13 ms·

Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

244 points by kergonath 4y ago

musicale 4y ago
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.
- __d 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      It would have been a crash prone buggy piece of shit like it was on every other platform?
      - musicale 4y ago
        I see not much has changed in terms of the web, web browsers, and web apps.
        scarface74 4y ago
        No, modern browsers aren’t crash prone. They are just memory hogging, battery killing monstrosities - except for Safari.
        musicale 4y ago
        Web browsers have definitely progressed: In the bad old days you'd have to restart your web browser because it crashed. Now you have to restart your web browser because it has consumed all system resources, spun up the fans to maximum, and slowed performance to a crawl. And those weekly severe security vulnerabilities don't crash your browser anymore - they just enable it to be taken over by criminals.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Netscape would crash the entire Mac pre OS X back in the day. I didn’t have any such issues with Adobe, Aldus, or Microsoft software. While MS did do some crazy stuff to kill Netscape, IE was just a better browser. IE 3.0 for the Mac was native code and the most standards compliant browser in existence for awhile.
        KerrAvon 4y ago
        You really need to consider Safari instead if that’s how bad it is with Chrome etc.
        4y ago
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    > 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. What makes you believe that? > 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. If the iPhone had supported stylus input from day 1 touch wouldn't have evolved nearly as well. Developers would say "just use the stylus" and been done with it. Modern mobile had to go through an evolutionary phase where touch was the only input method to get where it is today.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Personally, the one feature from PDAs that I miss from modern smartphones is the Graffiti system of text input.
rbanffy 4y ago
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.
- kergonath 4y ago
  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.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    It was a nice feature in 1997 in Mac OS 8.0 too. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.01/Jan98MacTechOnline/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.01/Ja...
  - sgerenser 4y ago
    IIRC the “data detectors” patent[0] from the Newton era was still valid when the iPhone came out, and was one of the few patents specifically wielded by Apple in court against Android and Samsung. [0] https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,946,647.PN.&OS=PN/5,946,647&RS=PN/5,946,647 https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...
- gumby 4y ago
  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.
  - 4y ago
SulphurSmell 4y ago
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.
- __d 4y ago
  There's a patch for the date issue: http://40hz.org/Pages/newton/hacking/newton-year-2010-problem/ http://40hz.org/Pages/newton/hacking/newton-year-2010-proble...
  - SulphurSmell 4y ago
    Well isn't that great! Have to look at this. Thanks!!
johndoe0815 4y ago
Egg freckles! :)
- __d 4y ago
  Tried the easter egg in the Einstein emulator? https://eeggs.com/items/538.html https://eeggs.com/items/538.html
- fzzzy 4y ago
  Eat up martha
pgib 4y ago
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.
- musicale 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
      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 4y ago
        Jony was ID director by WWDC 97 https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500 https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500
docfort 4y ago
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-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-will-lose-700-million.html 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 https://beepdf.com/wp-content/uploads/newton/COMPCON-HW.pdf.
- billti 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      One wonders what the world would look like if AT&T could design a processor worth a damn.
  - KerrAvon 4y ago
    You know, it occurs to me in retrospect that Apple overpaid for NeXT, which is something people said at the time, but I kind of ignored. No one else would have bought them at anywhere near that price. The black hardware had failed. OpenStep was cool but the OS didn’t run super well on PC hardware. NeXT should have been $150M tops. Apple eventually had to rewrite all of the software anyway to make use of it. Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did overpay for NeXT at the time.
sircastor 4y ago
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.
stakkur 4y ago
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.
- EB-Barrington 4y ago
  "Eat Up Martha"
- donarb 4y ago
  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.
- cmiller1 4y ago
  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.
mistrial9 4y ago
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
ridiculous_fish 4y ago
I own a "dummy" Newton which was used in store displays. A fun artifact from that time. https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1520489983554981890 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/15204899835549818...
- kabdib 4y ago
  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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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-steve-jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0 https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
  - xenadu02 4y ago
    Innovating too early usually fails. Wait too long and it's not innovation. There's an art to innovating enough that people want to buy what you're selling given the limitations of hardware/networks/ecosystems at the time you bring the product to market.
  - goto11 4y ago
    OpenDoc is kind of an engineers dream. I remember being fascinated by it at the time (having only read about it). But yeah, it was a distraction. Microsoft also made large investment in OLE (object linking and embedding) at the time which was a similar technology. In retrospect these were solutions in search of a problem. Great that you could embed an Execl sheet in a Word document, but it wasn't what made consumers excited at the dawn of the web.
    - astrange 4y ago
      > OpenDoc is kind of an engineers dream. One would hope it isn’t - the problem with component systems is they’re a Conway’s Law violation, which is the reason the app model works so much better. (in terms of actually shipping, not technical correctness)
linsomniac 4y ago
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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- noizejoy 4y ago
