[HN Gopher] Remembering Apple's Newton, 30 years on
___________________________________________________________________
Remembering Apple's Newton, 30 years on
Author : kergonath
Score : 230 points
Date : 2022-05-30 11:53 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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
| SeanLuke wrote:
| 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.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| > I built a Sherlock clone
|
| Was "Sherlocked" a term coined yet when you did this? Had Apple
| started getting inspiration from 3rd party developers yet?
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| cmrdporcupine wrote:
| 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.
| yobananaboy wrote:
| 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
| lostgame wrote:
| I'm legit interested - I'm in Canada, as well - I've always
| wanted one.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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.
| WoodenChair wrote:
| > I built a Sherlock clone for the Newton (which 15 years later
| landed me in the middle of the Apple vs. Samsung patent
| lawsuit).
|
| Please, tell us more.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Around 1998 I built an open source application on the Newton
| called Hemlock which loaded, parsed, and used Sherlock search
| templates to grab data from internet sites just like Sherlock
| did. Sherlock can either search from the internet or can
| search from files. The Newton didn't have a filesystem: it
| had a searchable database system. One of the things I was
| working on, and proposed on Usenet, was to search both the
| internet and the Newton database system in one shot, though I
| eventually didn't do it as the Newton already had a great
| search tool for the database system built in.
|
| About 15 years later I walked into my lab and got served with
| a subpoena by Samsung's legal team for deposition.
| Everybody's lawyers suddenly wanted to talk to me. They dug
| through my postings, my software, old files on my laptop,
| even the old Newtons in my office. Between Apple, Samsung,
| and the very helpful SFLC legal team, the whole thing was
| like being dropped into a tank of very nice sharks.
|
| One of the patents Apple was going after Samsung for was
| 8,086,604, the "604" patent. Hemlock, and my proposals on the
| Usenet for improving it, predated this patent by quite a bit
| and easily covered most of its claims. Eventually Samsung
| decided to argue that they didn't violate the patent, rather
| than argue that it was invalid. That turned out to be the
| right decision (they won). But had they gone the invalidation
| route, I'd likely have found myself on the stand in SF. That
| patent is still live, and my prior art is still ready to
| invalidate it.
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| > SeanLuke
|
| That name rang a bell so I had to look you up. I just have
| to say, I love your book!
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Thank you. Wait, which one?
| alfiedotwtf wrote:
| Essentials of Metaheuristics. That was one of my first
| intros to optimisation and opened up my eyes to the
| field!
| stardek wrote:
| After the other user mentioned your name I thought it
| sounded familiar too so I looked you up. I used MASON
| quite a bit in the past, thanks for all your work on
| that!
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > That patent is still live, and my prior art is still
| ready to invalidate it.
|
| I wonder how many other invalid patents are out there. It
| boggles my mind that the patent office will grant anyone a
| patent without even checking for prior art.
| pkaye wrote:
| That is why I think every patent submittal should come
| with a bounty to be paid to anyone who identifies prior
| art to invalidate it. The bounty is setup using a bond or
| something similar. If no prior art is identified within a
| reasonable time (say 2 years), the bond is reverted back
| to the submitter.
| skavi wrote:
| It took a team of very expensive lawyers to find that
| prior art on some old forum. I don't think the patent
| office has those kinds of resources for each application.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Did a casino game for the Newton.
|
| Maybe the most interesting/memorable part of my brief foray
| into the Newton was being invited to the Apple Campus and
| meeting other engineers (I was still so young then). We were
| each paired with a weird development Newton that was some kind
| of PCB bento.
|
| It was cool to see how the sausage is made (or at least what
| dev prototypes can look like).
|
| I remember too the one engineer I chatted with in the evening
| that told me, "You could work here." That really surprised me
| -- I thought you had to have a PhD or something to work for
| Apple.
|
| (Not too many years later, I would in fact get a job at Apple.)
| irrational wrote:
| Hmm, this reminds me that I have a Newton... somewhere. The last
| time I booted it up it still worked.
| Vitaly_C wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _"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.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Bill Gates (and thus contemporary Microsoft) was _obsessed_
| with "pen computing", so your perception was completely
| accurate.
| adastra22 wrote:
| They don't teach cursive anymore.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _They don't teach cursive anymore._
|
| Depends on the school.
|
| Low-end public school? Probably not. But private schools, and
| my nephew's Catholic school do.
|
| I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive. Are
| people who don't learn cursive not able to read the first
| line of a California license plate, or locate a Walgreen's
| pharmacy?
| troutwine wrote:
| > I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive.
