[HN Gopher] Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
___________________________________________________________________
Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
Author : macstainless
Score : 22 points
Date : 2022-08-30 20:47 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (timemachiner.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (timemachiner.io)
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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)
| mikestew wrote:
| 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.
| QuarterRoy wrote:
| 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.
| abruzzi wrote:
| 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.)
| mikestew wrote:
| 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.
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| 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.
| jedc wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan....
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899
| SeanLuke wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yeah, that's what Walter Smith says:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22400696
| EB-Barrington wrote:
| Eat up Martha
|
| (one of the 200,000 former Newton owners here)
| rcarmo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| jmbwell wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Games, stream video content, entertain young children at
| restaurants and on planes, edit/produce content for social
| media, ...
| amysox wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > (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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-30 23:00 UTC)