  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.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  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_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
  - linsomniac 4y ago
    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 :-)
SeanLuke 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - lostgame 4y ago
    I’m legit interested - I’m in Canada, as well - I’ve always wanted one.
  - yobananaboy 4y ago
    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
  - Brajeshwar 4y ago
    Cool. May I know a ballpark on the price. My co-founder is in Toronto. I can pick it up some day from him. My Profile has all my contact details.
  - cmrdporcupine 4y ago
    UPDATE: I'll spend some time in the basement today going through my crap and I'll find the two Newtons, and do some research on what they might be worth based on condition and what others have gone for. It's time for me to purge anyways. Prefer these go to a nerd's home who will have fun with them, esp if said person has a history with the Newton.
JeremyReimer 4y ago
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.
- markus_zhang 4y ago
  Thanks man. I never owned a Newton but the device looks interesting. I figured Apple learned a lot from it to reach the pads.
- wrs 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Walter, thanks for NewtonScript! It is still one of my favourite languages. Dual inheritance for the win... _proto/_parent
- hajile 4y ago
  I think the following is a bit inaccurate. > And NewtonScript influenced the creation of JavaScript, with its prototype-based object model, dynamic variable typing, garbage-collected memory, and fast interpreted design. Today, JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world. The reasons are understandable though (sorry if there are any slight mistakes as I'm writing from memory here). Brendan Eich was hired to create a Scheme in the browser. Later, the requirements were changed to "make it look like that new Java language". He has said on record that he was familiar with the Self language. JS is often called "Lisp in C's clothing" because under the surface, it is quite similar to Scheme with a prototype object system (Scheme has no object system by default). Apple created a language in the 1990s called Dylan that was also used on the Newton. It started out as something very close to Scheme + CLOS (Common Lisp Object System though it's more properly MOP -- MetaObject Protocol). Lots of programmers hate the lisp lack of syntax for whatever reason, so they changed Dylan to an infix-style language. OpenNewton is still a thing if you're interested. NewtonScript kept much of the Dylan-style syntax, but changed out the complex MOP for the more easy to understand prototypal inheritance. I've never encountered even the hint that Newtonscript was on Eich's radar when he started work on Javascript. There are definitely similarities that become apparent when you look at both language designer's inspirations: Scheme + Self + C/Java = JavaScript Scheme + Self + Dylan = NewtonScript The result is two languages with the same core language ideas from Scheme, the same object system from self, and very different syntax inspirations from C and Dylan. EDIT: Eich says in an interview he never saw NewtonScript before designing JS https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2520193410/6 https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2520193410/6
gumby 4y ago
> ...the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper... In other words, the size of an A5 sheet of paper. C'mon Ars!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- JeremyReimer 4y ago
  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. :)
  - gumby 4y ago
    I suppose if they'd made it the size of an A4 folded along its major axis it would have been easier to hold, though reading text would have been annoying.
Ishmaeli 4y ago
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.
agiacalone 4y ago
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 4y ago
  A small pedantipoint, the big unveilings started years before that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY
  - quadcore 4y ago
    With a Vangelis tune s'il vous plait.
wanderingstan 4y ago
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.
- rileyphone 4y ago
  Yeah, wondering what Larry Tesler's thought process was here, the people from GM seemed pretty hurt by it in the doc (worth watching but not very critical overall).
gumby 4y ago
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.
irrational 4y ago
Hmm, this reminds me that I have a Newton… somewhere. The last time I booted it up it still worked.
jordanmorgan10 4y ago
I mean, this product epitomized "ahead of its time", no?
mark_l_watson 4y ago
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.
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  Fun fact. In addition to being the chief proponent behind genetic programming, John had the patent on lottery scratch-off tickets.
  - mark_l_watson 4y ago
    Indeed he did! I told him about my experiment of using GA to train small recurrent networks (using what I called variable weight size, that would increase during training). He said that it was a very cool idea but it wouldn’t scale. A few weeks later I agreed with his almost instant analysis. I did use the code as an example in my C++ Power Paradigms book.
    - joefourier 4y ago
      Why wouldn’t training small recurrent networks with GA scale? Genetics algorithms are embarrassingly parallel, even more so than training neural networks by gradient descent. It’s not efficient sure but it’s trivially scalable.
      - mark_l_watson 4y ago
        Because training is not steepest descent.
dang 4y ago
Related: (others?) The Newton Application Architecture (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 - Feb 2020 (37 comments) Newton Storage History (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 - March 2017 (11 comments) Why Steve Jobs Killed the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 - April 2016 (1 comment) Soup (Apple) – the Newton storage system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 - Feb 2016 (1 comment) Why I Carry a Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877256 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083181 - Aug 2015 (6 comments) A Guide to the Apple Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079507 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9635168 - May 2015 (11 comments) Patching the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125296 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5643063 - May 2013 (1 comment) Newton OS running on an iPad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1703130 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320646 - Oct 2008 (5 comments)
protomyth 4y ago
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.
8bitsrule 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Not feeling old yet?? It's time for the Millennials to start scheduling their colonoscopies. Welcome to old age!
