General Magic Concepts

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

by Aaron Hurst · 31 Aug 2013 · 209pp · 63,649 words

to allow him to take two of Apple’s stars (Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld) with him. 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

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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. Five years later, the iPhone was released. Marc had built a product for innovators, but the early adopter market wasn

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future

by Ben Tarnoff · 13 Jun 2022 · 234pp · 67,589 words

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

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

by Fred Vogelstein · 12 Nov 2013 · 275pp · 84,418 words

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

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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

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, 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

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

by Jimmy Soni · 22 Feb 2022 · 505pp · 161,581 words

, 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

Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future

by Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman · 8 Jul 2024 · 207pp · 65,156 words

just one example: Ironically, many of the ideas that formed the foundation of the iPhone were tried over a decade earlier at a company called General Magic, which was staffed with some of Apple’s earliest and most prominent technical leaders. But the technology wasn’t yet ready to enable the right

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capabilities at the right price to achieve the type of revolutionary success the iPhone enjoyed. In another ironic twist, many people from General Magic came back to Apple, ready for the right moment for the iPhone to become a phenomenal success. Conventional thinkers often maintain that if something was

Microserfs

by Douglas Coupland · 14 Feb 1995

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

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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

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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

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

by Leander Kahney · 14 Nov 2013 · 363pp · 94,139 words

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

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

by Andy Hertzfeld · 19 Nov 2011

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

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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

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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

Apple in China: The Capture of the World's Greatest Company

by Patrick McGee · 13 May 2025 · 377pp · 138,306 words

. He’d founded three companies by the time he graduated from the University of Michigan, and then developed an expertise working on mobile devices for General Magic, a pioneering Apple spinout that never made it commercially but garnered respect in Silicon Valley. Fadell, who often dyed his hair in the bleached style

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, 280, 284, 293, 295, 296, 316, 318 Gassée, Jean-Louis, 31–32 Gates, Bill, 21, 140 Gateway, 110 Gelles, David, 382 General Electric, 381–82 General Magic, 123 General Motors, 240, 268, 276, 381 Germany, 169, 176, 185, 283, 286 Gifford, Kathie Lee, 181 Gilchrist, Alan, 221 glass, 162–65, 269, 272

eBoys

by Randall E. Stross · 30 Oct 2008 · 381pp · 112,674 words

-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

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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