| Are people who don't learn cursive not able to read the
| first line of a California license plate, or locate a
| Walgreen's pharmacy?
|
| It's sort of an outdated mode of writing that survived due
| to inertia. Cursive is super, super useful when your
| writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the
| writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause
| your writing tool to leak against the medium. Theoretically
| it's also faster to write than block characters, but the
| speed differences appear to be minimal for short-duration
| writing with the benefit of uniformity of block characters
| _outside_ of cultures that stress uniformity of cursive
| lettering. Worth pointing out that the examples you give
| here are not especially stylized letters and that
| Walgreens, outside of its red cursive letter logo,
| generally prefers a sans-serif block lettering. That said,
| I'm sure for someone not familiar with cursive lettering
| the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable, but most
| humans tolerate unreadable characters pretty well when
| scanning words we already know.
|
| The slow death of cursive is indicative of the change in
| medium: most people write to one another by computer, or on
| mechanically printed paper. It's a similar process by which
| we started adding vowels, spaces and punctuation: the
| constraints of the medium or its tools improved with time.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool
| can 't withstand repeat impacts against the writing
| medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause your
| writing tool to leak against the medium._
|
| Cursive is unrelated to quills and ink. Quills and ink
| existed for a thousand years before cursive was invented.
|
| Cursive exists to relive the strain of writing a lot.
| Printing is much harder on the hands that cursive. If
| cursive hurts when you write, you're doing it wrong.
| You're supposed to hold the implement very loosely and
| gently, not like you're holding on for dear life.
|
| _the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable_
|
| The cursive "r" is an "r" with a bit on the right linking
| to the next letter.
|
| The cursive "s" is an "s" with a bit on the left linking
| it to the previous letter.
|
| The forms have evolved over the centuries, but they're
| still there. Even the weird capital F makes sense if you
| write it enough times. It's an "F" made without lifting
| the pen.
|
| I went to public school early in life, and so didn't
| learn cursive. When I joined a private school, everyone
| was already writing cursive, and I had to catch up. It
| took me maybe three weeks. I remember getting g and q was
| hard for me. But people are able to learn new things
| every day.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| I don't think cursive's ergonomic claims hold for
| lefties, as we have to push the pen instead of smoothly
| pulling it along. Perhaps if I were writing Arabic, my
| opinion would be different.
| diablerouge wrote:
| I'm a lefty and have found cursive very comfortable (and
| I'm also both an underwriter and an overwriter.) Perhaps
| if you're a sidewriter you get the worse experience of
| pushing a pen.
|
| I definitely find writing a nicer experience with a
| pencil, a fountain pen, or a felt-tipped pen - ballpoints
| require too much pressure to be comfortable.
| anon2020dot00 wrote:
| As a lefty side-writer, I find no challenge with using
| cursive. Writing in print is also pushing most of the
| time so I don't understand the claim that lefties has to
| push more.
| troutwine wrote:
| > But people are able to learn new things every day.
|
| I don't think anyone suggested otherwise?
|
| I think the conversation might be slightly hung up on the
| specific example of a quill (reed stylus, sharpened bird
| bone, charcoal stick, brush all encourage a flowing
| character), nor is the only reason to prefer cursive
| writing to relieve hand strain, although that's true for
| informal long-form and for some hands and for some
| alphabets. My general point here is that the medium of
| writing tends to dictate the common forms of writing and
| with the common medium now being mechanical -- computer,
| printer etc -- we're seeing a shift in how people form
| their characters, if they even form them by hand at all.
| spc476 wrote:
| Modern pens are horrible to write with, you have to press
| down on the paper to get the ink out, and doing so causes
| the fingers (or at least, my fingers) to cramp up. I
| switched to a fountain pen over a year ago, and the
| difference is night to day. No longer do I have to press
| down on the paper---the ink just flows out of the pen
| with no pressure required, and it's now a pleasure to
| write cursive. I also think my handwriting improved just
| using a fountain pen.
| felipemnoa wrote:
| >>Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool
| can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium
|
| In my experience it is much more comfortable to write
| cursive. You do not have to lift the pen for every single
| letter. It is quite annoying to have to do that, quite
| honestly. My hand feels much more happier to be able to
| just follow a flow.
|
| I also do not understand the hate, it is much more
| comfortable. It is like hating touch typing. Sure, you
| can type with two fingers but not very efficiently.
|
| To each their own I guess.
| troutwine wrote:
| Oh yeah, for sure. The hand is certainly part of 'the
| tool' and variation there will make different approaches
| to forming characters comfortable for different people.
