General Magic

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Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

And it doesn’t have to end once you’re on dry land. Among the many amazing people who I got to work with at General Magic were Wendell and Brian Sander. Father and son, both insanely brilliant, salt of the earth, engineer’s engineers. Brian was my manager at General Magic and both the Sanders helped me figure out how to create MagicBus, a digital peripheral bus for the Magic Link. The ideas and patents we created together are now the basis for USB devices around the world. It was a dream come true. When General Magic imploded, we all went our separate ways. But I never lost touch. And ten years later, I hired Brian to work on the iPod with me.

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And if I test negative, no one else I hire on our team will have to take it.” Luckily, I tested negative and we hired some amazing people. Then we got to work negotiating with General Magic to get a version of their operating system (OS) that would do what we needed. I knew the code, knew we could make it work. But by that point General Magic was sinking fast. No revenue, no customers, lots of panic. Marc Porat had made many promises to many people and they were all coming up empty. After months of struggling to squeeze an OS out of General Magic, I got the call: Tony, we just can’t do it. Sorry! I was left with a job title, a budding team, a budget, and a mission we believed in, but no operating system and half a year down the drain.

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Many startups are founded by entrepreneurs who just left big companies. They saw a need, pitched their bosses, got rejected, then struck out on their own. I watched it happen with Pierre Omidyar at General Magic. In his spare time, he wrote up some code to let people auction off collectibles to each other. When it started picking up steam, he asked if General Magic would be interested in it. No, thank you, was the answer; that’s a ridiculous idea. So he got a waiver from General Magic that said they claimed no rights to his work, quit, and started a small startup called eBay. There were a lot of reasons for Pierre’s success—perfect timing, a great idea, the will to follow it, the skill to implement it, the ability to lead.

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

There was no internet then, so I would religiously read MacWEEK and Macworld, and there was always the last page of each of those rags which were like the murmurs, the rumors, the goings-on, and this company called General Magic kept popping up in it. I was like, Whatever that is, I have got to learn more about it. Marc Porat: General Magic had all the buzz. All the buzz. It was where the pixie dust was. It was where you wanted to work if you were cool and smart. Tony Fadell: I am looking all over for General Magic, and I find out that their office is in Mountain View in this high-rise, and so I show up about eight thirty in the morning with a tie and a jacket on, with my résumé in hand, and walk in the door.

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That’s kind of in our sweet spot, isn’t it?” That was General Magic’s thing: the whole notion of electronic community. I said, “That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard! If you want to do it, bye, see you later.” That was eBay. Amy Lindburg: Everything came out of General Magic like just a big explosion. Michael Stern: iPhones, social media, electronic commerce, it all came out of Magic. That’s the story. The Bengali Typhoon Wired’s revolution of the month By the early nineties, Silicon Valley had racked up an impressive array of fascinating failures—The Well never scaled up, VR never took off, General Magic was in the process of imploding.

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So I bid on this chip and I get it a few days later, that’s my first purchase, but I’m fascinated by this site—fascinated by both the concept of people getting together and buying directly from each other with no real middleman, and by this guy Pierre, who shows up every night on his little chat board to ask questions: “How do you like what’s going on? Do you have any suggestions? I just had a long day at General Magic.” He was working at General Magic at the time. Pete Helme: By 1996 things at General Magic weren’t going well. Steve Westly: And he’s got the thing set up in the back room of his apartment—it’s a two- or three-bedroom place, and the back room is eBay. It’s twenty-five cents to list and a teeny little fee, and you send your check to this P.O. box.

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

This is simply not true, as the failure of General Magic showed. Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld headed General Magic's development effort. These two men were the lead software engineers on the Apple Macintosh and are arguably the two most talented, creative, and inventive programmers ever. Their simultaneous design and programming on the Macintosh was a success in 1984 (although Jef Raskin, who did no programming, contributed much of the design). However, things changed quite a bit in the ensuing 14 years, and their methods were no longer viable. In early 1993, I interviewed Andy Hertzfeld at General Magic's engineering headquarters—Andy's living room in Palo Alto—and he described his design/programming philosophy to me.

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Who but history could second-guess an engineering talent as towering as Andy's? There is no doubt that the product General Magic had in mind was, and still is, extremely desirable. There is no doubt that its technology was superb. There is no doubt that Marc Porat's ability to establish strategic partnerships and make business deals was second to none. There is no doubt that the company was well sired and well funded. So what caused its demise? I offer interaction design, or a lack of it, as the smoking gun. Despite its stellar pedigree and awesome talent, General Magic's product was engineered and not designed. The current thinking in the industry ignores this obvious deduction, as Michelle Quinn's article shows.

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But most software-based products, even consumer products, aren't that sensitive to any particular date. For example, in 1990 the PenPoint computer from GO was supposed to be the progenitor of a handheldcomputer revolution. In 1992, when the PenPoint crashed and burned, the Apple Newton inherited the promise of the handheld revolution. When the Newton failed to excite people, General Magic's Magic Link computer became the new hope for handhelds. That was in 1994. When the Magic Link failed to sell, the handheld market appeared dead. Venture capitalists declared it a dry hole. Then, out of nowhere, in 1996, the PalmPilot arrived to universal acclaim. It seized the handheld no-man's-land six years late.

Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed Everything by Steven Levy

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, information retrieval, information trail, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Pepsi Challenge, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, rolodex, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, The Home Computer Revolution, the medium is the message, Vannevar Bush

He is a cofounder of a start-up company called General Magic. Nestled in the cubicles of the General Magic engineering department is virtually a Mac Hall of Fame. In the corner sits Bill Atkinson, the corporation's chairman. Next to his cubicle is Hertzfeld, the inspiration to the young hackers on staff Also in the room are Susan Kare, the original Macintosh artist; Dan Winkler, author of HyperTalk; and Bruce Leak, the key wizard behind Macintosh QuickTime. Joanna Hoffman, hired by Jef Raskin as a marketing person when only four people worked on Macintosh, is General Magic's vice president of sales and marketing.

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A button with a picture of a package might flash at that point, and if you touched it, the disk would arrive at your house the next day, billed to your bank account. Oddly, among General Magic's companions in the pocket communications trade is a product produced solely by Apple itself. It's called Newton. Its head engineer is another Mac alumnus, Steve Capps. Working with him on the project are Macintosh classmates Jerome Coonen and Larry Kenyon. Newton is a pen-based digital slab slightly larger than a human hand. Its icon-based interface is less whimsical than that of General Magic, but still an obvious successor to Macintosh. Example: when you scratch the .. pen over text on the display in an erasing motion, the text disappears-in a simulated puff of smoke.

