Imagine a tech company so visionary that it could take an idea public. A “concept IPO,” they called it.

The three founders were former Apple employees, two of whom—software engineers Andy Hertzfeld and Bill Atkinson—were already Silicon Valley legends for their work creating the Apple Macintosh. Atkinson’s inventions included the double click and the drop-down menu. The third founder, Marc Porat, had a gift for seeing the future.

In 1989, in a large red notebook, he drew a visionary product that would fit the future he had foreseen with eerie accuracy. He called it the Pocket Crystal. You don’t need to have seen the sketch before for it to be instantly familiar. The Pocket Crystal schematic depicted a thin glass rectangle with no protruding buttons—just a touch screen.

The project was green lit, but with a caveat: It was too big, even for Apple. General Magic was born, and its partners controlled so much of the world’s communications industry that Alliance meetings had to begin with an antitrust lawyer listing all the topics they were prohibited from discussing.

General Magic attracted talent from within Apple and beyond, engineers custom-building almost everything, and innovation came fast and furious: an early form of USB; touch-screens with a virtual keyboard; ‘skeuomorphic’ graphics that depicted their functions, like a filing cabinet, a game room, and a virtual street with a store for new applications (i.e., an app store); messages with stickers and animated characters (i.e., precursors to emojis).