3 ms·

what was the OCR algorithm in this?

by nsonha 4y ago

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.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - fredoralive 4y ago
      The Newton handwriting recognition did turn up in Mac OS for a quite a while as Inkwell, although only of interest to owners of 3rd party graphics tablets as Apple don’t offer pen input on Macs. Don’t think it got updated much (barring removing a Newton holdover easter egg). Got dropped during the great 32 bit purge a few releases ago.
  - AlanYx 4y ago
    A derivative of it (co-written by Larry Yaeger, who worked on the Newton) actually was incorporated into OS X, called Inkwell. You could make it appear as an input area by plugging in a graphics tablet. It was removed in OS X 10.15. The current macOS/iOS handwriting recognition tech is unrelated.

what was the OCR algorithm in this?

by nsonha 4y ago

what was the OCR algorithm in this?

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.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - fredoralive 4y ago
    The Newton handwriting recognition did turn up in Mac OS for a quite a while as Inkwell, although only of interest to owners of 3rd party graphics tablets as Apple don’t offer pen input on Macs. Don’t think it got updated much (barring removing a Newton holdover easter egg). Got dropped during the great 32 bit purge a few releases ago.
- AlanYx 4y ago
  A derivative of it (co-written by Larry Yaeger, who worked on the Newton) actually was incorporated into OS X, called Inkwell. You could make it appear as an input area by plugging in a graphics tablet. It was removed in OS X 10.15. The current macOS/iOS handwriting recognition tech is unrelated.