He went home that year and drew what he actually meant. A thin glass rectangle, without any keyboard or buttons. A screen you touched with your finger, one device that could be a phone, a fax, a mailbox, a game console, and a shopping mall, all folded into something that fit in your pocket. He called it the Pocket Crystal. He wrote that it needed to feel less like a gadget and more like a piece of jewellery, something with the comfort of a smooth stone or the pull of a small crystal.

This was 1989. Fewer than one in six American homes owned a computer. The web didn’t exist yet for ordinary people. And Mark Porat had just described the smartphone, fifteen years before anyone could build one.

That single idea became a company called General Magic, and its story is one of the strangest, saddest, and most quietly important tales in the history of technology. It is also, oddly, a story almost nobody has heard.

A Team Too Good to Fail

Porat wasn’t an engineer. He was an economist, the man who coined the phrase “information society” in his Stanford dissertation years earlier. His gift was seeing shapes in the fog before anyone else could. When Apple proved too slow and too cautious to build its device, it convinced CEO John Sculley to spin the project out as its own company in 1990.

Marc Porat shares his early vision on the future of computing. Image from CHM

He didn’t do it alone. His co-founders were two of the people who had quite literally built the soul of the Macintosh. Bill Atkinson had written the graphics engine that made the Mac’s interface feel alive, and had invented things you still use every day without knowing his name: the menu bar, the selection lasso, the rounded rectangle every app button still borrows. Andy Hertzfeld had written huge chunks of the original Mac’s code.

Word spread instantly. People slept outside the office just to get an interview. Joanna Hoffman, one of Apple’s original marketing minds, joined. So did a young diagnostics engineer named Tony Fadell. So did a robotics-obsessed engineer nicknamed “Android” by his friends, Andy Rubin. So did a quiet developer named Pierre Omidyar. None of these names meant anything yet. They would.

Sony, Motorola, AT&T, Philips, and a dozen other giants signed on as partners and investors. By 1994, sixteen of the world’s largest telecom and electronics companies had put money and board seats behind a hundred-person startup that had never sold a single product. The New York Times called it the most closely watched company in Silicon Valley.

Building the Future by Hand

Because nothing they needed existed yet, they had to invent it themselves. Touchscreens weren’t good enough, so they built their own. Modem chips were too bulky, so they wrote software that did the modem’s job instead. When an engineer needed a way to connect devices to their accessories, he put together a system with no name, an early version of what we now call USB. Another engineer drew small animated faces that people could send each other to express a mood. They called them emoticons. Many who were there believe they were the ancestors of today’s emoji.

The operating system, called Magic Cap, showed you a drawing of a desk with a phone, a calendar, and a filing cabinet on it. You tapped the phone to make a call. It was so intuitive that most people never opened the manual.

Underneath it was a language called Telescript, built around the idea of small programs, or “agents,” that could travel across a network on your behalf, buy a plane ticket, check prices, and return results to your device. In 1991, on machines running at a few megahertz, they were describing cloud computing.

Right Idea, Wrong Decade

Then Apple, the company’s own parent and closest partner, built a rival product called the Newton, reportedly using notes taken in General Magic’s own board meetings. The people at General Magic felt betrayed. The Newton flopped anyway, its handwriting recognition so unreliable that a cartoonist turned it into a running joke.

In February 1995, General Magic went public on nothing but an idea and a famous list of founders. The stock doubled on day one. It raised almost a hundred million dollars. A banker reportedly stripped off his suit jacket in the office out of sheer eagerness to win their business.

But months earlier, the actual devices had already hit shelves, and almost nobody bought them. The Sony Magic Link sold a few thousand units. Its network, built by AT&T, was closed off from the open internet, while a Swiss researcher named Tim Berners-Lee had just released something free, open, and unpolished into the world: the web.

General Magic looked at the early web and saw a toy. They had built something richer, more animated, more capable. What they missed was that the toy was free and belonged to no one, and that mattered more than elegance.

Inside their own building, on the side, an employee named Pierre Omidyar had gotten curious about people selling things to each other online. On Labour Day 1995, he launched a small auction site from his personal website. The first item sold was a broken laser pointer. He called the site Auction Web. It became eBay.

By 1996, the company had burned most of its money. Its partners pulled back. Porat left. Most of the staff lost their jobs. He later said the strain nearly destroyed his marriage along with the company, and that he felt a deep sense of shame for years afterwards.

The Real Product Was the People

Here’s the twist. General Magic’s failure scattered its engineers across Silicon Valley like seeds from a burst pod, and each one carried a hard lesson from the tragedy.

Tony Fadell went on to help build the iPod and co-invent the iPhone, the very device Porat had sketched in his notebook. Andy Rubin took the dream of a wireless handheld device and eventually built Android, naming it after his own office nickname. Pierre Omidyar’s side project made him a billionaire before he turned thirty-one. Kevin Lynch, once a General Magic engineer, later led development of the Apple Watch. Megan Smith became the Chief Technology Officer of the United States.

Two of these future titans, Fadell and Rubin, reportedly sat about twenty feet apart at General Magic. Between them, their later work ended up in the overwhelming majority of smartphones on Earth.

There’s a phrase that keeps surfacing when people describe startups that arrive too early: paddling for a wave that hasn’t formed yet. If you start too soon, the wave slides right underneath you and leaves you behind. General Magic started paddling in 1989. The wave finally broke in 2007, carried in by a device called the iPhone, built in part by someone who once worked twenty feet from where it all began.

General Magic failed completely as a business. Almost nothing about its idea failed. It just took until 2007 for the world to catch up.