THE VIDEO SHELF · general magic history
GENERAL MAGIC - Official Trailer
The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.
Why HN readers recommended it
HN recommends the documentary itself as a story of an epic early failure in mobile computing, and the trailer is the linked entry point.
This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.
Video & recommendation details
- Creator / channel
- General Magic and the Soul of Tech
- Topic
- general magic history
- Format
- documentary
- Level
- general
- HN recommenders in dataset
- 2
- HN mentions in dataset
- 3
- Recommendation years in dataset
- 2021–2025
These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.
From the original HN conversations
Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.
Highly recommend the documentary on General Magic. They were actually trying to build the iPhone as early as 1989 (and into the 90s). My former boss Meghan Smith was part of that team, she loved it — and so many Silicon Valley companies came out …
brunorsini on Hacker News · 2024-12
In He Built Apple's 1980s iPad Concept [video]Have you watched the (pretty good) documentary "General Magic"? If features a lot of the same people than folklore.org, to the point one could consider it an Apple "side story", though there are also future Googlers and people who built Android. Here's the trailer: [VIDEO] …
the_af on Hacker News · 2021-01
In Halt and Catch Fire Syllabus
Summaries, classifications and recommendation records are from the HackerTube source dataset. Read about this library and its limitations.
