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Five Years Later, Newton Still Going Strong
CrezzyMan writes "Today is the five year anniversary of Apple's cancellation of the Newton platform. In spite of this, the Newton community has remained stronger than ever: it has even been the subject of academic research. In just the last few days, an IrCOMM stack and a new connection library have been released, on top of OS X syncing and 802.11b support."
I know that most of us have Palm Pilots of some sort, but the Newton was really cool especially when you consider that it was invented many, many years ago and then mass-produced fairly efficiently.
The Palm is great and all, but the Newton was just so innovative for its time. I still have the one I bought several years ago and will give it to my daughter when she gets old enough.
Join my Slashdot clan
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
The Newton is just a pocket bible for the cult of the Apple
To this day, no one has created a PDA device that is as natural to use as the Newton. I still keep mine around for notetaking which I then sync to MS word via a VB Script.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
D'oh!
...but as a picture frame!
The LCD screen died on me (note to self: don't store in backpack, then toss backpack).
So, I took the guts out, and it makes a really nifty picture frame now (the case nicely displays a 4x6 photo).
"Jesus saves, but everyone else in a 10 foot radius takes full damage from the fireball."
The Newton, like many other products have had competition. I guess Apple's Newton probably couldn't keep up with the rising popularity of Palm. Correct me if I am wrong, but can't you only sync a Newton with a Mac. I have seen some kits that allow you to sync the Palm with a serial connector to the mac serial connector on pre-USB macs. If this is the case, why would you buy the Newton for a Mac only, when you could buy the Palm to run on both!
Like I just said in another post to this thread, the Newton is just really, really innovative and is a natural, intuitive handheld to use.
If you actually read the article you'd see that the Newton is still being used by many people, and they're not just super-geek hobbyists on some masochistic joy-ride. Don't make blanket statements about something that you probably have never even used.
It works well what it's supposed to do, and don't cut it down for that. I bet many Newton owners are still pleased about their device, whereas many Palm Pilot folks get a new PDA and then stop using it after the novelty wears off.
Join my Slashdot clan
Background: 28/M/Bi-Sexual; Owner of a Linux company; MBA Harvard 2003; B.S. Comp Sci MIT 2000
Did Newton owners choose wrong or were they simply ahead of the curve?
Remember, Grafitti was developed by Palm for Newton. Their device did not exist at that time.
Without Newton, the technology and the marketplace for handhelds would not be what it is today.
The fact that Newton was only available for five years and has had five more years of life post-Apple is the real story.
d a v e
"Hmmm...upgrades."
Related link. http://www.nabiscoworld.com/newtons/
Mmmmmmmmmmmm Fig Newtons
Worst. Sig. Ever.
I'm sure there are still DOS users out there too. Why don't they get any coverage?
Er, that's a bit of a negative view of this. Maybe they made the perfect choice, so they stuck with it. Amigas were amazing computers for their time. Same goes for the Newton. Obviously the Newton worked so well that people can still use them today. I wish I could say the same for my PalmIII that lasted less than 2 years.
I think the term "has remained stronger than ever" warrents some investigation.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: the Newton is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered the Newton community when Slashdot confirmed that the Newton market share has dropped yet again, 5 years after it was discontinued by Apple. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that the Newton has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. the Apple Newton is collapsing in complete disarray..
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the Newton's future. The hand writing is on the wall: the Newton faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for the Newton because the Newton is dying. Things are looking very bad for the Newton. As many of us are already aware, the Apple Newton continues to lose market share. At Apple the red ink flows like a river of blood.
The Newton development team is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that the Newton has steadily declined in market share. the Newton is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If the Newton is to survive at all it will be among handheld dilettante dabblers and hangers-on. the Newton continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the Newton is dead.
Fact: the Newton is dying
Trolling is a art,
Looks like their webserver is being run on newton, 10 comments and already /.'d. Oh well I guess they figured adding 802.11b support was more important then adding /. defense.
Check out my life
Anyone else keep on getting Handspring banner ads while viewing this story? ;)
->www.chuma.org, ranting and Newtons, what more could you want?
Not after that slashdotting!
esp. w/ Microsoft doing so well w/ Tablet PC.
f eb 2003/tc20030226_5785_tc024.htm
/ ch ronicle/archive/2003/02/26/BU189565.DTL& type=tech
Business week had an article on them exceeding analysts' sales expectations and even selling out at Best Buy:
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/
and the San Francisco Chronicle had an article on Compaq crediting them with much of the little good news they had:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=
Although the print recognizer from Newton OS 2.0 lives on in Mac OS X as ``InkWell'', the cursive recognizer (licensed from Paragraph) is now central to the Tablet PC (and it's able to learn one's handwriting / improve recognition over time)
Ironically, one of things which Tablet PCs are often criticized for, battery life is a strong suit of Apple's Power PC.
Got modded down for it over at www.macslash.org, but I simply don't understand why Apple can't at least do a pen-enabled convertible version of their iBook. I'd buy it---ideally I'd like a single system to replace my NeXT Cube, Wacom ArtZ tablet, Newton and Fujitsu pen slate and Docking Station---an Apple pen convertible, or an iMac w/ a detachable pen slate display unit would do that very nicely.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Kearney: Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton: beat up Martin.
[Dolph writes "Beat up Martin" which the Newton translates as "Eat up Martha"]
Kearney: Bah! [throws Newton]
I still wonder why Apple decided to stop all Newton developement, it was after all bringing in profit.
And it could easily have been made a daughter company of Apple...
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Does that mean that at least 5 years after Apple's gone out of business, there will still be a great Apple users community.
I'm all for it !
