[HN Gopher] Remembering Apple's Newton, 30 years on
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Remembering Apple's Newton, 30 years on
Author : kergonath
Score : 126 points
Date : 2022-05-30 11:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| my friend went to a Newton startup.. there was nothing wrong with
| the product and they did a lot of things right. There were some
| shenanigans among management but not huge.. the company went
| bankrupt and the engineers were paid relatively low wages
| SeanLuke wrote:
| I built a lot of fun stuff for the Newton. I built a Sherlock
| clone for the Newton (which 15 years later landed me in the
| middle of the Apple vs. Samsung patent lawsuit). I also wrote the
| Java virtual machine available for the Newton. It was a lot of
| fun for a bored PhD student. My Newtons have recently all died
| and it's a little sad.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| I have a couple here that I could sell you, assuming the
| shipping isn't awful (I'm in Canada). I tried to put them on
| eBay some years ago but got low-balled and jerked around.
| Haven't tried them lately, not sure of their condition.
|
| One is an original MessagePad in box, the other a late model, I
| forget, I'd have to go look.
| yobananaboy wrote:
| Out of curiosity what was your list price? I've been starting
| to collect (got a Mac IIsi with a portrait monitor a few
| months back) and would be interested in getting a MessagePad
| in working condition
| lostgame wrote:
| I'm legit interested - I'm in Canada, as well - I've always
| wanted one.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > I built a Sherlock clone for the Newton (which 15 years later
| landed me in the middle of the Apple vs. Samsung patent
| lawsuit).
|
| Please, tell us more.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Around 1998 I built an open source application on the Newton
| called Hemlock which loaded, parsed, and used Sherlock search
| templates to grab data from internet sites just like Sherlock
| did. Sherlock can either search from the internet or can
| search from files. The Newton didn't have a filesystem: it
| had a searchable database system. One of the things I was
| working on, and proposed on Usenet, was to search both the
| internet and the Newton database system in one shot, though I
| eventually didn't do it as the Newton already had a great
| search tool for the database system built in.
|
| About 15 years later I walked into my lab and got served with
| a subpoena by Samsung's legal team for deposition.
| Everybody's lawyers suddenly wanted to talk to me. They dug
| through my postings, my software, old files on my laptop,
| even the old Newtons in my office. Between Apple, Samsung,
| and the very helpful SFLC legal team, the whole thing was
| like being dropped into a tank of very nice sharks.
|
| One of the patents Apple was going after Samsung for was
| 8,086,604, the "604" patent. Hemlock, and my proposals on the
| Usenet for improving it, predated this patent by quite a bit
| and easily covered most of its claims. Eventually Samsung
| decided to argue that they didn't violate the patent, rather
| than argue that it was invalid. That turned out to be the
| right decision (they won). But had they gone the invalidation
| route, I'd likely have found myself on the stand in SF. That
| patent is still live, and my prior art is still ready to
| invalidate it.
| irrational wrote:
| Hmm, this reminds me that I have a Newton... somewhere. The last
| time I booted it up it still worked.
| Vitaly_C wrote:
| I've got two MessagePad 130's for sale with some pretty
| interesting accessory peripherals if anyone's interested... One
| has the original box. 3Com and Motorola wireless modem
| accessories, original manuals, leather case, screen protectors,
| serial cables, 3.5" disks etc.
| perardi wrote:
| _"Handwriting recognition was a key part of the plan."_
|
| I was pretty young during this era of computing...but it felt
| that handwriting input was going to be The Thing in terms of
| next-generation computer interaction. Mind you, all I had access
| to was MacWorld and whatever PC mags were at the bookstore, but
| handwriting was seemingly going to be the text input method of
| the future. I swear you could even buy what amounted to a teeeeny
| little Wacom tablet to plug into your computer for handwriting
| recognition.