paulpauper 4y ago
The newton sucked. No offence but it was the size of a large book, washed out green and grey screen, etc.
- __d 4y ago
  On the one hand, you're right. There were numerous flaws, in hardware, in software, in pricing, marketing, etc. On the other hand, it was awesome. It could do things that nothing had done before, and weren't done by anything else for years (even to today) after. You can argue that Apple made the wrong compromises, and the success of the Palm Pilot suggests that a lot of people agree with you. But then the Palm had a crappy screen too, so maybe that wasn't as much of an issue as you think. And it was smaller than an iPad Mini. The Newton group had plans for smaller and larger models that were never brought to market. It was hard to get the battery life and CPU power into a smaller device back then. Still, the Palm, iPaq and various PocketPCs clearly hit a sweet spot of size.
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    the palm was a lot smaller and cheaper
    - __d 4y ago
      And simpler. It used Graffiti rather than a full neural net-based HWR. It used compiled 68k C applications, not NewtonScript. It was a fairly ruthlessly simple device. Consequently, it was much cheaper to make, and could fit in a smaller package.
    - jandrese 4y ago
      Palm Pilots were a good example of "worse is better". Apple pushed the boundaries of the possible a bit too hard and ended up with a device that mostly worked but was expensive and had too many issues for the price point. Palm was less ambitious but their product was cheaper and more reliable.
    - musicale 4y ago
giantrobot 4y ago
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).
- indymike 4y ago
  I think Newton didn't make it because early 90s jet setters liked Palm Pilots that would fit in your pocket and played well with non-Apple computers. It was pretty rare to go to a meeting and see a Newton, but everyone would pull out the Palm Pilot. Price and form factor were probably the drivers.
  - giantrobot 4y ago
    Newtons predated the Palm Pilot by a couple years. The Pilot 1000 was not released until 1996. The Newton was on the way out by the time the Palm Pilot was released and off the market by the time the really popular Palm III/V/VII series was released. So in the early 90s no one had a Pilot and by the late 90s the Newton was history. The jetsetters the Newton was targeting (or I posit they were targeting) did end up getting Palm Pilots in the late 90s but in the early 90s likely either went with electronic organizers like a Sharp Wizard or a full laptop if they went with any electronic PIM/organizer device.
newman314 4y ago
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.
- wrs 4y ago
  http://newtonfaq.com/ http://newtonfaq.com/ will get you going.
  - __d 4y ago
    Nice to see you here, wrs
Vitaly_C 4y ago
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 4y ago
“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.
- adastra22 4y ago
  They don’t teach cursive anymore.
  - dsr_ 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      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."
      - hnfong 4y ago
        "autocorrect fails" :D
spinaltap 4y ago
Is this the "OpenDoc" thing that Steve Jobs trashed about in the famous video?
- protomyth 4y ago
  No, that was a framework on the Mac.
- JeremyReimer 4y ago
  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.
  - larkost 4y ago
    Fleshing this out a bit more: The idea was that there would be one "Document" type, and that you could have multiple parts in that document, each supported by a separate application. Users getting a document could always see it (there were essentially graphical previews built in to the format), and you only had to have the Application to modify content in that section of the document. As an example: a single document that had one area that was a spreadsheet, another area that was a chart derived from the data in that spreadsheet area, and then other areas that were images or text areas. For those that have used Adobe's InDesign with embedded images from Photoshop or Illustrator, this is much the same idea (except using plugins rather than the original app to do the rendering). It was a neat idea, but needed a lot of different places to buy into it, and it would have needed to have a killer InDesign replacement as part of the OS, and it never had that. Plus all of the apps like Word and Excel would have had to buy into having that as their hub, and I am not sure that Microsoft (or others) would have ever given up that much control.
wrs 4y ago
If you have (or want) a Newton and need to bring it up to the modern era (as much as possible), here are some resources: http://newtonfaq.com/ http://newtonfaq.com/ Includes help enabling nice things like WiFi, modern Flash memory, dates after 2010…
leephillips 4y ago
Surely an underrated device. They were essential when, for example, you were under siege and needed to send a fax from a train.
nsonha 4y ago
what was the OCR algorithm in this?
- lproven 4y ago
  It didn't have OCR. It had stroke recognition: it literally learned your handwriting. The code was bought in from a Russian company called Paragraph. I had a play with a friend's Remarkable last month. It is tragic. It's a lobotomised Newton with all the clever stuff removed. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see how profoundly dumb 21st century kit is.
  - nsonha 4y ago
    if the stroke recognition was as superior as you say it is, why isn't it in Apple products these days? Sounds like it can only process from direct input and not pictures from other sources
    - lproven 4y ago
      What a very strange question. There are multiple reasons why not. Have you read the rest of the discussion? Did you not wonder why people are commenting "egg freckles" and "eat up Martha"? [1] Little to none of the Newton's design was continued in later Apple products, because it was a product from the period when John Sculley ran the company. When Steve Jobs came back, he cancelled all the Sculley products, notably the Newton, which he described as "that scribble thing". [2] The tech was not used further because it didn't work very well. [3] It didn't sell because it was impossible to try before you buy, and impossible to borrow a friend's. The Newton needed weeks to learn that single user's handwriting. If you let a friend use it, it tried to learn their handwriting, making it worse at its owner's. So you couldn't try it in a shop, because it didn't know you or your writing. Newton OS 1.x only understood cursive ("longhand" as we non-Americans call it). As the many comments here show, a lot of people don't really know how to write in cursive any more. So Newton OS 2.x added support for block printing, but it was too late, the damage was done. That's why the device was parodied in "Doonesbury" (which is the source of the 'egg freckles' line) and the Simpsons ("Eat up