| My own hand is a small block with occasional tails
| between letters which I find comfortable to write in but
| is very idiosyncratic. I was taught to primarily write in
| cursive as a child and then re-taught to write in
| architectural block as a young adult, which I'm sure has
| something to do with it.
| kalleboo wrote:
| > _I also do not understand the hate, it is much more
| comfortable_
|
| The hate stems from when we were taught it (poorly) in
| elementary school, where it was slower, physically
| painful and the result was illegible.
|
| Now I go weeks between writing anything physically at all
| (and even most of that is Kanji now as I moved to Japan)
| so learning a new way of writing seems pointless
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Those claims are not true at all as a southpaw. I was
| pushing the pencil instead of smoothly pulling it. As
| soon as my teachers stopped requiring cursive and only
| cared that we wrote with whatever handwriting was most
| legible, I dropped it.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Was at a private catholic school in Australia and they
| dropped cursive in around 2012.
| nsonha wrote:
| > I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive
|
| Isn't the whole point to handwrite faster, which people
| don't even do anymore? I for one didn't write fast in
| cursive so even that's not true.
|
| On the other hand it's harder to read, harder to OCR.
|
| Given text is read way more than it is written, the choice
| is clear.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| I've actually found my cursive to be _much_ more reliable
| to OCR. I think it's because I explicitly learned cursive
| when I picked up fountain pens as an adult, as a result
| my letter forms are consistent. Maybe not "correct", but
| consistent.
|
| I even went through a period where I used the "long s" in
| my script, and I was able to get that to OCR just fine
| after some training.
| nsonha wrote:
| may have something to do with cursive letters having more
| "features". I only assume it's harder to OCR but that
| needs proof. I think it's safe to say that reading
| cursive is slower for humans.
| ineedasername wrote:
| My kids all learned cursive in school. But maybe it varies by
| country and region of the country. I'm in the US, east coast.
| Public school in a mix of blue & white collar-- more blue
| collar though-- in a small city that's a suburb to a large
| city.
| dsr_ wrote:
| 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.
| zinckiwi wrote:
| I used Palm Pilots in college and got very proficient with
| Graffiti, to the extent that it became a pseudo-shorthand
| for me when taking pen-and-paper notes in class.
|
| Of course, I also had a Newton MP2000 (later upgraded to
| 2100) that I used in labs to input data to the native
| spreadsheet program, imported the resulting graphs into the
| native word processor for the writeup, and stopped by on
| the way back to the dorm to print it out wirelessly, all
| before anyone else sat down at their computers. That felt
| like _magic_.
| valley_guy_12 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| "autocorrect fails" :D
| wmf wrote:
| I was a Newton fanboy and Graffiti hater... and then I
| actually tried Graffiti and realized it's so much better.
| It's a powerful lesson about how technical superiority
| isn't everything.
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| Personally, the one feature from PDAs that I miss from modern
| smartphones is the Graffiti system of text input.
| __d wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It would have been a crash prone buggy piece of shit like
| it was on every other platform?
| musicale wrote:
| I see not much has changed in terms of the web, web
| browsers, and web apps.
| scarface74 wrote:
| No, modern browsers aren't crash prone. They are just
| memory hogging, battery killing monstrosities - except
| for Safari.
| musicale wrote:
| 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.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| You really need to consider Safari instead if that's how
| bad it is with Chrome etc.
| scarface74 wrote:
| 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.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| In the bad old days, you would have to restart your
| computer as well. I remember Netscape frequently crashing
| back in the day and that bomb icon from Mac OS System 7.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| > 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.
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| I own a "dummy" Newton which was used in store displays. A fun
| artifact from that time.
| https://twitter.com/ridiculous_fish/status/15204899835549818...
| kabdib wrote:
| 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.
| leephillips wrote:
| Surely an underrated device. They were essential when, for
| example, you were under siege and needed to send a fax from a
| train.
| zerop wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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-st...
| goto11 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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)
| pjmlp wrote:
| Components are everywhere on Windows, Android IPC, XPC on
| macOS/iDevices, DBUS, gRPC, and plenty of other RPC
| reboots
| NaOH wrote:
| Relatedly, there's Steve Jobs's thoughtful yet off-the-cuff
| response when questioned at the 1997 Worldwide Developer
| Conference about Apple killing OpenDoc.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o
| xenadu02 wrote:
| 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.
| nsonha wrote:
| what was the OCR algorithm in this?
| lproven wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| fredoralive wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| AlanYx wrote:
| 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.
| 0898 wrote:
| 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-adamt...
| ineedasername wrote:
| I have horrible handwriting, and remember that it's handwriting
| recognition-- for the time- was extremely good.
