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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.
Good technology never dies I guess. I wonder if Apple is planning to fill the space left by the Newton. They can't be developing Inkwell for nothing can they?
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
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.
Apple users are cultist fanatics who buy anything Jobs blesses.
Yes, that explains the phenomenal success of the Power Mac G4 Cube.
I beg to differ:
a ti cians/Newton.html
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathem
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
...and I bet Apple knows *exactly* how many colors it displays. 2?
I'm angry, and I Meta Moderate!
Apple: Though I fell off of that tree just as hard as I could, I could not overcome 32 feet per second squared. Thus, Newton would not, and could not die.
I regret this, my brothers, and hope that one day if enough of us fall on his head, we may kill him yet. If it comes to it, we may even coerce an entire branch to snuff him out!
Yours,
The Apple
Try this link:
Newton
Dunno why the first added a space into the middle of the link. It wasn't there when I pasted it.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
As big and heavy as the Newton is (compared to a Palm or iPaq or Zarus), and as small and light as PC laptops are becoming, whats the difference between the two other than the former being obsolescent and the latter being more flexible in terms of hardware vendors (c.f. latest Apple jackboot of non-apple DVD players and its software).
The weight and size of the Newton is a factor. Or did I mistake the slant of the article, and this is more of a nostalgia item, like rehabbing my old Amiga?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
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.
At the last LinuxWorld Expo in New York, I noticed that every booth had a newton with a card reader attached to it, so they could swipe guests' badges and get a record of who visited their table. They must have had 100s of newtons.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
Early models were bulky, expensive and bug-ridden. Apple marketed the Newton poorly, and it was widely ridiculed; a memorable Doonesbury strip by Gary Trudeau effectively doomed the device.
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If a comic strip could "doom" something, then MS/Windows would be dead a long time ago. It seems that slashdot alone has a large amount of these linked from user comments.
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After shopping around, he found a machine that did it all: Web, e-mail, calendar and address book, but it could also recognize ordinary, cursive handwriting that wasn't as awkward as graffiti The biggest problem with a Newton is its size: It's as big as a brick. ----------- I had a nice little acer laptop that did all of that and more. It had a 233Mhz MMX processor. It ran windows 2000 decently on 80MB (max) of RAM, and was wonderful for Linux. Unfortunately it took a spike in a power surge, silly me for not getting a surge guard
Seems to me that one could do a lot better by getting a used mini-laptop. Mine didn't cost me a huge amount, and it was a lot more productive than any handheld.
It seems that handhelds are often just used as toys, with a cheap notebook at least you can run linux or do some programming
You don't have to listen to your wireless MP3's on a Newton with a dim, old, scratched-up screen - a pal of mine has put together a display upgrade kit and is currently taking orders!
(sorry buddy!)
but seriously, if there is "news" that is remotely Apple related, Wired, is all over it. They love to report Apple news and culture, it tends to be of this type: Gee, Apple stopped doing X long ago, but look, these hip trendy, user groups are doing it themselves!!!! Yay Apple!
Don't believe me? Try this story or this story or this story
Or maybe I'm just missing something? Is there really a well dresses, over educated, hip Apple underground that I have never seen? Wired just tends to report these user groups and people as trendy, San Fran artist types. They have swallowed more than just a bite of Apple's marketing message. (bad pun, I know)
Kind of like Slashdot reports on Linux types... Think about it, it is easy to come up with stereotypes of Wired readers. And slashdot readers for that matter.
but I digress, I do think the Newtons are cool.
.....
This sounds cool, but can you connect it to a PC? I don't have money for a Newton and a Mac.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
Which begs the question, who'd be interested in building it?
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
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
Nelson: Take a note on my Newton to beat up Martin.
Kearny: (scribles "Beat up Martin" on Newton's display
Newton: (converts handwriting to "Eat up Martha")
Nelson: (grabs Newton and hurls it at Martin's head)
"Brrraaaiinnssss..."
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
om my Mew7on. 1 love this cool hamb writing pecognition. 1 think Cndr Taco yses one to post 5lashdot stories.
a memorable Doonesbury strip by Gary Trudeau effectively doomed the device.
The Comic
=-Jippy
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).
Since they stopped supporting the same PCMCIA cards that my laptop uses -- and relying on grafitti rather than a keyboard.
