General Magic was an American software and electronics company co-founded by Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld,[1] and Marc Porat.

[9] Porat, Hertzfeld and Atkinson were soon joined at General Magic by Susan Kare,[10] Joanna Hoffman (vice president of marketing),[11] hardware pioneer Wendell Sander, Walt Broedner and Megan Smith who joined from Apple Japan, and most of Apple's System 7 team, including Phil Goldman and soon after Bruce Leak and Darin Adler.

[7] Sculley, Motorola CEO George Fisher, Sony president Norio Ogha, and AT&T division chairman Victor Pelsen became board members.

By early 1993, Newton (originally designed as a tablet with no communications capabilities) started to attract market interest away from General Magic.

[6] On February 8, The New York Times referred to General Magic as "Silicon Valley's most closely watched start-up company."

It reported that the company was introducing software technology called Telescript with the intent of creating a "standard for transmitting messages among any machines that compute, regardless of who makes them."

[2] In an article titled "Here's Where Woodstock Meets Silicon Valley," on February 27, 1993, The New York Times reported that General Magic had backing from "American Telephone and Telegraph, Sony, Motorola, Philips Electronics and Matsushita Electric Industrial."

This new team of 60–70 people set out to create a voice recognition-based personal assistant service that would be as close to human interaction as possible.

Portico synchronized to devices such as the Palm Connected Organizer and Microsoft Outlook and handled voicemail, call forwarding, email, calendar etc., all through the user's own personal 800 number.

The new company sold the Magic Cap OS as hardware named DataRover and focused on vertical market systems.

By 1999, the company's stock had plunged significantly, with Forbes attributing the drop to "losses, layoffs and missed projections.

"[7] Most of the management that was involved in bringing Portico to market left by early 2000 to pursue other interests with Internet startups.

[8] Unlike the Newton and other PDAs being introduced at the same time, the Magic Cap system also did not rely on handwriting recognition,[1] putting it at a marketing disadvantage.

[17] Its other software, Telescript, was "software-agent technology that would search the Web and automatically retrieve information such as stock quotes and airline ticket prices.

Telescript is compiled into a cross-platform bytecode in much the same fashion as the Java programming language, but is able to migrate running processes between virtual machines.

The company achieved many technical breakthroughs, including software modems (eliminating the need for modem chips), small touchscreens and touchscreen controller ASICs, highly integrated systems-on-a-chip designs for its partners' devices, rich multimedia email, networked games, streaming television, and early versions of e-commerce.

[18][20] The film includes interviews with Marc Porat, Andy Hertzfeld, Joanna Hoffman, Megan Smith, and Tony Fadell.