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Joanna Hoffman, hired by Jef Raskin as a marketing person when only four people worked on Macintosh, is General Magic's vice president of sales and marketing. Even the communications director has a pedigree-she's John Sculley's former publicist. General Magic began when Marc Porat, a former Stanford MBA working at Apple, came up with a product idea called Pocket Crystal-a personal communications device that would not only combine the functions of telephone, fax, electronic mail, but perform the tasks of a digital Filofax, and, finally, be a conduit to various databases and even, eventually, financial accounting systems. It would not only be an umbilical to the world's knowledge and a handy reminder of your personal business-it would be your wallet.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

I used to go to Silicon Valley every now and then to work with a software publisher there, and every time I was in the valley, I would hear about a company called General Magic. General Magic was founded by the core team that built the Macintosh, and I really wanted a job there because I couldn’t find any experienced people I could learn from in Ann Arbor to help me build and grow a startup. There were no internet and no email back then, so I literally pounded the door. Eventually, I got an interview. At General Magic, we developed the early versions of a smartphone that years later would become the iPhone. The company raised tens of millions of dollars, but its product was too advanced for the technology of the time and too early for adoption.

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—MARC ANDREESSEN, FOUNDER OF NETSCAPE AND ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ In 1995, General Magic, the startup company where Tony Fadell worked, built an early version of a smartphone. The hybrid telephone-computer was unlike anything the industry had seen before. But it never caught on—the technology for touch screens was in its infancy, the processors consumed a lot of energy that strangled the battery life, and very few people were using email. When Apple introduced the first iPhone, twelve years later, most of those problems were alleviated. But by then, General Magic was long gone and its smartphone mostly forgotten. Apple wasn’t competing with General Magic, but it wasn’t the first company to work on the smartphone idea either.

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The company raised tens of millions of dollars, but its product was too advanced for the technology of the time and too early for adoption. It failed spectacularly. After General Magic, I made my own designs for what would look like a personal smartphone (without the phone) and pitched it to all the partners of General Magic. One was Philips. I pitched the vision and the product to their CEO. He said, “I want you to build this for me.” So the Philips Mobile Computing Group was born and went on to develop a number of Windows CE–based handheld devices. Then in 1999, after a brief stint as a VC at Philips, I started another startup called Fuse.

Running Money by Andy Kessler

Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, Apple II, bioinformatics, Bob Noyce, British Empire, business intelligence, buy and hold, buy low sell high, call centre, Charles Babbage, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, flying shuttle, full employment, General Magic , George Gilder, happiness index / gross national happiness, interest rate swap, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, knowledge worker, Leonard Kleinrock, Long Term Capital Management, mail merge, Marc Andreessen, margin call, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, packet switching, pattern recognition, pets.com, railway mania, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez canal 1869, Toyota Production System, TSMC, UUNET, zero-sum game

Not overnight—it probably took three or four months to get all the shares through Goldman Sachs. I think we were buying the shares of Marc Porat, one of the founders. As other investors starting hearing about 98 Running Money General Magic’s new service, the stock started trading close to $2, still less than the cash in the bank. In our first 12 months, we managed to scrape up barely $20 million in capital—how lame. But thanks to NetApp and Pinnacle and General Magic, we turned it into $25 million, a 25% gain. Maybe this investment thing really is going to get off the ground. > > > IR Is Dead “And then the Suez Canal and turbines drove transportation costs even lower and . . .”

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We were thinking the same thing. We were in on this deal. > > > It Works Again! PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA—MID-1998 Holy shit! I can’t even believe it. General Magic stock, the one we had been buying for $1 and $1.50 when they had $2.50 per share in the bank, has started running. They launched a trial of their voice recognition system, and investors were intrigued. The stock went from $2 to $3. But this is unbelievable—the unexpected happened. Microsoft, a company worth almost 10,000 times more than General Magic, stepped up and licensed their voice technology—and invested in the company. The stock just this minute doubled to $6.

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They won a lawsuit against Microsoft but missed every quarter and pissed most of the money away. What caught our eye was this little chip company inside it named Hifn doing hardware compression that seemed to be worth more than the whole company. Maybe they’d split it off. The stock ticked up by eighths and quarters day by day. The strangest name we owned was General Magic. The company was the great scam IPO of 1995. Goldman Sachs took it public on the promise of electronic agents and bots for computers and phones that would scour networks for just the information you need—yeah, right. They raised $90 million, and maybe $60 million was left. The founders were long gone, and some new dude from Novell was brought in to turn it around.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

A whole bunch of other things grew out of it—some of the video products from Apple and so forth. Then, at General Magic, I went to work on a PDA—but I worked half-time at General Magic and half-time I was still working on how to make inexpensive delivery systems on a television for interactive TV, and work with video and games and things like that. Livingston: You worked on your own projects on your own time? Perlman: On my own time. I relinquished half of my stock options. I worked out a deal with them where 2 and 1/2 days a week I worked on my own stuff, 2 and 1/2 days a week I worked on General Magic stuff. And then what happened is General Magic, in my last year there, said, “Hey, we want to do video stuff too.”

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Though we were quite frugal, it still was a high cash burn. We were just about out of money. So I mortgaged my house, liquidated all my assets, and brought in all the cash I could to help it. (Although I did make some good money from General Magic and Catapult, it wasn’t until after that point. Both companies did their IPOs after that. There was a holding period for General Magic, and so on.) We didn’t tell the employees that we were running low, because we didn’t want people to be in a panic. We were going to tell them if we were really hitting a wall, but I could keep the company going a little bit longer.

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But, then again, I’ve seen companies that really have a lot of execution problems. General Magic is a good example of that. They really did not execute well in what they were doing. The product was very expensive; it was over $1,000. It was heavy. The battery didn’t last long. The screen was not very bright. And it was loaded with all sorts of features that were not really needed by a mobile professional, which is what a PDA—this was 1990—was targeted for. Palm, on the other hand, made something small, light, the battery lasted a long time. It was inexpensive and focused on things like a calendar and address book. I saw General Magic working on getting bunny rabbit animations working to make it cute.

Work Optional: Retire Early the Non-Penny-Pinching Way by Tanja Hester

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, anti-work, antiwork, asset allocation, barriers to entry, buy and hold, crowdsourcing, diversification, estate planning, financial independence, full employment, General Magic , gig economy, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, independent contractor, index fund, labor-force participation, lifestyle creep, longitudinal study, low interest rates, medical bankruptcy, mortgage debt, Mr. Money Mustache, multilevel marketing, obamacare, passive income, post-work, remote working, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, side hustle, stocks for the long run, tech worker, Vanguard fund, work culture

But there are ways around that, as we’ll discuss later.) Real estate investors can also sell properties, and any money made from increased property values is additional magic money, though it may be subject to hefty taxes. 4. Passive business income generation: Investing time to build a business that generates magic or semi-magic income through minimal effort on the part of the business owner. In some cases, the business may later be sold to a new buyer, with those proceeds providing a one-time infusion of magic money, but at the cost of a regular income stream thereafter. Though the investing methods differ, the goal behind all of these approaches is fundamentally the same: The investor (you) puts hard-earned money into their chosen investment vehicles with the expectation that the magic money generated from the investments will increase faster than inflation and expenses.