-1, Troll
or
-1, Flamebait
or perhaps
-1, Overrated
Pick your poison. This post is really stupid. The Newton 2000 and 2100s were really awesome, and still impress people when you show them around the things.
Big deal that it's a "dead" platform. Some people still have them, like them, use them, and want to keep using them until they no longer work.
What should you care if they do just that? Are they somehow infringing on your ability to use whatever PDA you have?
What an asshat.
Think I'm a troll? One word. You.
-/-
Mikey-San
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
Why when I refresh the page does it keep switching between an AMD logo/topic and an iBook graphic? Has the top secret Apple/AMD project come to fruition as a Newton replacement or something? :)
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
i met a guy who had one of these things, and i just dont get it. a PDA now can do so much more. and laptops are so small. i honestly think its the coolness factor of it being rare and a collectors item.
what would be great is if apple revives the newton, to go with with their new style/os.
what is nailchipper?
Why is this story posted with an AMD Icon? Does Timothy know something we don't?
Help fight continental drift.
did AMD make Newtons? (headline icon). Or was that just a whole piece of Apple's history that passed me by?
Since everything else seems slashdotted, try this: The Newton Source
Its important to remember that barring failure a piece of technology one buys will always be as capable as when it was the latest technology.
Bush and Blair ate my sig!
In fact, it's feeling better! ;-) I think it is neat that people are utilizing technology in the ways they do. If they can make a 5 year old platform work, more power to them. In the meantime, I will be using my handspring.
The devices the users of this "dead" platform [the newton] still work, and are still useful to them.
Can you name a reason why these users should drop their newtons and get, instead, some newer device like a Palm or PocketPC?
Really.. any reason. Perhaps the PocketPC can do better the things that these people do with their newtons? Perhaps there's some fatal flaw or incompatibility in the newton? Perhaps you believe the speed of the Newton is insufficient for their needs? Is there some reason why they would benefit more from using the same platform as a larger customer base such as Palm has? Anything? Do you know?
Because if you cannot come up with any reasons why these people should stop using their newtons, then i will, in fact, assert that you are a troll for saying that they should stop using their newtons.
I lusted after Newtons.
Then the PalmPilot came out.
I realized I couldn't fit a brick in my pocket.
So I got a PalmPilot Personal. Then a V.
Just last week I upgraded to a Tungsten. It kicks butt.
That said, I'd still like to have a used Newton to play with... I'm sure half the appeal is the community aspect (which is also part of the reason why I like Macs still...)
But I can't go partying in NYC with a friggin Newton in my pocket!
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
Oh, great. Why don't you just say, "Tesla wasn't so great!" and get this group *really* pissed off.
Whats up with that?
Martin: How innovative. I like it!
Kearney: Hey Dolph, take a memo on your Newton: beat up Martin.
[Dolph writes "Beat up Martin" which the Newton translates as "Eat up Martha"]
Dolph: Bah! [throws Newton]
Martin: [being bonked on the head] Ow!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
There is a lot of older/discontinued hardware out there still going strong. Take the old Radio Shack Color Computers are an example, there is even a convention held each year in the Chicago area billed this year as the 12th Annual Last Chicago CoCoFest.
http://members.aol.com/clubbbs/glenside
SJust because a company gives up on a product, does not mean that it is no longer useful!
Hi tHerm SlesHd0++ers!
I um p()syting tgis fhrum M/i newton oS1Ng teh huMduuritiMg rec0gmi+ion!
Th1mk D1flrant!
I use my Newton MP2100 daily. In fact it's sitting here next to me as I type this. I put Linux docs and HOWTO's relevant to my work on it that I need on it and well as various notes on Java programming. When SJ ended the Newton I tried other PDA's: CE, PalmOS (I stuck with that one for about 4 years) but in the end the *only* PDA I have *ever* used that allowed me to truly store and manage the information I needed for daily life was my Newton. So I switched back.
;)
Now, Paul Guyot at http://www.kallisys.com has made an ATA driver for CF cards and instead of having a slot with a 20MB card for storage I have a slot with 128MB of storage divided up as 4 32MB stores.
Need support? Not a problem. The community is still alive and well. Sign up for the Newtontalk list at http://www.newtontalk.net and ask away. We get PalmOS converts daily signing up.
Surfing the web and checking email works fine on the Newton. I can even chat with people via IM programs like Jabber and ICQ or on the IRC. In addition to that I get weeks of use out of a set of batteries.
Now would I *like* for something newer/smaller/faster/prettier to come along? Sure. But so far nothing comes close to managing information for me the way my Newt does.
And unlike the Simpsons episode's depiction, when I type "Beat up Martin" it digitizes it into "Beat up Martin"... I really was hoping to see "Eat up Martha" but no such luck..
Polymorphism -- It's what you make of it.
- Unleashing a new product category before the product itself was ready.
- Ignoring customer feedback on design issues and pricing.
- Vague and inexplicit value proposition.
- Getting nailed by a competitor who listened to customers, built a more portable platform, hit the market target price, and understood the core value proposition of a PDA.
I was a big fan of the Newton from the Messagepad 120 on -- with the 120 and Newton 2.0, Apple had finally delivered on the promise of the PDA. Unfortunately, after years of fumbling, overpromising and under-delivering, the market had moved on, and simply would not believe anything that Apple had to say -- something I'll dub the Newton Effect. The Messagepad 2000, which was ultimately more capable (thanks to DEC's StrongARM), was also ultimately a step in the opposite direction of what the market was asking for: smaller and cheaper, not bigger and over $1000!I stil have my Messagepad 120, and it still comes out of the case every now and then to remind me that bad business decisions can and will kill superior technology.
