General Magic

General Magic

(General Magic, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA) A former company founded in 1990 as a spinoff of Apple. It was established to create a platform for personal communications products and services and license the technology to a wide variety of manufacturers and service providers. It ceased operations in 2002 after an unsuccessful attempt to raise capital or achieve a strategic merger or acquisition.

General Magic's products included the Magic Cap operating system and Telescript programming language. The concept was to embed intelligence into e-mail and other applications to allow them to cooperate with one another and move messages intelligently through diverse public and private networks. One example of an application was a personal agent that could scour the Web and locate the best price for some desired item. The platform could be thought of as an early attempt at a type of Web services infrastructure, even before the Web had exploded.

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General Magic - A software company based in Mountain View, California. Products released in 1994 after four years in development include: Telescript - a communications-oriented programming language; Magic Cap - an OOPS designed for PDAs; and a new, third generation GUI. Motorola's Envoy, due for release in the third quarter of 1994, will use Magic Cap as its OS. What PostScript did for cross-platform, device-independent documents, Telescript aims to do for cross-platform, network-independent messaging. Telescript protects programmers from many of the complexities of network protocols. Competitors for Magic Cap include Microsoft's Windows for Pens/Winpad, PenPoint, Apple Computer's Newton Intelligence and GEOS by GeoWorks. http://genmagic.com/.