We almost had a smartphone in the 90s. Why did it fail?

**Erika Beras** (0:01)
This is Planet Money from NPR. Okay, how many times have you sat and thought about how much more you could accomplish if you had more, more time, more money, more resources?

**Emma Peaslee** (0:15)
Like how good your project could be if you had just one more day?

**Erika Beras** (0:19)
Or a bigger budget or more help?

**Emma Peaslee** (0:22)
Well, this is the story of a company that did have all of that, and they were making something amazing, something most of us touch every day. A smartphone.

**Erika Beras** (0:30)
But, and this is the part that is bonkers, this was happening nearly two decades before the iPhone came out.

**Tony Fidel** (0:40)
Before the Internet, before Wi-Fi, before mobile data, before cell phones even.

**Emma Peaslee** (0:46)
Tony Fidel was employee number 29 at that company.

**Tony Fidel** (0:50)
Before even email really existed for people, before anything like Amazon or e-tailing existed, before downloadable games or downloadable music existed. All of that stuff. We were creating all the technology that would later become what the iPhone was.

**Emma Peaslee** (1:07)
Nowadays, Tony is a businessman. He's always been a computer geek. His words, not ours.

**Tony Fidel** (1:13)
I was making fake IDs on a Mac in high school because you had a laser printer, and a laser printer was like, oh my God, I could replicate things in the world. So I was making fake IDs on laser printers.

**Erika Beras** (1:22)
You must have been very popular.

**Tony Fidel** (1:24)
Oh, yeah. I made a lot of money too.

**Erika Beras** (1:26)
Tony was brought up in the 70s and 80s to build things.

**Tony Fidel** (1:30)
I was fixing things. I was changing electrical sockets.

**Erika Beras** (1:35)
You're describing yourself as being like a shop class kid.

**Tony Fidel** (1:39)
Yeah. My grandfather taught shop class.

**Erika Beras** (1:42)
Oh, seriously a shop class kid. Okay.

**Tony Fidel** (1:44)
He always had the mantra, if a human made it, a human can fix it and build other things too.

**Erika Beras** (1:49)
Tony's favorite thing to tinker with was computers.

**Tony Fidel** (1:52)
It was your own world. You can make anything you wanted.

**Emma Peaslee** (1:55)
Around the time Tony was in high school, mid-80s, computer geeks actually started to become cool.

**Tony Fidel** (2:01)
Rolling Stone, there was a huge article by Stephen Levy about the original Mac team. I was like, oh my God, there's computer guys like me, guys and gals like me, building this thing that I love, the Macintosh, and they're in a rock and roll magazine. I'm like, superstars.

**Erika Beras** (2:18)
He's 15 and he became obsessed with these computer engineers.

**Tony Fidel** (2:24)
Oh, I could be like that. So they were my heroes. And so I would just track them obsessively, yes, talking they could say.

**Erika Beras** (2:31)
Tony went to college, launched a few startups, and he kept reading tech magazines. And then one day he saw something buried in the gossipy type pages in the back of one of those magazines. Tony learned his heroes were working on this top secret project. It was at a brand new company called General Magic.

**Tony Fidel** (2:51)
And I was like, General Magic, what? What is this?

**Emma Peaslee** (2:55)
And he didn't care how, he just wanted in.

**Tony Fidel** (2:58)
I had no idea what they were doing, but whatever it is, I needed to get involved.

**Emma Peaslee** (3:02)
He found a number, started calling sometimes 10, 15 times a day.

**Erika Beras** (3:05)
This is your favorite band, you're like, I want to get on the road with the band.

**Tony Fidel** (3:08)
Yeah, I'll be a roadie, whatever it takes, I just want to be with this band. So after, you know, a six to seven month knocking on the door, getting rejected, and pestering the hell out of everyone there, they gave me a job, and I went crazy.

**Erika Beras** (3:22)
Tony moved to Silicon Valley to work with his heroes. He was 21, his dream had come true. He was hired as a software engineer in the hardware team at General Magic to make the first smartphone, this thing that was going to change the world in 1991
Hello, and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Erika Beras.

**Emma Peaslee** (3:43)
And I'm Emma Peaslee. General Magic had everything, the vision, the talent, the money, but having everything might have been its undoing.

**Erika Beras** (3:54)
Today on the show, with a push to create the first smartphone can teach us about how genius ideas come to life or don't.

**Emma Peaslee** (4:16)
General Magic was creating basically an iPhone, but in the early 90s.