LGR Tech Tales - General Magic: Creating the Cloud
ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 14 ส.ค. 2016
- This episode covers the origin and demise of Apple spin-off company General Magic, and its impact on modern tech. Join me in LGR Tech Tales, looking at stories of technological inspiration, failure, and everything in-between!
● Consider supporting LGR on Patreon:
/ lazygamereviews
● Social links:
/ lazygamereviews
/ lazygamereviews
● Main sources for info:
"Magic Cap Cellphone Demo August 1995" by Andy Hertzfeld
• Magic Cap Cellphone De...
"Bill Atkinson and General Magic" by TWiT Network
• Bill Atkinson and Gene...
"The Video That Launched The Smart Phone Revolution" by David Hoffman
• 1993 - The Smart Phon...
"What Is The Cloud - By AT&T" by David Hoffman
• What Is The Cloud - By...
"Classic PC/TV - Sony Magic Link PIC-1000" by PC/TV
• Classic PC/TV - Sony M...
"Why Smart Executives Fail", book by Sydney Finkelstein
www.amazon.com...
"The Most Important Dead Company in Silicon Valley?" by Michael Kanellos
www.forbes.com/...
"A History of Silicon Valley" by Piero Scaruffi
www.scaruffi.co...
"Communicating in the Magic Kingdom" by Lorri Grube
chiefexecutive....
"The DaveNet Letter" by Dave Winer
scripting.com/d...
"Bill and Andy’s Excellent Adventure II" by Steven Levy
www.wired.com/1...
● Background music credits:
"Nautical 2" by Loscil
• Loscil - Nautical2
"Milinda," "Swampwalk" by Diode Milliampere
diodemilliamper...
"S1gns Of L1fe - Stratosphere"
• S1gns Of L1fe - Strato... - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
![What Happened to America Online? [LGR Tech Tales]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/A3DudqwsRPw/mqdefault.jpg)
These are my favourite LGR segments, but they must take you weeks to put together.
same here
same here
i concur. i love these things.
Tech Tales was the first LGR video I ever watched. I always get excited when I get a new Tech Tales video notification on my phone.
I hope whoever designed General Magic's logo is still doing graphic design work. Because I like it very much.
@Inje Kim yeah, I love it
Ok Kenny...
Happy bunny in hat!
Your channel is absolutely top notch. Thank you for bringing your viewers such great information and perspective on the past. It's people like you that help bring us back from taking things for granted, and possibly educating the younger generations on where all these modern devices came from.
I appreciate the kind words :)
Yup awesome work as always!
TheCgOrion 9th
I just wanted to say that back during my senior year of high school ( just graduated in May, actually) my generalized anxiety disorder was in full swing. So I'd pull up a video of yours during work and whether due to your calming voice or the extremely descriptive content it would make all my unbearable anxiety and panic just vanish! Just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for making my high school experience so much easier, you're awesome man!
No offense, real life must be rough, homie
@@likethesunshine I'm not trying to knock you, but meditation is like putting a band-aid on a gushing wound. If someone has anxiety, there's nothing they can do to cure it. And yes, I'm spiritual, but I am a realist too. I know this, and I've listened to Eckhart Tolle, read spiritual books, tried meditation, tried "letting go", tried letting it be as it is. And guess what? Nothing worked in the long run. For some of us, especially those of us with mental disorders, suffering is life-long. And that's all there is to that.
@@likethesunshine I did. It doesn't work for me. Suffering is my life. I was born with Autism, and developed Bipolar, and now am on meds that could cause God-knows-what down the line. So I live hedonistically, and am kind to others. But for true joy... Well, I'll be turning 28 on the 19th, so I've only got about a few decades, and then I'll be happy. For now though, suffering is my bedfellow. Do not take pity on me. I've learned to live with it, and just drown in Programming.
@@likethesunshine Like I said, I've tried all that. I don't drink. You don't need to make that assumption of me. This will go on until I reach the Afterlife. This is my life. I'm getting used to it, and nothing you say, no matter how clever, can ever change that.
@Clorox Bleach Evidently. we do. Shut your mouth.
Tech Tales is an absolutely amazing series of videos and I'm so glad you keep making more!
Could not agree more
I think the next Tech Tales should be Compuserve.
It was everywhere back in the 90's.
I didn't own my first PC until Fall of 2000, but I remember hearing about Compuserve quite a bit in the 1990s.
yes!!
Companies need to learn abput fair use, and government should do more to enforce it. This video is educational, so it falls fully under fair use. This is very frustrating to see!
Not to mention the commercials are over 20 years old
adventureoflinkmk2 No, what youtube needs to do is stop sucking main media's dick. TH-cam built a system entirely oriented to help classical media keep YT under their hawk-like scrutiny... while classical media would very happily have new media like YT destroyed with absolutely no remorse if they could. After all, innovation is the only thing that really threatens their monolithic lobby.
