Tim Harford

speaker

411 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Sep 2026 last heard 6d ago

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

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recordings per month · last 12 months

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

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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.

Click on a manila folder to see your files, or a floppy disk to save your work.

That idea existed, but General Magic took it in new directions.

Click on the phone to make a call, on the inbox to check messages, or the calendar, the notepad, the Rolodex.

You get the idea.

Click on the door icon to go out on the virtual street.

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