General Magic - Magic Cap, Telescript and The Cloud

Magic Cap, Telescript and The Cloud

The basic idea behind the General Magic system was to distribute the computing load of a typical user's tasks across many machines in the network. They felt that handhelds would always be lacking power in comparison to the desktops and servers they would communicate with, so that making a clone of a desktop machine in a handheld form would be doomed to fail. Instead, the devices would be based on a fairly minimal operating system known as Magic Cap, which was essentially a UI and the most basic services needed to run the machine. The UI was based on a "rooms" metaphor; e-mail and an address book could be found in the office, for instance, while games might be found in a living room.

User applications were generally written in a variant of the C programming language with object oriented extensions, calling the set of objects that made up the Magic Cap OS. These programs were installed in packages that were quickly loaded and unloaded as needed in order to conserve space. These applications, and interactions between them, could be scripted using the utility language, Magic Script.

Programs could also be written in a new programming language, Telescript, which made communications a first-class primitive of the language. Telescript was compiled into a cross-platform bytecode in much the same fashion as the Java programming language, but interestingly was able to migrate running processes between virtual machines. This radical idea defined a robust agent that could serialize its code, data, and state, deploy itself across one or more remote computers, and resume execution at the next instruction with all state intact. For instance, a user might start a Telescript application on their handheld, travel over the cell phone network and start a Telescript application on a large Telescript server. The two applications would then interact to provide a complete application. The agent might perform days- or weeks-long tasks after the client disconnected, and dispatch updates periodically to the client. The user-end software was tasked primarily with request and display.

The developers saw a time when Telescript application engines would be widely available across various communications systems, first the cell phone networks and desktop machines, and later the internet. Eventually Telescript would become ubiquitous, and interconnected Telescript engines would form a "Telescript Cloud" across which mobile applications could execute. Stationary, long-lived processes called "places" would run in the cloud permanently and provide services to agents which would "go" from one place to another to access services, collect information, and eventually dispatch results back to the user.

Sony, AT&T and Motorola all introduced Magic Cap devices in late 1994, based on the Motorola 68300 Dragon microprocessor. Unlike other PDAs being introduced at the same time, the Magic Cap system did not rely on handwriting recognition, which meant it was almost an afterthought in terms of media coverage when Apple introduced the Newton. From that point on every PDA discussion was about the quality of the recognition, and the Magic Cap systems were basically ignored.

The systems also suffered from being introduced with no real infrastructure behind them. Since the cell carriers were not yet running any Telescript services, the entire distributed system was reduced to running applications on the handheld. Further, the World Wide Web and Mosaic were gaining rapid acceptance, and met users' needs well enough to obviate demand for General Magic's solutions.

Partners soon ended production of Magic Cap devices.