Isawa De La Pradera dude they cant its not posible they need to the media will always force them
This is why more people need to become cablecutters, not use adblock (atleast for content creators they like/do not support in otherways), and/or use patreon.
@@isawadelapradera6490 bro youtube has become the main media
I forgot I said on the original, but good stuff!
I really love the presentation of these because you don't try to force any cringeworthy humor or shoehorn "witty" nerd references. I don't like propping people up by vaguely tearing others down, but that REALLY gets annoying and I love that you typically don't do that. Just a seamless, informative, naturally entertaining video that doesn't waste any time.
I would love it if you made a video about Netscape Navigator's and Internet Explorer's legendary battle.
I think a series focusing on important technology showdowns would be fun to do. Netscape versus IE, Betamax versus VHS, Commadore versus Amiga versus the PC.
I love these. I understand they may not get as many views as some of your others, but they are just so well done! The information is presented in an interesting, yet concise fashion. This really pulls in the attention of the viewer. I really hope you keep doing them. Thank you for the great content
Honestly, I'm just going to watch this agian just because it was uploaded agian. And i love tech tales.
From a tweet: Just a heads-up: the most recent LGR Tech Tales episode on General Magic has been taken down due to copyright issues with a few video clips.
now stop asking :p
"the general magic alliance" sounds like a cult.
Dade Murphy Or the bureaucratic arm of the Occult.
Well, it WAS owned by the Cult of Apple.....
Straight up Harry Potter shit
not as much as Star gate
Dade Murphy Or a group in the Harry Potter universe,
This was a trip. It's crazy, these ones where a company had a great idea but it was out of it's time. This one sounds like a supergroup of tech geniuses. But it shows how much timing matters in the tech industry.
These tech tales are some of the best videos you create! Keep up the good work!
Keep the Tech Tales coming! Fave feature of your channel!!
I love your vids LGR. Especially ones telling stories about old IT companies. Keep going mate. :D
Another company that might make a good Tech Tales is Juno Online Services. When I think of General Magic, Eagle computers and others who were giants who have fallen, they come to mind. In the early days of the Internet, Juno became a giant by offering first free email with ads through its client and then free Internet service. There were a couple of years there in the 90's where basically everyone I knew had a Juno email address, mostly lured-in by those "Free Email!" CDs they gave away in book stores. While it is difficult to find hard numbers, I would have to imagine their reach was gigantic for a while. And then they just sort of faded away, which is hard to understand why considering how difficult it is to compete with free, even if there are ads on it. They were already pretty obscure before broadband was really available. What happened?
I love these vids. I found LGR through a tech tale about AOL and have been working through the LGR backlog ever since.
Love the Tech Tales series LGR, keep'em comin'. Reminds me of the glory days of G4
All LGR videos: A tier. Tech Tales: S tier
Wow, Clint. This is highly insightful. Still in disbelief that this was the group responsible for modern day smartphone technology and had a share in the advent of cloud computing.
Tech Tales is one of the best things on TH-cam, another great one
Guess most of us viewers can agree how much in awe we find ourselves to see by how much the idea of what we know as the cloud today predates the term "(data) cloud" itself. But if that was not enough, to think that it even predates the internet turns what we thought we knew about computer science upside down (at least for a layman like me). Great work Clint!
Man you are such a great tech story teller, and I love listening to rise and fall of great companies! You do a great job man, honestly.
I really love this series mate - keep it up! 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
Wow, thanks for "Tech Tales"..... They are one of my personal favorite videos on TH-cam
I really enjoy these sorts of videos on your channel. They are educational, well researched, and nostalgic at the same time. :)
Hindsight is always more clear than how events occur; but it seems like if General Magic had simply left their proprietary Magic Cap and Telescript technologies to be more open to begin with, and allowing AT&T to only be one of multiple possible backends for entering their Cloud, then they could've had more early adopters of their standard early on.
Since the internet was a natural evolution of the groundwork laid out by server computing, and was also being developed at the same time as General Magic's tech, it seems like the advent of the internet was going to be inevitable. The question wasn't _if_ the internet was going to take off and be massively adopted, but _when._ With that said, Telescript seemed very capable of allowing for encryption and secure cloud access, so it seems like if they could've banked on secure cloud access via any device and gotten some success from that.
If General Magic could've done a few choice things different they probably would've lasted a lot longer with a significantly higher amount of success. I have to wonder how different things would've been if they did stay around and saw some lasting success from their cloud computing coexisting with, and even thriving within/through, the internet back in the mid to late 90's.
With so many aces in the hand, how could they fail so bad ?
My take :
•Reading the discussions on Wipikedia, it seems they botched it REAL hard.
•It looks way too proprietary to ever gain traction from enough parties.
•The "room metaphor" reeks of misguided bells-and-whistles design.