| 8bitsrule wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| _Not feeling old yet??_
|
| It's time for the Millennials to start scheduling their
| colonoscopies.
|
| Welcome to old age!
| whartung wrote:
| 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.
| paulpauper wrote:
| The newton sucked. No offence but it was the size of a large
| book, washed out green and grey screen, etc.
| __d wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| the palm was a lot smaller and cheaper
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| __d wrote:
| 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.
| linsomniac wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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_Comput...
| linsomniac wrote:
| 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 :-)
| noizejoy wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| rbanffy wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| hammycheesy wrote:
| I believe you are thinking of WinFS
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS
| rbanffy wrote:
| They tried to deliver that idea since the early 90's.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And they partially did with ReFS, only available in the
| server SKUs though.
| rbanffy wrote:
| It was kind of underwhelming.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Longhorn: https://www.theregister.com/2003/05/13/microsoft_si
| delines_l...
| anthk wrote:
| Palm used that too.
| gumby wrote:
| By the way it was similar to the memory design of Multics back
| in the early 1960s, (though Multics' final implementation was
| slightly different)
| kergonath wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It was a nice feature in 1997 in Mac OS 8.0 too.
|
| http://preserve.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.14/14.01/Ja.
| ..
| sgerenser wrote:
| 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=...
| jjkaczor wrote:
| 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.
| SulphurSmell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| There's a patch for the date issue:
| http://40hz.org/Pages/newton/hacking/newton-year-2010-proble...
| SulphurSmell wrote:
| Well isn't that great! Have to look at this. Thanks!!
| EricE wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > something that only recently Apple has brought back
|
| In what form? Just curious.
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| I mean, this product epitomized "ahead of its time", no?
| Swannie wrote:
| I badly wanted a Newton. Or a Psion3. Big time nostalgia.
| alwillis wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]: http://cf.psl.msu.edu/hallofame.htm
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Fun fact. In addition to being the chief proponent behind
| genetic programming, John had the patent on lottery scratch-off
| tickets.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| johndoe0815 wrote:
| Egg freckles! :)
| fzzzy wrote:
| Eat up martha
| __d wrote:
| Tried the easter egg in the Einstein emulator?
|
| https://eeggs.com/items/538.html
| giantrobot wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| docfort wrote:
| 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-ap....
|
| In 1996, money to keep things going was important:
| 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.
| billti wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| One wonders what the world would look like if AT&T could
| design a processor worth a damn.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| Most of the stuff below the UI layer was the same.
|
| One thing that changed was IOKit, rewritten in C++, but
| there actually wasn't a good reason for that and I think
| everyone agrees sticking to ObjC would've been better...
| lproven wrote:
| ISTM that everyone misses a vitally important key part of
| NeXT.
|
| Yes, there was the OS, but there were other OSes, notably
| BeOS, and NeXTstep/OpenStep ran on other OSes, notably
| Solaris.
|
| Yes, there was Steve Jobs.
|
| But NeXT had a core thing that nobody else did: the state-
| of-the-art development tools.
|
| Apple _needed_ to get Mac developers on-board with the new
| OS. Sun had a great OS. Be had a great OS. Apple itself had
| A /UX. OSes abounded; there was lots of choice. Jobs'
| vision was very important.
|
| But without the NeXT developer tools, notably Interface
| Builder and Objective-C, the deal would not have saved
| Apple.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yet they weren't sure the Mac community was that keen
| into Objective-C, hence the Java Cocoa bridge as plan B.
| msh wrote:
| If a deal makes you the most valuable company in the world,
| how can that deal be overpriced?
| jdkee wrote:
| "Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did
| overpay for NeXT at the time."
|
| Not if you view the transaction as a package deal.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| You know how YC investors pick teams, not products? Apple
| at the time bought a team, not the technology. They also
| bought credibility by bringing a founder back on-board.
|
| Apple's biggest problem at the time was bad management,
| followed by credibility.
|
| They solved both problems and got some technology (ObjC,
| what would become Darwin, etc) as a free bonus.
|
| The complete NeXT takeover of management made it more like
| a reverse acquisition in any case and the results speak for
| themselves.
| wrs wrote:
| 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/
|
| Includes help enabling nice things like WiFi, modern Flash
| memory, dates after 2010...
| gumby wrote:
| > ...the size of a folded A4 sheet of paper...
|
| In other words, the size of an A5 sheet of paper. C'mon Ars!