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Keep both risk and fees in your mind as we walk through the potential investment vehicles you may choose to incorporate into the set of tools that will generate your magic money. The good news is that it’s easier than ever to find high-quality, low-fee investment vehicles and to manage them yourself without having to be an expert. Investment Vehicles to Consider Now we’ll talk about all of your options for investing your funds to generate magic money that will support you for life, including the pros and cons of each approach and which vehicles are more hands-off versus those that require doing more homework. As we walk through each of your options for investment vehicles, keep in mind that you only need one or two of these to create a solid early retirement financial plan.

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But remember as well that being forced to take a distribution from your IRA or 401(k) doesn’t mean you’re being forced to spend that money, only that you’re required to pay income taxes on it at that point. You can take those required distributions and reinvest them instantly in index funds, more real estate, or anything else to continue generating magic money for you, and you’ll only ever owe additional tax on those investments’ subsequent capital gains. For all of your other magic money sources that aren’t tax-advantaged, tapping them is much simpler. For stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, including index funds held in taxable brokerage accounts, you simply collect dividends and pay income tax on the dividends, and when you sell shares, you pay only long-term capital gains tax—a lower rate than regular income tax—as long as you’ve owned the shares at least 12 months.

Androids: The Team That Built the Android Operating System by Chet Haase

Andy Rubin, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, commoditize, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Ken Thompson, lock screen, machine readable, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, Parkinson's law, pull request, QWERTY keyboard, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, web application

They were still making all their money off the Apple II, but all the mindshare was going into Mac.” A few years later, Ed joined the Taligent130 spin-out, followed by General Magic soon after, “right when they did their IPO. It set the record for IPO gain, and then nose-dived in the months after. The company itself was not very healthy at that time. All the people were already kind of disenchanted. There was so much hype building up to the IPO that there was a lot of letdown.” Ed lasted at General Magic for about ten months, then joined WebTV. He stayed through the acquisition by Microsoft and another ten years until joining the Android team.

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Both Google Talk and SMS (with MMS) made it in time for the 1.0 launch. 299 It’s true –you can look it up. On your phone. 300 Andy later joined Google, and was involved in some meetings with the Android team early on. 301 Andy Hertzfeld knew Andy Rubin; Hertzfeld was a co-founder of the company General Magic, where Andy Rubin worked in the early 90s. 302 Cat is a command in Unix which is short for “concatenate.” It is used to output contents of files. 303 COW = Cell On Wheels, a mobile cell site that exists for this exact kind of situation. 304 Android’s activity lifecycle is the system which controls the state of applications.

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Silicon Valley Tech History There are also many great books and documentaries about tech history, including these which I really enjoyed: Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made, by Andy Hertzfeld This is a great book for understanding how one of the canonical pieces of Silicon Valley history came to be. It’s also a great look into the people and the team behind that project. Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson I enjoyed this book not only for its interesting portrayal of Mr. Jobs, but also (even more) for the history of Silicon Valley and high tech that it told along the way. General Magic (documentary), directed by Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude The movie gives a close look into the culture and vision of a company which might have been one of the early successes in mobile computing, except that they were at least ten years too early. Contents Cast xiii Introduction xvii PART ONE: IN THE BEGINNING 1 Android the...

Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution by Fred Vogelstein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, cloud computing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, driverless car, Dynabook, Firefox, General Magic , Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Googley, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software patent, SpaceShipOne, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, web application, zero-sum game

Like many electronics whizzes in Silicon Valley, he had Tony Stark’s respect for authority too. At Apple in the late 1980s he got in trouble for reprogramming the corporate phone system to make it seem as if CEO John Sculley were leaving his colleagues messages about stock grants, according to John Markoff’s 2007 profile in The New York Times. At General Magic, an Apple spin-off that wrote some of the first software for handheld computers, he and some colleagues built lofts above their cubicles so they could more efficiently work around the clock. After Microsoft bought his next employer, WebTV, in the mid-1990s, he outfitted a mobile robot with a web camera and microphone and sent it wandering around the company, without mentioning to anyone that it was connected to the Internet.

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He was young, brash, and smart, having been part of cutting-edge portable-hardware engineering in the Valley for fifteen years. He once told a reporter that he would have ended up in jail had he not discovered computers. He occasionally showed up for work with bleached hair. He was not good at holding his tongue when faced with substandard work or ideas. His first job out of college was at General Magic, a company Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld spun out of Apple in the early 1990s in the hope of developing some of the first software ever written exclusively for mobile devices. The project failed and Fadell found himself at Philips, the giant Dutch conglomerate, where he quickly became the company’s youngest executive.

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Samsung trial; Fadell and; Fadell compared with; Grignon and; iPad and; Jobs and; in meeting with Jobs and Google executives on Android; stomach ailment of Fortune magazine Fortune 500 companies Fox network Foxconn Galaxy smartphone Game of Thrones Ganatra, Nitin Gates, Bill; convergence and; and Google’s hiring of engineers away from Microsoft; iPad and; iPhone and; Jobs and; Macintosh and; tablets and Genentech General Magic General Motors (GM) Gizmodo Gmail GO Corp. Google: ads; Android acquired by; Android phones of, see Android phones; as antitrust target; Apple’s battle with; Apple’s partnership with; and Apple v. Samsung; boards of directors and advisers intertwined with Apple; book digitization and; bus fleet of; business model of; campus of; cars banned by; Chrome; Chromecast; Chrome Pixel; cloud of; companies purchased by; competing projects at; consumer electronics made from scratch by; culture of; deadlines and; “don’t be evil” mantra of; DoubleClick purchased by; engineers at; engineers hired away from Microsoft by; Glass; GrandCentral Communication acquired by; Gundotra at; information sharing at; iPhone and; Jobs’s attacks against; Jobs’s threat of patent-infringement lawsuit against; Maps, see Google Maps; marketing and; Microsoft and; Microsoft Office substitutes; Motorola purchased by; News; Nexus, see Nexus; Now; number of projects at; Open Handset Alliance of; open-platform approach of; Oracle v.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

By 2013 Google’s software would dominate the world of mobile phones in terms of market share. Early in his career, Rubin had worked at Apple Computer as a manufacturing engineer after a stint at Zeiss in Europe programming robots. He left Apple several years later with an elite group of engineers and programmers to build one of the early handheld computers at General Magic. General Magic’s efforts to seed the convergence of personal information, computing, and telephony became an influential and high-profile failure in the new mobile computing world. Andy Rubin went on a buying spree for Google when the company decided to develop next-generation robotics technologies.

