8 ms·

Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30

44 points by macstainless 4y ago

abruzzi 4y ago
still have a 2000 upgraded to 2100 in a closet somewhere. At some level the iPhone was such a disappoinment after having owned a Newton, becuase the early iPhone, even after the introduction of the app store, felt like a bunch of siloed apps, where the Newton "soup" allowed fairly seamless extensibility and interoperability. (well, at least it felt like that in the 90's.)
- spaetzleesser 4y ago
  I always wonder how a Newton would perform on modern hardware. Considering how well the handwriting recognition worked on 90s hardware it should be pretty great by now. I definitely miss it. The iPhone feels like a step backwards in terms of user and developer friendliness.
  - projektfu 4y ago
    Part of the issue is the move from resistive screens to capacitive screens. The iPhone is just not accurate enough for handwriting. The iPad with pencil is frustrating for handwriting. But the iPad pro with pencil 2 is likely better, but I've not had a chance to try it. The tablet PC era computers were pretty good with handwriting but the os didn't make enough drastic changes in user interface to make them work well. Choices were using the on screen keyboard a lot or getting a clunky unit that included a keyboard. Chromebooks with pen are quite frustrating, and I recommend against them. The pens also tend to use disposable AAAA batteries.
- mikestew 4y ago
  Of course the early iPhone apps were siloed, one could not even copy/paste between apps until three versions in. :-) But the iPhone did, indeed, feel like a step back in many ways. Though Microsoft would let it languish and later get stomped by iOS, the early WinCE/Windows Mobile devices had better inter-app communication and integration. I felt like I could get stuff done (and I did) on some of those devices. The early iPhone had a lot of innovation, but there was no last-minute editing of a Word doc on those devices.
QuarterRoy 4y ago
My first job after college was maintaining Newton script mobile application used by my employer. Later we moved the app over to a windows CE device and developed an office management suite in the 4D programming language to compliment it.
rcarmo 4y ago
It is somewhat ironic that I can actually write this on an iPad using Scribble nearly 30 years later and after Apple killed the Newton, reinvented its mobile devices, and declined to add a stylus to them... Incidentally, it recognizes "egg freckles" just fine.
- charles_kaw 4y ago
  I suppose it took a bunch of innovations to make it more usable over that past thirty years, though. - vastly improved software - much better accuracy and integration with "custom" words (such as contact book addresses) - bigger screen - no hitting the edge every few words - lower latency/higher resolution - ink appears as you're writing, providing better and instant feedback
EB-Barrington 4y ago
Eat up Martha (one of the 200,000 former Newton owners here)
LeoPanthera 4y ago
I still have a Newton (a 2100), and although it ceased to be a daily carry device for me somewhere around 2007, I only finally stopped using it altogether just a few years ago, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to move my notes on and off the thing. The bad handwriting trope has always baffled me. I've never had a problem. I know that the 2000 series Newtons are considerably improved compared to the original generation, but I did also use an original generation Newton, and it was actually fine. I think the "Eat up Martha" gag from the Simpsons became such a trope that people just assumed it must be awful.
- Maursault 4y ago
  I was always amazed by it. Other PDAs used a special alphabet one had to memorize, but Newton learned and recognized natural handwriting. And while Newton didn't last long, the handwriting recognition did, reincarnated as Inkwell.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh)
  - mikestew 4y ago
    And then Microsoft acquired the company that made Calligrapher (which originally ran on the Newtons), and it ended up in the early WinCE PDA devices. I used it with the WinCE devices, and it worked quite well. "Egg freckles", indeed.
  - gumby 4y ago
    > Other PDAs used a special alphabet one had to memorize, Graffiti was so easy to use that you would see people write with it on whiteboards.
    - projektfu 4y ago
      This has always baffled me. Graffiti was generally less than 20 characters per minute for me and I was an early palmpilot adopter. Eventually better options came out resembling the smartphone keyboards we have today. I never used a Newton but the Microsoft handwriting recognition was pretty good on the iPAQ. Maybe the Palm graffiti approach is ok for people who don't care about feedback and can edit tiny characters on a tiny device.
amysox 4y ago
Handwriting recognition is a "hard" problem, and the Newton tried to take it on directly, with more or less success. Other companies went for workarounds. Some people retrained humans to write in such a way that the PDA could easily recognize it, e.g. Palm with their Graffiti writing system used with PalmOS. Others just put a keyboard on the device, as in the early WinCE devices, and which reached the pinnacle of evolution on the Blackberry. Then smartphone makers just turned that into a software keyboard on the screen, which is what we see in iOS and Android. Now, the big thing is voice recognition, which is also a "hard" problem. But we no longer need to seek workarounds the way we did with handwriting recognition, for two reasons: first, because the phone itself now contains much more processing power than the early PDAs did, and second (and more important), the evolution of high-speed wireless networking makes it not only possible, but feasible, to offload the "hard" parts of voice recognition to an even more powerful server somewhere on the Internet. Which enables, not only voice recognition, but software agents like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. One day there will likely be a breakthrough somewhere that makes the gap between handwriting recognition and voice recognition look like child's play. I'm not sure what that will be. Maybe direct brain interfacing, as in William Gibson's or Jim Strickland's science-fiction universes, or as in John Scalzi's "BrainPal"? (Taken from some musings I wrote on Facebook back in 2018)