Martha") and so on. [4] The tech was not adopted because it failed and because it wasn't a Jobs product. It wasn't good at synching with a parent device (the Palm Pilot did that) and it wasn't good at standalone (because ubiquitous wireless Internet didn't exist yet) and it competed with the Mac rather than being a partner to it. But the critical point to grasp here is that the mere fact that it didn't succeed does not mean that it was not good. It was very very good. I own 2 of the devices. The tech is amazingly good at what it does; the problem is that what it does wasn't essential and wasn't very useful. The iPad was too big and too radical when it was devised. Which is why Apple miniaturised it and launched the 2nd generation product first: the iPhone. The iPad came before the iPhone. The iDevices are technologically conservative. They are existing tech, simplified and miniaturised. They are very small pocket-sized UNIX machines. This is well-known tech so the result was polished and worked well and was a hit. The original Newton design was a pocket-sized battery-powered Lisp Machine, and was amazing radical tech... but arguably tried too soon. So the result was flawed and inconsistent and didn't work all that well, and so it flopped. Which is why 21st century computing is flooded with iterative refinements of existing successful products, resulting in vast complexity and hard-to-understand failure modes, rather than bold innovative experimental new tech.
alwillis 4y ago
I was so jazzed about the Newton that I co-founded the Boston Computer Society Newton Users Group [1] a year before it launched. As far as I know, it was the first users group for the Newton. Those were amazing days. We even managed to have a couple of members of the Newton team give us a sneak preview of the Newton (NDAs required) a couple of months before it launched. Our group helped with the rollout at MacWorld Boston—we were upgrading OMPs early that morning with the latest firmware that had just come out. Of all of the user groups and tech communities I've participated in, the community around the Newton was second to none, in terms of their vision, foresight and camaraderie. The Newton Hall of Fame [2] is worth checking out for anyone who was part of the community back then, with many names that will bring back memories, including yours truly. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Computer_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Computer_Society [2]: http://cf.psl.msu.edu/hallofame.htm http://cf.psl.msu.edu/hallofame.htm
whartung 4y ago
I had a 130 and a 2000 (or 2100). I always thought they were very interesting devices, I'm just not organized or busy enough to need a PDA (even today). I love the idea of soups and NewtonScript. My newton turned in to my first e-reader. Having "books at my fingertips" I really enjoyed, although it was all fiction. I later ended up buying a Palm VII, I think, off eBay. It was all fancy with some wireless connectivity that was obsolete when I bought it, but it had a backlight and cost $20. That was a really nice little e-reader.
Brajeshwar 4y ago
I missed the era of Newton because, well, Computers were new, a tad young for the technology of that time, and perhaps my geographic upbringing. Nonetheless, I will forever remember anything resembling a Pocket PC-ish design devices and systems. I did look around and asked people in the know to get my hands on any non-working Newton for my keep-sake, but so far, no luck. Pocket PC Devices, especially the iPAQ 2000[1], changed my career and sling-shot me from a Magazine Cover designer to building HIPPA Compliant Programs for these devices. If you see doctors, in the USA, ticking off stuff holding one of them during the early 2000s (perhaps till the 10s), they might be using one of the programs I wrote. [2000-2002] I used to always carry an iPAQ and I was kinda showing off. Fellow commuters on the BEST buses and the Domestic Western Railway in Mumbai thought I was a Japanese, surveying things with cool gadgets to be introduced in India soon. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ
Swannie 4y ago
I badly wanted a Newton. Or a Psion3. Big time nostalgia.
davidferguson 4y ago
I have a Newton MessagePad 110, got it off eBay some years ago for a cheap price. It still works, and I’m going to take it to EMF Camp this weekend and send a fax using it!
0898 4y ago
In September 2004, I went to the World Wide Newton Conference in Paris. A chap called Adam Tow gave a talk where he showed us an email he got from Steve Jobs about the future of the Newton. Basically, one day in 1997 or 1998 Adam was walking past Homma's Brown Rice Sushi in Palo Alto, and saw Steve Jobs getting some takeout. Adam wanted to ask him about the fate of the Newton, but managed to hold his tongue. Instead, he went home and emailed jobs using the subject line "Homma's Brown Rice Sushi", because he figured that since he was just there he'd open the email. It worked! Steve replied, and they got into a discussion on the future of the Newton. You can see the exchange here on slide 61: http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/2004/program/adamtow/slides-adamtow.pdf http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/2004/program/adamtow/slides-adamt...
sswaner 4y ago
I still have my Newton. It won me a copy of Adobe After Effects from John Knoll at MacWorld. In the presentation showing how to do special effects, Knoll offered a copy of the software to anyone who could draw a picture of Bill Gates — on a Newton. I raised my hand and scribbled a smiley face as I ran to the front of the room. Forgot I was in handwriting recognition mode. It changed my drawing to “OK” right as I showed him. Got a good laugh and the software.
jjkaczor 4y ago
Heh - I miss those days of offbeat, new products. Myself, I grabbed a 130 shortly after release. Combined with a PCMCIA modem, and serial cable connector to my Motorola Flip, I was one of those obnoxious nerds in coffee shops checking my email, before WiFi and smart-phones. NewtonScript was amazing, such a great language - and the promise of an operating system with built-in database-like/searchable storage was amazing. Which was also one of the reasons I fell in love with BeOS a little later.
ineedasername 4y ago
I have horrible handwriting, and remember that it's handwriting recognition-- for the time- was extremely good.
EricE 4y ago
Newton was amazing. Once you did a bit of training, it could read your handwriting with easy. The assisted drawing was the coolest thing and something that only recently Apple has brought back. I only had a Message Pad 110 - I really regret not saving a bit more for the 120 - it was a marked difference between the two.
- layer8 4y ago
  > something that only recently Apple has brought back In what form? Just curious.
m463 4y ago
also remember "McIntosh Post-It Notes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-BH8j06pM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-BH8j06pM (lol, macintosh)

