General Magic

And this is Tom Hersh-Hershenson.

Welcome to General Magic and the Soul of Tech.

We believed we were building something that would change the world, and in some ways we did.

In others, we didn't understand what we were setting in motion.

The story of General Magic isn't over.

We're still living inside what it started.

Our special guest today is Steve Schramm, one of the OG general magicians and a real Silicon Valley veteran.

I'm going to bring back something from the past.

I think all the AI companies will swerve towards hardware and they will become hardware companies that they call.

We were talking pre-interview and just looking at the company history, it looks like it's a three and a half year old company.

I know I'm mistaking there.

Tell me about the history of the company.

I mean, the company is,

the current incarnation of the company is three and a half years old and that's definitely correct.

I have been working on this problem some way or the other for about a decade.

So I started working on this in 2016.

Now he gets this call from Apple on the ski slopes.

Tony Fidel has idolized some of the early employees at Apple, most notably two members of the original Mac team, Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson, who Tony Fidel had worked with in the early 90s at the startup General Magic.

Also, Tony Fidel's startup, Fuse, is running out of time and money.

And this is a pretty common thing for people at the time, right? Like these names, Hertzfeld and Atkinson, like they are, if you were paying attention to the Mac at this time, you know, as a younger person, you really would idolize them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So and he worked with them at General Magic.

So he knew the magic.

There's actually a classic example of this.

It was called General Magic.

Has anybody heard of General Magic? This is real tech nerd stuff.

And none of them are old enough.

um it's a guy who worked at apple and then he kind of spun out and it was when the huge block mobile phones were created and he was sort of 20 years into the future and was like this there should just be one device it should have like a flat screen i mean this was in the 90s and he was able to attract money from apple samsung kind of everybody and build this three thousand dollar device it was kind of similar to a smartphone today but like it didn't work that way um i don't know it's an interesting story but they had unlimited so they built something that ended up being kind of useless

It was really fascinating.

Went on from there to a company called General Magic, a public company that had spun out of Apple and invented three major things.

The predecessor of the iPhone, famously an operating system called Magic Cap.

We invented agents using a language called Telescript.

And our vision for where that would go was exactly where we are today.

I think we thought it would get there a little sooner.

But everything that became Siri and Alexa and Google Assistant, all that, they all licensed the General Magic patents that I and my team developed.

So then I became known as the father of the virtual assistant.