Not my practice blog, by Scott Knaster

Memories #3: General Magic/Sony Magic Link launch

General Magic was a dream of a company founded in 1990 by Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld (who had previously combined to create most of the original Mac's look and feel) along with Marc Porat. General Magic was founded to build handheld wireless communication devices, but the hardware and networking technology wasn't quite there yet, and the advent of the Internet undercut and overwhelmed the company's intentions.

I started working at General Magic in 1990, and it was a blast. I could tell a bunch of stories about the company, but for today I just want to post the artifact below. It's a faux "telecard", just as it might appear in the Magic Cap user interface, that we sent to our ISVs when the first Sony Magic Link device shipped, signed by the General Magic folks who worked with developers.

Memories #2: Microsoft

I worked for Microsoft for almost 7 years, from 1996 to 2003. There were good times and less-good times. The beginning was terrific, when I got to work with the Mac Internet Explorer team (aka MS-Bay), a renegade bunch hired specifically to make Mac software that was not cloned from Windows applications. Early Mac IE was a great browser, designed and built specifically for the Mac by veteran Mac programmers, and I learned a bunch from that team.

My job was writing documentation and, by default, doing press, evangelism, and PR, since nobody in Redmond wanted to spend much time doing special stuff for the Mac. It was a blast. I enjoyed the dissonance of working at hated Microsoft but being part of a group that produced an excellent Mac browser. Very often we won folks over, because we had a great product: I even convinced my former boss Guy Kawasaki that IE was better. But some people would not be persuaded. Once, at Macworld Expo, we were handing out CDs with Mac IE on them. One guy asked for extra CDs. Hey, great, I thought: a fan. No, he said: he liked to put them in the microwave. At another Macworld I was interviewed live on local radio while a crowd gathered behind me and made rude gestures. Ah, memories.

After the Mac team, the jobs weren't as great as often, but I stuck around. I liked a lot of things about Microsoft, but I also wondered how such smart people could turn out products that were, let's say, not always smart, and I wasn't a fan of all the company's business practices. I guess that makes me something of a hypocrite, because I stayed there for years. But when I saw the item pictured below in the Microsoft company store, I thought it was a great statement about the company and lock-in: get 'em while they're young.

Memories #1: Colorado Rockies hockey

(While doing a massive cleanup project on my home office recently, I came across lots of stuff that reminded me of good old times: friends, family, work, sports, et al. I tend to save those kinds of things, because I enjoy the memories that come back when I look at them. So I tossed them [gently] into a box or three. And once a week or so, I'm going to pull one out and subject you to a story about it. This is the first one of those.)

The Colorado Rockies were a National Hockey League team, mostly forgotten now. The Rockies played in Denver for 6 seasons in the late 1970s and early '80s. Their wacky logo was a mountain carved out of the Colorado state flag. They were spectacularly unsuccessful on the ice, making the playoffs only once in those 6 seasons. The Rockies are known for having employed Don Cherry as head coach, and for being the first sports team to use "Gary Glitter's Rock & Roll, Pt. 2" regularly at games.

Despite their generally crappy play, Barbara and I used to love going to the games. For part of their run, Barbara was the assistant public relations director for the Denver Nuggets of the NBA, who played in McNichols Sports Arena, also the Rockies' home. Because of this connection, Barbara could get into the Rockies games, and she was able to sneak me in also by getting me this pass:

Eventually, Cherry left the team, the team left town, and a perennially crappy baseball team stole the name.