Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 11 Sep

Tim Harford’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.

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Arcade machines.

General Magic were writing games, in case you got bored while sitting in the back of a cab or waiting for an appointment.

You could just pull out your Pocket Crystal and play a game.

Books too.

There was a virtual library stocked with e-books.

The keyboard and mouse.

What a drag.

Pocket Crystal had a touchscreen.

No need for a mouse.

The keyboard was virtual, just displayed on the touchscreen by the software.

But the Pocket Crystal wasn't just obsoleting existing electronic technology.

It was creating something completely new.

The General Magic team developed a new kind of interconnecting cable, the precursor to today's USB.

They developed a new programming language, Telescript, to allow portable devices to talk to each other and to a network, you know, for social media.

Or e-commerce.

Not that anyone used those terms yet.

A reminder that this is all happening in the early 1990s, about 15 years before the iPhone and Facebook.

They called their portable network the cloud.

The crystal's touchscreen was filled with skeuomorphic graphics.

These are icons that visually represent a function.

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