The Apple Newton. Tons of really interesting stuff under the hood (a scripting language inspired by Self, an object store with transactions, a micro-kernel insp

The Apple Newton. Tons of really interesting stuff under the hood (a scripting language inspired by Self, an object store with transactions, a micro-kernel inspired by Mach that supported threading, virtual memory and fine-grained permissions, etc., etc.). Pretty whizzy for 1992. The hardware was too expensive and bulky, and the software tooling was never really there (I remember someone on the team comparing our dev tools with the newly released Visual Basic). The first release of the Newton was plagued with bugs (it shipped maybe 4-6 months too early) and had a hardware issue -- noise in the digitizer -- that made its handwriting recognition system perform very badly. Early consumer experience with it wasn't great, and that painted the product with fail and derision; the Doonesbury cartoon was accurate at the time.