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Until they toured Sand Hill for venture capital, Adam Cheyer had been skeptical that the venture community would buy into their business case. He kept waiting for VCs to toss them out of their meetings, but it never happened. At this point, other companies had released less-impressive voice control systems that had gone bust. General Magic, the once high-flying handheld computing Apple spin-off, for example, had tried its hand as a speech-based personal assistant before going out of business in 2002. Gradually, however, Cheyer realized that if the team could develop a really good technical assistant, the venture capitalists and the money would follow.

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., 240–241 DARPA Advanced Research Projects Agency as precursor to, 30, 110, 111–112, 164, 171 ARPAnet, 164, 196 autonomous cars and Grand Challenge, 24, 26, 27–36, 40 CALO and, 31, 297, 302–304, 310, 311 Dugan and, 236 Engelbart and, 6 Licklider and, 11 LRASM, 26–27 Moravec and, 119 Pratt and, 235–236 Robotics Challenge, 227–230, 234, 236–238, 244–254, 249, 333–334 Rosen and, 102 Taylor and, 160 Darrach, Brad, 103–105 Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence, 105, 107–109, 114, 143 DataLand, 307 Davis, Ruth, 102–103 “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A” (Barlow), 173 DeepMind Technologies, 91, 337–338 Defense Science Board, 27 de Forest, Lee, 98 “demons,” 190 Dendral, 113–114, 127 Diebold, John, 98 Diffie, Whitfield, 8, 112 Digital Equipment Corporation, 112, 285 direct manipulation, 187 Djerassi, Carl, 113 Doerr, John, 7 Dompier, Steve, 211–212 Dreyfus, Hubert, 177–178, 179 drone delivery research, 247–248 Dubinsky, Donna, 154 Duda, Richard, 128, 129 Dugan, Regina, 236 Duvall, Bill, 1–7 Earnest, Les, 120, 199 Earth Institute, 59 Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier (EG&G), 127 e-discovery software, 78 E-Groups, 259 elastic actuation, 236–237 electronic commerce, advent of, 289, 301–302 electronic stability control (ESC), 46 Elementary Perceiver and Memorizer (EPAM), 283 “Elephants Don’t Play Chess” (Brooks), 201 Eliza, 14, 113, 172–174, 221 email, advent of, 290, 310 End of Work, The (Rifkin), 76–77 Engelbart, Doug. see also SRI International on exponential power of computers, 118–119 IA versus AI debate and, 165–167 on intelligence augmentation (IA), xii, 5–7, 31 Minsky and, 17 “Mother of All Demos” (1968) by, 62 NLS, 5–7, 172, 197 Rosen and, 102 Siri and, 301, 316–317 Engineers and the Price System, The (Veblen), 343 Enterprise Integration Technologies, 289, 291 ethical issues, 324–344. see also intelligence augmentation (IA) versus AI; labor force of autonomous cars, 26–27, 60–61 decision making and control, 341–342 Google on, 91 human-in-the-loop debates, 158–165, 167–169, 335 of labor force, 68–73, 325–332 scientists’ responsibility and, 332–341, 342–344 “techno-religious” issues, 116–117 expert systems, defined, 134–141, 285 Facebook, 83, 156–158, 266–267 Fast-SLAM, 37 Feigenbaum, Ed, 113, 133–136, 167–169, 283, 287–288 Felsenstein, Lee, 208–215 Fernstedt, Anders, 71 “field robotics,” 233–234 Fishman, Charles, 81 Flextronics, 68 Flores, Fernando, 179–180, 188 Foot, Philippa, 60 Ford, Martin, 79 Ford Motor Company, 70 Forstall, Scott, 322 Foxconn, 93, 208, 248 Friedland, Peter, 292 Galaxy Zoo, 219–220 Gates, Bill, 305, 329–330 General Electric (GE), 68–69 General Magic, 240, 315 General Motors (GM), 32–35, 48–50, 52, 53, 60 Genetic Finance, 304 Genghis (robot), 202 Geometrics, 127 George, Dileep, 154 Geraci, Robert, 85, 116–117 Gerald (digital light field), 271 Giant Brains, or Machines That Think (Berkeley), 231 Gibson, William, 23–24 Go Corp., 141 God & Golem, Inc.

Revolution in the Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld

Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bill Atkinson, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, General Magic , HyperCard, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, Mitch Kapor, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine

Cast of Characters Bill Atkinson Jef Raskin recruited Bill to work for Apple in the spring of 1978. His work on the QuickDraw graphics package was the foundation of both the Lisa and the Macintosh user interfaces. Later, he single-handedly wrote MacPaint, the first great application for the Macintosh, followed by HyperCard in 1987. He co-founded General Magic in 1990 to develop personal intelligent communicators. Since 1996, he’s been a full-time nature photographer and has recently published a beautiful book of mineral photographs titled Within the Stone. Bob Belleville After a stint at Xerox where he was one of the main hardware designers of the Xerox Star, Bob joined the Mac team in May 1982 as the software manager.

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He joined the Mac team in February 1981 and became one of the main authors of the Macintosh system software, working on the core operating system and the User Interface toolbox, as well as many of the original desk accessories. He later went on to co-found three innovative companies: Radius (1986), General Magic (1990), and Eazel (1999). He is also the author of the book you’re currently reading and the creator of the Mac Folklore web site (http://www.folklore.org/). Joanna Hoffman Joanna Hoffman started on the Macintosh project in October 1980, while it was still a research project, and constituted the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project.

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Joanna Hoffman Joanna Hoffman started on the Macintosh project in October 1980, while it was still a research project, and constituted the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project. She wrote the first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines and later led the International Marketing team, where she was instrumental in making the Mac suitable for Europe and Asia from its earliest incarnations. She was vice president of Marketing for General Magic in the 1990s, and retired from the industry to devote her time to her family in 1995. Bruce Horn Bruce practically grew up at Xerox PARC, working there during summer break from the age 14. Bruce became one of the main architects of the Macintosh system software after starting at Apple in January 1982: he wrote the resource manager, dialog manager, and the Finder.

Microserfs by Douglas Coupland

Apple Newton, Big Tech, Biosphere 2, car-free, computer age, El Camino Real, Future Shock, game design, General Magic , guns versus butter model, hive mind, Kevin Kelly, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Multics, postindustrial economy, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, telemarketer, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence

We decided that if the government put Marilyn Monroe on a dollar coin, it would be popular enough to succeed. "And if they want to replace the five-dollar bill with a coin," said Susan, approaching us from the hibachi, "they can use Elvis." Susan didn't go out of her way to dress up this year and came as a biker chick. She was miffed at discovering that the assembly language programmer from General Magic she'd been chatting up all night was married. She swigged Chardonnay from a bottle, yanked an unripe orange from a tree, and said, "You guys are talking about Ethan? Being with Ethan is kind of like, well . . . like when you're sleeping with somebody who doesn't know what to do in bed but who thinks they're really hot stuff - and they're rubbing one part of your body over and over, thinking they've found your 'Magic Spot' when all they're doing, in fact, is annoying you."

