[1] Magic Software Enterprises was founded in 1983 by David Assia and Yaki Dunietz as a spin-off from "Mashov Computers",[2] a publicly traded Israeli company that provided business solutions on microcomputers.

Mashov’s major innovation was a metadata-driven approach to programming that required no compiling or linking, and also allowed instantaneous debugging.

The Magic platform was originally designed and developed by Jonathan (Yoni) Hashkes, along with Miko Hasson who was responsible for programme management.

In 2001, Magic released "eDeveloper" (Rohan), a graphical, rules-based, and event-driven framework that offered a pre-compiled engine for database business tasks and a wide variety of generic runtime services and functions.

In February 2001, Menachem Hasfari replaced Jack Dunitz as CEO after a series of failures that led the company to post two successive profit warnings.