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Newton Won't Die
Superman writes "Wired just published an article about the continuing popularity of the Apple Newton MessagePad, with props to Mad Max (a Newton MP3 Player), the new ATA driver, and Newton's 802.11 capabilities. Definitely an interesting read, and more proof that just because technology may be a little bit older, doesn't mean it's not useful." I still have my MP2000, and still think it has the best UI around. I keep meaning to convert it into a wireless MP3 player. I am currently hoping for Apple to make an iPod with AirPort and Rendezvous, though.
Jobs wasn't there when the Newton came out, and he's the one who ended Newton when he came in as iCEO in the late 90s.
I know you're a troll, but you're a stupid troll.
Actually Jobs wasn't a driving force behind the Newton.
John Scully championed the early PDA as the CEO of Apple during its introduction. Michael Tchao, Steve Capps, and Walter Smith were among the team members who worked with the OS and Stepan Pachikov developed the cursive recognition technology know then as Calligrapher.
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
If we're talking about the 2x00, it displays 16 levels of grey.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
The HWR system then known as CalliGrapher is still known as CalliGrapher today, also under the name Microsoft Transcriber on PocketPC and PenOffice on desktop Windoze. At Newton OS 2, Apple dumped the then fairly buggy CalliGrapher, and used their own recognizers that were better, and now found in OS X as Inkwell. CalliGrapher has shaped up in years since, and is pretty decent on PocketPC. CG6 on PocketPC is nowhere near as integrated as Newton HWR was on the Newton OS 2.x, but it beats using a character recognizer any day of the week. :)
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Yes, you can. There's a version of the Newton Connection Kit for Windows--I have it, but I've never used it.
Before the Newton was Steved, Apple kept track of whether Newton buyers had Macs or PCs... as I recall, 40-50% were PC users.
Why?
- A PDA needs a good os, good applications AND a good physical shape much more than a PC. Apple is hands-down the best at this. (For a PC, expandability is often very important. Apple isn't so hot at this IMO.)
- .Mac and the digital hub are crying out for way to TAKE your information with you. How awkward did Palms V5 look in the demonstration unvailing
.Mac
- A PDA is (was) a new platform and doesn't (didn't anyway) need the existing software so much. It was a level playing field that Apple had a natural gift at competing on.
- It's F**ing hardware. I thought you ran a hardware company Jobs!
;-)
Frankly I can't come up with a many good reasons not to.- The market already has fantastic products is highly competitive. Palm might have been, but it looks aging. Win CE? It's microsoft on try 3 and the market is still Palms. There is room here
- Afraid of a second failure
- Waiting for the next BIG thing. Bluetooth? Cheaper color screens? G5s...
Ok so everyone else here probably just made this list, but it was fun speculating!Thanks for moding me redundant! It was a pleasure
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
I've been a longtime computer nerd and a Mac user for the last 3 years. I used to BBS a lot, and have been to a goodly amount of runs and meets, meeting up with people I've known over the ether.
In the Mac people I've known, a lot of them tend to have much less full of the anti-social nerd in them than do the Windows and Linux communities. The Mac tends to draw people that are more "hip." They tend to be people with a real life and real jobs (often not computer related) that happen to really love their Mac, whereas a lot of Windows and Linux geeks moreso tend to be people that seem to have lost sight of anything other than getting their computer to crash once less a week, or in compiling some package that no one else has, so they can namedrop later in IRC.
A lot of Mac users are these artist types. They are people who love the Mac because it does what they want, as a tool, and because they are more emotionally-driven people, who value aspects of the Mac hardware and the Mac OS that are lost on people with no artistic sense.
That said, I'm completely outside these types. I'm far from hip, and definately not interested in being it. I did ramble off many stereotypes, and I've known all kinds- you just definately do see more of these artsy hipster types in the Mac community than in the PC world.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
We have a couple Newtons here in our company, and my brother recently resurrected his from the shelf. The handwriting recognition is out of this world. How it recognizes print or cursive is just amazing. Text to speech was actually useful (and used, might I add). The database for contacts was extensible. The cross references between messages/notes/contacts, etc. was very fast and intuitive.
The only issue we had with it was the synchronization capabilities. Apparently, it syncs quite well with Mac apps; however, that's one thing we don't have here.
Hell, we were just talking about this yesterday -- we wish they'd bring it back. The Newton platform is really nice. To me, its somewhere between Palm OS and CE (for those that wish to compare).
AFAIK the Ipaq runs on a Pentium III 400, with 64 megs of RAM.
You don't seem to Know too far, then. Read your own link.
Its a 400mhz Xscale, which is an ARM based chip, in the same family as the Newton's oddly enough. You got the memory right, and the 400mhz Xscale surely is more powerful than many servers, but strangely its slower for many things, than the 200mhz SA-1110 it replaced. And XScale is only on the newer Ipaqs; the older ones use the Strong-Arm CPU, (as does the MP2000).
The older ARMs, like the one the original series Newtons had, was not Intel at all; Intel bought ARM some time ago.