...-.-
Why do you exist
Where do you get your information that Palm developed Grafitti for the Newton? They may have developed their Grafitti engine on a Newton, though I doubt even that. As far as I can recall, and I was developing for Magic Cap devices at the time, the first commercial release of Grafitti was on the original Palm Pilot.
Which... link... do... I click... on?????
TurboGrafx 16 community, and an NES community, and others.
Though if I shelled out the bucks for a worthless piece of nifty executive crap like the Newton, I'd be inclined to cover my ears and scream "lalalallaalala" when people mention it's a dead technology.
I still use my Newton, and it's as capable now as it was five years ago when I bought it. Well, ok -- the battery life on my rechargable dropped, but I was able to refurbish it.
My point is I bought the Newton to use as a handheld computer for taking written and audio notes, and for reading books on flash memory. The fact that it's still better at (all three of) those tasks than a Palm or WinCE device is beside the point.
I still use a Performa, too... I bought it to use as a Word Processor. Guess what? It's still a great word processor. Just because there is new hardware out there that fits the bill doesn't mean the non-hardware-junkies out there are going to buy it.
Ooh! Ford just release a new car! It still goes the same places on the same roads, but it's SHINY and NEW. I'll stick to my existing car until it stops doing what I bought it for, and THEN buy a new one.
Imagine my surprise when I found out that Palms used Grafitti. But I still waited a little while longer (> 1 year) to make sure that Palms were going to be around before springing for a Palm IIIx (4MB!! whoo hoo!).
Was the Newton before its time? Hardware wasn't up to it, but I think that people were ready for it.
Is this thing on? Hello?
No way.. I bought my Newton 2000 back in '97 and since then I have owned a few Palm OS and Windows CE based PDAs since then and nothing compares to my Newton, even to this day. From the perfect size of the entire unit to the level application intergration, everything else just seems to suck, very bad I might add. I still believe that the 2000 and 2100 Newtons still have the best handwritting recognition of any PDA.
Newton FACTS! $895.00 for programming manuals!
:
And allegedly Apple extorted percentage of gross profits and enforced a draconian punishement NDA, also helped kill the damned thing.
895.00 for programming documentation, for many years! And apple never dropped the price until many years later, halving it, and then at the bitter end, dropping the price of the books to 35 dollars.
Meanwhile compilers for MS Windows and programming information was FREE, and then eventually about 35 dollars for beta versions.
Apple also REFUSED to use "Graffitti" style entry and was obsessed on idiotic cursive.
I NEVER write in cursive, ever since 6th grade.
Letter by letter won the world and the more open-minded Palm Pilot mad history.
Apple also REFUSED to support C Compilers and instead wanted everyone to use a mandatory enforced crap language called DYLAN.
Palm Pilot later on had a wide variety of languages, including C.
Apple is retarded. I am a very successful Mac devloper (manuy shrink wrapped mass market successes) but I convinced every developer I knew to pan that piece of crap.
I saw many in my life, and though they were "cool" and high tech. They did everyting incorrectly to offend enginners such as myself.
No manuals without paying 895.00, a percentage of gross sales, hostility to mac platform but not MS windows by apple, The lack of C and mandate to use DYLAN (named after the gospel singing aging hippie in fact).
I am glad the Newton died but I and other engineers such as myself helped kill that crap.
Walt, Sweet Pea, Pippin, Nike, all other products from that idiotic division all ate up millions and were stillborn hardware projects. All becuase of engineering fiascos.
Remember Taligent Pink? Millions wasted by idiotic apple.
Remember Kalieda? Millions wasted on a graphics model that could only draw to one screen depth and one screen way after the MAc shipped.
Remember Bedrock (license fee per COPY SOLD! Dead)
How about remembering
OpenDoc (crashed on clean vanilla 840AV with latest OS)
CyberDog (68K bugs killed it too)
SOM - fascist rules, buggy, anti-C
Copland/Gershwin (could not run RAM disks, or DAs, could not boot from locked Syquest) stillborn after wasting 80 million!
QuickDraw GX (license fee per MS Windows COPY SOLD! Dead)
QuickDraw GX printing
Powertalk
QuickDraw 3D (was OK, but apple was cagey with pricing rules)
Dylan
Hypercard
Geoport
SK8
Newton, etc etc etc..... DEAD AND PATHETIC all because of bugs, greed, and lies.
All those Apple engineering efforts all dieg because people like me helped convince other engineers to let them die!!!
Apple only did one thing right in history : Mac OS (Inside Mac volumes 1 - 6) and QuickDraw and I would like to add OpenDoc but it is too slow and has too many system heap handles and apple killed it.
One project from 1982-1984, thats it.
AppleTalk was OK and a real OSI 7 layer network, and that was in 1985 and allowed postwcript printer sharing, but still, no successes from 1985 to now.
I dance on the grave of Newton and its 895 dollar introductory programming manuals.
You see, they devised ways to determine what things cost, how much profit they return, and things like that.
Let me use an example: You stand in front of me. I extend both my hands, palms up. You reach into your pocket and take out a dollar bill. You place that bill in my right hand, I take the dollar and give you ten dollars back. Next you repeat the process, but put the dollar in my left hand instead. I give you a dollar and a quarter back.
Now, you have 100 more dollar bills, which hand will you put them in? If you put all 100 in my left hand, you will get 125 dollars back from me. If you put all 100 in my right hand, you will get 1000 dollars back from me. Is this a hard choice for you?
Guess what, the choice isn't so hard for other people either.
To move the example along, replace my two hands with product lines, factories, ect...