I remember my HP 200LX back in the stone age. I could pop the modem out of my laptop and dial up and run telnet sessions and check email -- all the while saving out to the (albeit expensive at the time) 4 meg CF card. I did this all on a regular (albeit small) keyboard. All of this and it rode on my hip -- and the batteries lasted for days. Ever since then PDA's have gone downhill for all I care.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
I think it was "Eat up martha"
--
Don't sweat the petty things, and don't pet the sweaty things.
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.
Than what is it?
Can you not call the poles of a colorspace "colors"?
If you aren't going to call it a color, what epsilon away from pure black or pure white do you choose before you can actually call it a color?
Indeed, Jobs hated the Newton- some say because it was the brainchild of the man who ousted him. Jobs bought back the spun-off Newton, Inc. and killed it, after they were actually turning a profit for a couple of quarters.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I actually chose the MP2000 because of the larger size, though I could do with less weight, because I was interested in note-taking.
When I went to a startup a few years back, it was our first computer. It sent and recieved faxes, sent and recieved e-mail, and I used the HWR to take the notes of the first Board of Director's meetings. (And yes, they were readable afterwards.)
I was just thinking I could get by with a Palm or a Handspring, and you have to go and run a story about the Newton. Thanks a lot.
*loads up eBay*
Oh well, here's an older story from the last time I was on a Newton trip.
SIGFEH
and yes it's huge compared to a Palm Pilot/Handspring Visor, but it lets me enter pretty fast, hadnwriting works fine for me once it learned how I write (the reverse of Graffiti, where you get to learn how to write the way it needs you to). I can use the backlighting as an emergency flashlight. What I need to do is figure out how to convert the data from the backups to a format readable by other systems. What I really want to do is export my contact list from my Newton to my iPod, but I haven't taken the time to research the intermediate steps. u
It's easy to condemn something with 20-20 hindsight; but nobody had done anything like the Newton before.
How big exactly should the screen be? What resolution? How powerful a processor do people want? What things make a PDA succesful for day to day users?
There is no combination of answers that is right for every user. The Newton combination worked well for certain people. However, there were many other people who didn't need that much screen or processing power.
It did get a lot of things right, like superb battery life. On the other hand, one thing it got resoundingly wrong was connectivity. Connectivity worked OK on the Mac, but Windows utilities were always buggy and unreliable, and Apple had an indifferent attitude towards Windows users. So, you either had to be a Mac user or a tolerant Windows user to be pleased with the Newton's basic out of the box connectivity options.
The Newton screen size is a dividing point for users. Either you love it or you hate it. Most people prefer something you can slip into a shirt pocket and feels comfortable in one hand. Witness the move from clamshell PDAs to palm style form factors in WinCE. I know trying to sell users on my PDA apps, it was always a struggle with Newtons, but put a Palm in their hand and they immediately wanted it.
The Palm was a rare, perfect combination. Good battery life, large enough screen to do what most people wanted but not any larger; and excellent connectivity. By being less ambitious in the screen department than the Newton, and less ambitious in the connectivity department than WinCE, it could be smaller, simpler, more reliable and cheaper.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
But if it's for all the things you describe then the screen isn't big enough. Unless you're very good at working in such a small are (Newton die-hards always seem to have skills the rest of us lack, like consistent handwriting) you need something about the size of a composition book. If Newton had been that size, it would have worked much better. Of course, it would also have been too expensive to sell....
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."
The new Sony Vaio U1 ultrasmall notebook machines are the Cat's Ass!
http://www.dynamism.com/u1/index.shtml
Real PC Real Small: 29 oz And that's ok because if your PDA doesn't actually fit in your pocket it doesn't matter how large it really is.
That was before they all died.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Probably something color NEXTSTEP. Everyone bitched and moaned like it was the end of the world, but nowadays it still looks better than everything else out there =)
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Curiously, Graffiti was first released for the Newton and the AT&T EO (which I also had.)