@@musaran2
They learned to be super proprietary from Apple.
Love these look backs, you do a great job highlighting the lessons learned for those of us in the Tech industry to learn by
Thank you for making the tech tales, it's the best TH-cam series alongside Ahoy
Great video! I still remember interviewing there when I moved to California in ‘96.
This is just such a good series. Thank you very much for your awesome work here and every other episode of Tech Tales!
I love your Tech Tales videos! Could you consider doing one on Gateway Computers?? I miss the cow boxes!
Excellent video! I remember when the word "data cloud" was first introduced, and I had been doing tech a little by then, and knew what it meant and really wasn't that excited by it. I remember hearing about the devices from magazines, never could get one or have access to them, though. Thanks again!
Very good Clint! Love Tech Tales
I absolutely LOVE this series
I've never seen Tech Tales before. I really need to go back and watch more of your videos.
I love this channel and its Tech Tales, Tales of Tech
This story is even deeper and more interesting than what is told in this video. There is an actual documentary movie about General Magic and the people working there to revolutionize technology.
I just like playing your videos in the background while I work on something. You kinda help me concentrate.
I love listening to Tech Tales while I drift off to sleep, Clint's voice is so calming!
+yngv1 Samoyeds Rule!
Don’t feel bad, but I use the Tech Tales series to fall asleep a lot. The content is super interesting, but you make the videos so damn relaxing. So, I enjoy the knowledge and entertainment until I get tried, close my eyes and continue to listen, and then pass out lol.
You capture the right words. Too ahead of its time. I came into the internet scene at the end of 1992. It was still at a growing stage for the masses and it was at a painful speed. These guys were doing a prototype of the smartphone.
As an educational channel, use of those ads would fall under fair use
Arguably, but I'd rather just swap the footage and not deal with the aggravation.
Sadly Fair use is only a defense in court. If they don't want you to use it they can legally. Though they would never go to court because they know you would win. But you would need to be willing to go to court and have a serious front for a bluff.
Why would a company go out of their way to copyright claim an advertisement? That's rather silly!
It absolutely would have served as fair use, but I understand just not wanting to deal with the hassle
Lazy Game Reviews Yeah I get where you're coming from. Saves a buttload of money for other more important things like somehow finding a mechanical keyboard for $5 and hot wheels PCs
One of the General Magic software creations that probably will not make any of these videos is the banking software commissioned by Visa International. I worked on the software team that created Magic Banking that ran on the Magic Link. Actually paid bills and transacted with real checking accounts. But--Visa went with software written elsewhere for this same purpose to run on the PC.
This was one of my favorite tech tales eps. Very informative!
Atkinson wasn't just the creator of HyperCard. He did QuickDraw and coded regions masking before square masking was cool. He was the heart of everything graphic that made both Lisa and Mac ROM, giving an edge for so long.
I love getting a small whiskey buzz and BINGING LGR. my friend
I missed the first upload. Glad i caught it this time. Love these tales
These Tech Tales videos are awesome! couldn't help but subscribe.
wow, talk about a hype-train crashing HARD
wow this is a blast from the past I used to do email tech support for the magic link version of AOL. still have one of these
Consider taking a look at 1-800-Music-Now... a telephone-based service that let you "Discover" and "Sample" new music with the option to buy instantly and get a CD/Cassette mailed to you.
They were active (briefly) around 1995... I used to call them after bed time and press random numbers to discover / sample music DECADES before Pandora and the like were a thing...
It's how I got my first taste of Metallica, Slayer, and the like... I'd see what shirts the other kids were wearing at school and check them out on the phone while I tried to fall asleep.
Congrats on 400 thousand subs
Can you do a tech tales episode on Microsoft Bob?
That seems more like oddware, but seems like a good suggestion.
Thx
Yeah, seems more like oddware especially since Microsoft is still around and is a tech giant pretty much.
Yamatoman 64 m
Congratulations on 400,00 subscribers!
have my like again, you probably have a good reason to re-upload it.
He had to switch out stuff due to copyright :/
This looks to be the birth of The Cloud. Interesting.
Yeah, I was familiar with General Magic, but I wasn't aware they (or their partner AT&T) had coined this usage of "cloud". Use of a cloud symbol to represent nonspecific networks of computing equipment apparently was used as early as 1977 in ARPANET documents, though.
LGR, thanks for this great video and for the link to the "What Is The Cloud - By AT&T" animation - I just cited that video when updating Wikipedia to say that references to the Cloud as a distributed computing platform go back as far as 1993.
LGR deserves his own TV show
I really like the General Magic logo so much.
