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Newton FAQ
- ctxc 4y agoIs it really a good FAQ if it doesn't explain _what_ it is as top level info? What is this? There are no links to the original product (or whatever it is - hardware? Software? OS?) either in the first few minutes of navigation.
- Finnucane 4y agoQ: is this a website about Isaac Newton, the city of Newton, MA, or fig cookies? A: No, none of those things.
- sambapa 4y agoThat's why I don't like global variables...
- seanhunter 4y agoWeirdly it explains what an FAQ is but assumes you know what "Newton" is.
- locusofself 4y agomy thought exactly. I spent a few minutes on the FAQ and I don't know what a Newton is. Some kind of Palm Pilot like device I assume?
- EricE 4y agohttps://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/18/319/1714 https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/mobile-computing/... Although if you just spent 20 minutes training it, it was frighteningly good at recognizing handwriting. It could read my writing better than I could back in the day.
- jhbadger 4y agoHas the Apple Newton really fallen so far out of the public consciousness that this wouldn't be obvious? What about the Palm Pilot? Yes, I know the idea of PDAs has basically disappeared since the advent of smartphones (which are really just PDAs that also work as phones), but even so.
- torstenvl 4y agoI know what an Apple Newton is. But this is not the Apple Newton FAQ. It's the Newton FAQ. If you don't specify the context and namespace, don't be surprised when people don't know wtf you're talking about. You might as well make a "String Class FAQ"
- nmstoker 4y agoOr better yet a "String FAQ" for maximally reduced context, similar to a "Newton FAQ". Just the addition of an extra word (Apple) would help, but presumably the Newton fans are still tied to the way the Apple marketing talked about Newton without any qualification words. https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30 https://youtu.be/lkg4EAK0Y30
- throwanem 4y ago> Has the Apple Newton really fallen so far out of the public consciousness that this wouldn't be obvious? Yes. > What about the Palm Pilot? The what? Kidding aside, I doubt anyone who finds their way to this FAQ without knowing what it's about will care enough to find out. If they do, there's no shortage of obvious search terms throughout the text that will make the context very easy to come by.
- antifa 4y ago> Has the Apple Newton really fallen so far out of the public consciousness that this wouldn't be obvious? They ceased production of the Apple Newton in 1998 according to Wikipedia. and the most recent Palm product I've heard of came out in 2010. PDAs are basically floppy disks as far as the wider public knows.
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- AlbertCory 4y agoIn working on my Book III (basically, the early 90s), I've done a ton of research on handheld devices and the money pit they were. Newton is not going to be any more than a footnote. Jerry Kaplan's book Startup tells the story about how Sculley stabbed GO in the back with Newton -- actually, both GO and General Magic. They got a lot of press and flopped miserably. And of course, let's not forget Momenta (as easy as that would be, given that they failed so fast). Meantime, Palm finally figured out something people would buy and use, by scaling back expectations and building a device that did something valuable.
- georgeecollins 4y agoStartup is a really good book. People should be very wary of power of monopolies, MSFT also really messed with GO and General Magic. The example of Palm vs Newton is great because it shows how clear goals trump excellent technology. Newton had this amazing OS where you could turn it on or off at any moment and preserve state. All data was available to all apps. And with that technology -- and probably some other choices-- and a great processor at the time (relative to Palm) it was useless because it was so slow. A handheld device cannot ever be slow. Palm did very little well and survived up until smart phones.
- jhbadger 4y agoAnd Palm's "Graffiti" actually existed as a software package for the Newton by Palm before the Palm Pilot! It was popular in the early days of the Newton because the handwriting recognition in the first versions of the Newton OS were pretty bad (Remember Doonesbury's "Egg Freckles" comic, or The Simpsons' "Eat up Martha" when the bullies were trying to write "Beat up Martin"?)
- CharlesW 4y ago> Startup is a really good book. A Google search is surprisingly unhelpful at a finding the book you mean. Who is the author?
- chongli 4y ago
- im_down_w_otp 4y agoI use my MessagePad 2100 regularly. It's a really wonderful device waaaaaaaaay ahead of its time. I am considering getting a reMarkable to use as my "daily driver" replacement, and dedicating the Newton to my home office museum.
- NoahKAndrews 4y agoI'd also recommend considering Supernote
- criddell 4y ago“Can I use my Newton as a web server?” Really? That’s a frequently asked question?
- kwhitefoot 4y agoI doubt that any question related to the Apple Newton would be frequently asked! Assuming that Apple Newton is what it is about, the FAQ doesn't seem to explain.
- gurchik 4y agoSimilar to Doom, there is a group of people who try to get web servers running on unconventional hardware. There is an HTTP server for the Nintendo 3DS for example: https://github.com/dimaguy/3ds-httpd https://github.com/dimaguy/3ds-httpd
- layer8 4y agoThe F in FAQ isn’t to be taken at face value: […] text consisting of questions and their answers may thus be called a FAQ regardless of whether the questions are actually frequently asked. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ]
- Koala_ice 4y agoYes. I wrote the web server for it back in 1998. It was actually pretty cool since we also integrated a public "wall", calendar and contacts sharing, instant messaging, and even a federated discovery protocol for other Newton servers.
- getoffmyyawn 4y agoI had an eMate and it was (and still is - if you replace the battery pack) an exceptional device for taking notes and focused distraction free writing. What makes it great for these tasks is that it wakes from sleep instantly and puts you right back where you were in your document as fast as you can open it. Saving is automatic. You just open it up, type some stuff, and close it again. It's light, rugged, and the battery lasts all day. What's not great anymore is that it's non-trivial to transfer your writings to a modern system. However, it is still possible.
- hungryforcodes 4y agoKind of like the Freewrite. So there is definitely still a market for these devices today.... (I had an eMate 300 and loved it btw, along with the replaceable batteries)
- bdcravens 4y agoLooking through the list of 3rd party implementations, I came across the Digital Ocean devices (not the cloud provider; the original company was defunct by the late 1990s) - the Newton came out just a few years before I really started getting into tech (I was a poor high school kid at the time), so not terribly familiar with a lot of companies in that space. I do remember seeing the Newton being used in the Steven Seagal movie, Under Siege 2, which came out in 1995. https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Digital_Ocean_Tarpon https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/Digital_Ocean_Tarpon