General Magic is “the most important company to come out of Silicon Valley that no one’s ever heard of” and a gripping retelling of the inception of smartphones.

In 1990, a handful of superstar Apple employees founded a startup called General Magic to build a groundbreaking pocket-sized computer. This vision was so convincing that General Magic launched on the stock market before even showing a finished device. It was set to be one of the most exciting companies of the decade, thanks to the work of its charismatic CEO, Marc Porat, and several members of the Macintosh computer’s development team, including software geniuses Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld.

Instead, General Magic became one of Silicon Valley’s most dramatic failures, after shipping a single generation of hardware to abysmal sales numbers. It was blindsided by the newly popular World Wide Web, unable to juggle a complicated set of corporate partnerships, and undercut by its own parent company, Apple, which beat it to market with the similar-looking Newton PDA. But General Magic’s former employees ended up defining the modern tech landscape — including virtually the entire smartphone market.

– Adi Robertson, The Verge

Head over to their website for streaming and download options. This is, without a doubt, the greatest tech documentary of the year.