Thomas Dolby [0] has a great anecdote about meeting Marc Porat and Bill Gates in his autobiography ‘The Speed of Sound’
“Marc Porat and I were eyeball-to-eyeball as he continued to fill me in about his company. Marc didn’t notice, but across the table, Bill Gates was ignoring the sycophants to his left and right, and straining to eavesdrop on Marc’s jargon-laden elevator pitch. Gates seemed to be getting more and more agitated, and was poking at his beef Wellington. As Marc explained his technology in more detail, Gates began rocking nervily back and forth in his chair.
“You’ll have these intelligent agents, as I call them,” said Marc quietly, “scouting and negotiating on your behalf, pulling in data from all over the Net. Eventually you won’t really need a PC, because all your work will be in a sort of cloud.”
Suddenly there was an explosion from across the table. “MARC, THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!” It was Gates.
His tie was too tight and the veins were bulging on his neck. In the wake of this high-decibel outburst, a deadly silence descended on the room. Startled faces at both tables turned our way. Even the waiters froze, silver ladles in their hands. Amid the hush that had fallen, Marc Porat visibly shriveled in his seat, looking like he wished a hole would swallow him up.”
Fascinating! I didn't know that. Telescript was the networking software and it's not even mentioned in the movie. I thought it was crazy when I worked there. It had the structure of a virus.
Telescript was an amazingly cool idea. I almost quit a very good job to go to work for GM and work on Telescript. In retrospect, it was indeed a language whose purpose was writing [benevolent] viruses but it had no security whatsoever (or at best very little).
What Porat is describing sounds a lot like what is described in this old book I've been reading called Mirror Worlds by David Gelernter. I think it was published in 1991. It has some pretty interesting ideas, although I don't think that the use of "intelligent agents" is quite mainstream yet. We do see this among programmers with things like IRC bots though.
Microsoft came out with a competing technology in that timeframe called 'Microsoft Pen Computing' as a direct response to the hype around General Magic.
“Marc Porat and I were eyeball-to-eyeball as he continued to fill me in about his company. Marc didn’t notice, but across the table, Bill Gates was ignoring the sycophants to his left and right, and straining to eavesdrop on Marc’s jargon-laden elevator pitch. Gates seemed to be getting more and more agitated, and was poking at his beef Wellington. As Marc explained his technology in more detail, Gates began rocking nervily back and forth in his chair.
“You’ll have these intelligent agents, as I call them,” said Marc quietly, “scouting and negotiating on your behalf, pulling in data from all over the Net. Eventually you won’t really need a PC, because all your work will be in a sort of cloud.”
Suddenly there was an explosion from across the table. “MARC, THAT’S FUCKING BULLSHIT AND YOU KNOW IT!” It was Gates.
His tie was too tight and the veins were bulging on his neck. In the wake of this high-decibel outburst, a deadly silence descended on the room. Startled faces at both tables turned our way. Even the waiters froze, silver ladles in their hands. Amid the hush that had fallen, Marc Porat visibly shriveled in his seat, looking like he wished a hole would swallow him up.”
The whole book is worth a read.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Dolby