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It didn't exactly have a filesystem; it had an object persistence system for "soups". A soup contained "frames." This Wikipedia describes frames: https://en.wi

It didn't exactly have a filesystem; it had an object persistence system for "soups". A soup contained "frames." This Wikipedia describes frames: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frame_language Newton's frames were much simpler than full-blown frame systems designed for knowledge representation--just mutable finite maps, really. Basically, soups were persistent graphs of maps, (or dictionaries, or hashes, or objects, depending on your language background). Newton apps were also soups. I didn't actually work on the shipping soups. I worked on bauhaus, the Lisp-based Newton OS, which had its own frame system that was a little more like what the Wikipedia article describes, though still simplified when compared to a full-blown knowledge representation system. Apple had one of those, too, by the way. It was called MacFrames, and it was invented by Ruben Kleiman. Both Matt Maclaurin and I had been MacFrames users before getting involved with Newton. MacFrames later evolved into SK8, the Hyoercard-on-steroids project that never made it past management gatekeepers into the wild. I worked on SK8, too, after I returned to Apple post-NeXT, and when I ultimately left Apple it was to go to work for folks that I had met working on SK8. That's yet another story. Those folks founded a startup named Reactivity, where I worked for another 7 years. Some of them are famous now--for example, one of the founders was John Lilly, formerly of Mozilla and now with Greylock; and another was Mike Schroepfer (everyone called him "Schrep") who is now Facebook's CTO. I loved Reactivity, too, but I left it because of a health catastrophe. It was later acquired by Cisco, where, coincidentally, I'm doing some work now. I'm compressing several more tomes worth of stories into the last couple of paragraphs there. I figure I can only ramble so much before it becomes a bore.

tambourine_man 9y ago
Ramble on :) You should do a podcast. A Debug episode on that would be really interesting.
wrs 9y ago
They're called "frames" because Bill Luciw used them like KR frames when he built the Intelligent [sic] Assistant. Built-in dictionaries/hashes weren't a common feature of languages at the time, so I had no better idea what to call them. :) I thought the minimum set of data types you'd need for a usable language is primitives, arrays, and records; frames are how you do records.
- mikelevins 9y ago
  Right; I remember your discussions with Capps about them in the Living Room. I agree that built-in finite maps were not a common feature of the languges at the time, and that "frames" were a decent word for them. After newton I worked on Ruben Kleiman's SK8 for a while (I had used SK8 when it was still called MacFrames for a personal UI-system project, and then later I worked on Matt Maclaurin's GATE, which also used MacFrames). SK8 was more of a full-blown frame system (plus other things; if Newton's Dylan is my all-time favorite working language, SK8 is my all-time favorite IDE)). The bauhaus frame system was somewhere in-between. It tried to provide a foundation for more frame-system features without actually implementing the more complicated and esoteric ones, like multiple parallel and extensible inheritance systems and truth-maintenance systems and so on. Larry Tesler wrote the initial version of it during his sabbatical, and then I took it over when he, as he put it, "put his executive hat back on."
  - osteele 9y ago
    A couple of “small world” connections: 1. SK8 was implemented in Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL), which was a product of Coral Software in Cambridge, MA. This was one of the justifications for Apple's acquisition of Coral in 1988. Coral became Apple Cambridge, and went on to create Dylan, which was implemented in MCL. 2. There was a period of time where I had moved to California but continued to work on Dylan. Whenever I returned to MA to work out of the Cambridge office, I stayed with my father-in-law, who had originally proposed “frames”.
    - mikelevins 9y ago
      Cool! The small-world connections are dense around Apple in general and around Newton in particular.

tambourine_man 9y ago

Ramble on :) You should do a podcast. A Debug episode on that would be really interesting.

wrs 9y ago

They're called "frames" because Bill Luciw used them like KR frames when he built the Intelligent [sic] Assistant. Built-in dictionaries/hashes weren't a common feature of languages at the time, so I had no better idea what to call them. :) I thought the minimum set of data types you'd need for a usable language is primitives, arrays, and records; frames are how you do records.

mikelevins 9y ago
Right; I remember your discussions with Capps about them in the Living Room. I agree that built-in finite maps were not a common feature of the languges at the time, and that "frames" were a decent word for them. After newton I worked on Ruben Kleiman's SK8 for a while (I had used SK8 when it was still called MacFrames for a personal UI-system project, and then later I worked on Matt Maclaurin's GATE, which also used MacFrames). SK8 was more of a full-blown frame system (plus other things; if Newton's Dylan is my all-time favorite working language, SK8 is my all-time favorite IDE)). The bauhaus frame system was somewhere in-between. It tried to provide a foundation for more frame-system features without actually implementing the more complicated and esoteric ones, like multiple parallel and extensible inheritance systems and truth-maintenance systems and so on. Larry Tesler wrote the initial version of it during his sabbatical, and then I took it over when he, as he put it, "put his executive hat back on."
- osteele 9y ago
  A couple of “small world” connections: 1. SK8 was implemented in Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL), which was a product of Coral Software in Cambridge, MA. This was one of the justifications for Apple's acquisition of Coral in 1988. Coral became Apple Cambridge, and went on to create Dylan, which was implemented in MCL. 2. There was a period of time where I had moved to California but continued to work on Dylan. Whenever I returned to MA to work out of the Cambridge office, I stayed with my father-in-law, who had originally proposed “frames”.
  - mikelevins 9y ago
    Cool! The small-world connections are dense around Apple in general and around Newton in particular.