[HN Gopher] Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30 ___________________________________________________________________ Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30 Author : macstainless Score : 22 points Date : 2022-08-30 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago) (HTM) web link (timemachiner.io) (TXT) w3m dump (timemachiner.io) | LeoPanthera wrote: | I still have a Newton (a 2100), and although it ceased to be a | daily carry device for me somewhere around 2007, I only finally | stopped using it altogether just a few years ago, as it was | becoming increasingly difficult to move my notes on and off the | thing. | | The bad handwriting trope has always baffled me. I've never had a | problem. I know that the 2000 series Newtons are considerably | improved compared to the original generation, but I did also use | an original generation Newton, and it was actually fine. | | I think the "Eat up Martha" gag from the Simpsons became such a | trope that people just assumed it must be awful. | Maursault wrote: | I was always amazed by it. Other PDAs used a special alphabet | one had to memorize, but Newton learned and recognized natural | handwriting. And while Newton didn't last long, the handwriting | recognition did, reincarnated as _Inkwell._ [1] | | [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh) | mikestew wrote: | And then Microsoft acquired the company that made | Calligrapher (which originally ran on the Newtons), and it | ended up in the early WinCE PDA devices. I used it with the | WinCE devices, and it worked quite well. "Egg freckles", | indeed. | QuarterRoy wrote: | My first job after college was maintaining Newton script mobile | application used by my employer. | | Later we moved the app over to a windows CE device and developed | an office management suite in the 4D programming language to | compliment it. | abruzzi wrote: | still have a 2000 upgraded to 2100 in a closet somewhere. At some | level the iPhone was such a disappoinment after having owned a | Newton, becuase the early iPhone, even after the introduction of | the app store, felt like a bunch of siloed apps, where the Newton | "soup" allowed fairly seamless extensibility and | interoperability. (well, at least it felt like that in the 90's.) | mikestew wrote: | Of course the early iPhone apps were siloed, one could not even | copy/paste between apps until three versions in. :-) But the | iPhone did, indeed, feel like a step back in many ways. Though | Microsoft would let it languish and later get stomped by iOS, | the early WinCE/Windows Mobile devices had better inter-app | communication and integration. I felt like I could get stuff | _done_ (and I did) on some of those devices. The early iPhone | had a lot of innovation, but there was no last-minute editing | of a Word doc on those devices. | spaetzleesser wrote: | I always wonder how a Newton would perform on modern hardware. | Considering how well the handwriting recognition worked on 90s | hardware it should be pretty great by now. I definitely miss | it. The iPhone feels like a step backwards in terms of user and | developer friendliness. | jedc wrote: | I _loved_ my Newton. I loved it so much that even when it was | stolen out of my car in ~2003, I got a MessagePad 2100 off of | eBay to replace it. | | It was only when the iPhone came out that someone was able to pry | my Newton out of my hands. | Apocryphon wrote: | One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its | systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like | language, though that seems to have been replaced by | NewtonScript. | | https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf | | https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.... | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 | SeanLuke wrote: | Dylan was never on the Newton. The Newton team had two proposed | products, Senior and Junior. Senior was gonna run Dylan, but | they kept waiting on the Dylan team to produce something | usable, and it never happened. So they gave up on Senior, | dumped the notion of using Dyan entirely, and finished Junior | using NewtonScript to get the product out the door. That became | the Newton. | Apocryphon wrote: | Yeah, that's what Walter Smith says: | | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696 | EB-Barrington wrote: | Eat up Martha | | (one of the 200,000 former Newton owners here) | rcarmo wrote: | It is somewhat ironic that I can actually write this on an iPad | using Scribble nearly 30 years later and after Apple killed the | Newton, reinvented its mobile devices, and declined to add a | stylus to them... | | Incidentally, it recognizes "egg freckles" just fine. | charles_kaw wrote: | I suppose it took a bunch of innovations to make it more usable | over that past thirty years, though. | | - vastly improved software - much better accuracy and | integration with "custom" words (such as contact book | addresses) | | - bigger screen - no hitting the edge every few words | | - lower latency/higher resolution - ink appears as you're | writing, providing better and instant feedback | jmbwell wrote: | Something that strikes me, using a Newton today, is just how | little has changed in the fundamental things people want to do | with a mobile device: messaging, contacts, calendars, and notes. | For all that modern devices can do, these four essentials seem | more or less the same in concept and function between my | MessagePad 120 and my iPad Pro, despite 30 years between them. | thrway3344444 wrote: | Games, stream video content, entertain young children at | restaurants and on planes, edit/produce content for social | media, ... | amysox wrote: | Handwriting recognition is a "hard" problem, and the Newton tried | to take it on directly, with more or less success. Other | companies went for workarounds. Some people retrained humans to | write in such a way that the PDA could easily recognize it, e.g. | Palm with their Graffiti writing system used with PalmOS. Others | just put a keyboard on the device, as in the early WinCE devices, | and which reached the pinnacle of evolution on the Blackberry. | Then smartphone makers just turned that into a software keyboard | on the screen, which is what we see in iOS and Android. | | Now, the big thing is voice recognition, which is also a "hard" | problem. But we no longer need to seek workarounds the way we did | with handwriting recognition, for two reasons: first, because the | phone itself now contains _much_ more processing power than the | early PDAs did, and second (and more important), the evolution of | high-speed wireless networking makes it not only possible, but | feasible, to offload the "hard" parts of voice recognition to an | even _more_ powerful server somewhere on the Internet. Which | enables, not only voice recognition, but software agents like | Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. | | One day there will likely be a breakthrough somewhere that makes | the gap between handwriting recognition and voice recognition | look like child's play. I'm not sure what that will be. Maybe | direct brain interfacing, as in William Gibson's or Jim | Strickland's science-fiction universes, or as in John Scalzi's | "BrainPal"? | | _(Taken from some musings I wrote on Facebook back in 2018)_ | drzoltar wrote: | I've always wanted to get one of these old Apple Newtons and | trying to upgrade the built in handwriting recognition system | with something a bit more modern, within the limitations of | having 8mb of ram :). Anyone have any experience hacking them? | LeoPanthera wrote: | I think it would be more interesting to run under emulation. | The hardware is getting a bit old and creaky these days. Under | emulation it could enjoy a considerable CPU and RAM boost. | | An iPad with a pencil would be an ideal target. | | (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need | to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.) | NobodyNada wrote: | > (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't | need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.) | | The Newton has a 32-bit ARM processor, whereas all of Apple's | processors for the last ~5 years have only implemented | AArch64. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-30 23:00 UTC)