendor in the early 2000s for a chat system that used a very literal city metaphor to organize chat rooms. Because of course the word "room" was used and that implied they had to reverse out from their into buildings, and city blocks, and cities. So navigating to different rooms involved all kinds of clicking around town. We, habitual corporate IRC users, were not impressed.

Like Scott said, pretty awesome data dump on GM.

Telescript is a whole story in itself.

I remember being in a meeting where Marc was pitching Pocket Crystal to Al Alcorn at Apple.

The dark side was the company was peak ex-Apple rock star programmer ego.

I loved the ideas of these kinds of products and always hated the metaphor when using them. They were valuable when the general public was trying to understand what the hell all that computer stuff was, but really they got in the way.

It reminds me of those old "mall" or "map" efforts to get people online (eWorld, the Playstation online environment, even, at an extreme, Second Life). The fact is nobody wants to "walk" from shop to shop; they want to be in gap and then be in See's candies. On the web you can click from one to the other; in real life you can't so you walk. Trying to reproduce these meatspace metaphors merely unnecessarily implements meatspace limitations. Even now I prefer to use the command line on my mac because the friction of dragging the mouse around for routine action is annoying...but getting better.

Apple got this right with the iphone. They started out with metaphors that reflected experiences skeuomorphically to teach you how to use the touch interface (e.g. scrolling "wheels" to select numbers) then phased them out relatively quickly as everybody internalized them.*

Failure to comprehend this is one of the many issues killing VR. They need to exploit the new affordances of the new technology, with a small number of onramps.

* Whether they continued this phase out for too long is another question

I still have my two Magic Links, a bunch of SRAM cards, and a bunch of shrink wrapped software. Lost my telebug cable years ago.

GM is where Andy Rubin learned how to leverage carrier partnerships. He took that knowledge to Android and the rest is history.

Also, Pierre Omidyar of eBay worked in GMDTS.

They were a bunch of Really Smart Guys over there. Good Times.

Would be cool, to make simulator, to touch so different interface on modern hardware.

I think, 10 years old android phone will run it.

i have a magic cap and an eo440. amazing artifacts from another time