General Magic had everything. The mid-1990s Silicon Valley company had unlimited funding, an alliance including Apple, Sony, and AT&T, and a founding team that included two creators of the original Mac.

Sarah Kerruish and Matt Maude, the directors of a new documentary about the pioneering tech startup

The company whose 1990's work set the stage for modern smartphones also created a voice assistant

Stories and lessons from his new book, Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Tech nerds everywhere should rejoice at General Magic

One of the things that makes the documentary special is that there was a documentarian present with a camera rolling at the time all the craziness was going on.

The film, directed by Matthew Maude and Sarah Kerruish, tells the story of the eponymous company from its spin off from Apple to public offering (it was the first concept IPO) and abrupt decline.

A new documentary called General Magic shows how it had a big hand in creating much of the mobile technology we use today, and they stopped by the Weekend Beat to discuss.

Come for the history; stay to have your mind blown by the key players’ startlingly accurate predictions of our current landscape.

Who put the phone in your pocket? You might think Steve Jobs did. But the credit (or blame, depending on how you feel about smartphones) really goes to a company called General Magic and the visionaries who ran it.

I remember the guys at General Magic. I remember what Apple did to them. What I didn’t know was what they did next.

The film is packed with footage of General Magic’s employees talking with shocking prescience about their technology.

General Magic’s failure has become one of the most important legends in the history of Silicon Valley.

They saw the future, but the future had yet to arrive, and the company wound up crumpling in failure.

Podcast

From Tony Fadell to Megan Smith, six influential members of the 1990s startup General Magic share their advice for designers, technologists, and entrepreneurs.

“General Magic” is a remarkable documentary movie of the computer company of the same name, founded in 1990.

Trailer

General Magic is a reminder of how compelling stories about technology can be

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These “magicians” have become the tech innovators that now lead companies like Samsung, Apple and Facebook. General Magic, the film tells the story of how great vision, grave betrayal and an epic failure changed the world forever.

If you have lightning, and you have a bottle, are you guaranteed to capture that lightning in the bottle. This fascination film has a visceral and playful way of laying out how the invention of the smartphone - years before the first iPhone - didn't pan out for the creators at General Magic, highling how those skilled smarties still went on to found and support some of the biggest companies in Silicon Valley today. No technical experience necessary.

In many projects you might build one or two innovative breakout things and then you build on top of a lot of existing stuff. You kind of stand on the shoulders of giants. We weren’t doing that at General Magic. We were building the giant from the toes all the way up to his head (emphasis added).

The footage is unbelievable. This geekily funny doc inspires big dreams at every turn.

Matthew Maude and Sarah Kerruish's documentary 'General Magic' chronicles the rise and fall of the pioneering tech company that created a product ahead of its time - a compelling history

Old Silicon Valley nostalgia descended upon a San Jose theater as "General Magic," a recently released documentary about a 90s startup by the same name, held its local premiere on Thursday (its initial debut was at the Tribeca Film Festival in April).

During a filmic celebration of a legendary startup, and Silicon Valley's past, tech VIPs reflect on the industry's current uncertainty and where things are headed.

Contains a refreshing amount of casual, blunt honesty that you won't find in many profiles of present-day companies. The film does well to show that the talent assembled at General Magic seems truly staggering in retrospect.

One of the whispered-about legends of Silicon Valley, General Magic was an early-Nineties spinoff of Apple tasked with developing what was, essentially, the technology (as well as the aesthetics and the ethos) of the smartphone.

The film vividly portrays the company’s inventive spirit, and present-day interviews with key employees — many of whom went on to important roles at Google, Adobe and elsewhere — make it clear that their time at General Magic was instrumental in their later successes.

The story of a failure that was, in fact, a triumph, “General Magic” recounts the short but brilliant life of an early 1990s technology company that saw the future too soon.

This film stands for the idealism of ideas, the devotion of those who try to bring them to life, and the way that businesses, even those with the very best ideas and people, can fail but live on in unanticipated ways.

“General Magic” is such an involving documentary for so many reasons it’s hard to know where to begin. The title itself, as it turns out, might be best.

The film, directed by Matthew Maude and Sarah Kerruish, is poignant, entertaining and full of life lessons from the small and personal to the universal. Lessons that should be appreciated by everyone, especially those on the cutting edge of technology today.

A fascinating look at what it means to fail, and whether a failure that changed the world is really a failure at all.