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The only remotely personal question the form asks is: Sports? Activities? Here's what I wrote for everybody: "Abe/Susan/Bug/Michael/etc . . . greatly enjoys repetitive tasks." * * * Geek party night: it's kind of like if we were in Hollywood and going to an "industry party." That guy Susan met from General Magic had a party up at his place in the Los Altos Hills. All day at the office Susan and Karla talked about what they're going to . . . wear. It was really un-Karla, but I'm glad she's getting into her body and taking pride in it. Susan's on the prowl, so she wants to look sexy, techie, "fun," and serious all at once.

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You're right, at Microsoft bodies get down played to near invisibilty with unsensual Tommy Hilfiger geekwear, or are genericized with items form the GAP so that employees morph themelfves into those international symbols for MAN and WOMAN you see at airports. * * * Susan got a job offer from General Magic - that guy she chatted up at the Halloween party recommended her - and Todd got a job offer from Spectrum HoloByte. At first I couldn't imagine why - then he told us that someone at the gym must have recommended him. It's occupational cannibalism here. Both offers are tempting. But Susan's got too much money stoked into the Oop!

The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Ruth Porat’s brother Marc was also the author of a first-of-its-kind 1977 Commerce Department study of the information economy (part of which originated as his Stanford PhD thesis): Marc Uri Porat and Michael Rogers Rubin, The Information Economy, U.S. Department of Commerce, Office of Telecommunications (1977). On General Magic, the company Marc Porat founded and many of whose employees went on to play seminal roles in the development of Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, see Sarah Kerruish, Matt Maude, and Michael Stern, General Magic: The Movie (Palo Alto, Calif.: Spellbound Productions, 2018). 29. Michael Siconolfi, “Under Pressure: At Morgan Stanley, Analysts Were Urged to Soften Harsh Views,” The Wall Street Journal, July 14, 1992, A1. 30.

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Quattrone left the bank in 1998 for Deutsche Bank and then Credit Suisse, earning upwards of $100 million per year. Then there was Morgan Stanley banker and close Meeker ally Ruth Porat, a Palo Alto native with deep connections to the tech world. Her physicist father, Dan, had worked at SLAC; her brother, Marc, was CEO of General Magic, an already legendary company that tried and failed in the early 1990s to build a pocket-sized computer—an iPhone before its time. Together, Ruth Porat and Meeker vetted nearly every Internet start-up that came down the chute in the late 1990s, and the bank became the primary manager on fifty of them.28 Some observers wondered whether it was healthy to have tech’s most bullish analyst and its most connected bankers working together so closely; some sharp-elbowed bankers (including Quattrone) already had a reputation for pressuring their researchers to talk up a stock.

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But that device had an early death as well, felled by glitchy software and by the fact that it was John Sculley’s pet project. As soon as Jobs got back into the CEO suite, he axed it. “God gave us ten styluses,” Jobs’s biographer Walter Isaacson recounted him saying as he waved his fingers in the air. “Let’s not invent another.” The closest the Valley came to realizing the dream was the ill-fated adventure of General Magic.2 By the early 2000s, other companies had achieved tremendous success with cell phones that featured e-mail and some very rudimentary Web browsing. The BlackBerry, a mobile phone featuring a tiny keyboard, became an indispensable device for legions of businesspeople in the first years of the decade, turning swift thumb typing into a badge of workaholic honor.

The Purpose Economy: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World by Aaron Hurst

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, Firefox, General Magic , glass ceiling, greed is good, housing crisis, independent contractor, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, Max Levchin, means of production, Mitch Kapor, new economy, pattern recognition, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QR code, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, Ronald Reagan, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, underbanked, women in the workforce, work culture , young professional, Zipcar

They founded a new company and called it General Magic. Within a couple of years, they launched the first smartphone. You could make calls, manage your calendar, and even shop online. To put this in perspective, this was before the first web browser and required the phone to be connected to a phone line (i.e. not so mobile). The company went public and the stock doubled on the first day. Then it all fell apart. The market wasn’t ready. The partner infrastructure wasn’t in place. The company ended up seeking new business models and products, and 12 years after General Magic was founded, it ceased operations.

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Its venture capital backers were Merrill Pickard and Technology Venture Investors, the two firms where Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Bob Kagle worked pre-Benchmark. Before Microsoft acquired eShop (turning the software into its Merchant Server product), Omidyar left, but tellingly he was fever-free and did not head off to start his own company. He took a job at General Magic, recruiting developers to work with the company’s software. Previously, he had not been a senior executive; General Magic was his first opportunity to get out of his cubicle and away from printouts of code, to develop business relationships with others. His professional experiences permitted him to see where nascent electronic commerce was headed: businesses selling to other businesses.

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He desperately needed a full-time UNIX systems expert to oversee the server, but even before that, he needed a helper who did nothing but slice open the envelopes and pull out the checks. By the middle of 1996, he had to do something: either resign from his day job and try to make a go of this new company, or pull the plug. He was earning more from eBay than from his salary at General Magic, and it may appear that the easy choice would have been to chuck the job. He was twenty-nine years old, without dependents, possessing technical skills and professional experiences that would enable him to work for any employer in the Valley. For such a person, starting a company was not fraught with the risk of lasting professional damage.

Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in LIfe by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, Airbnb, cognitive bias, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, digital map, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, General Magic , global pandemic, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Paul Graham, peak-end rule, randomized controlled trial, Renaissance Technologies, Sam Altman, science of happiness, selection bias, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systematic bias, Tony Fadell, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, urban planning, Y Combinator

Here’s another important point: Fadell had already established himself as a well-regarded employee before he created his successful business. Fadell was not some serial entrepreneur who was a born risk-taker and incapable of having a boss; nor was he some career failure taking his last swing at career success. By the time Fadell started Nest, he had worked as a diagnostics engineer at General Magic, a director of engineering at Philips Electronics, and a senior vice president at Apple. By the time he started Nest, in other words, he had among the best employee résumés in Silicon Valley. And crucially, this decade-plus of experience rising as an employee at blue-chip companies gave Fadell deeply relevant and specific skills related to the business he created on his own.