|
| All of which seems funny to me by 2022 standards. Computers were
| supposed to adapt to our "natural" input method of
| handwriting...but instead everything is a keyboard, be it a soft
| or hard keyboard, and then voice recognition for short on-the-go
| messages or for individuals with accessibility constraints. I
| mean, I literally _cannot write_ any more. If you put me back in
| 4th grade, I'd flunk a cursive test so hard they'd hold me back a
| year.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Bill Gates (and thus contemporary Microsoft) was _obsessed_
| with "pen computing", so your perception was completely
| accurate.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They don't teach cursive anymore.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They don't teach cursive anymore._
|
| Depends on the school.
|
| Low-end public school? Probably not. But private schools, and
| my nephew's Catholic school do.
|
| I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive. Are
| people who don't learn cursive not able to read the first
| line of a California license plate, or locate a Walgreen's
| pharmacy?
| troutwine wrote:
| > I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive.
| Are people who don't learn cursive not able to read the
| first line of a California license plate, or locate a
| Walgreen's pharmacy?
|
| It's sort of an outdated mode of writing that survived due
| to inertia. Cursive is super, super useful when your
| writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the
| writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause
| your writing tool to leak against the medium. Theoretically
| it's also faster to write than block characters, but the
| speed differences appear to be minimal for short-duration
| writing with the benefit of uniformity of block characters
| _outside_ of cultures that stress uniformity of cursive
| lettering. Worth pointing out that the examples you give
| here are not especially stylized letters and that
| Walgreens, outside of its red cursive letter logo,
| generally prefers a sans-serif block lettering. That said,
| I'm sure for someone not familiar with cursive lettering
| the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable, but most
| humans tolerate unreadable characters pretty well when
| scanning words we already know.
|
| The slow death of cursive is indicative of the change in
| medium: most people write to one another by computer, or on
| mechanically printed paper. It's a similar process by which
| we started adding vowels, spaces and punctuation: the
| constraints of the medium or its tools improved with time.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| >>Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool
| can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium
|
| In my experience it is much more comfortable to write
| cursive. You do not have to lift the pen for every single
| letter. It is quite annoying to have to do that, quite
| honestly. My hand feels much more happier to be able to
| just follow a flow.
|
| I also do not understand the hate, it is much more
| comfortable. It is like hating touch typing. Sure, you
| can type with two fingers but not very efficiently.
|
| To each their own I guess.
| dsr_ wrote:
| It took about an hour of practice to learn Graffiti, the
| PalmOS modified handwriting system. Humans are a lot better
| at adapting to computers than the other way around.
|
| I was taught cursive in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade... and it
| hurts my hand, and looks terrible, so I don't do that. My
| usual writing is a modified drafter's font.
| valley_guy_12 wrote:
| Some engineer (I forget if it was an Apple engineer or a
| Handspring engineer) once remarked that Graffiti was a much
| smarter way to do handwriting recognition than Newton,
| because: "If the Palm Pilot made a mistake, people blamed
| themselves for not writing Graffiti correctly. If Newton
| made a mistake, people blamed Apple."
| musicale wrote:
| Turns out PDAs are pretty great once you have ubiquitous wireless
| internet.
|
| Merging them with cell phones, cameras, and music players also
| turned out well.
|
| And that ARM CPU turned out to be a good investment, in more ways
| than one.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Personally, the one feature from PDAs that I miss from modern
| smartphones is the Graffiti system of text input.
| __d wrote:
| Newtons, at least the 2000/2100, and possibly the 130 IIRC,
| supported PCMCIA Ethernet cards, including both WaveLAN IEEE
| (first gen 802.11 DSSS) and Proxim RangeLAN (first gen 802.11
| FHSS) wireless LAN cards.
|
| But the NewtonOS user experience was very much based around an
| occasionally-connected model, with syncing between the PDA and
| a "master" device or beaming between PDAs, and built-in support
| for inbox and outbox stores that would accumulate items to be
| dealt with once connectivity was lost or regained.
|
| So although there ended up being a bunch of TCP/IP-based
| Internet stuff for Newtons, it was very much "bolted on the
| side", even more so than MacOS and Win95 around the same time,
| because the interaction model was hard-wired against constant
| connectivity.
