Terrific read, with contributions from core players such as Andy Hertzfeld, Woz, John Sculley, Tony Fadell, and many more.
An oral history of General Magic, the company that invented the iPhone — two decades too early.
Terrific read, with contributions from core players such as Andy Hertzfeld, Woz, John Sculley, Tony Fadell, and many more.
Fantastic story/history. What stood out to me (among many other things) was:
“Andy Hertzfeld: NeXT was a revenge plot. That’s the reason I didn’t work at NeXT. Steve denied it and we’d argue till he was blue in the face. But it was true: The purpose of NeXT was to eclipse Apple. And I loved the Mac. I didn’t want to work against the Mac. But Steve wanted the Mac to fail, and so he started NeXT.”
Dang. Okay, now I’m going to need to read this piece.
Dang. Okay, now I’m going to need to read this piece.
Well worth the time. Enjoy. An interesting absence in the dialog is Bill Atkinson. I’ll comment on that after you finish…
Finally got back to this one. I remember hearing about the company name, but didn’t remember what they’d come up with.
Wow. Holy Daystrom Institute. These people had it all figured out only a short time before the tech and manufacturing capability could make it possible. Wow.
I think it would have failed anyway. It wasn’t open ended enough. It had too much HyperCard legacy about it, too much desktop metaphor. Bill Atkinson was and no doubt still is a genius as is Hertzfeld but there was something about the way General Magic came together that was bothersome to me. And, I was at all of their early announcements and demos. I was very excited about it all but I had a feeling it would fail. Maybe expectations were too high given the folks involved, I don’t know, but something wasn’t right.
Sounds like too many other problems that were out of their reach needed to be solved before they could have succeeded.
Now I’m curious about what Steve Perlman’s working on.