First, nothing begins if not opening
No, Intel never bought ARM, they are still around and still own the rights to the ARM IA. However, the StrongARM CPU was not actually designed by ARM, but rather DEC, who licensed the instruction set from ARM. Actually, if memory serves, DEC designed the StrongARM somewhat at the impetus of Apple at the time the Newton was being developed. A few years later, DEC sued Intel over something completely unrelated: Intel had stolen part of the Alpha design and implemented it in their own chip. Intel basically conceded this, and they reached a settlement part of which included Intel buying much of DEC's semiconductor business, including the 2114x Tulip ethernet chipset, and the StrongARM. Intel basically ignored the StrongARM for a while during which time it became rather popular in embedded devices, and now they have renamed newer versions the "XScale" and started actually marketing them. Probably Intel would love to drop the chip and stop paying royalties to ARM, but their clients would just buy other ARM processors from other manufacturers, and they would not benefit at all.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
The Newton group actually thought about and did user testing on their interface, then published interface standards. Unlike most OSes
Sigh. I spend so much of my professional life dealing with poorly thought out languages/systems that I look back very fondly on the Newton.
Actually I still use two of them. One is in the kitchen - I use it to keep track of groceries I need. The other sits by my desktop machine for taking notes.
No electrons were harmed creating this post, though some may have been subjected to electrical and/or magnetic fields.
There have been multiple attempts to discuss licensing the Newton OS from Apple for the sake of open source but also for commercial purposes. Apple isn't interested in letting others have access to Newton technology, even if money is offered.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Yes, it can be connected to a PC via serial cable. Last I tried the Newton Connection Utilities (NCU), it was still working on Win2k.
Don't forget Apple fronted a good deal of the money for ARM to get started, and they still own millions of shares of ARM stock. They may not have influence in the company any more, but it'd wouldn't be crazy for them to hook up with ARM again, and it certainly wouldn't put them in a bad position. Intel fabs ARM, but they don't own the company. A PPC handheld may be possible some day, but a G4 PDA is totally out; way too hot.
This is where I get my recommended daily allowance of "Foot in Mouth."
Almost forgot-
Unlike the PalmOS and PocketPC, on the Newton you can program apps for the native API using the native language. The very same API and language you'd use if you were developing for Newton OS via a Mac or Windows host. Complete with an IDE and building GUIs, all on the Newton.
Yes, on PalmOS or PocketPC, you can program using various non-native environments, LispMe, Python, etc. There are similar options to this on the Newton, but neither the other "big players" can you do first-class development. I suppose you can program in assembler on the Palm OS and probably call native Palm OS API funcs, but that's hardly how you'd usually do it on the desktop.
I keep track of self-hosted PDA programming environments on this page.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
Close but not quite. By the time of NewtonOS 2.0 and 2.1 the Apple handwriting recognition technology known as "Rossetta" was awesome at recognizing printed writing and was rapidly improving at cursive but wasn't quite good enough early enough to entirely replace CalliGrapher. So they left a semi-decent version of Calligrapher in the ROM too. If you told the Newton you write mostly "printed, disconnected" text, you are using Rossetta. But if you have it configured to allow cursive recognition, you are using CalliGrapher.
(I was the SQA engineer for Newton's recognition group at the time.)
Side note: the original Newton's poor out-of -the-box HWR probably wasn't the fault of Paragraph's recognizer; it was mostly due to a bad preference setting and a memory issue. Simply turning off dictionary-only mode made the Original MessagePad work much better.
I play Nerd-Folk!
When I was at university in 95 a local Apple dealer was selling off the first gen Newts at a bargain price (they had two huge boxes of them from an auction). They were selling like hot-cakes, and despite being left-handed and with scrappy handwriting, I figured I would give it a try as I could always sell it on to another student at cost.
I'd tried dozens of PDAs over the years, and they'd all fallen by the wayside. The Newt's OS, however, was so well designed and intergrated that it made it a joy to use. The recognition on that device was about 80-90% on my scrawl, which was enough for it to be usable for entering names, addresses and the like.
On leaving university and earning some real money, I went and checked out all the latest PDAs - and concluded that none of them were a patch on the Newt in UI terms. So I bought myself a 2100.
The UI in the later Newts is so well thought out that I still haven't found anything to compare (as a PDA rather than as a portable media player, which seems to be the current trend). The synching software sucks, but the Newton OS is rock solid, and has never lost a single byte of data.
Every morning my Newt wakes up at 6:30 and a piercing alarm goes off. I hit the power switch and it snoozes. At 6:40 it silently wakes up and picks up my emails and newsgroups before going back to sleep. At 7:00 the alarm clock snooze times out and it wakes me up properly. I then lie in bed reading my emails.
I go through this every day, yet it only needs about 1 hour's charging every week or two. And if I have to travel, I have the option of using standard AA batteries, or even a solar panel! In fact, they are so efficient that Trevor Bayliss (Mr. Clockwork Radio himself) once demonstrated an eMate modified to run on clockwork.
It will print to most parallel port printers (via an adaptor) or over IR to a suitable printer. With an extra bit of software you can beam data to and from a Palm. You can even run a web server on it in case you need to view your contacts or diary from elsewhere on your network.
I really wish they'd released a smaller version as a companion to the 2100. I would have bought both, as the size of the Newt is sometimes a problem. Generally, though, I like the large size as it makes data entry so much more practical.
With the 2100 (and possibly 2000) the Newt was really starting to deliver on its early promise. If I'd been Steve Jobs, I would have fixed the synch software to make it more intuitive and work better over IR, then offered bundle deals with the original iMac (which also had IR and came out around that time). The iMac would be the "family" computer, the 2100 for Dad, something similar (in translucent) for Mum, and eMates for the kids. All able to beam data between each other and the iMac.