|
| Newtons also supported an infra-red version of AppleTalk, using
| an adapter connected to the built-in AppleTalk connector. This
| supported the usual AppleTalk network services -- wireless
| printing was the most useful.
|
| Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional
| knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was
| developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside
| Apple. But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and
| thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the
| major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.
| musicale wrote:
| Imagine if Netscape Navigator had arrived first on the
| Newton, along with a WAN card.
|
| > Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the
| institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the
| iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread
| even inside Apple
|
| :(
| scarface74 wrote:
| It would have been a crash prone buggy piece of shit like
| it was on every other platform?
| musicale wrote:
| I see not much has changed in terms of the web, web
| browsers, and web apps.
| scarface74 wrote:
| No, modern browsers aren't crash prone. They are just
| memory hogging, battery killing monstrosities - except
| for Safari.
| musicale wrote:
| Good point. In the bad old days you'd have to restart a
| web browser because it crashed. Now you have to restart
| it because it has consumed all system resources, spun up
| all of your fans, and reduced performance to a crawl.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| I own a "dummy" Newton which was used in store displays. A fun
| artifact from that time.
| https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/15204899835549818...
| kabdib wrote:
| I spent one memorable Christmas-to-New-Years holiday tracking
| down a bad bug in the Newton kernel that (for a while) only
| happened up on those kiosk devices. I spent nearly two weeks
| tracking down a timing window where an interrupt between two
| ARM instructions would cause the scheduler to stop scheduling
| threads. Very Heisenbuggy.
|
| The fix was to swap those two ARM instructions. It's
| simultaneously the hardest and the most trivial bug I have ever
| fixed.
| zerop wrote:
| Going through this article I realise that apple had tonnes of
| innovators and a culture for them. No wonder it became what it
| became after Steve jobs took cover but I feel that the modern
| giant tech companies (except Tesla probably IMO) do not have this
| culture now
| scarface74 wrote:
| It's just the opposite. Apple became successful after Jobs came
| back because he killed all of the "innovations" and started
| focusing on products that the market cared about.
|
| Sure QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, PowerTalk, etc. might have been
| "innovative". But they weren't what consumers wanted.
|
| The iMac on the other hand especially running pre-OS X was
| technically crap at the time. But it saved Apple.
|
| I think this clip when Jobs killed OpenDoc explains it all.
|
| https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| Not feeling old yet?? ... next year is the 40th anniversary of
| PBS science TV show _Newton 's Apple_, with Ira Flatow. (The one
| with the theme music 'borrowed' from Kraftwerk.)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Not feeling old yet??_
|
| It's time for the Millennials to start scheduling their
| colonoscopies.
|
| Welcome to old age!
| paulpauper wrote:
| The newton sucked. No offence but it was the size of a large
| book, washed out green and grey screen, etc.
| linsomniac wrote:
| Never forget that Apple big-footed an individual to take away
| newton.com from him. IIRC, "Mark Newton" (edit: ?, from memory)
| had the domain and Apple took it. Can't find a reference to the
| story now.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I'm torn on this one, because at some point "first-come, first-
| served" is not a great thing in the realm of non-fungible
| domain names. I can't find much information on this subject,
| but what did Apple do?
|
| Was it similar to the Nissan case?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
| linsomniac wrote:
| This is really strange: I thought maybe I could use the
| wayback machine to look at the old site, but it only goes
| back to Nov 1998, where it has Apple content on it. Doing
| various searches I can't find a trace of the story. I
| searched the history on slashdot, which is probably where I
| heard about it, but no reference. Maybe it was Usenet...
|
| But I can't find any references to it anywhere.
|
| Much of the outrage at the time was: Hey, Apple, you already
| have Apple.com, why aren't you using apple.com/newton ? The
| owner of newton.com seemed to have as much right as Apple did
| to use the domain (it seemed to be his legal last name), and
| IIRC he had it for years before Apple released the Newton.
