1. General Magic 1993~1995

1. General Magic 1993~1995

This venture business started in 1992 by investing AT&T, Motorola and Sony to have an easy to use wired and wireless personal communicator through AT&T network using General Magic’s technology called “Telescrpt” language. This was very much similar to today’s “smart phone”. The members of this venture company were from Apple spun out people headed by Mr. Marc Porat and all members were very excited to develop both OS (operating system) called Magicap OS and Telescript. The top management at General Magic was excellent in convincing the investors and became their business supporters.

I took responsibility in the middle of development (1993~) and by watching their activities as well as what have been happening in the rest of the world, I have come to conclusion that this business will not FLY! The reason of this was their dreams and the real world has a huge gap and these will not be done by these companies e.g., General Magic, AT&T, Motorola and Sony.

For examples;

The speed of MODEM is too slow (1.2~2.4K, realty required 10Mbps or faster) The capacity, size, power consumption of ROM

The running speed of CPU

Robustness of Telescript

Application software for personal use

Etc.

The president at General Magic kept saying this was an excellent idea and would like to implement it as soon as possible which all of investors have the same opinion as the president.

The other issues were a) speed of Magicap OS development and fixing specifications of OS, b) took long time to develop much more robustness of” Telescript”

However, during development stage at General Magic, the rest of world has changed a lot and “Internet protocol” became the way of connecting many PCs. This was initially developed by the US Government and used with workstations as prime protocol.

By using this Internet, the Telescript is not required and many different devices can be connected rather than Magicap OS products.

The general Magic has successfully put NASDAQ but I took action to directly communicate with the president of Sony explaining the realty of the business and recommended his to shut it down.

This project dreamed by software engineers and the ideas were excellent but they have missed out what is happening outside of their world.