Some more positive memories: - Magic Cap came from the early-1990s expectation that the future involved intelligent agents that would travel around the network

Some more positive memories: - Magic Cap came from the early-1990s expectation that the future involved intelligent agents that would travel around the network, do work (e.g. searching for the best price on a flight or new shoes), and then report back when the user was connected again. In practice, this meant that you could send email to another Magic Cap user that included executable code, like an animation or a little game, that would run in a sandbox on the user's device. Even today, we still don't really have this -- you can't stick JavaScript (or a Java applet) in an email and expect the receiver to be able to run it. - The Motorola Envoy ran on Motorola's low-bitrate, high-power (and now defunct) Ardis wireless network. It was robust enough to work from within an airplane!! Because almost nobody had them (in 1995), the flight attendants would not stop you from sending and receiving email wirelessly while flying. Of course today, even if Ardis still existed and still worked from 30,000 flight, they would be telling you to put your phone into airplane mode... - I did not have a Motorola Envoy, but I did have a Sony Magic Link that I used for email from 1995-1996. It was amazing! You could leave it by your bed, and when you woke up in the morning, it would make a (free, local) call to AT&T PersonaLink to exchange email. I have fond memories of lying in bed in my PJs in early 1996, having just woken up, and flirting via email with a high-school friend who had already arrived at school at the computer lab. This all seemed like an incredible luxury at the time. Of course "checking email when you first wake up" became much more common with the end of per-minute fees from major ISPs (AOL ended theirs in December 1996), the rise of laptops and pervasive Wi-Fi (~2001), and eventually the rise of cellular handhelds with email (~2005).