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And crucially, this decade-plus of experience rising as an employee at blue-chip companies gave Fadell deeply relevant and specific skills related to the business he created on his own. When he had his the-world-needs-a-less-clunky-thermostat epiphany, he had experiences that directly prepared him to follow through on his idea. Fadell utilized the lessons in product design that he had learned at General Magic; the lessons in managing teams and financing that he had picked up at Philips Electronics; and the lessons in improving the entire customer experience that he had absorbed at Apple. He recruited a team from the network that he had built and poured in capital that he had earned from his time as an employee at all three companies.

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

He became an ace pro- The Perfect Thing 54 grammer and started three companies before he graduated from the University of Michigan. His first job out of college, in 1992, was at a start-up called General Magic, working beside two of the stars of the legendary team that had created the Macintosh, Andy Hertz-feld and Bill Atkinson. It was like joining a basketball team and finding yourself teammates with Larry Bird and Dr. J. Unfortunately, the General Magic handheld communicator was a flop. From there, Fadell had a weird few years at the Philips corporation. Concerned about its overly staid reputation, the Dutch conglomerate had offered Fadell, still in his twenties, the chance to head its new mobile computing group.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life by Rory Sutherland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, butterfly effect, California gold rush, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, confounding variable, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Firefox, Ford Model T, General Magic , George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, IKEA effect, information asymmetry, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, John Harrison: Longitude, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mason jar, Murray Gell-Mann, nudge theory, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Rory Sutherland, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, US Airways Flight 1549, Veblen good, work culture

This book is an attempt not only to create them, but also to give them permission to act and speak more freely. I hope it will free you slightly from the modern rationalist straitjacket, and help you understand that many problems might be solved if we abandoned the rationalist obsession with universal, context-free laws. Once free of this constraint, you might have the freedom to generate magical ideas, some of which may be silly but of which others will be invaluable. Unfortunately, many of your friends and colleagues, and most of all your finance director or your bank manager, won’t like any of these new non-sensical ideas, even the valuable ones. That’s not because they are expensive – most of them are very cheap indeed.

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Sadly, no one in public life believes in magic, or trusts those who purvey it. If you propose any solution where the gain in perceived value outweighs the attendant expenditure in money, time, effort or resources, people either don’t believe you, or worse, they think you are somehow cheating them. This is why marketing doesn’t get any credit in business – when it generates magic, it is more socially acceptable to attribute the resulting success to logistics or cost-control. Ethically principled as it may sometimes seem, this aversion to magic brings huge problems; the ingrained reluctance even to entertain magical solutions results in a limitation in the number of ideas that people are allowed to consider.

The Little Book That Still Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt

backtesting, book value, General Magic , index fund, intangible asset, random walk, survivorship bias, transaction costs

Step-by-step instructions for selecting stocks using magicformulainvesting.com follow. Other options include, but are not limited to, the screening packages available at aaii.com, powerinvestor.com, and smart money.com. Though these sources are generally fine, and are available either for free or at a reasonable price, they are not specifically designed to generate magic formula stocks. They will only give a rough approximation of the magic formula results because of differences both in the criteria the user can select and the underlying data sources. General screening instructions are available on each site. Option 1: MagicFormulaInvesting.com Step 1 Go to magicformulainvesting.com.

Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Ah, but according to the purified market populism of the conservative renaissance, those other members of Congress are simply mistaken. Government cannot create jobs; it’s impossible by definition. The only entity endowed with this power is business, and the smaller that business is, the more potent its job-generating magic. Thus one of the great catchphrases of the period: “Government doesn’t create jobs; you do,” as Republican freshman Nan Hayworth of New York put it in a speech to business leaders in her district. One reason the Right fastened on the “job creator” line so avidly is because it allowed them to flip the script of the hard-times scenario.

You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, digital Maoism, Douglas Hofstadter, Extropian, follow your passion, General Magic , hive mind, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Conway, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Long Term Capital Management, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, Project Xanadu, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, social graph, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

This book is about those arguments. The design of the web as it appears today was not inevitable. In the early 1990s, there were perhaps dozens of credible efforts to come up with a design for presenting networked digital information in a way that would attract more popular use. Companies like General Magic and Xanadu developed alternative designs with fundamentally different qualities that never got out the door. A single person, Tim Berners-Lee, came to invent the particular design of today’s web. The web as it was introduced was minimalist, in that it assumed just about as little as possible about what a web page would be like.

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Up the Stack 71, On Labor Day weekend in 1995 … Omidyar’s background and origins of AuctionWeb: Adam Cohen, The Perfect Store: Inside eBay (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003 [2002]), 3–21. The startup Omidyar co-founded was initially called the Ink Development Corporation, later renamed eShop; Microsoft bought it in 1996. The name of the company he worked for that made software for handheld computers was General Magic. 71, Buying and selling was still … Gates memo: Bill Gates, “The Internet Tidal Wave,” May 26, 1995. The memo surfaced during the Department of Justice antitrust investigation of Microsoft, and is available at justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/03/03/20.pdf. 72, If the internet of 1995 inspired … Nearly 45 million users: Internet Live Stats, available at internetlivestats.com.

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

Rose Byrne blasted it open with magic and then did the same thing with the front door, which was also locked. In the lobby, they passed through a small room that looked like a bordello, and walked to the elevators opposite the front entrance. Celia pressed the call button. The doors opened. They got into the elevator. Ropey strands of salvia could bring Fairy Land’s women to a generalized magical destination, but it could not indicate why that destination was magical or what they should do when they got there. Given that this chapter occurs at this book’s rough three-fifths mark, it’s pretty obvious that Fern isn’t in the Fontenoy. Neither of the women know that. Which is shameful ignorance and demonstrates the limits of their preternatural powers.

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

“In Your Pocket” As Rubinstein remembers, his biggest initial problem was that everybody at Apple, including Jony’s ID group, was already busy with other products. As was usual with such exploratory, blue-sky projects, Apple went looking for an outside consultant. Someone recommended Tony Fadell, a designer/engineer who specialized in handheld hardware and digital audio. Fadell had worked for General Magic, an Apple spinoff, and developed PDAs for Philips before launching his own start-up, Fuse Networks, in the late 1990s. Fadell’s twelve-person firm was busy trying to build an MP3 stereo player, a conventional rack-mounted component with a hard drive and CD reader instead of a tape deck or FM radio.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

So Rubinstein started negotiating with Toshiba to have exclusive rights to every one of the disks it could make, and he began to look around for someone who could lead the development team. Tony Fadell was a brash entrepreneurial programmer with a cyberpunk look and an engaging smile who had started three companies while still at the University of Michigan. He had gone to work at the handheld device maker General Magic (where he met Apple refugees Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson), and then spent some awkward time at Philips Electronics, where he bucked the staid culture with his short bleached hair and rebellious style. He had come up with some ideas for creating a better digital music player, which he had shopped around unsuccessfully to RealNetworks, Sony, and Philips.