That picture of "engineers" had me cracking up. How you know they're engineers is that they're senselessly wearing hardhats indoors.
great way to start my morning with LGR tech tales
great episode again
love your tech tales, surely they must be the ones involving the most research work of all your stuff, together with your vintage computer reviews?
i wonder, does all that info still stick in your after doing so many? ;)
oddware series are cool too
Worth noting that a lot of General Magic's former patents have been used by patent trolls in recent years. Company called Minero Digital tried to get royalty payments for every USB hub in existence using patents they bought off of General Magic.
At 7:21 in the middle of the screen it says plane crash in Quincy Illinois. Me and my wife were in Quincy having dinner when it happened. We saw the fire trucks and emergency services racing out of town and we saw the huge plume of black smoke. This was just after my daughter was born in 1996
Darn I thought this was a part 2 or something, I really enjoyed this one
I wonder what a on alternate reality would look like with this thing taking off.
An earlier release with only a year or two of real use before technology progressed as normal.
Well, an alternate reality where Apple didn't release the Newton might have helped.
I was a heavy use of portico. Two key features: giving you an 800 number anyone could call you on and find you ringing which would ring numbers either together or in series.
Oh wow. I remember watching computery stuff on ME/U back in the day!
Volkswagen licensed OnStar for the 1997 VW Golf/Rabbit and other, later models as "Volkswagen Telematikdienste". It was marketed on a CD at this time with promising features at this time. Unfortunately, the system was analogue and support was ceased so in 2006(?)...
A roomy of mine while I lived in Eindhoven worked on this thing at Philips. She referred to it as "the rabbit". I've actually had one of these in mine hands, via a different route: a company that I worked with, that dealt with Philips.
Hi Clint. As a French guy, I have a request for a Tech Tale. It is about the French Minitel. That was dead on in the 90's.
Watching this video on my Magic Phone.
I picked up one of the Datarover units off of Ebay some time ago, it was a real pleasure to use and amazingly interesting. I would've loved to get a peak at it during the company's (and the hardware's) peak.
Good idea for Tech Tales or something similar would be an episode about Panasonic, with their attempts at the 3DO and all that
I had no idea the "cloud" term dates back that far. I remember the term "dumb computing" being used back in the 90s, but none of it really took off as most people didn't have a very fast internet connection back then. Guess Apple just held on to the concept until the technology and infrastructure was ready.
These history vids are so good
Remember: there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer...
I swear that i once saw a device with the magic link logo on it being sold. It was either circuit city or radio shack, but whatever it was cost over 500
I had a magic link for a couple years. I remember I had just purchased a sony camcorder rechargable battery (instead of the battery adapter) Then my magic link was stolen. I never did use that battery...
It was a limited (looking back) but pretty cool device. I still have the berlitz translator software pcmcia card somewhere around here.
2:56 pause! looks familiar? 2016, ahead of its time.
Real unsung hero of tech :')
never heard of general magic before :OO so, thanks!
I love your Tech tales !
1994-I can tell you having a Motorola wedge,ThinkPad 340 , university internet...was novel. I carried it all in a briefcase with an audio modem running dial up on my mobile.
Thank God Rogers had local calling minutes free.
Net nav. Was my phone providers base "access" aol disk came free in the mail.
That's a darn shame you had to re-edit and re-upload that video after all that hard work. I just don't see why the BBC had taken your original General Magic video down since the news footage was still edited and not shown completely. Anyways, thanks for sharing. On the next LGR Tech Tales video, I would like to see the story on Packard Bell or even Compaq.
The BBC? They had nothing to do with why this was re-uploaded. But yeah, it's annoying, but no big deal!
I love Tech Tales.
Love your videos, but tech tales are definitely my favourite! Do more!
tech tales are the best! MOAR!
Me: Oh yey new lgr video!! ....Ooohhhhh its just a reupload
I still fapped to it, again.
+Chew Bacca xD
Just watched the documentary ‘General Magic’ brilliant. As you say in the video, the vision just too WAY ahead of its time, like 30 odd years! But ye, if it wasn’t for General magic, I wouldn’t be watching or writing this comment right now.
I see another example of how the "so called" "Fair use" laws actually work... Forcing me to reconsider a project idea I had... Sorry it happened, but I don't mind re-watching and re-liking. :-)
2:56 I love this ridiculous stock picture.
Interesting tale about a company I never heard of until now.
Great series. More please.
General Magic seems to be to the handheld tech world what Jodorawski’s Dune was to 80s cinema.
What happened? Apple secretly were building the Newton using GM ideas they were privy to, they released it and it flopped, taking the wind out of the sales of GM.
Need more of this!
Typical example of tech that was ahead of its time. Look at it 20 years later and we have lightweight, cheap and blazing fast laptops that rely on this very concept; Barebones OS that relies on powerful cloud servers for the vast majority of it's capabilities. Look at the Voice Typing feature in Google Docs; A function that used to require a very powerful PC to process the input in realtime, now you simply use a node and let offsite servers do all the heavy lifting.