244 points by kergonath 4y ago

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.

__d 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    It would have been a crash prone buggy piece of shit like it was on every other platform?
    - musicale 4y ago
      I see not much has changed in terms of the web, web browsers, and web apps.
      - scarface74 4y ago
        No, modern browsers aren’t crash prone. They are just memory hogging, battery killing monstrosities - except for Safari.
        musicale 4y ago
        Web browsers have definitely progressed: In the bad old days you'd have to restart your web browser because it crashed. Now you have to restart your web browser because it has consumed all system resources, spun up the fans to maximum, and slowed performance to a crawl. And those weekly severe security vulnerabilities don't crash your browser anymore - they just enable it to be taken over by criminals.
        scarface74 4y ago
        Netscape would crash the entire Mac pre OS X back in the day. I didn’t have any such issues with Adobe, Aldus, or Microsoft software. While MS did do some crazy stuff to kill Netscape, IE was just a better browser. IE 3.0 for the Mac was native code and the most standards compliant browser in existence for awhile.
        KerrAvon 4y ago
        You really need to consider Safari instead if that’s how bad it is with Chrome etc.
        4y ago
- xenadu02 4y ago
  > 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. What makes you believe that? > 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. If the iPhone had supported stylus input from day 1 touch wouldn't have evolved nearly as well. Developers would say "just use the stylus" and been done with it. Modern mobile had to go through an evolutionary phase where touch was the only input method to get where it is today.
jcranmer 4y ago
Personally, the one feature from PDAs that I miss from modern smartphones is the Graffiti system of text input.

rbanffy 4y ago

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.

kergonath 4y ago
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.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  It was a nice feature in 1997 in Mac OS 8.0 too. http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.01/Jan98MacTechOnline/index.html http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.01/Ja...
- sgerenser 4y ago
  IIRC the “data detectors” patent[0] from the Newton era was still valid when the iPhone came out, and was one of the few patents specifically wielded by Apple in court against Android and Samsung. [0] https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5,946,647.PN.&OS=PN/5,946,647&RS=PN/5,946,647 https://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...
gumby 4y ago
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.
- 4y ago

SulphurSmell 4y ago

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.

__d 4y ago
There's a patch for the date issue: http://40hz.org/Pages/newton/hacking/newton-year-2010-problem/ http://40hz.org/Pages/newton/hacking/newton-year-2010-proble...
- SulphurSmell 4y ago
  Well isn't that great! Have to look at this. Thanks!!

johndoe0815 4y ago

Egg freckles! :)

__d 4y ago
Tried the easter egg in the Einstein emulator? https://eeggs.com/items/538.html https://eeggs.com/items/538.html
fzzzy 4y ago
Eat up martha

pgib 4y ago

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.

musicale 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
    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 4y ago
      Jony was ID director by WWDC 97 https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500 https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500

docfort 4y ago

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-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-will-lose-700-million.html 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 https://beepdf.com/wp-content/uploads/newton/COMPCON-HW.pdf.

billti 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    One wonders what the world would look like if AT&T could design a processor worth a damn.
- KerrAvon 4y ago
  You know, it occurs to me in retrospect that Apple overpaid for NeXT, which is something people said at the time, but I kind of ignored. No one else would have bought them at anywhere near that price. The black hardware had failed. OpenStep was cool but the OS didn’t run super well on PC hardware. NeXT should have been $150M tops. Apple eventually had to rewrite all of the software anyway to make use of it. Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did overpay for NeXT at the time.

sircastor 4y ago

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.

stakkur 4y ago

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.

EB-Barrington 4y ago
"Eat Up Martha"
donarb 4y ago
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.
cmiller1 4y ago
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.

mistrial9 4y ago

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

ridiculous_fish 4y ago

I own a "dummy" Newton which was used in store displays. A fun artifact from that time. https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/1520489983554981890 https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/15204899835549818...

kabdib 4y ago
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 4y ago

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 4y ago
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-steve-jobs-wwdc-97-ff0174c171d0 https://donhopkins.medium.com/focusing-is-about-saying-no-st...
- xenadu02 4y ago
  Innovating too early usually fails. Wait too long and it's not innovation. There's an art to innovating enough that people want to buy what you're selling given the limitations of hardware/networks/ecosystems at the time you bring the product to market.
- goto11 4y ago
  OpenDoc is kind of an engineers dream. I remember being fascinated by it at the time (having only read about it). But yeah, it was a distraction. Microsoft also made large investment in OLE (object linking and embedding) at the time which was a similar technology. In retrospect these were solutions in search of a problem. Great that you could embed an Execl sheet in a Word document, but it wasn't what made consumers excited at the dawn of the web.
  - astrange 4y ago
    > OpenDoc is kind of an engineers dream. One would hope it isn’t - the problem with component systems is they’re a Conway’s Law violation, which is the reason the app model works so much better. (in terms of actually shipping, not technical correctness)

linsomniac 4y ago

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.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
noizejoy 4y ago
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.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
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_Computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nissan_Motors_v._Nissan_Comput...
- linsomniac 4y ago
  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 :-)

SeanLuke 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- lostgame 4y ago
  I’m legit interested - I’m in Canada, as well - I’ve always wanted one.
- yobananaboy 4y ago
  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
- Brajeshwar 4y ago
  Cool. May I know a ballpark on the price. My co-founder is in Toronto. I can pick it up some day from him. My Profile has all my contact details.
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  UPDATE: I'll spend some time in the basement today going through my crap and I'll find the two Newtons, and do some research on what they might be worth based on condition and what others have gone for. It's time for me to purge anyways. Prefer these go to a nerd's home who will have fun with them, esp if said person has a history with the Newton.

