Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

Off-topic, but I have to...

(From the photo caption) "Bill ... with his iphone prototype"

Nope. That's a Sony Magic Link, built by Bill (and others, myself included) during his time at General Magic. I feel General Magic is another one of Bill's endeavors that isn't widely understood or appreciated.

There was a great documentary on Magic Leap! https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com

That is a great documentary, but it's about General Magic, not Magic Leap.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Leap

Yep. I can be seen briefly in one scene, listening intently in the background while Marc Porat waxes poetic.

Hi there. I will correct the iPhone prototype reference. Thanks for the heads up. - Axle / www.patternproject.ca

This is my favourite documentary on tech! If you know more please let me know

Who are you sir? I am a big fan of the general magicians

My name is Jay. I guess I was one of the "lesser" magicians. I worked on the Telescript side, doing infrastructure for the Telescript engine. But I got to interact with both Bill and Andy, and Phil and Tony, who I followed to further ventures. My experience at General Magic was certainly eye opening and super educational.

OMG. I was a fan of Telescript (and Obliq) at the time. I still believe that Java and the hype surrounding it contributed to the demise of mobile agents, although I'm sure that reality was more complex than that. Kudos for having such a cool job!

Here's the real story behind "Magic Creep":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28838332

Not to be confused with General Magic, which wasn't a money grubbing fraud from day one, which didn't put on the most ridiculous obnoxious unenlightening cocaine addled TedX talk in the history of the universe, which didn't post fraudulent obviously impossibly fake demos to youtube falsely claiming "Just another day in the office at Magic Leap", which didn't have a toxic nepotistic bro culture that excluded and belittled women, that didn't settle a huge lawsuit for sex discrimination against the one woman they hired to fix the "pink/blue problem" but then rebuffed and ignored, that didn't burn through billions of investment dollars producing nothing of value, which didn't blatantly rip off many people's original ideas in their unoriginal invalid fraudulent patent applications, which didn't publish an astounding but physically impossible video of a whale leaping out the gym floor and splashing down while hundreds of children not wearing AR headsets were somehow magically able to perceive it and clap and cheer and say "WOOOAAAHH!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8J5BWL8oJY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbpqwUUfMAQ

https://x.com/fernandojsg/status/1017411969169555457

Magic Leap gave magic a bad name (and was the biggest disgrace of the entire AR industry, even spectacularly worse than a certain Google Glasshole publishing a nude selfie of himself in the shower), while General Magic truly was the good kind of magic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725347

I was googling for my friend Josh Siegel who used to work at General Magic, and found this cool org chart!

http://www.datarover.com/SEKRIT/general-magic-org-chart-1994...

Josh Siegel worked in Magic Cap Core Technology with Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld (both "on loan"). At Sun he rewrote the PostScript interpreter in X11/NeWS from James Gosling's original messy design, and we worked on an X11 window manager written in PostScript. And at Los Alamos National Labs he wrote MMPORG simulations of World War III for the Joint Chiefs of Staff with a beautiful interactive NeWS front-end. (Sun was lucky to steal him away from LANL to work on NeWS instead of WWIII.)

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/NeWS/owm.ps.txt

https://www.donhopkins.com/home/catalog/unix-haters/x-window...

Don Woods worked in Communicating Applications. He and Will Crowther created Colossal Cave Adventure, and we worked on TNT (The NeWS Toolkit) together. His workstation was named "colossal" and when you logged in, its /etc/motd said "Welcome to Adventure!! Would you like instructions?" to the peril of anyone who typed "yes" to the csh prompt. Don wrote the "Spider" card game in PostScript for NeWS, after having previously implemented it at SAIL (Stanford AI Lab) and for XDE (at Xerox PARC).

https://donhopkins.com/home/archive/news-tape/fun/spider/spi...

http://www.icynic.com/~don/

After having worked on NeWS (the network extensible PostScript window system) and written a lot of PostScript code at Sun, Telescript was obviously the right approach. Today the same approach is called "AJAX".

I wonder what "SEKRET" means? ;)

http://www.datarover.com/SEKRIT

Must have something to do with Magic Cap for Windows '95, which may be the killer app of e-mail...

http://www.datarover.com/

Oh my gosh, Don, you are giving me nightmares.

But what do you mean about the whale? I know they hypnotized the kids with some Magic, but the whale really did Leap out of the gym floor. That's where they got the company name! I saw it with my own eyes, in that YouTube video.

And don't expect me to believe that Rony Abovitz is not a real astronaut, and those were not real apes, and that was not a real space fudge monolith. I can taste right now, in my virtual mind!

About the shower glass guy... I knew him when he was a camera salesman at LZ Premiums in San Jose. I used to go there when I lived nearby, just to eye the merchandise and compare prices.

Eventually I bought something there - a huge Manfrotto tripod with a fluid head. I can still see the smile on Robert's face when he brought it out: "this guy finally bought something!"

I worked for a time with a dude who was absolutely over the moon with his magic link. He got it in a way that I haven’t seen elsewhere.

Yes, he carried it everywhere. Yes, he used it during his job interview. Yes, it helped.

Do you mean the same guy who perfected the high art of plugging his new AR/VR company at the end of his bombastic woman-blaming non-apology apology that his lawyer warned him not to post because all his colleagues jumped ship from his previous AR/VR company after his sexual abuse scandal sold you a huge Manfrotto tripod with a fluid head at LZ Premiums in San Jose, the one by Coyote Creek and the salt evaporator flat? Oh, do dish to me all about your huge Manfrotto! What has it seen? Tell me more! Tell me more! How's the fluid head treating you after all these years?

PS: Hello fellow Jaunter! Was it big and strong enough to support a Jaunt VR camera? Did you manage to nick one before they shut down? ;)

Don't hold back. Tell people how you really feel :)

Few seem to have put it so succinctly. Although your text recovers completely after being fully compressed to "from day one" ;)

Magic Leap gave Nova a bad name and Ft. Lauderdale a worse name but visitors should know better than to be sold their own dream.

Exactly the thing I was advising yachtsmen against when I was a teenager.

Back in the Everglades there never were that many legitimate sources of income so different cultures had long developed different ways to survive in that type of climate :\

Small-town resort coup on SV that one.