drzoltar 4y ago
I’ve always wanted to get one of these old Apple Newtons and trying to upgrade the built in handwriting recognition system with something a bit more modern, within the limitations of having 8mb of ram :). Anyone have any experience hacking them?
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  I think it would be more interesting to run under emulation. The hardware is getting a bit old and creaky these days. Under emulation it could enjoy a considerable CPU and RAM boost. An iPad with a pencil would be an ideal target. (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.)
  - NobodyNada 4y ago
    > (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.) The Newton has a 32-bit ARM processor, whereas all of Apple's processors for the last ~5 years have only implemented AArch64.
  - rgovostes 4y ago
    Here you go: https://github.com/pguyot/Einstein https://github.com/pguyot/Einstein You need to locate the ROM. The Internet Archive has some: https://archive.org/download/AppleNewtonROMs https://archive.org/download/AppleNewtonROMs
    - LeoPanthera 4y ago
      Delightful!
jedc 4y ago
I loved my Newton. I loved it so much that even when it was stolen out of my car in ~2003, I got a MessagePad 2100 off of eBay to replace it. It was only when the iPhone came out that someone was able to pry my Newton out of my hands.
Apocryphon 4y ago
One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like language, though that seems to have been replaced by NewtonScript. https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.org/about/apple-dylan/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899
- SeanLuke 4y ago
  Dylan was never on the Newton. The Newton team had two proposed products, Senior and Junior. Senior was gonna run Dylan, but they kept waiting on the Dylan team to produce something usable, and it never happened. So they gave up on Senior, dumped the notion of using Dyan entirely, and finished Junior using NewtonScript to get the product out the door. That became the Newton.
  - Apocryphon 4y ago
    Yeah, that's what Walter Smith says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696
    - wrs 4y ago
      Ironically, I see my old comment has two autocorrect typos. :)
  - p_l 4y ago
    I've read somewhat opposite account, that there was a complete Lisp/Dylan system available, but there were issues both political and hardware related that ultimately led to C++ (which was then hot new stuff still) being used with NewtonScript on top.
- linguae 4y ago
  One of the things that fascinates me about the history of the Newton is that if it weren't for complaints from those advocating C++ that escalated to John Sculley (who ruled in their favor), we may have ended up with mass-market machines that ran a Lisp operating system. There's a wonderful interview between lispm and Mikel Evins, two regular contributors on Hacker News, that can be found at http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os. I'm quite fascinated by pre-1997 Apple's projects. Before Jobs' return, Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation; in its attempts to find a successor to the classic Mac OS, it explored various paths, but none of these paths led to a successor until Apple bought NeXT. Apple's more radical explorations during this era seem to have a profound Xerox PARC influence. Xerox PARC is probably most famous for Smalltalk and its GUI. However, there are many people who don't know that Xerox developed its own Lisp environment, Interlisp, which was known for its GUI (not all Lisp innovations came from MIT). These explorations ended once Apple committed to NeXT technology for its foundation in 1997, and today Apple has been pursuing its own direction (e.g., the iOS human interface guidelines, Swift, the gradual inclusion of iOS UI/UX elements and practices in macOS) that is distinct from the Xerox PARC, classic Macintosh, and NeXT traditions.
jmbwell 4y ago
Something that strikes me, using a Newton today, is just how little has changed in the fundamental things people want to do with a mobile device: messaging, contacts, calendars, and notes. For all that modern devices can do, these four essentials seem more or less the same in concept and function between my MessagePad 120 and my iPad Pro, despite 30 years between them.
- thrway3344444 4y ago
  Games, stream video content, entertain young children at restaurants and on planes, edit/produce content for social media, ...
- macstainless 4y ago
  It has changed somewhat, but the biggest thing is connectivity. If ubiquitious connections were around then, like they are now, the Newton may have had a very different story.
georgewsinger 4y ago
Interestingly, the Newton was pretty cheap for its time: released for $900 ($1,844.29 in inflation-adjusted terms). IIRC the original price was supposed to be much higher, but at the last second it was cut lower. Most first-in-kind technology is usually quite expensive[1] (especially during the 80s/90s era), but Apple has frequently been able to release innovative products (relatively) cheaply, as far as I can tell. [1] https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/ https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/