|
| A bulk of the remaining animosity at the time was HOW Apple
| went after it. They didn't offer to buy it or negotiate with
| the guy that had it. Instead they went with: "This is ours
| now." through ICANN or whatever it was at the time.
|
| Very similar to the nissan.com situation, except, you know,
| the individual still has nissan.com.
|
| This was probably around the time that an article came out
| about domain squatting, which ended with: Does this mean that
| I could just go out and register mcdonalds.com ? E-mail me
| with your thoughts at: ronald@mcdonalds.com :-)
| noizejoy wrote:
| Good (and sobering) to also remember the dark side that seems
| to go along with much (or is it all?) of human achievement.
|
| The sad/interesting part is, that some of those dark moments
| seem so unnecessary - at least in hindsight. But I suspect that
| the underlying psychology of ruthlessness may be a requirement
| for much (all?) larger achievements.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| Some aspects of the Newton, such as the database-centric file
| system, were so much ahead of their time they'd still be ahead of
| ours.
| gumby wrote:
| AFAIK this was the inspiration for Microsoft's database
| filesystem attempt that almost killed a Windows release and
| ended up never seeing the light of day. I can't even remember
| its code name.
| hammycheesy wrote:
| I believe you are thinking of WinFS
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Longhorn: https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/13/microsoft_si
| delines_l...
| anthk wrote:
| Palm used that too.
| gumby wrote:
| By the way it was similar to the memory design of Multics back
| in the early 1960s, (though Multics' final implementation was
| slightly different)
| kergonath wrote:
| It's interesting that some engineers went on to work with Be,
| and then a bunch of engineers from Be went (back, for some of
| them) to Apple early in the MacOS X era. There are things you
| can trace back to the Newton across companies like that.
|
| Another thing was text selectors, where you could do things
| with random text, depending on what it was supposed to
| represent (open the web browser when taping a link, open the
| phone app when tapping a phone number, track parcels, show a
| place in Maps, things like that). Nowadays, it is everywhere,
| but it was a nice feature on the Newton.
| SulphurSmell wrote:
| I still have my MP2000, and it powers up just fine. Although, it
| could handle year 2000...it seemed to hit the wall from a date
| range perspective soon after. Anyhow, I was soooo stoked at the
| time to get one. Back then, there was not a small, useful,
| handheld device. People that carried them were weirdos. I
| doubled-down and carried a giant Moto flip-phone too. As fun as
| the Newton was, it never became my killer device. Why? No one
| else had one. I could not easily share all that clever stuff I
| had in my Notes or my Calendar. I firmly believe that if more
| people had them...you would have seen more adoption. Casio made a
| few very colourful WinCe devices, too...same fate. And they were
| huge... may as well carry a real computer...a laptop. As soon as
| cell phones got "apps"... calendar especially, then I knew PDA's
| were dead. When iPhone was launched...well, I knew that it was
| the smaller, smarter, more connected Newton that was imagined way
| back then.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| I mean, this product epitomized "ahead of its time", no?
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I bought a new Newton after having lunch with Larry Tesler. He
| was both enthusiastic about the Newton as well as trying to talk
| me into rewriting my first Springer Verlag Common Lisp book to
| use the Dylan language. John Koza also had lunch with us, and it
| was great fun.
|
| Years later, I was cleaning up the closet in my home office and
| ended up throwing away all Newton materials - my general rule
| that if I haven't used something in a few years, I like to get
| rid of it.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Egg freckles! :)
| fzzzy wrote:
| Eat up martha
| __d wrote:
| Tried the easter egg in the Einstein emulator?
|
| https://eeggs.com/items/538.html
| giantrobot wrote:
| I have a full collection of Newton's from the OMP to the 2100
| (including an eMate). They're neat devices and it's interesting
| to wonder what could have been.
|
| At the same time it's really easy to see their limitations and
| why they failed to take off. The Newton was aimed squarely at the
| _concept_ of a late 80s early 90s jetsetting executive. A small
| device that replaced a briefcase and purchased on the company
| AmEx.
