Valley of Genius Read online

  Tom Zimmerman: The problem was that we started spending more money on protecting our patents than on innovating, and that consumed more and more of our resources. It’s sad.

  David Levitt: It was terrible timing, because within a year of VPL closing its doors, the PlayStation came out. For $300 you could have replaced our $50,000-per-eye Silicon Graphics machines—in 1994. What is so interesting is that no one picked up on that. Had they not noticed that the leader in the field had left it open to them and that the hardware was now affordable? Who was going to pick it up? No one did.

  Michael Naimark: What happened? The spotlight shifted to the internet and the web.

  Scott Fisher: So my lab at NASA fell apart and out of that came lots of little companies that really wanted to build pieces of the technology and figure out what the content was and where we could go with it. And for the next decade some of us did that, while the internet stuff went through a similar kind of crazy roller-coaster ride. I thank God for the internet, because that became the next big meme that took the attention away from VR. Which was fine because then we could get back to work.

  Clive Thompson: The weird irony or poetic strangeness about VR is that it was the production of a billion mobile phones with their need for screens and little sensors that could figure out whether you were tilting them or whatnot that created this new generation of hardware: You’ve got Facebook’s Oculus, Google’s Cardboard, Microsoft’s HoloLens, HTC’s Vive, and they’re all trying to figure out what this environment is good for.

  David Levitt: These VR fads come and go. Before VPL ended, I used to think that there is a technological inevitability to VR—that it was unstoppable! After VPL was gone I realized that it takes a visionary: a Steve Jobs or a Jaron Lanier or an Engelbart determines whether these things are overlooked or not. A true visionary just makes the future out of what is available, and does not wait for the technology to catch up with him.

  Tom Zimmerman: There are three archetypes that are essential for invention. The dreamer, the first person who thinks of an idea. The engineer who reduces the idea to a prototype. And then the entrepreneur who takes that one prototype and works out the marketing, financing, and business model to make thousands or millions of them. Jaron was the entrepreneur.

  Jaron Lanier: If all a lab needed was a head-mounted display, we would sell them that. If all they needed was a glove, like Scott, we could sell them that. We had all these modules: a spherical video system so we could gather and replay spherical video; we did 3-D sound. We really had the complete thing—all in sort of early versions that would be considered somewhat crude today, but we had the whole package. We demonstrated what virtual reality could be as a product. Nobody else had done that.

  Young Harvill: And I think we also touched a place in terms of the cultural dream where it kind of flourished in people’s imagination and literature and movies. So I think we did well.

  Jaron Lanier: Nobody had put the whole thing together, and nobody had just shown the joy of it before. We showed the joy of it.

  From Insanely Great to Greatly Insane

  General Magic mentors a generation

  Chances are that you’ve never heard of General Magic, but in Silicon Valley the company is the stuff of legend. Magic spun out of Apple in 1990 with much of the original Mac team on board and a bold new product idea: a handheld gadget that they called a “personal communicator.” Plugged into a telephone jack, it could handle e-mail, dial phone numbers, and even send SMS-like instant messages—complete with emoji and stickers. It had an app store stocked with downloadable games, music, and programs that could do things like check stock prices and track your expenses. It could take photos with an (optional) camera attachment. There was even a prototype with a touch screen that could make cellular calls and wirelessly surf the then-embryonic web. In other words, General Magic pulled the technological equivalent of a working iPhone out of its proverbial hat—a decade before Apple started working on the real thing. Shortly thereafter, General Magic itself vanished.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The Macintosh had a great launch; it was really successful at first. Steve laid down a challenge at the introduction, which was to sell fifty thousand machines in the first hundred days, and it exceeded that. But then starting in the fall, sales started dropping off.

  Steve Wozniak: It just didn’t have any software at first.

  Fred Davis: MacPaint and MacWrite were like demo programs. They weren’t real tools that you could use to do stuff.

