Ep. 2 | The Soul from Every Side | Scott Knaster

Welcome to our second episode of General Magic & The Soul of Tech. This was a nostalgic conversation with one of our early colleagues at General Magic.

Scott Knaster is one of the few people who worked at Apple, General Magic, and then Microsoft and Google—which means he’s seen the soul of tech from just about every angle. In this conversation, he talks about what made each of those cultures different, and why Magic’s still stands apart in his memory. He explains why “size corrupts” even the best-intentioned companies, why Steve Jobs remains the most magnetic figure in any story he appears in, and why storytelling is the tool he uses to preserve what mattered before it’s forgotten. It’s a warm, honest, and sometimes funny look at what happens when a company is built around people rather than products—and what gets lost when that stops being the priority.

In this episode:

• 01:01 – Falling in love with Apple in 1983 — “the soul that was in its products”

• 04:15 – Employee #14 at General Magic: the Rumor Monger story, and learning storytelling from Andy Hertzfeld

• 08:14 – Telescript as proto-agentic AI — “writing about air travel in the 1700s”

• 09:40 – Culture shock: from General Magic to Microsoft and the Borg

• 12:43 – “At Apple, it has to be cool. At Microsoft, it has to win.”

• 15:16 – From soulful to soulless: the broliarchy and Silicon Valley today

• 17:49 – Google’s “don’t be evil” era — sincere origins, the layoffs, and what broke

• 20:48 – “Size corrupts” — why company culture breaks down at scale

• 22:51 – The rules of Steve Jobs stories and his singular intuition

• 28:22 – Why General Magic never anticipated surveillance capitalism

• 33:21 – Seventeen books, a one-man stage show, and a Substack called “Occasionally Misses Expectations” — plus why Scott’s personal bumper sticker would read: “Adjacent to Greatness”

About Scott Knaster

Scott Knaster is a Silicon Valley veteran who spent four decades as a technical writer and communicator at Apple, General Magic, Microsoft, Danger, and Google. Employee #14 at General Magic, he worked alongside Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld, and Marc Porat documenting MagicCap and Telescript from day one. At Danger, Inc. — Andy Rubin’s mobile OS venture and maker of the Sidekick/Hiptop, and the direct precursor to the Android phone — Scott documented a foundational moment in mobile computing before the platform wars that followed. At Google, he spent 17 years as a senior technical writer and managed the Google Developers Blog, growing it to over 100,000 subscribers as a bridge between Google’s internal engineering vision and its external developer community. He is the author of 17 books — including the influential How to Write Macintosh Software, which gave a generation of developers their start on the Mac — and a performer who has told tech stories on stage in one-man shows. He now writes the Substack “Occasionally Misses Expectations,” preserving the stories behind the companies that shaped modern technology before they’re forgotten.

Resources & Links:

• Scott Knaster on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottknaster/

• Scott Knaster on Fandom

• Occasionally Misses Expectations — Scott Knaster’s Substack

• Adjacent to Greatness — Scott’s original Blogspot blog

• List of books written by Scott Knaster

  • Cooking with Hypertalk 2.0

  • How to Write Macintosh Software: The Debugging Reference for Macintosh (2nd edition: 1988, ISBN 978-0672484292; 3rd edition: 1992, ISBN 978-0201608052)

  • Macintosh Programming Secrets (1st edition: 1988) (2nd edition: 1992, ISBN 978-0201581348)

  • Presenting Magic Cap

  • Macworld Discover Internet Explorer 3 (1997, ISBN 978-0764540318)

  • MSN the Everyday Web (2001, ISBN 978-0735611405)

  • Mac Toys: 12 Cool Projects for Home, Office, and Entertainment (2004, ISBN 978-0764543517)

  • Hacking iPod and iTunes (2004, ISBN 978-0764569845)

  • Hacking Mac OS X Tiger: Serious Hacks, Mods and Customizations (2005, ISBN 978-0764583452)

  • Take Control of Switching to the Mac (2008, ISBN 9781933671048)

  • Learn Objective-C on the Mac (2008, ISBN 978-1430218159)

• General Magic documentary: https://www.generalmagicthemovie.com

The full uncut video is below on YouTube for those nostalgia buffs who want to hear our full conversation.