|
| Unfortunately for the Newton that's a pretty rarified market.
| Even within that market a contemporary laptop was vastly more
| capable for only 2-3x the price. Because the Newton seemingly
| aimed at such a narrow market it just couldn't support itself let
| alone a third party ecosystem.
|
| I was in love with the _idea_ of a Newton, they were the PADD
| from Star Trek! The price put them out of reach until I bought a
| 2000 second hand. I 'm glad I _started_ with that one because the
| 2000 and 2100 were the most capable Newton 's released and had
| the best expansion options. I was able to get some use out of it
| for years. Between NUGs and the NewtonTalk mailing list die hards
| were able to keep Newtons useful for a while.
|
| My love for them aside I can understand why Steve Jobs axed them.
| Like the $4500 PowerBooks (the base 3400c cost that much in 1997
| dollars!), the Newtons were just way more expensive than their
| utility could justify. The Palm Pilot market was an order of
| magnitude larger than the Newton and it was selling for half the
| price. There wasn't much reason to fight two entrenched platforms
| in two different markets (Windows/PC and Palm/PDAs).
| docfort wrote:
| A little more color on ARM and its financial contribution ($800M)
| to keeping the lights on at Apple:
| https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/john-sculley-how-arm-saved-ap....
|
| In 1996, money to keep things going was important:
| https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/28/business/apple-expects-it....
|
| Finally, foreshadowing arguments about why it was important to
| use 64-bit computing in a handheld device, Mike Culbert explains
| 32-bit advantages in Newton over the incumbent 16-bit of the
| time: https://beepdf.com/wp-content/uploads/newton/COMPCON-
| HW.pdf.
| billti wrote:
| Wow. I knew Apple was an investor in ARM, but the specifics are
| crazy. For those that won't read the linked story, this I found
| to be fascinating:
|
| > Newton was not successful, but Newton actually made $800
| million dollars because Apple eventually sold the 43 percent it
| owned in ARM, which, by the way, kept the doors open at Apple,
| just before Steve Jobs came back. It was one of the really
| important decisions that Gil Amelio [the last CEO before Steve
| Jobs returned] made, and it gave them the cash to buy NeXT.
| musicale wrote:
| This is extraordinary. Picking ARM for Newton basically
| enabled all of Apple's modern success: keeping the lights on,
| getting Steve Jobs back, NeXTSTEP evolving into Mac OS X and
| {i/iPad/TV/mac}OS, and of course ARM-based systems from the
| original iPod to the Mac Studio/M1 Ultra.
| gumby wrote:
| > ...the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper...
|
| In other words, the size of an A5 sheet of paper. C'mon Ars!
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| There was enough confusion in the comments over whether a
| folded A4 was an A5 or A6, that I figured I made the right
| call. :)
| [deleted]
| spinaltap wrote:
| Is this the "OpenDoc" thing that Steve Jobs trashed about in the
| famous video?
| protomyth wrote:
| No, that was a framework on the Mac.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| I don't think so. OpenDoc was a document sharing service in
| classic Mac OS, similar in some ways to Microsoft's OLE (Object
| Linking and Embedding) but somewhat more advanced. Back then,
| some folks thought that applications were going to become more
| like components that interacted with each other to make a kind
| of "super-application", but the use case ended up being just
| dropping an Excel spreadsheet in Word.
|
| Newton had lots of ways to share information between
| applications running on NewtonOS, but designed to fit the much
| smaller memory footprint of the device.
|
| I believe the only things the Newton and OpenDoc had in common
| were that Steve Jobs killed both of them as cost-cutting
| measures.
| newman314 wrote:
| I was just thinking about my MessagePad over the weekend.
|
| Does anyone have good links for modernizing a MP in 2022? Up to
| date/usable networking etc.
| protomyth wrote:
| I miss soups and NewtonScript. Honestly, it was such a nice
| little machine that was so close to getting it right. I still
| think some of the big ideas of that machine would serve us well
| today. A replicating soup would be fun.