44 points by macstainless 4y ago

still have a 2000 upgraded to 2100 in a closet somewhere. At some level the iPhone was such a disappoinment after having owned a Newton, becuase the early iPhone, even after the introduction of the app store, felt like a bunch of siloed apps, where the Newton "soup" allowed fairly seamless extensibility and interoperability. (well, at least it felt like that in the 90's.)

spaetzleesser 4y ago
I always wonder how a Newton would perform on modern hardware. Considering how well the handwriting recognition worked on 90s hardware it should be pretty great by now. I definitely miss it. The iPhone feels like a step backwards in terms of user and developer friendliness.
- projektfu 4y ago
  Part of the issue is the move from resistive screens to capacitive screens. The iPhone is just not accurate enough for handwriting. The iPad with pencil is frustrating for handwriting. But the iPad pro with pencil 2 is likely better, but I've not had a chance to try it. The tablet PC era computers were pretty good with handwriting but the os didn't make enough drastic changes in user interface to make them work well. Choices were using the on screen keyboard a lot or getting a clunky unit that included a keyboard. Chromebooks with pen are quite frustrating, and I recommend against them. The pens also tend to use disposable AAAA batteries.
mikestew 4y ago
Of course the early iPhone apps were siloed, one could not even copy/paste between apps until three versions in. :-) But the iPhone did, indeed, feel like a step back in many ways. Though Microsoft would let it languish and later get stomped by iOS, the early WinCE/Windows Mobile devices had better inter-app communication and integration. I felt like I could get stuff done (and I did) on some of those devices. The early iPhone had a lot of innovation, but there was no last-minute editing of a Word doc on those devices.

QuarterRoy 4y ago

My first job after college was maintaining Newton script mobile application used by my employer. Later we moved the app over to a windows CE device and developed an office management suite in the 4D programming language to compliment it.

rcarmo 4y ago

It is somewhat ironic that I can actually write this on an iPad using Scribble nearly 30 years later and after Apple killed the Newton, reinvented its mobile devices, and declined to add a stylus to them... Incidentally, it recognizes "egg freckles" just fine.

charles_kaw 4y ago
I suppose it took a bunch of innovations to make it more usable over that past thirty years, though. - vastly improved software - much better accuracy and integration with "custom" words (such as contact book addresses) - bigger screen - no hitting the edge every few words - lower latency/higher resolution - ink appears as you're writing, providing better and instant feedback

EB-Barrington 4y ago

Eat up Martha (one of the 200,000 former Newton owners here)

LeoPanthera 4y ago

I still have a Newton (a 2100), and although it ceased to be a daily carry device for me somewhere around 2007, I only finally stopped using it altogether just a few years ago, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to move my notes on and off the thing. The bad handwriting trope has always baffled me. I've never had a problem. I know that the 2000 series Newtons are considerably improved compared to the original generation, but I did also use an original generation Newton, and it was actually fine. I think the "Eat up Martha" gag from the Simpsons became such a trope that people just assumed it must be awful.

Maursault 4y ago
I was always amazed by it. Other PDAs used a special alphabet one had to memorize, but Newton learned and recognized natural handwriting. And while Newton didn't last long, the handwriting recognition did, reincarnated as Inkwell.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh)
- mikestew 4y ago
  And then Microsoft acquired the company that made Calligrapher (which originally ran on the Newtons), and it ended up in the early WinCE PDA devices. I used it with the WinCE devices, and it worked quite well. "Egg freckles", indeed.
- gumby 4y ago
  > Other PDAs used a special alphabet one had to memorize, Graffiti was so easy to use that you would see people write with it on whiteboards.
  - projektfu 4y ago
    This has always baffled me. Graffiti was generally less than 20 characters per minute for me and I was an early palmpilot adopter. Eventually better options came out resembling the smartphone keyboards we have today. I never used a Newton but the Microsoft handwriting recognition was pretty good on the iPAQ. Maybe the Palm graffiti approach is ok for people who don't care about feedback and can edit tiny characters on a tiny device.

amysox 4y ago

Handwriting recognition is a "hard" problem, and the Newton tried to take it on directly, with more or less success. Other companies went for workarounds. Some people retrained humans to write in such a way that the PDA could easily recognize it, e.g. Palm with their Graffiti writing system used with PalmOS. Others just put a keyboard on the device, as in the early WinCE devices, and which reached the pinnacle of evolution on the Blackberry. Then smartphone makers just turned that into a software keyboard on the screen, which is what we see in iOS and Android. Now, the big thing is voice recognition, which is also a "hard" problem. But we no longer need to seek workarounds the way we did with handwriting recognition, for two reasons: first, because the phone itself now contains much more processing power than the early PDAs did, and second (and more important), the evolution of high-speed wireless networking makes it not only possible, but feasible, to offload the "hard" parts of voice recognition to an even more powerful server somewhere on the Internet. Which enables, not only voice recognition, but software agents like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant. One day there will likely be a breakthrough somewhere that makes the gap between handwriting recognition and voice recognition look like child's play. I'm not sure what that will be. Maybe direct brain interfacing, as in William Gibson's or Jim Strickland's science-fiction universes, or as in John Scalzi's "BrainPal"? (Taken from some musings I wrote on Facebook back in 2018)

