General Magic

In Silicon Valley there's a lot of origin stories

of companies that were at... had the right idea, but were completely

at the wrong time and yet they paved the path for everything else.

There are a handful of stories that define Silicon Valley.

You know, there are legends, and General Magic was one of the legends.

You have to believe, you have to be proud, you have to be

absolutely convinced that you're gonna bend the way the world is moving,

and you're going to take it in a different direction.

If you're always playing it safe and you're not failing

there's a very high probability you are not doing anything particularly important.

No matter how big we dreamed, the fact that you could touch

the lives of billions, billions,

it was vaguely imaginable,

but the scale of it was inconceivable.

The reason you should care about the story of General Magic

is because it involves something fundamental,

and that is... failure isn't the end.

Failure is actually the beginning.

The reason this story so haunts the people that were involved,

that they still live with it, is because they knew that they were right.

Did it fail? I mean, the company itself failed, the ideas didn't fail.

The people who worked there didn't fail. So, was it a failure?

I was in high school.

Sixteen at the time.

I didn't really wanna go to class. Every waking moment that I wasn't in school

I was on the computer, learning something about it, programming and doing something.

Talking to friends about it, I was the geek, you know, The Revenge of the Nerds.

For me every weekend was fixing things, or building things, from the age of three or four.

Soapbox derby racer, or we could repair lawnmowers or what have you.

But with this I could create new things. I could sit there and I could program a game,

or I could program graphics, I could do things and you spoke a language no one else knew

and you could tell people about it and they were like, wow.

And then it was the Mac and it was all about the Mac.

What is that?

There were names of people like Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Bill Atkinson,

rock stars in Rolling Stone, but had nothing to do with music. They were my heroes.

My name is Andy Hertzfeld, I bought and fell in love with an Apple II in 1978.

And went to work for Apple in 1979 and was lucky enough to help design the Macintosh.

You have to go and find out more about them,

and how can I go work with them, because I wanted to be like them.

Hello, I am Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

January 24th 1984,

uh, the Macintosh was being publicly introduced

to the world, for the very first time.

You know what I remember? We were sitting here

and there was this roar, just sort of like a sound wave coming, coming at us.

It was a culmination of years of work, of years of expectation.

This was it.

What we are trying to do with Macintosh is take away

yet another barrier to usage of personal computers.

One of the neatest things about Macintosh was we had a chance

to change the way that people thought of computers.

We called it the computer for the rest of us,

because computers weren't for ordinary people.

We thought we had a chance to make a difference. Steve Jobs just drummed it into us.

He was just such a brilliant motivator.

The greatest people are self-managing. They don't need to be managed.

What they need is a common vision.

Once they know what to do, they'll go figure out how to do it.

We truly believed with every fiber of our being

that if we can solve that problem of, um, making computers accessible

to an ordinary person by making them easy enough to use,

we could truly change the world.

But behind the scenes,

behind that facade, things were changing.

Steve Jobs was involved in palace politics.

That was much bigger at that moment than the Mac.

I was just too tunnel-visioned to be able to appreciate that.

I got a phone call, like around 10:00 a.m. in the morning

from someone on the Mac team saying, "You won't believe this, but Steve got fired."

The core team was stunned. That said, things were a mess in many ways.

But Steve and John Sculley didn't agree about what to do with it.

Fights escalated to the point where the board told Sculley

that he had to remove Steve.

Um, wrenching decision for everyone,

both Steve and Sculley and everyone close to them.

Since the Mac,

really I think we were all looking for the next thing

- because it really jaded us for anything else. - Yes.

Any other project that kept coming up, kinda fizzled very quickly

because it didn't have the grandness of the vision,

it didn't have the grandness of potential impact.

And now what?

Good evening, I'm Marc Porat.

Today many people believe that information tools

are the third technology to change the course of civilization.

Changing our relationship to nature, to each other,

to the very way we experience reality.

The Aspen Institute attracted some of the most amazing people.

It had a place where they could speak freely to each other in private.

Cyrus Vance or Henry Kissinger or the Shahbanou of Iran or...

Very, very powerful people that you would never expect to meet.

Those were the people, that was, that was the teaching there, you could,

and in fact, you were responsible and had a mandate to invent the future.

Because the future your parents handed you, that was broken.

And so that started me in the track of saying, "What can I do to create the future?"

There comes a moment where for some reason you are in the future,

and you see something very, very clearly. You just see it.

That's what happened to me, and I went into the future,

and I saw the world which, which I thought was very real and very tangible.

And I stood in that moment, inside it, and I looked around my... me,

and it was there, it was all there. It was basically the General Magic vision.