JeremyReimer 4y ago

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.

markus_zhang 4y ago
Thanks man. I never owned a Newton but the device looks interesting. I figured Apple learned a lot from it to reach the pads.
wrs 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Walter, thanks for NewtonScript! It is still one of my favourite languages. Dual inheritance for the win... _proto/_parent
hajile 4y ago
I think the following is a bit inaccurate. > And NewtonScript influenced the creation of JavaScript, with its prototype-based object model, dynamic variable typing, garbage-collected memory, and fast interpreted design. Today, JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world. The reasons are understandable though (sorry if there are any slight mistakes as I'm writing from memory here). Brendan Eich was hired to create a Scheme in the browser. Later, the requirements were changed to "make it look like that new Java language". He has said on record that he was familiar with the Self language. JS is often called "Lisp in C's clothing" because under the surface, it is quite similar to Scheme with a prototype object system (Scheme has no object system by default). Apple created a language in the 1990s called Dylan that was also used on the Newton. It started out as something very close to Scheme + CLOS (Common Lisp Object System though it's more properly MOP -- MetaObject Protocol). Lots of programmers hate the lisp lack of syntax for whatever reason, so they changed Dylan to an infix-style language. OpenNewton is still a thing if you're interested. NewtonScript kept much of the Dylan-style syntax, but changed out the complex MOP for the more easy to understand prototypal inheritance. I've never encountered even the hint that Newtonscript was on Eich's radar when he started work on Javascript. There are definitely similarities that become apparent when you look at both language designer's inspirations: Scheme + Self + C/Java = JavaScript Scheme + Self + Dylan = NewtonScript The result is two languages with the same core language ideas from Scheme, the same object system from self, and very different syntax inspirations from C and Dylan. EDIT: Eich says in an interview he never saw NewtonScript before designing JS https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2520193410/6 https://wm-help.net/lib/b/book/2520193410/6

gumby 4y ago

> ...the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper... In other words, the size of an A5 sheet of paper. C'mon Ars!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
JeremyReimer 4y ago
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. :)
- gumby 4y ago
  I suppose if they'd made it the size of an A4 folded along its major axis it would have been easier to hold, though reading text would have been annoying.

Ishmaeli 4y ago

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.

agiacalone 4y ago

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 4y ago
A small pedantipoint, the big unveilings started years before that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY
- quadcore 4y ago
  With a Vangelis tune s'il vous plait.

wanderingstan 4y ago

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.

rileyphone 4y ago
Yeah, wondering what Larry Tesler's thought process was here, the people from GM seemed pretty hurt by it in the doc (worth watching but not very critical overall).

gumby 4y ago

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.

irrational 4y ago

Hmm, this reminds me that I have a Newton… somewhere. The last time I booted it up it still worked.

jordanmorgan10 4y ago

I mean, this product epitomized "ahead of its time", no?

mark_l_watson 4y ago

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.

SeanLuke 4y ago
Fun fact. In addition to being the chief proponent behind genetic programming, John had the patent on lottery scratch-off tickets.
- mark_l_watson 4y ago
  Indeed he did! I told him about my experiment of using GA to train small recurrent networks (using what I called variable weight size, that would increase during training). He said that it was a very cool idea but it wouldn’t scale. A few weeks later I agreed with his almost instant analysis. I did use the code as an example in my C++ Power Paradigms book.
  - joefourier 4y ago
    Why wouldn’t training small recurrent networks with GA scale? Genetics algorithms are embarrassingly parallel, even more so than training neural networks by gradient descent. It’s not efficient sure but it’s trivially scalable.
    - mark_l_watson 4y ago
      Because training is not steepest descent.

dang 4y ago

Related: (others?) The Newton Application Architecture (1994) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 - Feb 2020 (37 comments) Newton Storage History (2007) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 - March 2017 (11 comments) Why Steve Jobs Killed the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 - April 2016 (1 comment) Soup (Apple) – the Newton storage system - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 - Feb 2016 (1 comment) Why I Carry a Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10877256 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10083181 - Aug 2015 (6 comments) A Guide to the Apple Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10079507 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9635168 - May 2015 (11 comments) Patching the Newton - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8125296 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5643063 - May 2013 (1 comment) Newton OS running on an iPad - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1703130 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 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 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320646 - Oct 2008 (5 comments)

protomyth 4y ago

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.

8bitsrule 4y ago

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 4y ago
Not feeling old yet?? It's time for the Millennials to start scheduling their colonoscopies. Welcome to old age!

paulpauper 4y ago

The newton sucked. No offence but it was the size of a large book, washed out green and grey screen, etc.

