TELESCRIPT is a language-based environment for constructing agent societies that has been developed by General Magic, Inc.: it is perhaps the first commercial agent language.
TELESCRIPT technology is the name given by General Magic to a family of concepts and techniques they have developed to underpin their products. There are two key concepts in TELESCRIPT technology: places and agents. Places are virtual locations that are occupied by agents. Agents are the providers and consumers of goods in the electronic marketplace applications that TELESCRIPT was developed to support. Agents are software processes, and are mobile: they are able to move from one place to another, in which case their program and state are encoded and transmitted across a network to another place, where execution recommences. Agents are able to communicate with one-another: if they occupy different places, then they can connect across a network, in much the standard way; if they occupy the same location, then they can meet one another.
Four components have been developed by General Magic to support TELESCRIPT technology. The first is the TELESCRIPT language. This language `is designed for carrying out complex communication tasks: navigation, transportation, authentication, access control, and so on' [White, 1994]. The second component is the TELESCRIPT engine. An engine acts as an interpreter for the TELESCRIPT language, maintains places, schedules agents for execution, manages communication and agent transport, and finally, provides an interface with other applications. The third component is the TELESCRIPT protocol set. These protocols deal primarily with the encoding and decoding of agents, to support transport between places. The final component is a set of software tools to support the development of TELESCRIPT applications.