It was gonna be so revolutionary that it would take over the world.

So this book I wrote in 1989 and this was a compilation of, of the ideas.

And it was called Pocket Crystal.

And this is what we came up with in 1989.

And there it is, we really had it.

We definitely had it.

Business is just stories. That's what people do, they tell stories.

And they... and the ones who tell the most compelling stories are the ones who,

you know, end up making the most progress forward and Marc was a great story teller.

After Steve Jobs left in 1985, a lot of people were pretty depressed,

and they wondered what Apple's future was going to be like.

You know, could Apple still go on without Steve Jobs there?

Marc was one of the first people to see that computing in the future was gonna be,

not just about computation, it was gonna be about communications,

it was gonna be about content and it was gonna be very, very personal.

Something that you could hold in your hand.

And it was a telephone, it was essentially going to be a smartphone

with a lot of intelligence in it.

Imagine a personal computer, with applications organized

around these personal wants and needs.

An object through which you communicated with yourself about everything

that you're thinking about. It was the way you reached out and touched other people,

and it was the way that you reach beyond that into the larger world.

Marc always came with his giant red book, uh, and he would thumb through the pages

and, uh, he was able to romance me,

he was able to romance Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld.

Please leave a message and we will return

your call as quickly as possible.

I saw a message on my answering machine from Bill Atkinson

who was my mentor at Apple, my hero.

"I just saw the greatest thing ever.

You got to come back to Apple to work with me on it."

And the very next day Marc Porat came over to my house with his models and stuff.

Wouldn't it be nice, if all these notes, which are very useful,

I could have with me when I needed them. Wouldn't it be nice I suppose,

if letters that were important, arrived, fell out of the sky.

I was a little skeptical at first, because Marc is such a slick salesperson,

but I saw that, hey, this is pretty cool.

And when I saw this, the concept and I talked to Marc,

I got the same butterflies in my stomach.

The same feeling that I had when I first encountered the Macintosh.

This book was not just ideas,

not just possibilities,

but this was a complete and thorough collection

of the vision of the future, scenario by scenario.

Marc said, "We are gonna create what comes after the personal computer."

"John," he said, "I think this can be the future of Apple,

but I'm not sure it can be done inside of Apple.

I think it's got to be a separate company."

I helped Marc get the investment from the Apple board.

So Apple ended up spinning out General Magic.

This was the beginning of what became, I think, the most important company

to come out of Silicon Valley that nobody had ever heard of.

There was this aura of secrecy.

We knew the people that went in.

We knew they were smart people.

You know it had Apple's fairy dust sprinkled on it.

So we had no idea what it was,

but by the rumors it seemed just captivating.

There's this company, it has Andy and Bill and,

and they're going off to do something.

And I was like, "I don't know what they are doing yet, but I know I need to be there."

I was dressed up, I had my suit coat and a tie,

and I was there at about 8:30 in the morning.

I knocked on the door, no one answered, so I opened the door

and it was very quiet and I'm like, "Where is everybody?"

And I look over and there are two people in this office

and they had been there all night, and they looked at me with these dazed eyes

and they were like, "We're not hiring." And that was it.

Everybody in the valley knew that Magic was... was doing something really cool,

and really hot, they didn't know exactly what it was.

Everybody wanted to be there and people literally would sleep on the doorstep

to try to get an interview or get into the building.

I mean from your perspective, is this unique?

Or is this everywhere in the valley and not so special?

No, no it's not everywhere in the valley!

The best, the brightest the coolest, the smartest.

Hi Megan, welcome aboard.

Oh, smile! You are on "Candid Camera."

I was always building things.

I come from a long line of engineers. And so the idea of going to Silicon Valley

and learning with these extraordinary people how to make products

and create things and do just amazing things,

that's what I wanted to do, it was drawing me.

Andy Hertzfeld had gotten my name as a Mac developer, and so he called me.

I'm sorry to offend you with this Non Disclosure Agreement...

But he couldn't tell me what it was, and I was just thinking,

"Oh my god I am talking to Andy Hertzfeld right now."

My parents are looking at me going, "I don't know anything

about this General Magic. Why don't you go to a company you know, like

IBM or Microsoft, can't you go there, where it's well known?"

I'm like, "No, I wanna go work for General Magic."

He would call me ten, fifteen times a day just begging,

"Please get my resume" and he would just ask me,

"Please, I will not stop until I work there."

And so I go into the interview, first thing in,

people sat me down on the floor, ripped my tie off, ripped off my jacket and said,

"That's not how we work here." So I go home back to Michigan, packed up all my things,