Managers and investors put their money where it will do the most good.
Simply turning a profit is meaningless. Do a google search for "weighted average cost of capital" and you will see how many "profitable" companies/products/services actually destroy wealth.
When I close down a project and the employees bitch at me for doing so(often times they lose their jobs), they often say the same stuff: It was profitable, why did you close us?
The answer is simple, the capital I was dumping into the project would earn more elsewhere. Apple is no different. I don't know if they did shut down this product for that reason, but I do know that your respons of "it was profitable" is quite meaningless.
Of course there is a great deal more that some may bring up, such as diversification and topics like that, but I think that is probably above and beyond the scope of Slashdot. I would have thought basic economic theories would be easy for the Slashdot crowd, it is just math afterall, but after reading the drivel from the latest war discussion*, I think I'll stick with the basics for you guys.
*The two theories proposed by the "this is all about oil" crowd are really bad for the most part.
The two theories being:
1. GWB wants to take the Iraqi oil and flood the market to make gasoline cheap so we can all drive around in SUV's!!!
or the more popular
2. GWB wants to seize the oil fields, sell the oil at bargain prices to his oil buddies and have them still charge just as much for it!!!
Anyone who took Econ 101 in college(that is almost everyone, right?) should be laughing at all who make such claims.
Wow I'd love to see your mod stats when all the firefight dies down. I modded up, and when I refreshed it was modded down, and then I refreshed again and it was modded up again.
see subject..
He only mentions one other product and doesn't comment negatively on it.
I still use DOS!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
NTFS/FAT32 != HFS+
Mac Ipods use a HFS+ formatted harddrive with the drivers loaded...
Win uses a Fat32 format (iirc..heck it could be NTFS but same basic problem)
( you have to be careful if you erase it...or you'll add a lot of trouble for yourself re-adding the drivers/software that run it)
Oppps. I meant Open Transport, not OpenDoc in the above post when discussing "non failures" of apple.
Open Transport (Based on the same source IBM and Dec liscenced, and 8 other companies) OTX, was adapted for Mac and was semi-cool. Apple had IPv6 running 5 yuears before anyone else. But Open Transport was slower than hell for tiny packet overhead and worse... it had hundreds of system heap memory handles and was ported by functional retards. Apple killed it last year, except for OS 9.2.2 usage (still going strong).
Sorry about typing OpenDoc by mistake.
In the bar above I'm getting an AMD icon for this story instead of an apple portable icon like the one on the main page... ?
Yep, I get them over and over again with this story, in fact I am getting them even when posting this message.
Nothing like smart banner ads!
When it first came out I went all out and got everything there is to get for the newton - enjoyed it for 2 years then switched to palm. It still sits in my closet if anyone is interested in lifting it from me.
so that they l00k LIEk the guards.
5 .h tml
http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/030227/telecoms_lucent_
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
Also meant to say,
Even though Apple innaugurated it (pen computing), and they could suddenly be way ahead if they'd just dust off the Newton and re-issue it (w/ native Mac OS X synching / integration, QuickTime / MP3 support and a few other things).
But Steve Jobs wouldn't go for that, and he's assured that Apple's not in a position to do that.
Bummer man.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Of course, you shouldn't forget that the Newton was actually in the black for the first time since its creation when Steve Jobs killed it. There is a distinct possibility that the Newton could have held down the high-end of the PDA market, particularly with vertical apps, and gradually trickled down to the consumer level.
I've always suspected that Jobs killed it because it was a John Sculley project. Most everyone in the Newton division bolted for Palm.
What's even worse was finding out that, within two years, Jobs was offering to acquire Palm, to which they replied, "Thanks, no." Jobs trashed the Newton brand, ran off its engineers, and only realized the error of his ways about the time that Microsoft was gearing up to enter the market. Too late.
My first computer ever (I'm 21) was a 64K Tandy Color Computer 2. I never did get a disk drive, but I have the cassette tape interface. I still have it along with all my cassettes and cartridges.
About 5 years ago or so, I even bought a 512K Tandy Color Computer 3 for pretty cheap.
So many fond memories *sniffle*
I'm curious. Why is this post a troll?
/. needs to let everyone with karma moderate, not just those that they hand pick.
It's offtopic, but it's true.
No kidding. You should've seen how many were being used at Macworld in January. I am still amazed at how good the handwriting recognition is compared to Palm, etc., and these machines are OLD! Way to go Apple! Always innovating!
Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time is enemy action.
Newton OS was amazingly cool. A truly "virtual" computer... the file system was only accessable as an ISAM. There were no programs, only "Application Objects" that didn't execute.. they were always resident in RAM, but may or may not have had their windows exposed. The UI toolkit was sweet with very handy methods for doing handwriting style form input. The "source" for any program installed on your system was always available from other programs and could be hooked into, modified, etc. on the fly.
It was a truly unique consumer machine from a technical point of view, very FUN. Its application programmer's hacking paradise.
Sure it was incredibly impractical, like old school UNIX running on a home-pc vs MS-DOS, but also incredibly cool in the same way.
A friend of mine has designed and manufactured a backlight/touchsceen upgrade for the MP2x00 - see http://www.adago.net for more info.
</PLUG>From Pen Computing Magazine #22, June 1998
Why Did Apple Kill Newton?
©Copyright 1998 David MacNeill
Early Friday morning, February 27, 1998, Apple Computer made official what the Newton cognoscenti had strongly suspected for six months: the Newton handheld computing platform was dead.
