General Magic Diary

Had an interesting discussion today with a developer on the merits of the different PDA OS's, specifically Palm versus WinCE versus Blackberry, etc. All have different strengths, pro's & con's. We were trying to go over what each one seemed to do right, and where each one seemed to fall down... both from a interface standpoint and a capabilities standpoint.

It got a little long, as we started reminiscing about other, older products... Apple's Newton, and the old General Magic stuff, which was huge for awhile. I remembered a lot about the Newton- but virtually nothing about what actually ended up happening to General Magic. I'd seen the interface and done some reading in high school, but that was about it.

He was kind enough to pass on this interesting diary-type history of General Magic, from someone who had a smidgen of inside info and a lot of hands on experience with them. Not pretty stuff, but it's a very good read in the category of "things not to do if you're a company" sorta way. Their experiences with the product pretty much speak for themselves. If you're a Woz fan, its prolly worth reading for the tidbits involving him alone.

One of my favs:

A few days later Andy proudly demos for us the OAG airline-schedule flight guide and other business apps and games on his 2- and 4-Mbyte SRAM cards. Steve is steaming.
'How dare you walk around with 2- and 4-Mbyte RAM cards?' he asks. 'You owe it to your customers to live with what you have designed and are shipping them!'

I also found a neat picture of the device I'd seen back in high school when visiting a university.