| Ishmaeli wrote:
| I recently attended a sales meeting for group health insurance
| reps at Blue Cross Blue Shield of TX.
|
| They are going all-in on HMO plans. Of course everyone remembers
| how unpopular HMOs were in the 90s, deservedly so or not.
|
| The Apple Newton figured prominently in their presentation. Like
| the Newton, they argued, the HMO was premature to the market, and
| suffered from lack of supporting infrastructure, despite being
| ahead of its time in many ways. Today's HMO could be the iPhone.
|
| I wasn't convinced, but it was cool to see the Newton again, out
| in the wild.
| sircastor wrote:
| I had a 2100 (I think it was actually a 2000 with the memory
| upgrade) in the early 2000s. It was a fun toy, but I remember
| most the challenges of getting to be play like a first-class
| citizen with my Mac+. I found it to be a cool device in the
| tinker-y way that I like messing around with Linux and Raspberry
| Pis, but at the end of the day it required more attention than
| was worth it.
|
| +Excepting the iPhone, this has been the case for virtually every
| device I've owned. Palms (after the discontinuation of Palm
| Desktop), Smartphones prior to 2007, Android phones. 3rd Party
| vendors make a genuine strong attempt to make everything work,
| but first-class support really makes using a device normal,
| instead of a chore.
| agiacalone wrote:
| I remember the debut of the Newton. My father took me to a
| showcasing event that Apple had at the time (I was probably early
| high-school at the time).
|
| This was years before Steve Jobs' (in)famous big unveiling
| events.
|
| After that, I wanted a Newton so badly...never did end up getting
| one. Alas.
| pvg wrote:
| A small pedantipoint, the big unveilings started years before
| that
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY
| quadcore wrote:
| With a Vangelis tune s'il vous plait.
| pgib wrote:
| I still have a working eMate 300. Every now and then I start it
| up and play around a bit. It's neat to see how someone of it
| still lives on in iPad OS with the Apple Pencil.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I bought an eMate on a whim about 20 years ago and absolutely
| love it. I do a similar thing and have a play once in a while.
| Occasionally I'll use it as a distraction-free writing device,
| but the batteries need replacing for it to be truly useful.
| Will get round to it one of these days.
|
| I can't help but think it would make a really good Raspberry Pi
| casemod, but it feels like sacrilege to gut a working device.
|
| Incidentally, if anyone has any broken eMates I'd be
| interested...
| musicale wrote:
| Say what you will about Jony Ive but the eMate 300 is a
| beautiful design that also looks pretty functional.
|
| It also seems to have a high-contrast reflective screen that
| you could use in broad daylight, something that challenges even
| my rather bright MacBook Pro.
|
| As you note the iPad is something of a successor to the Newton
| both in hardware (e.g. ARM CPU, Apple Pencil) and interface
| (e.g. shape recognition/drawing, long press.)
|
| Apple apparently prototyped larger Newton tablets (VideoPad) as
| well as pen-based Mac OS devices (PenLite) but never brought
| them to market. Though macOS does work as a pen based system if
| you plug in a Cintiq, or an iPad with Sidecar.
| CharlesW wrote:
| > _Say what you will about Jony Ive but the eMate 300 is a
| beautiful design that also looks pretty functional._
|
| Thomas Meyerhoffer designed the eMate 300. Jony designed the
| second-generation Newton MessagePad, the Newton MessagePad
| 110.
| musicale wrote:
| Good to know - this is why HN is so great. Did Jony Ive
| head up Apple's design group at the time or did that come
| later after the iMac, etc.?
|
| (If HN didn't have its stupid edit locks I could edit it to
| read "say what you will about 1990s Apple.")
|
| In any case, the eMate looks like an amazing design and now
| I want to see more Meyerhoffer designs!
| mrpippy wrote:
| Jony was ID director by WWDC 97
|
| https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500
| musicale wrote:
| Ah, so that would place the eMate 300 during the Jony Ive
| era, making my edit unnecessary.