The rather terse press release gave the basic facts: Apple will cease all Newton OS hardware and software development, no more products will be made after the existing stock is depleted, and Apple will continue to provide support to users. Brief mention was made of development of a new low-cost Mac OS-based mobile device in the future, but no details were offered. But the most galling omission was the lack of an answer to the question on the minds of hundreds of thousands of shocked, angry Newton owners: Why?
Before I attempt to answer this question, let's take a quick tour of the mercurial five-year career of Newton. This will serve to prepare you for the several explanations we will be considering.
A brief history of Newton
During its turbulent five-year life, Newton technology was close to death several times, yet always managed to survive. Department heads came and went, but the essential concept of the personal digital assistant (PDA) was too compelling to die easily: A small, inexpensive, pen-based computing device that would accompany you everywhere, and that would learn enough about you to make informed assumptions about how to help you keep track of the myriad little bits of information we all must carry. It would be simple enough for anyone to use, a true computer for the rest of us.
I was fortunate to participate in the Newton beta test program and to co-author and deliver the training materials used to launch the product. The moment I saw that beta unit my life changed, and I wasn't the only one.
I still remember the excitement of holding a pre-release Newton NotePad (as it was labeled then) in my hands for the first time, said Clinton Logan, ace developer for LandWare. Truly unique products like that don't come along very often.
For those of us who bought into this vision, it seemed like the future was arriving ahead of schedule. Like the buyers of the original 128K Macintosh, we gladly paid the high price of admission just to participate in this achingly cool dream that had taken physical form. We loved it and made it work for us in ways unanticipated by its creators, which is the true measure of great computer design.
What is Newton ?
Newton had an identity crisis from the very beginning. Former Apple CEO and Newton champion John Sculley first showed the prototype to the press in Chicago on May 1992, where he described not only the device but also their platform strategy. A central theme in Apple's advertising and promotional materials at the time repeatedly used the phrase What is Newton? Some have suggested that Apple never actually answered this question to anyone's satisfaction.
Consider the name change. The product was originally called the Newton NotePad to suggest its personal assistive features, but that was later changed to MessagePad to emphasize the product's communications capabilities.
We had always intended for Newton to be a platform, not just a product, said former Newton Systems Group chief Gaston Bastiens, now CEO of Lernout & Hauspie, an eminent speech recognition company. Unfortunately, all the press took away with them was the handwriting recognition aspect, which was over-emphasized. The whole thrust of Newton was to be a personal communicator as well as a personal assistant. From a conceptual point of view, John was absolutely right. The infrastructure for two-way wireless at the time was not there; we all knew it was a couple of years away, but it was always part of our platform strategy.
John Sculley generally gets both the credit and the blame for the original Newton concept, but others who worked on the project say that Sculley simply understood and adopted the vision the designers had already created. However, these same people will admit that Sculley did foresee the current convergence of computers, communications, and content.
I have never seen a story more misrepresented by the media than what was really intended as the vision for a totally licensable platform for mobile wireless devices in the age of digital convergence, Sculley told me recently. They had an opportunity to create a major new industry, but nothing ever happened. Newton was intended to be a platform for wireless communications and handwriting was a very, very small part of the product.
The original MessagePad
Launched at Macworld Boston in August 1993, the first 5,000 MessagePads sold out within hours. Users went nuts over them, gladly paying the US$800. Apple ran training sessions at the show and handed out buttons that said I saw it, I did it, I want it. Newton stole the show. The MessagePad was marvelously solid and well-built--no surprise, since Sharp built them for Apple in Japan. (Sharp also released a superb Newton-based device called the ExpertPad, but very few of them were actually sold in the US.)
As wonderfully innovative as the original MessagePad was, it was far from perfect. Many felt that it was a beta product, not ready for prime time, and that it was released ahead of schedule because Sculley was determined to ship before he was ousted from the company. That rumor is untrue, according to Bastiens: There is no truth to that at all. John was in complete control at the time. I actually delayed the MessagePad's release from January '93 to August '93.
The most pernicious flaw in the MessagePad was a nasty memory fragmentation bug that severely hindered the functioning of the early version of ParaGraph's handwriting recognition engine, which was in the ROM of the MessagePad. Unless the user was very careful to reset the unit regularly, recognition would suffer.
In retrospect, said Pen Computing's editor-in-chief Conrad Blickenstorfer, Apple's decision to include a dictionary-based recognizer with access to only 10,000 words was a recipe for disappointment. If they had allowed character-based recognition to work alongside the word-based model, things would have been much different.
The Note Pad application, where users spent most of their time, was notorious for hogging all available system memory. This would cause problems such as forcing the user to reset the unit, though doing this would not lose any data. The Intelligent Assistant feature could be pretty dumb at times, making some odd assumptions in response to user commands. The Names and Dates applications were Spartan even by 1993 standards, lacking essential fields and varieties of appointments that every user needed. Physically, the original MessagePad was too wide for people with small hands to hold comfortably, and the unit was just a little too big to fit into any but the largest pocket. Unless you were a kangaroo, you carried your MessagePad in a briefcase or handbag. It wasn't really all that handy. The four AAA batteries proved insufficient for the MessagePad and the unit also lacked a cover for the glass display, so broken screens were quite common in those early days.
But none of this really mattered. We loved our Newtons with all their flaws, because there was nothing else out there even remotely comparable. Newton was unique.
Newton had the most advanced operating system of any personal computing device. Oriented around the task, not the application, Newton users could work easily and naturally. The friendly, responsive user interface shielded you completely from its sophisticated inner workings. It was built around a persistent object database that simplified file management more than any OS ever had. Though no one ever tried it commercially, the Newton OS was CPU-independent, so programs would theoretically not have to be recompiled for devices using different microprocessors. Developers sang the praises of the Apple-developed Newton Tool Kit, with its richly powerful NewtonScript language, though many grumbled about the steep price Apple charged for it.