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| spinaltap wrote:
| Is this the "OpenDoc" thing that Steve Jobs trashed about in the
| famous video?
| protomyth wrote:
| No, that was a framework on the Mac.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| newman314 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| http://newtonfaq.com/ will get you going.
| __d wrote:
| Nice to see you here, wrs
| protomyth wrote:
| 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.
| Ishmaeli wrote:
| 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.
| sircastor wrote:
| 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.
| agiacalone wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| A small pedantipoint, the big unveilings started years before
| that
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2B-XwPjn9YY
| quadcore wrote:
| With a Vangelis tune s'il vous plait.
| pgib wrote:
| 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.
| mattkevan wrote:
| I bought an eMate on a whim about 20 years ago and absolutely
| love it. I do a similar thing and have a play once in a while.
| Occasionally I'll use it as a distraction-free writing device,
| but the batteries need replacing for it to be truly useful.
| Will get round to it one of these days.
|
| I can't help but think it would make a really good Raspberry Pi
| casemod, but it feels like sacrilege to gut a working device.
|
| Incidentally, if anyone has any broken eMates I'd be
| interested...
| musicale wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Jony was ID director by WWDC 97
|
| https://bslabs.net/2018/05/28/wwdc-1997-videos/#500
| musicale wrote:
| Ah, so that would place the eMate 300 during the Jony Ive
| era, making my edit unnecessary.
|
| I'd still like to hear more about Thomas Meyerhoffer
| though.
| wanderingstan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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).
| sswaner wrote:
| 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.
| JeremyReimer wrote:
| 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.
| wrs wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Walter, thanks for NewtonScript! It is still one of my
| favourite languages.
|
| Dual inheritance for the win... _proto/_parent
| hajile wrote:
| 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
| mepian wrote:
| >OpenNewton is still a thing if you're interested.
|
| Did you mean Open Dylan?
| hajile wrote:
| Yes. I wonder how I missed that, but then again, I see the
| stuff that's made it into a PR of mine on occasion and I
| guess I shouldn't wonder....
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| Early Dylan owed more to Common Lisp than to Scheme,
| especially in its object system. It removed some of the more
| complicated CLOS mechanisms (e.g. :before, :after, and
| :around methods) but it still "felt" a lot like Common Lisp
| before its syntax was de-parenthesized.
|
| The first Dylan compiler was written at Apple Cambridge
| [Massachusetts] Laboratories in Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL)
| which was itself an Apple Product. Later, Apple decided they
| didn't really want Dylan after all so they sold the Cambridge
| lab, later renamed Digitool. The MCL product lives on today
| as Clozure Common Lisp (CCL).
|
| The transition from MCL to CCL is a dramatic story unto
| itself. I should probably write down what I remember about it
| someday.
| hajile wrote:
| I played around with Dylan around a decade ago. Maybe my
| Scheme comparison comes more from it having just one
| namespace (lisp-1) rather than the more functional aspects
| of Scheme. MOP is definitely from CL though.
| __d wrote:
| I'd love to hear the MCL to CCL story, if you do get around
| to it.
| wrs wrote:
| For the record, NewtonScript wasn't inspired by Dylan. I did
| work on Dylan, but only in the early stages when it had
| normal Lisp syntax. The syntax inspiration for NewtonScript
| was Pascal.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks man. I never owned a Newton but the device looks
| interesting. I figured Apple learned a lot from it to reach the
| pads.
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| 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
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Related: (others?)
|
| _The Newton Application Architecture (1994) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899 - Feb 2020 (37
| comments)
|
| _Newton Storage History (2007)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13805096 - March 2017 (11
| comments)
|
| _Why Steve Jobs Killed the Newton_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11486183 - April 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Soup (Apple) - the Newton storage system_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11079874 - Feb 2016 (1
| comment)
|
| _Why I Carry a Newton_ -
| 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 - Aug 2015 (6
| comments)
|
| _A Guide to the Apple Newton_ -
| 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 - May 2015 (11
| comments)
|
| _Patching the Newton_ -
| 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 - May 2014
| (19 comments)
|
| _Steve Wozniak on Newton, Tesla, and the original Macintosh_ -
| 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 - May 2013 (1
| comment)
|
| _Newton OS running on an iPad_ -
| 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 - May 2010 (4
| comments)
|
| _The iPad, the Newton, & the "Of Course" Model of Innovation
| Diffusion_ - 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 - Sept 2009 (1
| comment)
|
| _Mikel Evins about the Lisp-based Newton OS._ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=320646 - Oct 2008 (5
| comments)
| davidferguson wrote:
| 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!
| stakkur wrote:
| 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.
| donarb wrote:
| 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.
| EB-Barrington wrote:
| "Eat Up Martha"
| cmiller1 wrote:
| 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.
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