Have any of y'all ever used GO's PenPoint OS? It's been a while, but it might be my favorite OS ever (even before NEXTSTEP.) It was all OOP and encapsulated a lot of the ideas of OpenDoc back in the heady days of 1993. Great OS for a great machine. Built-in crazy faxing capabilities, and it had an optional cell phone. The lack of a TCP stack really ruined more-than-nostalgia use, though.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
And the fact that Steve killed the Newton dead with the wrath of God on a bad hair day.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
John Sculley. It's no secret that a) Steve Jobs has a tremendous vindictive streak, and b) most of the changes SJ made at Apple immeditaely upon his return were to cut or scale back JS's initiatives.
Yes, Newton was ahead of its time. It was too big. It was too expensive. It was poorly marketing. It was too __________ (fill in the blank). And, the Newton division was always in the red. That is, it was in the red until right before SJ axed it. Yes, friends, Newton was making a profit for the first time when SJ lowered the boom (two consecutive quarters, I believe); that more than anything tells me that killing it was an act of vindictiveness.
Of course, it didn't take SJ long to realize the error of his ways. About a year later, it came out that Jobs was offering to buy out Palm, but considering that Palm was mostly comprised of ex-Newtonites who were forced out by Steve (successful ones at that), there was no way it was gonna happen.
What was really crazy was that Palm was wildly successful at the time, but they were only nailing the low-end of the emerging PDA market. Newton was perfectly positioned at the time to nail the mid- to high-end of the market, particularly in vertical applications. I remember a MacWeek article at the time about how the Newton was causing a stir in several vertical markets. Apple had the first mover advantage, and they virtually owned the higher-margin high-end of the market. Killing the Newton was an act of sheer stupidity and short-sightedness.
Now that Microsoft has entered the market, I would say that the odds of Apple owning a big chunk of the PDA market are virtually nil. Palm has saturated the low and mid-range of the market; Microsoft and their partners are going after the mid to high-end. Once again, Apple set the table and Microsoft is eating the meal.
Apple might have an opportunity to add PDA features to the iPod; however, that still only gives them a small slice of the low-end consumer market.
If Jobs had been wise, he would have spun out the Newton division, much as he did the Filemaker Pro division, to create its own brand identity apart from Apple and keep the focus on cross-platform compatibility. Perhaps he might have more shrewdly licensed out the Newton OS and allowed PC manufacturers to build the hardware and sell the systems, thus getting a significant jump on Microsoft.
Ah well.
Run OS/2 on a Newton and load it up with Amiga software.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
The GameGear came out a bit behind the GameBoy and while the color screen was cool it never got as much play from me as my GB did. Even the original GB's batteries would last forever, Squints from Sandlot fooor-eh-ver and sticking them in the freezer for a little bit would make them go just a bit longer. The GG on the other hand went through batteries like they were going out of style. No amount of cooling said batteries was going to get them to eek out a little more game time. The drawback to the backlight was that the GG ran hot and sucked power. A heavy round of Columns would be over due to dead batteries far sooner than a heavy session of Tetris. The GG was cool no argument but it seriously let me down in times of gaming need.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
This technology saw last light at least a decade ago and still has its fans. Slashdot periodically runs stories about the imminent ressurection of AMiga.
...a built-in camera, synced with iPhoto? (Hey, Danger is pretty close to doing this.)
You're not the only one wishing for a mobile device that works in tandem with your desktop. The kind of scenarios you describe are the stuff of my dreams, too. The only problem I see is that Apple already has a handheld device on the market -- the iPod.
MP3 playing is one of the primary functions people want in a good handheld, and I don't see Apple competing with itself by offering two handheld mobile devices.
Could Apple evolve the iPod into this new dream handheld by slowly adding features? I don't know. The iPod's genius is in its form factor -- it's perfect for playing MP3s. Unfortunately, the same thing that makes it a great MP3 player makes it awkward as a general purpose device. And redesigning the iPod to make a better general purpose device would make the MP3 player experience worse.
I think this, frankly, bites, because Apple is the only company that can pull off the user experience I want in a mobile device. I want it wirelessly synced with every aspect of my desktop, I want to be able to plug in a pair of headphones and watch video while lying in my hammock. I want it all integrated seamlessly, and only Apple can pull that off. But I suspect their experience with the Newton has soured them on the idea, and the iPod fills its niche so well, there's not much room left to grow. More's the pity. The iPod's a great MP3 player, but it's not anything close to what Apple could do if it tried.
Thanks for the great post.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.