|
| I'd still like to hear more about Thomas Meyerhoffer
| though.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| Related, the documentary "General Magic" is quite good, and
| mentions how Apple's Newton sort of undercut the proto-smartphone
| being developed by apple veterans at General Magic. So many
| people saw the future but the tech wasn't quite there.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| Author here! I'm really happy to see people getting into the
| nostalgia about these weird and wonderful devices. Researching
| the story was absolutely fascinating, and I loved getting to talk
| to Steve Capps, who was still excited to talk about the work he
| did all those years ago.
| wrs wrote:
| Great article Jeremy! I have some minor quibbles about details
| but you got all the important stuff right. :) Thanks for such a
| nice commemoration.
| sanj wrote:
| Walter, thanks for NewtonScript! It is still one of my
| favourite languages.
|
| Dual inheritance for the win... _proto/_parent
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks man. I never owned a Newton but the device looks
| interesting. I figured Apple learned a lot from it to reach the
| pads.
| gumby wrote:
| Sadly I almost never saw one in the wild, even in the Valley, but
| TBH, hardware and software hadn't yet reached the point of
| viability.
|
| I'm glad the author mentioned the knowledge navigator concept
| video/s (were there two or just one? I can't remember any more).
| The iphone handily picked up that baton, but wisely didn't try to
| do so right away. But the NN vision was almost 20 years too soon.
| dang wrote:
| Related: (others?)
|
| _The Newton Application Architecture (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 - Feb 2020 (37
| comments)
|
| _Newton Storage History (2007)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 - March 2017 (11
| comments)
|
| _Why Steve Jobs Killed the Newton_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 - April 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Soup (Apple) - the Newton storage system_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 - Feb 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Why I Carry a Newton_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877256 - Jan 2016 (138
| comments)
|
| _Dash Board for Newton OS: a Comic Tragedy in Nine Acts_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083181 - Aug 2015 (6
| comments)
|
| _A Guide to the Apple Newton_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079507 - Aug 2015 (20
| comments)
|
| _The "personal organizer" we had before the Newton_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9635168 - May 2015 (11
| comments)
|
| _Patching the Newton_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125296 - Aug 2014 (17
| comments)
|
| _Talking with Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS from
| Apple_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7781265 - May 2014
| (19 comments)
|
| _Steve Wozniak on Newton, Tesla, and the original Macintosh_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5955583 - June 2013 (2
| comments)
|
| _Ask HN: Is there a FOSS implementation of Apple 's Newton OS?_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5643063 - May 2013 (1
| comment)
|
| _Newton OS running on an iPad_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1703130 - Sept 2010 (6
| comments)
|
| _Apple Gives Tribute to Newton with New 'What is iPad?' Ad_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1343523 - May 2010 (4
| comments)
|
| _The iPad, the Newton, & the "Of Course" Model of Innovation
| Diffusion_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290914 - April
| 2010 (31 comments)
|
| _A bit of vaporware (or "Microsoft's Secret Newton Killer")_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=838496 - Sept 2009 (1
| comment)
|
| _Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320646 - Oct 2008 (5
| comments)
| stakkur wrote:
| I owned two Newtons. The jokes about the handwriting recognition
| are a bit overstated, especially as later apps made it a joy to
| use. Also, Newton was _way_ ahead of its time, and though it
| looks quaint today, it was really something back in the day.
| donarb wrote:
| I had a Newton back then. Most of those who joked about the
| handwriting recognition were tech reporters who played with it
| for all of five minutes. Once you used the device on a regular
| basis, the recognition got better, similar to today's iPhone
| keyboard.
| EB-Barrington wrote:
| "Eat Up Martha"
| cmiller1 wrote:
| The handwriting recognition was running on the CPU so it got
| much better when they jumped from the 20 mhz ARM on the MP 1x0
| to the 162 mhz StrongARM on the later models.
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(page generated 2022-05-31 23:00 UTC)