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The film General magic documents the rise and fall of a startup of the same name from ’90s Silicon Valley that many attribute to the invention of an iPhone-like device long before Apple began to develop its revolutionary smartphone. The company was made up of talented former Apple engineers (many of whom had worked on the original Macintosh computer) and other well-known names in the consumer electronics industry today. It also highlights Sony, one of the few companies to have released a device running General Magic’s Magic Cap operating system: the Sony Magic Link PIC-1000 PDA.
Some believe that Magic Cap and the devices that run it were simply ahead of their time, forced to limp with limited hardware and electronics that made the operating system clunky and obsolete. But in reality, Magic Cap’s development suffered from countless delays and issues such as feature slippage, where an endless list of “neat†features and ideas resulted in missed shipping times and delays. .
Finally released in 1994, the Sony Magic Link PIC-1000 was a disappointment at best, and while it offered innovative features like a built-in modem for sending and receiving emails on the go, it wasn’t enough that the device exchange. the world. The upgraded Sony Magic Link PIC-2000 came out two years later, but it struggled with a price tag of $ 900 and faced an even bigger hurdle: the arrival of the $ 300 Palm Computing Pilot 1000 PDA. .
The Pilot 1000 operated within the limits of technology at the time, offering a fast user interface, reliable handwriting detection using ‘Graffiti’ which was easy to learn, and intelligent use of. a synchronization cradle for periodically receiving and sending e-mails via a desktop computer. It wasn’t as powerful as PDAs running Magic Cap, but it was powerful enough for most users and easily pocketable. As a result, it truly ushered in the era of the personal digital assistant. Sorry, Sony.
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