__d 4y ago
On the one hand, you're right. There were numerous flaws, in hardware, in software, in pricing, marketing, etc. On the other hand, it was awesome. It could do things that nothing had done before, and weren't done by anything else for years (even to today) after. You can argue that Apple made the wrong compromises, and the success of the Palm Pilot suggests that a lot of people agree with you. But then the Palm had a crappy screen too, so maybe that wasn't as much of an issue as you think. And it was smaller than an iPad Mini. The Newton group had plans for smaller and larger models that were never brought to market. It was hard to get the battery life and CPU power into a smaller device back then. Still, the Palm, iPaq and various PocketPCs clearly hit a sweet spot of size.
- paulpauper 4y ago
  the palm was a lot smaller and cheaper
  - __d 4y ago
    And simpler. It used Graffiti rather than a full neural net-based HWR. It used compiled 68k C applications, not NewtonScript. It was a fairly ruthlessly simple device. Consequently, it was much cheaper to make, and could fit in a smaller package.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    Palm Pilots were a good example of "worse is better". Apple pushed the boundaries of the possible a bit too hard and ended up with a device that mostly worked but was expensive and had too many issues for the price point. Palm was less ambitious but their product was cheaper and more reliable.
  - musicale 4y ago

giantrobot 4y ago

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).

indymike 4y ago
I think Newton didn't make it because early 90s jet setters liked Palm Pilots that would fit in your pocket and played well with non-Apple computers. It was pretty rare to go to a meeting and see a Newton, but everyone would pull out the Palm Pilot. Price and form factor were probably the drivers.
- giantrobot 4y ago
  Newtons predated the Palm Pilot by a couple years. The Pilot 1000 was not released until 1996. The Newton was on the way out by the time the Palm Pilot was released and off the market by the time the really popular Palm III/V/VII series was released. So in the early 90s no one had a Pilot and by the late 90s the Newton was history. The jetsetters the Newton was targeting (or I posit they were targeting) did end up getting Palm Pilots in the late 90s but in the early 90s likely either went with electronic organizers like a Sharp Wizard or a full laptop if they went with any electronic PIM/organizer device.

newman314 4y ago

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.

wrs 4y ago
http://newtonfaq.com/ http://newtonfaq.com/ will get you going.
- __d 4y ago
  Nice to see you here, wrs

Vitaly_C 4y ago

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 4y ago

“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.

adastra22 4y ago
They don’t teach cursive anymore.
- dsr_ 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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."
    - hnfong 4y ago
      "autocorrect fails" :D

spinaltap 4y ago

Is this the "OpenDoc" thing that Steve Jobs trashed about in the famous video?

protomyth 4y ago
No, that was a framework on the Mac.
JeremyReimer 4y ago
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.
- larkost 4y ago
  Fleshing this out a bit more: The idea was that there would be one "Document" type, and that you could have multiple parts in that document, each supported by a separate application. Users getting a document could always see it (there were essentially graphical previews built in to the format), and you only had to have the Application to modify content in that section of the document. As an example: a single document that had one area that was a spreadsheet, another area that was a chart derived from the data in that spreadsheet area, and then other areas that were images or text areas. For those that have used Adobe's InDesign with embedded images from Photoshop or Illustrator, this is much the same idea (except using plugins rather than the original app to do the rendering). It was a neat idea, but needed a lot of different places to buy into it, and it would have needed to have a killer InDesign replacement as part of the OS, and it never had that. Plus all of the apps like Word and Excel would have had to buy into having that as their hub, and I am not sure that Microsoft (or others) would have ever given up that much control.

wrs 4y ago

If you have (or want) a Newton and need to bring it up to the modern era (as much as possible), here are some resources: http://newtonfaq.com/ http://newtonfaq.com/ Includes help enabling nice things like WiFi, modern Flash memory, dates after 2010…

leephillips 4y ago

Surely an underrated device. They were essential when, for example, you were under siege and needed to send a fax from a train.

nsonha 4y ago

what was the OCR algorithm in this?

lproven 4y ago
It didn't have OCR. It had stroke recognition: it literally learned your handwriting. The code was bought in from a Russian company called Paragraph. I had a play with a friend's Remarkable last month. It is tragic. It's a lobotomised Newton with all the clever stuff removed. It is absolutely heartbreaking to see how profoundly dumb 21st century kit is.
- nsonha 4y ago
  if the stroke recognition was as superior as you say it is, why isn't it in Apple products these days? Sounds like it can only process from direct input and not pictures from other sources
  - lproven 4y ago
    What a very strange question. There are multiple reasons why not. Have you read the rest of the discussion? Did you not wonder why people are commenting "egg freckles" and "eat up Martha"? [1] Little to none of the Newton's design was continued in later Apple products, because it was a product from the period when John Sculley ran the company. When Steve Jobs came back, he cancelled all the Sculley products, notably the Newton, which he described as "that scribble thing". [2] The tech was not used further because it didn't work very well. [3] It didn't sell because it was impossible to try before you buy, and impossible to borrow a friend's. The Newton needed weeks to learn that single user's handwriting. If you let a friend use it, it tried to learn their handwriting, making it worse at its owner's. So you couldn't try it in a shop, because it didn't know you or your writing. Newton OS 1.x only understood cursive ("longhand" as we non-Americans call it). As the many comments here show, a lot of people don't really know how to write in cursive any more. So Newton OS 2.x added support for block printing, but it was too late, the damage was done. That's why the device was parodied in "Doonesbury" (which is the source of the 'egg freckles' line) and the Simpsons ("Eat up Martha") and so on. [4] The tech was not adopted because it failed and because it wasn't a Jobs product. It wasn't good at synching with a parent device (the Palm Pilot did that) and it wasn't good at standalone (because ubiquitous wireless Internet didn't exist yet) and it competed with the Mac rather than being a partner to it. But the critical point to grasp here is that the mere fact that it didn't succeed does not mean that it was not good. It was very very good. I own 2 of the devices. The tech is amazingly good at what it does; the problem is that what it does wasn't essential and wasn't very useful. The iPad was too big and too radical when it was devised. Which is why Apple miniaturised it and launched the 2nd generation product first: the iPhone. The iPad came before the iPhone. The iDevices are technologically conservative. They are existing tech, simplified and miniaturised. They are very small pocket-sized UNIX machines. This is well-known tech so the result was polished and worked well and was a hit. The original Newton design was a pocket-sized battery-powered Lisp Machine, and was amazing radical tech... but arguably tried too soon. So the result was flawed and inconsistent and didn't work all that well, and so it flopped. Which is why 21st century computing is flooded with iterative refinements of existing successful products, resulting in vast complexity and hard-to-understand failure modes, rather than bold innovative experimental new tech.