The MessagePad 100 and 110
In the aftermath of Doonesbury cartoonist Gary Trudeau's merciless week of lampooning the MessagePad's handwriting recognition, Apple steadfastly continued to improve the Newton line. (Trudeau later recanted his criticism and became a big fan when Apple sent him a MessagePad 2000.) In February of 1994, a new machine arrived with a completely re-designed case, a much more stable version of the operating system, and an expanded word list for the handwriting recognizer. The MessagePad 110, manufactured for Apple by Inventec, had an integrated screen cover, a larger display, more memory, and used long-lasting AA batteries instead of the wimpy AAA cells of its predecessor. Many felt that this was the machine Apple should have shipped first, and I believe it could have happened that way. I personally saw a fully operational MP110 in use by an Apple handwriting recognition engineer prior to the official launch of the original MessagePad, so the 110 was obviously in an advanced stage of development.
Apple continued to sell the original MessagePad with the new ROM of the 110 and called it the MP100. Existing MessagePad users could send in their units to be upgraded with the new ROMS.
Commercial applications, which had been sparse, began to arrive in quantity, joining the many shareware and freeware apps we were already enjoying. Based on the wealth of new developers, Newton's future seemed assured.
The fabled Newton LC
One of the most heartbreaking mistakes Apple made was not building a small shirt pocket-size device that would sell for under US$400. This form factor, combined with low pricing, has proven to be wildly successful for 3Com/Palm Computing and their best-selling PalmPilot platform. Original Newton Group leader Steve Capps told me some of his team originally wanted to build a Pilot-size Newton but the technology to do so wasn't there in 1991. He feels that Newton would have benefitted from getting smaller instead of larger, as it ultimately did with the MP2000/2100 and eMate 300 machines.
We should have believed in our own thinking, Capps observed. Palm didn't make the same mistakes and they deserve their success. John Sculley also confirmed that such products were always in the plan. (Several years later, Apple repeated the mistake when a palm-size US$450 StrongARM-based Newton was killed in favor of the eMate.)
I recently stumbled on an interesting piece of supporting evidence. While rummaging through some Newton accessories at a used Apple store, I found an Apple-branded leather case in which the sewn-in identity strip read MessagePad 110 / LC.
There absolutely were plans for an LC product to be released in 1995, said Bastiens. We had a complete design, developed with LSI Logic and ARM, for a 'one-chip-Newton.' It was a miniaturized MessagePad, like a PalmPilot.
The Newton LC would have changed everything. We were too nice to Apple, said Blickenstorfer, too willing to put up with their veil of secrecy, too willing to take 'no comment' for an answer. Perhaps we could have convinced them the LC was definitely the way to go. Apple could have shown us the LC a year before Palm asked us what we thought of the Pilot prototype.
Newton 2.0 and the MessagePad 120/130
At roughly one-year intervals, Apple released evolutionary improvements to the Newton line. The MessagePad 120 had a much better display and twice the memory of the 110. In late 1995, Apple shipped an improved MP120 with a powerful new version of the operating system. Newton OS 2.0, introduced at a huge party at the 1995 Fall Comdex show in Las Vegas, was a tremendous leap forward in functionality over what was originally named Newton Intelligence. Byte Magazine gave it an award for best operating system. All the internal applications were significantly enhanced and better woven together for a more intuitive user experience. The groundwork was laid for new OS enhancements such as a TCP/IP stack for Internet communications. It looked as though Newton would finally make good on its promise as a communications device. Again, Apple offered MP120 owners to upgrade their units to Newton OS 2.0 functionality, and droves of users took them up on the offer.
Following the release of 2.0, Apple gave us the MessagePad 130, which featured a very bright backlit display and another half meg of system memory for faster, more reliable performance. The backlight alone was worth the price.
The brilliant MessagePad 2000
While many users thought the MessagePad 130 was the ultimate Newton device, they were soon to be blown away by something so amazing that they would eat their words. Released in early 1997, the MessagePad 2000 was built around the fire-breathing new StrongARM processor from Digital Equipment and ARM. Running at 162MHz, the StrongARM made the Newton OS positively fly. Combined with a generous 320x240 pixel backlit grayscale display, an additional PC Card slot, an optional external keyboard, and digital voice recording, the MP2000 was considered by many to be the most impressive handheld computer ever made--albeit with an impressively high price of US$1100 to match.
Holding all this new technology together was the new 2.1 rev of the OS. It came with several new applications. An integrated application suite called NewtWorks contained a powerful internally-developed word processor and an Excel-compatible spreadsheet called QuickFigure Pro developed by PelicanWare. We also received an e-mail client called EnRoute i-net, developed by NetStrategy, and the NetHopper web browser developed by AllPen.
How did it all work? To quote from my own review in the December 1996 issue of Pen Computing, Everything you ever liked about any Newton device is here, and much more. I can honestly say this is the first Newton device that could replace my notebook computer as a traveling companion. And it did.
Meet the eMate
As paradigm-shatteringly cool as the MessagePad 2000 was, Apple simultaneously introduced a product that raised our eyebrows even higher. Billed as the education computer of the future, the eMate 300 was unlike anything anyone had ever seen. With the processing power of the MP130, the display and ROM of the MP2000, and a translucent green clamshell-style case that looked like something from the Bat Cave, this was a completely new class of computing device. Liked by virtually everyone from kids to golden agers, the eMate had an appeal that transcended traditional boundaries. Easy and fun to use, eMates were reasonably priced at under US$800--low enough so that almost every student in the US could have their very own computer. Schools could buy them at enticing quantity discounts, and soon they appeared in classrooms across the country. Educational software developers shipped dozens of titles for the machine.
