I joined Newton just as the transition from the Dylan stuff was happening. In the space of about a week the group moved from Dylan to "We're going to get this d

I joined Newton just as the transition from the Dylan stuff was happening. In the space of about a week the group moved from Dylan to "We're going to get this done now, in a small form factor [called Junior], really fast and in C++". I think the switch was due to resource constraints (512K of RAM was a big deal in a handheld product) as well as a sense that they needed to get real and ship something. The impetus may have been a small group of people (e.g., Capps and Walter and some other heavies) having a Serious Talk while at a trade show in June of 1992, but obviously management must have been involved, too. Anyway, I joined the group the week a bunch of people were out of town, and when they came back everything was different. There were a number of sad-faced LISP hackers roaming the halls, clutching copies of the C++ Annotated Reference Manual. The ARM (the book, not the CPU) must have been hell for them. From that point on the Dylan stuff was pretty much sidelined. The "Senior" product (a tablet) was kept alive for quite some time, but the group's focus was almost 100% on Junior. There were occasional releases of Dylan (and I got a copy of the book), but little true interest. Paul Mercer went an extra step further in reducing risk and complexity; he proposed ditching the microkernel in favor of a relatively simple a 68K-based handheld running an event loop and some apps, and he even got a lot of it working in a demo on some prototype hardware he whipped up. This was a little too radical, since there would have been no handwriting recognition, and he wound up leaving (and later founded Pixo, which was contracted to do the first UI for the iPod and was eventually bought by Apple). I'll note that what Paul proposed is essentially what the Palm Pilot did, with a limited character-by-character recognition interface that actually worked pretty well.