alwillis 4y ago

I was so jazzed about the Newton that I co-founded the Boston Computer Society Newton Users Group [1] a year before it launched. As far as I know, it was the first users group for the Newton. Those were amazing days. We even managed to have a couple of members of the Newton team give us a sneak preview of the Newton (NDAs required) a couple of months before it launched. Our group helped with the rollout at MacWorld Boston—we were upgrading OMPs early that morning with the latest firmware that had just come out. Of all of the user groups and tech communities I've participated in, the community around the Newton was second to none, in terms of their vision, foresight and camaraderie. The Newton Hall of Fame [2] is worth checking out for anyone who was part of the community back then, with many names that will bring back memories, including yours truly. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Computer_Society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Computer_Society [2]: http://cf.psl.msu.edu/hallofame.htm http://cf.psl.msu.edu/hallofame.htm

whartung 4y ago

I had a 130 and a 2000 (or 2100). I always thought they were very interesting devices, I'm just not organized or busy enough to need a PDA (even today). I love the idea of soups and NewtonScript. My newton turned in to my first e-reader. Having "books at my fingertips" I really enjoyed, although it was all fiction. I later ended up buying a Palm VII, I think, off eBay. It was all fancy with some wireless connectivity that was obsolete when I bought it, but it had a backlight and cost $20. That was a really nice little e-reader.

Brajeshwar 4y ago

I missed the era of Newton because, well, Computers were new, a tad young for the technology of that time, and perhaps my geographic upbringing. Nonetheless, I will forever remember anything resembling a Pocket PC-ish design devices and systems. I did look around and asked people in the know to get my hands on any non-working Newton for my keep-sake, but so far, no luck. Pocket PC Devices, especially the iPAQ 2000[1], changed my career and sling-shot me from a Magazine Cover designer to building HIPPA Compliant Programs for these devices. If you see doctors, in the USA, ticking off stuff holding one of them during the early 2000s (perhaps till the 10s), they might be using one of the programs I wrote. [2000-2002] I used to always carry an iPAQ and I was kinda showing off. Fellow commuters on the BEST buses and the Domestic Western Railway in Mumbai thought I was a Japanese, surveying things with cool gadgets to be introduced in India soon. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPAQ

Swannie 4y ago

I badly wanted a Newton. Or a Psion3. Big time nostalgia.

davidferguson 4y ago

I have a Newton MessagePad 110, got it off eBay some years ago for a cheap price. It still works, and I’m going to take it to EMF Camp this weekend and send a fax using it!

0898 4y ago

In September 2004, I went to the World Wide Newton Conference in Paris. A chap called Adam Tow gave a talk where he showed us an email he got from Steve Jobs about the future of the Newton. Basically, one day in 1997 or 1998 Adam was walking past Homma's Brown Rice Sushi in Palo Alto, and saw Steve Jobs getting some takeout. Adam wanted to ask him about the fate of the Newton, but managed to hold his tongue. Instead, he went home and emailed jobs using the subject line "Homma's Brown Rice Sushi", because he figured that since he was just there he'd open the email. It worked! Steve replied, and they got into a discussion on the future of the Newton. You can see the exchange here on slide 61: http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/2004/program/adamtow/slides-adamtow.pdf http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/2004/program/adamtow/slides-adamt...

sswaner 4y ago

I still have my Newton. It won me a copy of Adobe After Effects from John Knoll at MacWorld. In the presentation showing how to do special effects, Knoll offered a copy of the software to anyone who could draw a picture of Bill Gates — on a Newton. I raised my hand and scribbled a smiley face as I ran to the front of the room. Forgot I was in handwriting recognition mode. It changed my drawing to “OK” right as I showed him. Got a good laugh and the software.

jjkaczor 4y ago

Heh - I miss those days of offbeat, new products. Myself, I grabbed a 130 shortly after release. Combined with a PCMCIA modem, and serial cable connector to my Motorola Flip, I was one of those obnoxious nerds in coffee shops checking my email, before WiFi and smart-phones. NewtonScript was amazing, such a great language - and the promise of an operating system with built-in database-like/searchable storage was amazing. Which was also one of the reasons I fell in love with BeOS a little later.

ineedasername 4y ago

I have horrible handwriting, and remember that it's handwriting recognition-- for the time- was extremely good.

EricE 4y ago

Newton was amazing. Once you did a bit of training, it could read your handwriting with easy. The assisted drawing was the coolest thing and something that only recently Apple has brought back. I only had a Message Pad 110 - I really regret not saving a bit more for the 120 - it was a marked difference between the two.

layer8 4y ago
> something that only recently Apple has brought back In what form? Just curious.

m463 4y ago

also remember "McIntosh Post-It Notes" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-BH8j06pM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q-BH8j06pM (lol, macintosh)