The Day I Turned Off the Lights at General Magic

I admit this is a very self-indulgent post. I haven’t seen the new General Magic movie yet but I had to chime in. There were a lot of valuable lessons learned at General Magic, and I was gratefully exposed to a lot of high quality people, so I don’t regret for one second working there. But it was a sad day when I loaded up the boxes of archived code and IP into my pickup truck and drove it to a physical vault in San Jose to be placed in escrow as the last contractual obligation of General Magic.

General Magic’s partners made several Magic CAP based devices, including a few handheld PDAs, a “smartphone” that weighed too much and cost too much to be viable, and a small-office Fax machine/internet browser. I was on the Magic CAP PIC side of the house, but the other side of the coin was the Telescript server and network. Telescript was a proprietary network of “cloud” servers that leveraged “Intelligent Agents”, which were applications like viruses that could be released into the cloud to hunt for information, watch for a stock to hit a certain price and then execute a buy or sell order, watch for an airfare and send an alert to the user, or even attach to an email asking your friend to allow the agent to automatically sift through your rolodex and find your dentist contact. At that time, companies like AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy all ran proprietary services that were not exactly “the internet”. A small startup in the same office complex as General Magic named Navio went on to release the Netscape Navigator web browser and turned General Magic’s world upside down just before the whole Telescript and PIC system was supposed to launch.

I forget the exact date when I got the call to box up the IP. Mary Doyle had been the corporate attorney. She called asking for shutdown help. I was working at a subsidiary/spinout of General Magic called Icras, just around the corner from the then empty building at 420 North Mary Avenue in Sunnyvale. The building was empty of people but full of gear and equipment and I wept as I perceived all the ghosts left behind.

I walked through the lobby door and looked at the meeting room where Phil Goldman, Zarko Draganic, and Andy Rubin interviewed me. Phil hired me and then promptly quit to go start WebTV. WebTV was enabled by General Magic “inventions”. One insider story leaked back to the General Magic tribe was that WebTV kept a rolling screen in their operations center of all the top internet sites actively being browsed by their customers – and the Top 10 or more most popular sites were of course pornography before getting down the list to sites with news and weather and sports. One happy customer sent in an appreciation email explaining that he’d been trapped in bed for years due to an illness and couldn’t navigate a normal PC, but the wireless keyboard for WebTV opened new possibilities. The entire message was written in the subject line of the email, nothing in the body. Hoping to reference this poor soul as a poster child for their service, it was decided to just back off when the browser history of this customer revealed that he was solely hitting the “Top 10 sites”. That was an industry secret when congress was debating decency regulations for the internet.

WebTV saved my marriage during a 3-week business trip to Japan to support final design changes for a PIC manufactured by a partner there. When I abandoned my very pregnant wife who was on medical bed-rest, and left her home alone with a two-year old child and a five-year old child as her only support, we setup a WebTV in our bedroom so that she could email me and browse the web. When I came home, my living room was full of junk she bought from the internet and my credit card was limited out. Sweet revenge.

There was a funny story about a Japanese partner who wanted to make a “Magic TV” using General Magic technology. Being Japanese, they decided it would be a good idea to use an animated cartoon character as part of the user interface to make the user experience more intuitive. They licensed rights for Woody The Woodpecker and crafted an animated “Woody, The Internet Pecker”. The startup screen displayed the instructions, “Woody, the Internet Pecker! Touch Woody to start!”

I felt like I was going to a funeral when I marched up the stairs and past the kitchen where my favorite toy lived – the Italian espresso machine that opened my eyes to real coffee. I took that machine home as my prize for spending a day boxing up IP files. I eventually broke into the marketing closet, cleaned out all the sweatshirts and frisbees, and hauled it all to a homeless shelter where they grudgingly accepted the paraphernalia but already had better stuff from other failed dot-com startups. However, I also found several tons of high-quality, cotton fiber paper, suitable for printing resumes, all stacked on pallets. It took three trips to haul it all to my kids’ elementary school where I was informed it would feed their paper needs for 4 months.

Back in the day, I was often one of the first into the building. I’d fire up the espresso machine and whistle the Start Trek tune. Andy Rubin’s parrot, Cujo, would whistle back and would often climb down from her perch and come find me, crawl up my leg and sit on my shoulder. Rubin kept a closet of dialup modems in the corner tied into our T1 line and ran a side business ISP called “Spies.com”. One day we were trying to figure out what Cujo was trying to squawk and we realized the poor bird was trying to mimic the modem training tones that incessantly chimed in the closet! We muted the modems and I spent hours teaching Cujo to whistle the Star Trek tune, which she associated with me and used it to call me in the building when she was bored.