drzoltar 4y ago

I’ve always wanted to get one of these old Apple Newtons and trying to upgrade the built in handwriting recognition system with something a bit more modern, within the limitations of having 8mb of ram :). Anyone have any experience hacking them?

LeoPanthera 4y ago
I think it would be more interesting to run under emulation. The hardware is getting a bit old and creaky these days. Under emulation it could enjoy a considerable CPU and RAM boost. An iPad with a pencil would be an ideal target. (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.)
- NobodyNada 4y ago
  > (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.) The Newton has a 32-bit ARM processor, whereas all of Apple's processors for the last ~5 years have only implemented AArch64.
- rgovostes 4y ago
  Here you go: https://github.com/pguyot/Einstein https://github.com/pguyot/Einstein You need to locate the ROM. The Internet Archive has some: https://archive.org/download/AppleNewtonROMs https://archive.org/download/AppleNewtonROMs
  - LeoPanthera 4y ago
    Delightful!

jedc 4y ago

I loved my Newton. I loved it so much that even when it was stolen out of my car in ~2003, I got a MessagePad 2100 off of eBay to replace it. It was only when the iPhone came out that someone was able to pry my Newton out of my hands.

Apocryphon 4y ago

One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like language, though that seems to have been replaced by NewtonScript. https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.org/about/apple-dylan/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899

SeanLuke 4y ago
Dylan was never on the Newton. The Newton team had two proposed products, Senior and Junior. Senior was gonna run Dylan, but they kept waiting on the Dylan team to produce something usable, and it never happened. So they gave up on Senior, dumped the notion of using Dyan entirely, and finished Junior using NewtonScript to get the product out the door. That became the Newton.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  Yeah, that's what Walter Smith says: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696
  - wrs 4y ago
    Ironically, I see my old comment has two autocorrect typos. :)
- p_l 4y ago
  I've read somewhat opposite account, that there was a complete Lisp/Dylan system available, but there were issues both political and hardware related that ultimately led to C++ (which was then hot new stuff still) being used with NewtonScript on top.
linguae 4y ago
One of the things that fascinates me about the history of the Newton is that if it weren't for complaints from those advocating C++ that escalated to John Sculley (who ruled in their favor), we may have ended up with mass-market machines that ran a Lisp operating system. There's a wonderful interview between lispm and Mikel Evins, two regular contributors on Hacker News, that can be found at http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os. I'm quite fascinated by pre-1997 Apple's projects. Before Jobs' return, Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation; in its attempts to find a successor to the classic Mac OS, it explored various paths, but none of these paths led to a successor until Apple bought NeXT. Apple's more radical explorations during this era seem to have a profound Xerox PARC influence. Xerox PARC is probably most famous for Smalltalk and its GUI. However, there are many people who don't know that Xerox developed its own Lisp environment, Interlisp, which was known for its GUI (not all Lisp innovations came from MIT). These explorations ended once Apple committed to NeXT technology for its foundation in 1997, and today Apple has been pursuing its own direction (e.g., the iOS human interface guidelines, Swift, the gradual inclusion of iOS UI/UX elements and practices in macOS) that is distinct from the Xerox PARC, classic Macintosh, and NeXT traditions.

jmbwell 4y ago

Something that strikes me, using a Newton today, is just how little has changed in the fundamental things people want to do with a mobile device: messaging, contacts, calendars, and notes. For all that modern devices can do, these four essentials seem more or less the same in concept and function between my MessagePad 120 and my iPad Pro, despite 30 years between them.

thrway3344444 4y ago
Games, stream video content, entertain young children at restaurants and on planes, edit/produce content for social media, ...
macstainless 4y ago
It has changed somewhat, but the biggest thing is connectivity. If ubiquitious connections were around then, like they are now, the Newton may have had a very different story.

georgewsinger 4y ago

Interestingly, the Newton was pretty cheap for its time: released for $900 ($1,844.29 in inflation-adjusted terms). IIRC the original price was supposed to be much higher, but at the last second it was cut lower. Most first-in-kind technology is usually quite expensive[1] (especially during the 80s/90s era), but Apple has frequently been able to release innovative products (relatively) cheaply, as far as I can tell. [1] https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/ https://simulavr.com/blog/paying-for-productivity/