In my review of Revolution in the Valley I mentioned General Magic. Many of the people that created the Mac ended up at General Magic hoping to capture the spirit of the Mac, but in your pocket. Watch the documentary, it's wonderful! I wish there was a book about General Magic but I can't seem to find any.
The operating system General Magic made was called Magic Cap and I've never seen it in detail until I was watching an interview from 2018 with Bill Atkinson. He gave a demo of a production Magic Link device (made by Sony) and I absolutely adored watching him show it off 25 years later.
It all seems very simple now. My smartphone can do shitloads more but the Magic Link device and Magic Cap OS was made between 1990-1994, before the WWW, before the Palm Pilot, before we had low power SoCs, multi-touch capacitive touch screens, colour LCDs and before the first 2G/GSM network was rolled out in Australia or the USA!
But that's not what I enjoyed most about Bill's demo. What captivated me was how delightful and human it is. Compare it to the sterile Liquid Glass interface Apple just announced at WWDC or the bland Material Design employed by Google on Android. Magic Cap is the polar opposite. Maybe it's not the most efficient UI and I'm not saying we should return to that style of UI, but goddamn it, it's way more fun to use and made me feel something - joy, delight, happiness, honesty - in a way that the modern UIs on my devices simply do not.
I think it's because the people involved, e.g: Bill & Andy, are just sweet, nice people that care about others. Maybe the people who make the UIs for Apple, Google, Microsoft and Meta now are really nice too, but the organisations that they work in aren't letting those personalities out into the world and be reflected in the products they work on.
That's a real shame because without that injection of humanity, a personal touch like an artist does in a piece, it's difficult - for me at least - to feel that connection and trust in the software regardless of how technically capable it is. It's hard to be cheeky and saccharine when your employer has a market cap of over a trillion dollars and a billion or more users.
Anyway, here's some commentary on this 15 minute demo I made into a clip from the full episode:
If you liked that brief demo of Magic Cap from Bill, here's one by Andy Hertzfeld in early 1994, running on a Mac:
Kinda wish it was in higher quality, but it's 30 bloody years old, I can't be too fussy! There's also a user manual for Magic Cap 3.1 that was shipped on something called a DataRover 840.
