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Yeah, I wonder that too. Apple had always charged for the development system (heck, initially to develop for the Mac you not only had to buy the tools, you had

by wrs 7y ago

Yeah, I wonder that too. Apple had always charged for the development system (heck, initially to develop for the Mac you not only had to buy the tools, you had to buy a Lisa!). I don’t remember it being quite that much, though maybe in 2020 dollars it was. There was a C++ dev kit eventually, but only for drivers (though some people figured out how to use it from NS). I also did a “native NewtonScript” compiler that under the hood compiled NS to C and encapsulated the native code into a NS function. What really freaked people out was the 1% (?) royalty on apps, which I don’t think lasted long. Now of course Apple gets a 30% royalty and that’s considered normal! (I should mention that we wanted to have a Newton App Store, but you would have accessed it by modem, of course!) The 2000 had the StrongARM processor that ran about 10x as fast as the earlier models. That was really the first hardware that gave something like the experience we were trying for.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
I don't remember the royalty but I remember really well how the NTK killed the finances of a friend and me who wanted to get started with Newton dev right when the MessagePad 100 was released. Plus we had to buy a Mac (Quadra 610?) which also cost a lot. We talked to Apple Germany and the product manager told us if the cost is a problem then they didn't want us. They only wanted "professionals", no amateurs. Big mistake. I guess Apple always had a slightly arrogant touch :-). I remember there was a C++ dev kit eventually but at that time the momentum for Newton was already gone. It makes me kind of sad thinking about this. I think with today's connectivity and processing power combined with the ideas of the Newton devs we could have much better devices than what we have today. The iphone feels a little boring. Well made but boring.
matthiaswm 7y ago
Making the NTK so insanely expensive killed my enthusiasm pretty quickly. I was working as a SW engineer in L.A., so even if it would have been only a small game, I would have had the ability to at least add something to the pool. Even the Palm SDK was commercial in the beginning. But a free toolchain was put together by some hacker after a year or so, which subsequently convinced Palm to lower their price and eventually give it away for free IIRC. Then again, even VisualC 6 cost 400$ or so back then.

by wrs 7y ago

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I don't remember the royalty but I remember really well how the NTK killed the finances of a friend and me who wanted to get started with Newton dev right when the MessagePad 100 was released. Plus we had to buy a Mac (Quadra 610?) which also cost a lot. We talked to Apple Germany and the product manager told us if the cost is a problem then they didn't want us. They only wanted "professionals", no amateurs. Big mistake. I guess Apple always had a slightly arrogant touch :-). I remember there was a C++ dev kit eventually but at that time the momentum for Newton was already gone. It makes me kind of sad thinking about this. I think with today's connectivity and processing power combined with the ideas of the Newton devs we could have much better devices than what we have today. The iphone feels a little boring. Well made but boring.

matthiaswm 7y ago

Making the NTK so insanely expensive killed my enthusiasm pretty quickly. I was working as a SW engineer in L.A., so even if it would have been only a small game, I would have had the ability to at least add something to the pool. Even the Palm SDK was commercial in the beginning. But a free toolchain was put together by some hacker after a year or so, which subsequently convinced Palm to lower their price and eventually give it away for free IIRC. Then again, even VisualC 6 cost 400$ or so back then.