The tech company General Magic typified what it means to pour your heart and soul into a dream. An engrossing documentary, replete with archival footage and contemporary interviews, unveils their story in dramatic fashion.
When General Magic was founded in 1990, Tamagotchis hadn’t yet made it into the hands of millions of faux parents, Pixar’s Toy Story hadn’t arrived in theaters, and scores of video game playing teenagers had never heard of the Nintendo 64. In 1990, even the World Wide Web was in its utmost infancy.
It’s all the more remarkable, then, that a Silicon Valley company was throwing itself into a device temporarily named the Pocket Crystal. It was a small personal computer—filled with apps and games and communication tools—that one would carry with them everywhere they went. Today, such a device is so ubiquitous that it’s hard to remember what life was like before it.
If General Magic was behind such a transformative idea, why is the company so little known today? The documentary General Magic, directed by Matt Maude & Sarah Kerrish, tells that complicated story. It’s one of groundbreaking ideas on the one hand, failure and unmet promises on the other.
The film begins with overhead shots of Silicon Valley accompanied by warm, ethereal music. “The reason you should care about the story of General Magic,” a voice eventually says, “is because it involves something fundamental, and that is, failure isn’t the end. Failure is actually the beginning.”
It’s the voice of Marc Porat, whose visionary idea sparked the origins of General Magic. A futurist who communicates in a kind of poetic eloquence, Porat had worked at Apple in the early 1980s before leaving. Later that decade he approached John Sculley (CEO of Apple after Steve Jobs had been ousted in 1985) with a revolutionary vision.
It was an idea for “a tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object,” he told Sculley in an email. He added some romantic flourish: “It should offer the comfort of a touchstone. The tactile satisfaction of a seashell. The enchantment of a crystal. Once you use it, you won’t be able to live without it.” There was one other thing that Porat emphasized. As innovative as Apple was, he was adamant the project would need to be carried out separate from Apple. Sculley was persuaded, and he in turn convinced enough members of the board.
General Magic was born.
Porat brought on Andy Hertzfeld, the “software wizard” who had been pivotal in the development of the Macontish, and Bill Atkinson, also of Apple, who became chief scientist at General Magic.
From the outset, the company attracted an eager hive of developers, designers, engineers. One of those was Tony Fedall, a long-haired, 22-year-old who had fallen in love with computers at an early age. The thought of working with his heroes, guys like Hertzfeld, was too tempting to let go; he hounded human resources with phone calls, begging for a job that he eventually got. He became the quintessential young employee, willing to do anything and everything. “I was a newbie,” he reflects in the film. “A lot of people got to just do […] if you’re the young guy in the team you had to learn and do. So you had to work double or triple time.”
In reality, everyone was putting in insane hours; 100-hour work weeks were not uncommon. Some forewent hygiene. When well-dressed executives came to General Magic for a meeting, Bill Atkinson “stunk like a goat,” remembers General Magic’s legal counsel. “You could see the noses wrinkle on the faces of the three AT&T guys.” (The meeting was nonetheless a success.)
That was the culture: blithely unconcerned about anything other than creating, innovating, and turning visions into reality. The documentary features loads of archival footage showing gleeful team members at work. In one clip, a young engineer with an infectious grin on her face talks about the touch screen they’ve been working on. Asked by the cameraman how small it could eventually get, her response echoes the same forward-looking vibes of the company: “Someday? A Dick Tracy wrist watch.”
Along with AT&T, General Magic formed a consortium with fifteen other giants, including Sony, who would ultimately manufacture the company’s finished product, named The Magic Link.
But both before and after the device was released, the free-spirited days at General Magic were turning cloudy. The company excelled at creating and innovating, but that was different than getting an actual product to market. A press relations employee remembers the misplaced priorities: “[the developers] would just go off in all kinds of crazy directions and they were amazing ideas, but, dudes, we got to ship a product at the end of the day.”
Along with internal strife inside the company, an event from the outside shocked the entire team: Apple released their Newton, a PDA that was similar to what General Magic had been working so hard on. They were left feeling angered and betrayed. When The Magic Link came out the following year, it sold poorly—really poorly—and failed to generate the kind of excitement they had hoped. (It was little consolation that the Newton didn’t sell well either.) The team had dedicated countless hours and sacrificed any semblance of a personal life only to see their device—their vision—fall flat. It wasn’t the right time; people weren’t ready for it.
In the end, the story of General Magic has it all. Vision and ambition, betrayal and heartache, talent and hubris. When a company attempts to peer decades into the future and make it the present, perhaps those elements are all but inevitable.
Spectatio 