…

Macworld conference and, 325–26 NeXT computer and, 229–30, 236–37 SJ contrasted with, 171–73 SJ on, 568 SJ’s business relationship with, 173–76 SJ’s personal relationship with, 172–73, 175, 463–64 SJ’s sickbed visit with, 553–54 at SJ’s 30th birthday party, 188–89 worldview of, 230 Gates, Jennifer, 554 Gates, Melinda, 467, 554 Gateway Computers, 371, 374, 376, 379 Gawker (website), 353, 479 Geffen, David, 292, 427 Genentech, 321, 371, 453, 545 General Magic, 385 General M.C. Meigs, USS, 2 General Motors, 227 “Get On Your Boots” (song), 424 Getty, Ann, 228 Getty, Gordon, 228 Giacometti, Alberto, 151 Gibbons, Fred, 159 Gillmore, Dan, 311 “Girl from Ipanema, The” (song), 189 Giugiaro, Giorgetto, 342 Gizmodo (website), 495, 518, 520 Glaser, Rob, 409 Glavin, Bill, 195 Gnutella, 394 Gold, Stanley, 434 Goldberg, Adele, 96–97, 229–30 “Goldberg Variations” (Bach), 413–14 Goldblum, Jeff, 307 “Gold Lion” (song), 500 Goldman Sachs, 270 Goldstein, David, 374 Goodell, Jeff, 397 Google, 47, 136, 275, 321, 496, 502, 518, 531, 533, 534, 545, 552, 561, 563, 568 Android system of, 496, 511–14, 516, 528, 534, 563 Gore, Al, 321, 450, 481, 518, 532, 558 “gorilla glass,” 471–72 Gould, Glenn, 413–14 Graham, Katharine, 165, 231 Graham, Martha, 330 Gran Trak 10 (game), 53 graphical user interface (GUI), 95, 97, 98 Macintosh-Microsoft conflict of, 177–79 Grateful Dead, 57, 280, 414 Graves, Michael, 369 “Gravity” (song), 415 Graziano, Joseph, 374 Green Day, 413 Gretzky, Wayne, 349 Grokster, 394 Gropius, Walter, 126 Grossman, Lev, 473, 495–96 Grove, Andrew, 10, 246–47, 290, 294, 315, 448, 453, 454, 479 Grunbaum, Eric, 500 Hafner, Katie, 236 Haley, Alex, 456 Hallicrafters, 23 Hallmark, 289 Haltek Supply, 17–18, 67 Hambrecht, Bill, 104 Hambrecht & Quist, 104 Hamilton, Alexander, 171 Hancock, Ellen, 299–300, 308 “Handsome Molly” (song), 417 Hanks, Tom, 287, 290, 330 Hanna-Barbera, 352 Hannity, Sean, 508 Hard Day’s Night, A (Beatles), 412 Haring, Keith, 180 Harmony (music service), 409 Harris, David, 251 Harris, Gabriel, 251 Hartman, Arthur, 210 Hasbro, 321 Hastings, Reed, 545 Hawley, Michael, 224 Hayden, Steve, 162 Hayes, Rutherford, 193 HBO, 506 Heathkits, 16, 23 Heinen, Nancy, 450–51 Heller, Andrew, 231 Heller, Dave, 383 Help!

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

It seemed only logical to him that it was all about media coverage, and he was determined to become a top executive at CBS, which would enable him to make the changes from the inside. It didn’t work out that way, however, and two years later he was back at Stanford, where he received a graduate degree in economics. He coined the term “information economy,” went to work for Apple Computer, and later became the cofounder of General Magic, one of Silicon Valley’s ill-starred start-up companies. The West Coast counterculture acted like a magnet for thousands of young people around the country. Dorothy Bender picked the Summer of Love to leave Washington, D.C., and come to California. She was a rarity in the computer world of the 1960s: a woman and a programmer.

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

(Attention, NeXT and BeOS bigots: I don't need any flak about your poxy operating systems, OK? Write your own column.) The only thing a software product guide tells you is that no software is available for the system. When you see one of these beasts, run fleeing in the opposite direction. Amiga, Atari ST, Gem, IBM TopView, NeXT, BeOS, Windows CE, General Magic—the list of failed "new platforms" goes on and on. Because they are platforms, they are, by definition, not very interesting in and of themselves without juicy software to run on them. But, with very few exceptions (and I'm sure I'll get a whole host of email from tedious supporters of arcane and unloved platforms like the Amiga or RSTS-11), no software developer with the least bit of common sense would intentionally write software for a platform with 100,000 users on a good day, like BeOS, when they could do the same amount of work and create software for a platform with 100,000,000 users, like Windows.

Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software by Scott Rosenberg

A Pattern Language, AOL-Time Warner, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, call centre, collaborative editing, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, continuous integration, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dynabook, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, functional programming, General Magic , George Santayana, Grace Hopper, Guido van Rossum, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, intentional community, Internet Archive, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, L Peter Deutsch, Larry Wall, life extension, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, Mitch Kapor, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Nicholas Carr, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, scientific management, semantic web, side project, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, slashdot, software studies, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, Therac-25, thinkpad, Turing test, VA Linux, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Andy Hertzfeld had made a name for himself thanks to his central contributions to the original operating system for Apple’s Macintosh in 1984, which established the course of personal computing for the next two decades and set a standard for innovation and elegance that every new project in Silicon Valley still aspires to. In the years since he had left Apple, soon after the Macintosh’s introduction, Hertzfeld contributed his technical skill, boyish enthusiasm, and imagination to a couple of ambitious failures—first, General Magic, a start-up company that aimed to revolutionize the market for handheld “digital assistants,” and then Eazel, an open source company that ran out of money in the dot-com collapse before it could complete the programs it had designed for Linux users. Hertzfeld had become a fervent and vocal convert to the open source gospel; on the same day that Eazel shut down, Kapor, who was trying to decide whether to go open source with his new project, came to visit him and told him about his plans for OSAF.

Howard Rheingold by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", Alvin Toffler, Apple II, bread and circuses, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, commoditize, conceptual framework, disinformation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, experimental subject, General Magic , George Gilder, global village, Gregor Mendel, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Ivan Sutherland, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, license plate recognition, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, RAND corporation, Ray Oldenburg, rent control, RFC: Request For Comment, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telepresence, The Great Good Place, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, urban decay, UUNET, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

None of the evidence for political uses of the Net thus far presented is earthshaking in terms of how much power it has now to influence events. But the somewhat different roles of the Net in Tiananmen Square, the Soviet coup, and the Gulf War, represent harbingers of political upheavals to come. In February 1993, General Magic, a company created by the key architects of Apple's Macintosh computer, revealed their plans to market a technology for a whole new kind of "personal intelligent communicator." A box the size of a checkbook with a small screen, stylus, and cellular telephone will enable a person anywhere in the world to scribble a message on the screen and tap the screen with the stylus, sending it to anyone with a reachable e-mail address or fax machine.

