While some of their designs led to commercial flops and the company dissolved (in 2002), today, these failures are widely regarded as the ideas that would go on to inspire the entire contemporary paradigm of smartphones and electronic wearables such as smart watches. The Magic Cap software and operating system (OS) were designed by a pioneering firm called General Magic, founded with the explicit purpose of inventing the future of personal handheld electronic devices, or as they called them, “personal intelligent communicators.” General Magic’s ideas were highly speculative for their time-even bordering on science fiction. This story is told only in part by the Envoy’s physical form-the heart of the story lies within its software and operating system: Magic Cap. The Motorola Envoy, introduced in 1994, holds a highly important place in Cooper Hewitt’s collection-of all of the handheld personal electronic assistants and devices in the museum’s holdings, this one best explains the origins of smartphones. The two-year project was coordinated by an in-house team of conservators, curators, and registrar, and was conducted by digital conservation specialist Ben Fino-Radin and his team at Small Data Industries.īackground: This case study focuses on documenting and preserving interfaces in consumer electronics. This week’s posts feature case studies from Cooper Hewitt’s Digital Collections Management Project, a conservation survey of born-digital and hybrid objects in the permanent collection.

Motorola mac emulator