  Steve Wozniak: The Macintosh wasn’t a computer—it was a program to make things move in front of Steve’s eyes, the way a real computer would move them, but it didn’t have the underpinnings of a general operating system that allocates resources and keeps track of them and things like that. It didn’t have the elements of a full computer. It had just enough to make it look like a computer so he could sell it, but it didn’t sell well.

  Andy Hertzfeld: By December of 1984 the forecast was to sell eighty thousand Macs, and in fact they sold like eight thousand. So something had to be done. If the Mac wasn’t going to catch on, Apple didn’t have a future. So what to do about it?

  John Sculley: In 1985 Steve introduced the Macintosh Office, which was a laser printer—the LaserWriter with PostScript fonts from Adobe—and a Macintosh. One problem: The product just didn’t work. It wasn’t until at least a year later that the microprocessors were powerful enough that you could actually do the kind of things we were actually promoting back in 1985. So people weren’t buying it. Steve got depressed. And then he turned on me.

  Andy Hertzfeld: It got to the point where Steve was openly sabotaging Sculley. Something had to be done. Sculley and the board didn’t fire him, but they removed his responsibility from running the Mac. And so he had to leave.

  Ralph Guggenheim: Steve left in 1985. There was a rumor that he was starting a new company, NeXT. The NeXT machine was Steve’s effort to build his vision of a desktop workstation with lots of computing power and a CD-ROM. It was his attempt to show what he could have done at Apple.

  Steve Perlman: It was big, it was black-and-white, it was clunky.

  Andy Hertzfeld: NeXT was a revenge plot. That’s the reason I didn’t work at NeXT. Steve denied it and we’d argue till he was blue in the face. But it was true: The purpose of NeXT was to eclipse Apple. And I loved the Mac. I didn’t want to work against the Mac. But Steve wanted the Mac to fail, and so he started NeXT.

  Meanwhile, back at Apple:

  Larry Tesler: Steve was gone. Where are the new ideas going to come from now that we got rid of Steve? We’re going to run out of Xerox’s ideas. Where are we going to get ideas from? The management wanted new ideas. And so they decided they needed what they were calling the Advanced Technology Group. It was really an R&D group, a lab.

  Steve Perlman: We were building a color Macintosh.

  Steve Wozniak: The Mac wasn’t ever really selling until we introduced the Macintosh II in ’87. It had color.

  Larry Tesler: One of the things that grew out of it was the Apple Fellows Program. The first three Apple Fellows were Steve Wozniak, Bill Atkinson, and Rich Page. The initial definition of a fellow was someone who had made a big impact on the industry. Al Alcorn was recruited—he had done Pong. And they also wanted to recruit Alan Kay. So we brought them both in.

  Alan Kay: Steve never forgot where his ideas came from.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Alan Kay was my hero. I was like Damn! But it was still time for me to quit.

  Larry Tesler: And then as the program expanded and it even included a person who was not an engineer—Kristina Hooper Woolsey.

  Kristina Woolsey: I came in ’85 when the HyperCard stuff started. Bill Atkinson spontaneously decided to do the product. He and a small team just popped this thing out.

  Al Alcorn: HyperCard was developed by Bill and two or three guys in Advanced Technology and—it wasn’t supposed to be released. Products are supposed to be released by Product Development, not by Advanced Technology, understan
d? But Gassée, who succeeded Jobs as head of Macintosh development, wasn’t going to have it. So Bill and his team just conspired. And while Jean-Louis Gassée did his French thing and went off for a two-week summer vacation on the beach in the south of France, Bill just released it. And when Gassée got back he was furious, but he couldn’t stop it because HyperCard was really well received. It got great press. There are a lot of stories like that.

  Andy Hertzfeld: But the beginning of General Magic is really Marc Porat. He’s a very clever nontechnical person—an impresario businessman who in the thesis he did at Stanford came up with the first use of the term “information economy.” Marc was a college friend of Larry Tesler’s. So that was his connection to Apple. And he was hired on in the fall of 1988 to work in the Advanced Technology Group at Apple to try to help figure out what’s the next thing beyond personal computers.

