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General Magic (1992)
General Magic, a small but well-financed company (partners include Apple, Sony, AT&T, Motorola, Matsushita and Phillips) created two highly innovative (for its time) technological platforms for bringing personal communications into the next millennium:
- Magic Cap
- The Communicating Applications Platform, was designed with ease
of use and natural-ness of communications at heart. At once
disarmingly simple and sublimely powerful, it was designed and built
by an incredible team of engineers led by co-founders Bill Atkinson
and Andy Hertzfeld, and formed the interface for a new breed of
personal communicators such as the Sony MagicLink.
- Telescript
- The brainchild of Jim White, Telescript was an attempt to build intelligence into the network itself, so that remotely programmed agents could be injected into it and roam the virtual space looking for meeting of mutual benefit with other agents at places maintaineded within the cloud by other, stationary agents.
The General Magicians created an entirely new way of looking at the world of communications programming. It is my opinion that if the company had allowed Telescript to roam the Internet free from license restrictions - as I and some of my professors at M.I.T. were lobbying for - we'd all be building network applications in Telescript rather than Java, Ruby or PHP.
Information Provider Architecture
I was recruited by General Magic's communications group to design and implement (in Telescript) their information provider architecture and framework for external information access and sharing, and soon found myself working with such organizations as Mead Data Corporation (old friends from my NewsPeek days) and News Electronic Data (owned by Rupport Murdoch's NewsCorp).
Telescript was well suited both to link the user interface with powerful adaptive recognition engines and could have been an ideal language with which to build a set of broadcatch agents. To support the associated security, privacy and distributed (profile) data requirements, I forged strategic alliances with RSA DSI and Oracle Corporation.
