Sept. 13, 2026

ABOUT THIS EPISODE

This week we sat down with the 2018 documentary General Magic, about the early '90s startup of the same name that was full of Macintosh veterans who were way ahead of their time about mobile computing, online communications, and a lot of other stuff. Were they really trying to make the iPhone more than a decade before the iPhone? Did they seriously invent early precursors to USB, Java, and emoji long before those things became commonplace? Why did they fail so catastrophically? Join us as we discuss the movie to ponder these and other questions about a really heady, innovative era of computing.

The documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQymn5flcek

AT&T's 1994 video for PersonaLink and "the Cloud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbNrqe2IgSA

1994 Wired story about General Magic: https://www.wired.com/1994/04/general-magic/

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