  Megan Smith: Marc was very tied into Nicholas Negroponte and is part of that whole MIT Media Lab conversation.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Marc started by interviewing everyone at Apple trying to come up with a consensus—what’s in the wind. Eventually he decided the next thing beyond the personal computer combined two things. One is communication. The other thing is instead of being on the desk it was in your pocket.

  Megan Smith: And Marc came up with this idea that he called a Personal Intelligent Communicator—a smartphone, basically. The whole idea was there.

  Marc Porat: Remember something called the Sharp Wizard? It was a screen with some chiclet keys: one of those silly little organizer things, but useful. I took that and a Motorola analog cell phone and I duct-taped them together. That was the concept: “Imagine this screen was beautiful, imagine the applications were amazing, imagine that it was linked wirelessly with you everywhere.” And that little concept went around, and then we reduced it to something that was smaller and more beautiful.

  Andy Hertzfeld: And the smartest thing he ever did to make his vision real was make little models out of plaster.

  Steve Perlman: He was showing what looked like a little wallet—a block of plastic wrapped in leather.

  Marc Porat: Everything was going to become very small and in your hand, and intimate and jewelry-like. You’d wear it all the time, and if there was a fire in your house you’d think, Family goes first, and then I grab my Pocket Crystal.

  Megan Smith: Pocket Crystal—that was his nickname for it.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The first thing I said when I saw his models was, “Well, they’re not realistic.” And he said, “I know—but they will be.”

  Michael Stern: Marc Porat was an incredible visionary. His Pocket Crystal project at Apple was really a previsioning of everything that we now take for granted.

  Marc Porat: I wrote a book on it, all the things that this thing is supposed to do and why this computing-communication object would change the world.

  Michael Stern: Devices in your pocket, social networking, social media, a notion of an electronic community, anytime-anywhere communication, handheld devices that could enable you to do just about anything from shopping to research to talking to your mother. It’s all there, in that book he wrote. He was at Apple to help springboard the project and get it funded.

  Al Alcorn: So Marc was pushing this thing, and he infected Bill Atkinson and some of the other guys with this idea.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Marc met with Bill Atkinson, who had just finished HyperCard and was kind of looking around for what to do next. And he got Bill really excited about it. So one day right after my friend Burrell Smith went insane and I was dealing with that emotionally shattering experience and all of the fallout there, I get a phone call from Bill, incredibly excited, “You’ve got to see this new thing at Apple! It’s the next thing!” And my first thought was, Oh my God, Bill went insane too!? But he didn’t. And I called Bill and he said, “You’ve got to meet with this guy Marc.” And so Marc called me up. And I said, “Yeah, this is pretty interesting but I don’t want to work at Apple again.” And Marc said, “I understand you don’t want to work there. Why don’t we just pay you to be a consultant, and you know, just get started?”

  Marc Porat: Bill loved it. Andy saw it, was impressed that Bill was there. Bill was impressed that Andy was there. They immediately started seeing how to do it, and they signed up.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Bill created a prototype user interface in HyperCard. I wrote a server that allowed you to send little electronic graphical messages.

  Michael Stern: There were these beautiful little “tele-cards” with animations and handwritten notations and sound embedded in them.

  Andy Hertzfeld: All kinds of whimsical wacky animations—like we had a walking lemon. As well as these little graphical decorations also had meanings associated with them. Some of them you could even interact with, like one that was lips with a speech bubble. When you tapped on it a microphone appeared and you could talk into it and it would send your voice as part of the tele-card.

  Michael Stern: These beautiful little things you could exchange with each other. That was Bill’s thing.

  Andy Hertzfeld: We had what are now called stickers, which is part of instant messaging. You know how you could use little stickers in your messages? We had that working twenty-some years before the iPhone, in a better way than most people have it now.

  Steve Jarrett: You’ve got to remember, this was before even digital cellular existed.

