Telescript programming language

&gt; In 1990, Marc Porat convinced then-Apple-CEO John Sculley that the future of computing lay not in desktop personal computers, but much smaller portable devices combining computing power, communications systems, and data located on network-accessible servers.<p>Well that was staggeringly prescient.

Here&#x27;s something few people know: Sun saw Telescript as a threat (because Sun was all about &quot;the network is the computer&quot; and now Telescript was invading this space) and started the Java project in response. Microsoft saw General Magic&#x27;s social interface and deemed it to be a threat to Windows. Their response was &quot;Microsoft Bob&quot;.

This is probably posted now thanks to the Andy Hertzfeld interview from the other day [1] where he discussed Telescript as a failure.<p>The notion of a restricted server-side language for user scripts still sounds useful and an unfilled niche.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;tools-and-craft&#x2F;01-andy-hertzfeld" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.notion.so&#x2F;tools-and-craft&#x2F;01-andy-hertzfeld</a>

I actually worked on General Magic circa 1994-1995 at France Télécom. The whole tech stack was garbage, despite AT&amp;T’s valiant efforts to salvage it.

In retrospect, Telescript and mobile agents were a bet against the Internet; if you have good connectivity it&#x27;s easier to use RPC.

I loved this language. I still have all the papers somewhere. Unfortunately, the announcement of Java killed the few remaining chances it had of outliving General Magic.