The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies by Jason Fagone

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, Charles Lindbergh, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, General Magic , index card, Internet Archive, Neil Armstrong, pattern recognition, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, two and twenty, X Prize

Men read the daily “MAGIC Summaries” with bulging eyes and could not quite believe they were reading the authentic words and orders of imperial Japan. It was almost too good to be true. The president read MAGIC, and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, and Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and, eventually, Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Britain, who insisted on getting MAGIC raw, unsummarized by his generals. MAGIC led directly to bombs falling on imperial ships at Midway and other decisive naval battles. It caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese and saved the lives of unknown numbers of Allies. MAGIC changed the war. It was also one of the great secrets of the war, exactly like ULTRA, the Enigma codebreaking program.

Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender, Rick Tetzeli

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bob Noyce, Byte Shop, Charles Lindbergh, computer age, corporate governance, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, El Camino Real, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , Isaac Newton, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, market design, McMansion, Menlo Park, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, planned obsolescence, popular electronics, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Stephen Fry, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog

In January 2001, Ruby asked some former Newton engineers to begin work in earnest on some sort of portable audio device around the Toshiba micro-drive. In March he put an engineer he’d hired from Philips NV, Tony Fadell, in charge of the group. Fadell, an energetic entrepreneur with the build of a college wrestler and the intensity of a high school football coach, had worked at General Magic back in the early 1990s, with Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Susan Kare, veterans of the original Macintosh team, who had told him horror stories about Steve in his early days. “I expected an overbearing tyrant,” he says, “but he wasn’t like that at all. He didn’t resemble the guy from their stories at all.

After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul by Tripp Mickle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, airport security, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Boeing 747, British Empire, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, desegregation, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Magic , global pandemic, global supply chain, haute couture, imposter syndrome, index fund, Internet Archive, inventory management, invisible hand, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Ralph Waldo Emerson, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Y2K

The project took flight after Jon Rubinstein, the head of hardware engineering, discovered that Toshiba’s semiconductor unit had created a miniature disk drive that would hold a thousand songs. He pushed to buy the rights to every disk Toshiba made. To run the project, Jobs hired Tony Fadell, a hardware engineer who had worked on General Magic’s personal digital assistant. Rubinstein and Fadell assembled the components, while Apple’s head of marketing, Phil Schiller, contributed the idea of creating a wheel to scroll through songs, a concept inspired by a Bang & Olufsen phone. They handed the ingredients to Ive to package. The design concept struck Ive during his daily commute between San Francisco and Cupertino.

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

IBM and Microsoft made a major dent in the home market because they have solved two problems of incompatibility, that of the West’s alphabet and the Japanese system of pictograms, or kanji, and the other of the diverse Japanese computers and peripherals that cannot be shared. Conjuring up that old generic magic, the new Japanese-language version of Windows, 31.J, became a great success. It can be run on any of Japan’s high-end computers as well as on all PCs.34 With this, the bouncing ball of technological innovation in computers bounced back to the United States. Asia’s Four Little Tigers The world market for everything connected to microprocessing gave a boost to four Asian countries, the Four Little Tigers of Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, and Hong Kong.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

Bell Labs was the research arm of the Bell Telephone company, and as a group, Bell’s scientists and engineers won six Nobel Prizes and invented, among other things, touch-tone dialing, the laser, cellular networks, communications satellites, solar cells, and the transistor. I began to wonder about other Bell-like constellations of talent—including tech companies like PayPal, General Magic, and Fairchild Semiconductor, but also non-technological cohorts like the Fugitive Poets, the Bloomsbury Group, and the Soulquarians. The British musician and producer Brian Eno once said that as a visual art student he was taught that artistic revolution came from solitary figures—Picasso, Kandinsky, Rembrandt.

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

You might say that the seeds of the Google Telephone Company took root right after the company moved out of its Palo Alto office to Mountain View in August 1999. The tenant moving into the space Google vacated was a start-up company named Danger. Danger’s cofounder, Andy Rubin, was a veteran of Apple in the early 1990s and a fabled start-up called General Magic. He’d started Danger to make a mobile communications device called the Sidekick, less a cell phone than a tiny computer—arguably the first smart phone with a measurable IQ. Instant messaging, not phone calls, was the Sidekick’s main purpose; you held it sideways, slid out a keyboard, and began thumb-punching IMs, which appeared in colorful pop-ups on a bright screen.

Nobody's Perfect: Writings From the New Yorker by Anthony Lane

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Apollo 13, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, Frank Gehry, General Magic , Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Index librorum prohibitorum, junk bonds, Mahatma Gandhi, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Great Good Place, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban decay, urban planning

Mexican readers fell on this book avidly, it seems, although its subsequent global triumph should surely give them pause; the main effect, after all, has been to perpetuate the myth of their homeland as lust-ridden, superstitious, and amusingly spicy. Whether you like the book depends largely on your appetite for second-generation magic realism: the shocking inspirations of, say, García Márquez reduced to familiar trappings—a river of tears, an imperious ghost, a bedspread that covers three hectares. Esquivel takes a shortcut to the magic without going via the real, and it’s too easy a ride. The cream fritters sounded pretty good, though.

Code Complete (Developer Best Practices) by Steve McConnell

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, call centre, classic study, continuous integration, data acquisition, database schema, don't repeat yourself, Donald Knuth, fault tolerance, General Magic , global macro, Grace Hopper, haute cuisine, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, inventory management, iterative process, Larry Wall, loose coupling, Menlo Park, no silver bullet, off-by-one error, Perl 6, place-making, premature optimization, revision control, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, seminal paper, slashdot, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, statistical model, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine, web application

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constructs, Summary of Techniques for Reducing Deep Nesting operating systems, Program Design operations, costs of common, Common Sources of Inefficiency opposites for variable names, Computed-Value Qualifiers in Variable Names optimization, premature, Pick Your Process (see also ) oracles, software, Iterate, Repeatedly, Again and Again out keyword creation, How to Use Routine Parameters overengineering, Architectural Feasibility overflows, integer, Numbers in General overlay linkers, Executable-Code Tools overridable routines, Inheritance ("is a" Relationships), Summary of Reasons to Create a Class oyster farming metaphor, Software Farming: Growing a System P packages, Summary of Reasons to Create a Class paging operations, Common Sources of Inefficiency pair programming, Collaboration Applies As Much Before Construction As After, Collaboration Applies As Much Before Construction As After, Collaboration Applies As Much Before Construction As After, Collaboration Applies As Much Before 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