But the eMate wasn't just for kids. Journalists began snapping up eMates as the perfect portable writing tool. Even Steve Jobs liked the eMate. Apple reportedly began developing a bMate version for business people, featuring a better screen and a StrongARM processor. Anticipation was high for these new keyboard-equipped Newtons.
MessagePad 2100: The last Newton
Late in 1997, Apple shipped an incrementally improved version of the MP2000. The MessagePad 2100 had four times the system memory of the MP2000, a new 2.0 version of the Newton Internet Enabler, faster infrared, and support for Ethernet LAN connections. MP2000 users could upgrade for US$99, a real bargain. The added memory made Internet communications rock-solid and gave all your applications an overall speed boost. Though it never shipped, Dragon Systems showed us a working demo of a speech recognition engine developed in cooperation with Apple specifically for the MP2100. Though Apple never said as much, many Newton insiders believe the MP2100 was created specifically to be a platform for speech recognition.
So far, this brief history has ignored the business goings-on at Apple. However, there is one event that literally changed the face of the MessagePad 2100, and that is the aborted spin-off of the Newton Systems Group into Newton Inc, a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple Computer, in late 1997. During the time the MP2100 was being readied for market, the Apple logo-shaped molding on the face of the 2000 was changed to a circular indentation that was intended to hold the Newton Inc logo. By the time the units arrived from Sharp (the Japanese manufacturer of the original MessagePads and the MP2000/2100), Steve Jobs had reabsorbed Newton back into Apple proper. The final MP2100 cases have an Apple logo painted in the slightly wrong-looking round spot, while the Newton logo and the words Newton Technology are silk-screened in the upper left face of the unit. This obvious patch job is a constant reminder of what Newton might have been.
Why kill Newton ?
Theories about why Steve Jobs killed Newton run from the banal to the bizarre. I believe that the truth, as usual, lies somewhere in between the extremes.
It never made any money
The simplest and perhaps the most plausible explanation for Newton's untimely death is that it was simply unprofitable for Apple to continue supporting three operating systems: the Mac OS, Rhapsody, and the Newton OS. Some sources say that Apple sunk a billion dollars into Newton and recouped only about one-fourth of that amount in sales. That's bad business any way you slice it. Inventing the future is an extremely expensive proposition, and Apple Computer is in no position to continue to invest in a money pit like Newton while it fights to protect the Macintosh from Windows-based computers.
I prefer to think it was a cold business decision, said Clinton Logan. The Newton was at a crossroads. A palm-size device was desperately needed to stay in the PalmPilot/Palm PC product space, a color 'bMate' was needed to combat the upcoming larger flavors of Windows CE. Newton's desktop connectivity needed to be fixed, public awareness and opinion raised, etc. Apple is a struggling company and it simply didn't have the resources to make all that happen and still remain focused on its core business: the Mac OS.
Gaston Bastiens agrees: The only reason I can see why Steve would kill Newton is to cut costs enough to make the company profitable. He also must have seen that with Microsoft's release of Windows CE that Apple had no fighting chance to revive the Newton. They missed their opportunity, big time. We were first to market, had our infrastructure and technologies in place, and there was enough support from my players in Japan to support it.
It is clear that Newton was a losing financial proposition for most of its five-year history. It is also clear that Apple management did not understand how far ahead of the game they were, and that they gave up too soon to reap the rewards a healthy Newton platform could have provided.
Steve Jobs hates John Sculley
This one is easy to understand if you know anything about human nature. Sculley saw Newton as his personal contribution to the world, just as Jobs sees the Mac as his. Sculley ousted Jobs in a nasty boardroom coup, then got himself booted out for poor stock performance. Apple languished under the leadership of a pair of ho-hum corporate suits, then Jobs rode back in to save the day as interim CEO. And what's the first thing that happens when there is a new boss? He fires all his former rivals' executive flunkies, then snuffs out the pretenders' pet projects. Jobs must read Machiavelli; he clearly believes that it is better to be feared than to be loved.
Apple makes computers, and computers have keyboards
This supposedly is a quote from Steve Jobs during a Newton Inc re-absorption meeting attended by an acquaintance. According to this theory, Jobs has no use for handheld, keyboard-less devices like the MessagePad--just as he once had no use for hard drives on the Macintosh. He just doesn't seem to understand the fact that millions of people don't work sitting at a desk in an office building. They walk around, and have no laps on which to put laptops. Jobs doesn't believe in handwriting recognition, observed Steve Capps, Newton's principal designer.
The only thing wrong with this theory is that the keyboard-equipped eMate 300 was selling in respectable numbers to schools when the axe fell. So why kill a hot product unless you have an even hotter replacement for it, and in the process enrage and alienate the entire educational market? Education is one of Apple's few remaining strongholds.
Intel wouldn't commit to the StrongARM
There were reports that Apple was unable to get a satisfactory commitment from Intel to justify another production run of MessagePad 2100s. There was also good reason to believe that Jobs didn't want to owe anything to Intel because of his commitment to the PowerPC architecture, which I believe to be true. His new consumer mobile devices will contain PowerPC chips.