Cujo's corner was where Zarko, Mark Gonikberg, and Haixiang Liang worked on our software based modem. They eventually spun out a startup called SoftModem that got acquired by Broadcom. When Zarko convinced Mark and Haixiang to strike out on their own, he just walked into work one day and demanded all the IP for SoftModem and also requested a $50k investment. I don’t know how much, if any, he got in the end, but I helped him tear down some office cubicles and load up a U-Haul for the new SoftModem office, and we used my pickup truck to ferry a vintage Space Invaders video arcade game that may have belonged to Rubin over to a local pizza place hangout.

Those days in Silicon Valley were very different than today. We had lots of meetings with companies but never signed any NDA. Intel had meetings with General Magic to discuss the "Magic Bus", but decided not to pursue a partnership. Shortly thereafter, they released the USB design, which was very similar to Magic Bus. The culture at the time seemed to consider technology and inventions as the property of the developer or employee more than the company's intellectual property. That's what allowed so much General Magic IP to walk out the door with employees on their way to starting their own companies, often with the blessing of the company or at least its apathy.

I walked past where Pierre Omidyar sat while running an old Mac under his desk that hosted a bulletin-board service for trading Pez Candy dispensers – his girlfriend’s hobby. That was the precursor to eBay. I had a tendency to use an obnoxious French accent while shouting, “Bonjour Pierre, ha-ha-ha!” when I greeted him every day. I suppose that was strike one against me. Strike two and three were failing to buy friends-and-family stock for $17 per share when Pierre solicited funding. Pierre was working for Mark “The Red” Harlan at the time, and Mark bought a bunch of shares, which quickly turned into a very tidy profit and gave him the freedom to quit General Magic and drive around the country frequenting truck-stop diners and blogging about the food experience with a small puppet-doll that he carried around whose name escapes me.

I peeked into the lab where Brian Sander, Leland Lew, Jim Buteau and Dan Garland crafted our Dino and Betty chips and all the big-boards. I should have grabbed some of those from the pile as souvenirs. Those guys were often ignored and under-appreciated. Tony Fadell had been in that team which springboarded him over to Philips. It wasn’t really the MIPs based CPU core that was the “magic” as much as it was the analog chip that powered the touchscreen and audio and enabled the modem. Zarko’s SoftModem startup needed that analog chip to enable their compact and cheap modem design.

Kate Ebneter’s build machine area was vacant when I last saw it. There were so many developers all working on the same code tree that we needed strict processes for code check ins to avoid conflicts. We had a lot of prolific developers – Darin Adler, Timo Bruck, Mike Migliore, Pavel Cisler, Marco Pontil, Greg Marriott, and many more. We were supposed to test our own code using a Silicon Graphics workstation simulator and either a big-board or an actual target device before checking in. If you failed to follow the rules, and if your code checkin broke the nightly build, Kate would grab her ceremonial African hatchet with tinkly bells attached which she called “Bad Mojo”, and she would make a racket and a big fuss and scream and shout and march around the building whooping until she arrived at the desk of the perpetrator who had checked in the bad code. Public humiliation was supposed to be a deterrent but never really phased our developers, but Kate seemed to have a good time.

Steve Schramm took the lead in spinning out a subsidiary called Icras. Steve was the leader with Mike Migliore. Vince Cotter, Bart Anderson, Wendy Held, Rick Donald, JET, Josh Carter, and a few dozen other hardy souls from the Magic CAP Communicator team set out to build an industrial version of the PIC for vertical market applications. Home healthcare, logistics and delivery services, gas and oil, pharmaceutical reps, any application where data capture needed a better solution than a clipboard and pen. We partnered with Oki in Japan and built an ugly army-green brick that was fantastic, a major upgrade compared to the Sony Magic Link and the Motorola Envoy, with more memory and the new MIPs core CPU. It had dual PCMCIA slots and mated seamlessly to an external Metricom Ricochet wireless modem that provided 256kbps connectivity. Oki manufactured about 20,000 units for our first batch near Nagano. We called the unit the “DataRover 840”.

When my baby daughter got really sick and landed in the intensive care unit for two weeks, I used a PIC and Metricom modem night and day, emailing family and friends, and desperately searching the nascent internet for any helpful medical information. I actually did find helpful information from a website in Australia. Our doctors looked at that PIC like it was from a sci-fi movie, but they used it. It’s more fair to say it was like an iPad than a smartphone. It was perhaps the first wireless WAN tablet with generic web browsing capability.

The Magic CAP OS and the DataRover PICs were actually really functional. We had a meeting with Starbucks in their original Seattle HQ in a brick warehouse. They wanted a mobile device to capture customer orders when they walked in the door. The problem then as now was that no Starbucks shop had enough counter space for more than two or three cash registers. People had to stand in line and couldn’t mill around to view the other merchandise on the shelves. And once the line got to the door, a lot of people just gave up and left without ordering.