  Marc Porat: Many of us had analog cell phones, which were bricks, and some of us carried batteries in a little, tiny briefcase to go with the brick.

  Steve Jarrett: People were just using mobile phones to talk. So, it’s very, very early.

  Marc Porat: The theory and the strategy, right from the beginning, was to create a global standard. Apple and Microsoft would have the personal computer, IBM and Digital would have the bigger hardware, and we would do everything else. We would do telephones, we would do television set-top boxes, we would do kiosks, we would do absolutely everything else that had an operating system.

  Al Alcorn: But it clearly wasn’t going to get supported by management at Apple. It wasn’t going to happen.

  Marc Porat: It would need a lot of communication networking, including wireless, and it would need something that did not exist, which was a network to run on, which Apple did not have.

  Andy Hertzfeld: One company can make a computer, but it couldn’t make a communicator all by itself, because it wouldn’t be able to establish the communication standards. So it couldn’t be an Apple product.

  Marc Porat: But it was also clear that politically, it was going to be okay to spin this thing out.

  John Giannandrea: I think a big part of spinning General Magic out of Apple was this idea that it was too big even for Apple, right? Apple couldn’t deal with this thing.

  Marc Porat: So there were two projects established: General Magic on the outside, and Newton on the inside.

  Andy Hertzfeld: The Newton project was an 8-by-11 tablet that was supposed to cost $5,000.

  Marc Porat: The Newton was a hedge in a big strategy that we had described to Sculley.

  Andy Hertzfeld: Basically Marc convinced John Sculley to not only let us spin out from Apple but also to help us convince Sony and Motorola that they should join Apple in trying to create this new standard. We called it “the Alliance.”

  Marc Porat: Apple, Motorola, Sony: So now we had the three board members as licensees, who were the core of the founding partners.

  Michael Stern: This is before the web; this is 1990–1991. And so after we’d already formed a company and spun out of Apple…

  Andy Hertzfeld: We decided to bring AT&T into the fold. AT&T became the fourth investor in General Magic on par with Sony, Motorola, and Apple. And that kind of worked, I was surprised. We were off and running.

  John Giannandrea: It was a ridiculously ambitious company.

  Marc Porat: People of enormous quality began to come over and see what this crazy team in downtown Palo Alto was doing—and joined.

 
Andy Hertzfeld: We had a lot of the original Mac people.

  Steve Perlman: It was a great group of people. To have a chance to work side by side with Andy and Bill? Come on! They’re the real deal. These guys are just geniuses. I didn’t care if they called it General Pickle. I was going to work side by side with Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson; what else could anyone ever dream for, right? I think I was employee number thirteen.

  Michael Stern: Andy and Bill were the gods of the universe, and then these kids came to work for them. Andy in particular was the mentor for and helped train a cohort of brilliant kids. Many of whom had their first job at Magic, like Tony Fadell. Tony hung around and would just talk to people until we finally hired him.

  Tony Fadell: I had my own start-up in Michigan doing educational software and getting frustrated being a big fish in a little pond. There was no internet then, so I would religiously read MacWEEK and Macworld, and there was always the last page of each of those rags which were like the murmurs, the rumors, the goings-on, and this company called General Magic kept popping up in it. I was like, Whatever that is, I have got to learn more about it.

  Marc Porat: General Magic had all the buzz. All the buzz. It was where the pixie dust was. It was where you wanted to work if you were cool and smart.

  Tony Fadell: I am looking all over for General Magic, and I find out that their office is in Mountain View in this high-rise, and so I show up about eight thirty in the morning with a tie and a jacket on, with my résumé in hand, and walk in the door. There was no one around. Or at least I did not think so. So I walked down the hall, and I saw a couple people who looked like they had been there all night. I was like, “Hey! I wanted to bring my résumé by, wanted to see if you guys were hiring?” They looked up at me with these bloodshot eyes, like, “Leave us alone, kid.”