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Paul Guyot Releases ATA driver for NewtonOS
Dorian Gray writes "For a long time everyone, including Apple, said it couldn't be
done...mainly because NOS linear soup storage is so completely unlike conventional filesystems. But Newton users have refused to let the platform die, no matter how the manufacturer mis-managed (or ultimately killed) it."
Three Cheers for Paul's achievement. As the prepubescent third of the SlashDot readership hasn't realized yet, getting an ATA driver on the Newton is really an amazing feat.
First things first: I'm (Sean Luke) not just a Newton user, I'm a Newton developer. I'm the person little by little working on the MP3 player for the Newton, along with Paul Guyot and a few other diehards. :-) I'm also the author of (in my opinion) the second coolest thing to come out on the Newton recently since Paul's ATA driver, namely Waba (Java) for the Newton. I've also written Hemlock (a Sherlock-compatible internet search system for the Newton) and a bunch of chinese programs and other fun stuff.
Okay, so I'm a diehard, but the only reason I write Newton programs is, ultimately, for me. They're all open source. If other people find them useful, more power to 'em. And it's fun and relaxing -- the Newton's development environment is quite nice, especially compared to the Hideousness that is developing on Palms or WinCE boxes, ugh!
The Newton I use is a MessagePad 2000, the oldest Newton model that really, truly is still superior to pretty much anything out there. Which disturbs me. And the Ebay market has reacted accordingly -- the MP2K was introduced 6 years ago at $1100, and is still worth about $400 used. Newtons hold their value like no other computer I have ever seen. Which is a pain in the butt for me because I'd like to buy a Newton MessagePad 2100 to do some further development on, but they're still in the $700 range. :-(
The MP2K was an astounding machine for its time -- it's still an impressive machine. It has a 480x320 16-bit grayscale screen, a 162 MHZ StrongArm processor (and this was back in '94!), 1 Meg of static RAM, and 4 megs of internal Flash RAM for archival storage. It has a battery life easily as good as a Palm Pilot. It's got two PCMCIA card slots, presently filled with a 16-meg linear Flash RAM card and an AmbiCom 10Base-T Ethernet card. I also have a modem card.
Early Newtons suffered because Apple rushed them out the door before ParaGraph International (the makers of Apple's first handwriting system) had handwriting working very well at all. ParaGraph never really did much better, and eventually migrated to WinCE. This first handwriting system was bad enough that Palm Computing was born through selling Graffiti, an alternative input method for the Newton. In NewtOS 2.0 (circa 1993) Apple supplemented Paragraph's word-by-word recognition system with Rosetta, a letter-by-letter recognition system developed internally at Apple. Perfected in NewtOS 2.1, Rosetta is, bar none, the best handwriting system available for any PDA in existence. If you think Microsoft's recent attempts are any match, you haven't actually tried a Newton (OS 2.1) machine. It really is that good.
Newtons are very sophisticated little beasts, able to fax, print to inkjets or postscript, beam, email, ftp, surf the web, create and display fully-formatted ebooks (the Newton pioneered the notion), write in aribitrary foreign languages (Newtons were the first devices to use Unicode, which is used throughout the device). Equipped with Apple's MacInTalk voice synthesis, they can speak text in different voices. They can record and play long chunks of sound.
For as small a user community as the Newton community was, there was a very large number of developers, partially due to Apple's exceptional NewtonScript development environment (NewtonScript is a proto-based OOP language rather similar to Self. As such, Newtons have an amazing array of stuff available for them for free now. Besides the typical notepad-datebook-namecards-etc., Newtons sport web browsers, web servers (!), terminal emulators, word processors, spreadsheets, drawing programs, mod players, astronomy software, on-the Newton development software (although most Newton development is done on Macs or PCs, the Newton comes with a built-in compiler), and of course games, including a great chess program which beats the snot out of ones on other PDA platforms.
Why did the Newton never really take off? Because it was WAY ahead of its time, and because Apple hadn't figured out the price point. Apple was selling highly sophisticated Newtons for $800-1000, when it should have been stripping them of features and selling them at $300. It took Palm to finally realize that what people wanted was a glorified day planner that you could put in your pocket, for $300, and to heck with powerful features. The result: the Palm Pilot, a terribly primitive device with a grotesque UI, but it cost the right amount, had a great battery life, and fit in your pocket. And more power to 'em! Palm got the market right. It's taken Microsoft years to realize the same thing.
Just before Steve Jobs axed the Newton, the product was finally making a profit and Apple was preparing to spin off the company into a separate firm, Newton Inc. It had taken years, but the Newton was finally making money, and Apple was preparing a tiny one to compete head-on with the Palm Pilot. Why did the whole thing get Steved? Former Apple employees point to the fact that the Newton was the brainchild of John Sculley, the man who ousted Steve in the first place.
Oh, well.
I know about eight people who still use Newton 2000 series machines on a day to day basis. I recently dug out my old mothballed MP2000, after I broke the screen on yet another Palm OS unit.
It's been a funny and interesting experience, because the damn thing is so eminently more *usable* than ANYTHING on the market right now including any Palm unit (they're different kinds of machines, though) and including the iPaq. I had forgotten.
Things you routinely can do on a Newton--jot down a quick "ink" note and fax it from the airport between planes, take *real* notes in a meeting on its half-VGA sized screen, read the latest issue of Slate (converted to NewtonBook) while eating lunch, look up a phone number, download a usenet newsgroup to read on the plane, track a package with your cellular modem, actually convert print handwriting to text and *work*--these things as a combination still elude the most modern PDA-type devices. Palms are great for looking up numbers, and WinCE is not really great at anything but it *can* do a lot of this stuff if you really need to. Newton can do it all easily, quickly, and without requiring the user's brain to even really engage in the task of making it work.
Palm units just do not have the horsepower to do it all. 16Mhz and a tiny display. The current crop of WinCE machines can do some of this stuff, now that they also use StrongARM processors, but they remain significantly more cumbersome to use.
The Newton is sort of a sad story--only the MessagePad 2100, the very last of the species, was the first Newton device that lived up to the Newton's promise, after the line's laughable start.
But for a surprising number of people (those who don't really need good desktop synchronization), these last Newtons still are more *useful* than anything currently available.
If there were a reasonable desktop companion app for the Newton, I would probably keep on using it for a long time, maybe even until 2010--when the Newton's "2.01K" date problem kicks in and they really become obsolete. (OK, probably not that long.)