Starbucks had issued an RFP seeking a full-VGA handheld device running DOS and communicating over a proprietary LAN called “Lantastic”. Apparently, the cash registers were full VGA DOS computers, so they wanted an identical portable version. No such device existed at the time. So instead, Mark Beaulieu and the team crafted a nifty user interface with drop down menus and pick-lists, complete with Starbucks’ logos and artwork on our DataRover. Customizing the UI and pulling in graphics was a breeze with Magic CAP. The demo app was fantastic! Just a few taps on the screen and my triple-tall, non-fat latte was good to go. We also attached a magstripe credit card reader to the PIC for payment, used a wifi card in the PCMCIA slot to talk to a wireless label printer that printed the order and customer name for the barista to just slap on the cup, and had another laser based barcode reader in the other slot for “loyalty cards”.

The Gatekeeper and Decision Maker was the head of Starbucks’ IT department. He was their first, original IT guy. He was not impressed. Magic CAP was not DOS, and it was only a ? VGA screen. Furthermore, the marketing people swore that Starbucks would NEVER ask a customer for their name on any order, and loyalty cards were an invasion of privacy. They threw us out. I wonder where Starbucks is today on handheld devices and those other ideas?

We had a similar experience at Disneyland. Disney wanted a mobile device to take customer surveys. Roving surveyors would walk around the park and ask visitors a few simple questions. We again crafted a customized demo including Disney artwork and Mickey Mouse. The Disney marketing team freaked out when they saw the demo. Mickey Mouse was such a proprietary and closely guarded icon that they couldn’t grasp how we had merely scraped a GIF from their website and copied their trademarked intellectual property so easily. They could not get past the sight of Mickey Mouse’s smiling face on the screen to focus on the functionality of the demo or the device. It was as if we had pulled the top off the Ark of the Covenant and asked them to stare inside at the forbidden stone tablets. We got tossed out.

One of the lessons learned was that companies like Microsoft invested a lot in training and certification classes for the IT industry, which resulted in the concept that “proprietary systems are bad”, meaning any system that wasn’t Microsoft-proprietary was bad. We always had issues with IT departments who proudly displayed their Microsoft certifications on the walls because Magic CAP wasn’t a Microsoft product – as if standard communications between devices wasn’t enough for compatibility and data transfer. Microsoft announced their own mobile device OS codenamed “Pegasus”, and the handwriting was on the wall at General Magic.

It was around that time that Maurice Jeffries left General Magic to go to a tiny startup called Unwired Planet. Maurice asked me to go with him. I declined. Redwood City was too far a drive for me. Maurice went and soldiered on valiantly. I saw him at a trade show where Unwired Planet had a tiny card table while General Magic had a spacious pavilion. I remember sneaking food and water to Maurice as he sat forlornly alone at his little card table. I felt sorry for Maurice. But then Unwired Planet became Phone.com and merged with Software.com and finally changed to Openwave. Maurice made millions of dollars in stock and bought an expensive car. When my time ended at General Magic and Icras, I got a job at Openwave in Redwood City, just about 4 years too late to afford a car like Maurice’s for the long commute.

It took Microsoft years to release a stable Windows CE OS, or “WinCE” as we called it. The first really successful WinCE handhelds used General Magic’s Dino and Betty 2-chip PDA from Philips, like Anthony Armenta's Clio PDA at Vadem. Many startup companies who tried to make a business on top of WinCE couldn’t last long enough for the OS to mature. General Magic and arguably Apple Newton could have revolutionized the vertical market space, but both were focused on consumer electronics. Unfortunately, the price and features as a consumer device were not in line with the realities of hardware costs at that time, but vertical markets could and would have paid dearly regardless. Eventually, Symbol Technologies woke up and came back and re-secured their place in the vertical/industrial market space leveraging WinCE and resolving the IT industry’s fear of “proprietary” technology.

The DataRover subsidiary/spinout kept General Magic technology alive a bit longer, kind of like how Constantinople kept Roman culture alive after the fall of Rome, but eventually we succumbed to the dot-com implosion, and I was once again turning off the lights of a company into which I poured my heart and soul. In January, 2001, I left 4,000 DataRover PICs in the warehouse when the venture folded. I gifted my last surviving DataRover PIC to Kei Shimada in Japan about 2010. He worked at Panasonic on an original Magic CAP PIC that was tested with school teachers in Japan, and he remembered how it worked.

The General Magic alumni have some legendary members, but most of us are obscure participants who made it all work. There are a surprising number of successful companies and products aided and abetted by General Magic alumni. It was a fun ride. Worth every minute.