Magic Cap (short for Magic Communicating Applications Platform) is a discontinued object-oriented operating system for PDAs developed by General Magic. Tony Fadell was a contributor to the platform, Bill Atkinson shows the credits screen on Magic Link device, and Tony Fadell is mentioned in the conversation. and Darin Adler was an architect. Its

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incorporates a room metaphor, where the user navigates between rooms to perform tasks, such as going to a home office to perform

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, or to a file room to clean up the system files. Automation is based on mobile agents but not an

office assistant The Office Assistant is a discontinued intelligent user interface for Microsoft Office that assisted users by way of an interactive animated character which user interface, interfaced with the Office help content. It was included in Microsoft Off ...

. Several electronic companies came to market with Magic Cap devices, including the

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Magic Link and the Motorola Envoy, both released in 1994. None of these devices were commercial successes.

Mobile agents

The Magic Cap operating system includes a new mobile agent technology named Telescript. Conceptually, the agents carry work orders, travel to a Place outside of the handheld device, complete their work, and then return to the device with the results. When the Magic Cap devices were delivered, the only Place for agents to travel was the PersonaLink service provided by

AT&T AT&T Inc., an abbreviation for its predecessor's former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the w ...

. The agents had little access to functionality, because each agent had to be strictly authorized and its scope of inquiry was limited to the software modules installed on the PersonaLink servers. The payload carried by these agents was also hampered by the slow dial-up

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speed of 2400 bit/s. The authentication and authorization system of the mobile agents in Telescript created a high coupling between the device and the target Place. As a result, deployment of agent-based technology was incredibly difficult, and never reached fruition before the PersonaLink service was shut down.

References

External links

Archive section and "time capsule" dedicated to Magic Cap
– ''Pen Computing Magazine''
"Making Magic"
– a developer's introduction to General Magic and Magic Cap by Richard Clark, Scott Knaster, and the staff of General Magic (from ''Mactech'' 11:5)
Magic Cap Resources
– a combination blog and gallery with links to Magic Cap software, documentation and other information. Also includes a photo gallery of Magic Cap devices. {{Mobile operating systems Computer-related introductions in 1994 Discontinued operating systems Embedded operating systems Graphical user interfaces Mobile operating systems Object-oriented operating systems Personal digital assistant software

Mobile agents

See also

References

External links