The StrongARM processor is a combination of the low power RISC chip architecture from British ARM and Digital Equipment Corporation's workstation-class Alpha RISC processor technology. When Intel bought out DEC's chip fabs, the StrongARM suddenly became an Intel product. Initially, some analysts suspected that Intel would keep StrongARM production low or kill it off altogether so handheld computer makers would be forced to consider Intel's own mobile processor designs. Some analysts say Intel is committed to the StrongARM architecture and that production yields will remain high, while others say Intel can't decide what to do with the chip. According to a recent editorial by Jim Turley in Microprocessor Report, Intel needs the StrongARM to be a player in the handheld space but can't come to terms with selling a product they didn't invent. There are production issues as well.
To build StrongARM today, wrote Turley, Intel has to maintain the Hudson fab just as Digital left it. Revising the design for Intel's fabs would take months and could do violence to some of StrongARM's most charming characteristics. Later in the article Turley says Nobody wants to invest in a microprocessor without a future, and StrongARM's future is looking iffy.
Michelle Abraham of market research firm In-Stat offers a more optimistic view. As far as StrongARM is concerned, I believe Intel will continue to market the processor and move ahead with plans for the next generation StrongARM processors since they have signed an agreement with ARM.
Newton would compete with Mac NCs
This one holds up under close examination. Apple has been planning to ship low-cost network computers--the fabled Mac NC--which are essentially stripped down Macs with no local storage media that rely on a Rhapsody server computer instead for everything except local processing power. Code-named Columbus, this is Jobs' next big thing, and will probably ship in two versions. The Fast Ethernet-equipped education and business model will boot from a server, while a model aimed at the home market will have a hard drive, an optional DVD drive, and a built-in 56K modem. I believe that what we will see is an eMate shell with a PowerPC processor and a nine-inch color LCD display. If I'm right, then it is understandable why they nuked the Newton OS-based eMate: people would get confused between such similar looking products. As NewtNews editor Steve Holden said, It would look stupid for Apple to have two thin clients. One of them had to go.
Bill Gates bought the education market from Jobs for $500 million
Bear with me here; this one reads like an X-Files episode. Back when Newton OS 2.0 was released, Apple threw a party during Comdex Las Vegas. We all had a great time, then Bill Gates showed up to cheer us on. That night, I'm told, Gates saw the MessagePad 2000 prototype and flipped out over it. It is conjectured that this was when he saw the true possibilities of what was to become Windows CE. In the following year Gates saw the eMate prototype and immediately appreciated its potential to revolutionize education. Gates' wife Melinda then had a baby girl, and Gates decided he wantted eMate-like devices running Windows CE in the hands of every student in America, if not the world.
Soon, Apple Computer is on the rocks. Jobs and Gates--who have been portrayed in the media as bitter rivals but are actually good friends--conceived a scheme to save Apple. Microsoft poured a huge pile of cash into Apple, built a killer new Macintosh version of Microsoft Office 98 along with other hot new products for the Mac, and agreed to combine several key technologies between the two companies rather than compete technologically.
In exchange for their very survival, Jobs agreed to (a) sell $150 million in non-voting Apple stock to Microsoft; (b) settle out of court all pending Apple litigation against Microsoft for an undisclosed sum; (c) make Microsoft Internet Explorer the default web browser on all new Macs; and (d) give Gates complete access to key Apple technologies.
That's the public part that everybody knows. I have spoken to former Newton developers who claim this scheme goes much farther. The undisclosed amount paid by Microsoft, they say, combined with the $150 million, actually came to half a billion dollars. Among the stipulations to which Jobs allegedly agreed was that he would prematurely snuff Newton, thereby deliberately angering the education market so they would adopt Windows CE-based eMate-like devices.
And what was Gates' motivation? He was supposedly ticked off at Compaq for making a soon to be announced eMate clone that runs Windows 95 instead of Windows CE. This unnamed device is reportedly targeted directly at schools. Compaq is one of the few companies big enough to do whatever it bloody well wants and say to hell with Microsoft. It is widely believed that Gates wants the world to run on Windows NT and Windows CE, while the bloated and increasingly unsustainable Windows 95 fades away. To ensure that events in the education market happen on his terms instead of Compaq's, Gates supposedly bought the market for handheld school computers from Apple.
I don't believe this is the way it went down, but it is interesting to speculate about what Steve Jobs did agree to in these meetings.
Why not sell it, license it, or spin it off?
Over the last year, several companies have approached Apple about buying Newton technology outright. Apple maintained that Newton was not for sale, but privately the company was entertaining offers. Since they didn't seem to respond to any of them, this was probably just a delaying tactic.
While heading up the Newton Developer Association initiative to gather enough vertical market companies to pressure Apple into selling the Newton technology, I came across information about other companies making bids for Newton before it was killed, said former Newton developer E. Karsten Smelser of Borealis Communications. All of the bids were in the eight-figure range. Apparently, Steve turned them all down flat. It was Steve's unwillingness to negotiate that became my biggest problem in gathering support amongst these companies. I was told by many that they had already tried and were not going to waste anymore time on it.
There was also some talk of Apple licensing Newton technology to Planet Computing, one of the companies that recently offered to buy Newton. Smelser continues, I spoke with the other current licensees of Newton technology (the ones that aren't bankrupt) and they told me that they would never consider making anything based on that license since Steve/Apple can cancel it at any time, e.g. Mac clones.
Why not let Newton Inc spin off? Jobs' predecessor at Apple, Gil Amelio, instigated the spin-off plan. But when Jobs came back he decided to put a stop to it just as the Newton people were getting their new office furnished and their phones installed.
Apple legal would not allow the division to be sold/merged because of possible stockholder suits that would follow if in fact the technology did take off and become successful, says Jon Covington of PDA Inc/World Market Strategies. There would be no suits if they killed it.
It has been widely reported that when Jobs took the helm he wanted to raid the Newton division for the two or three Newton eMate designers as part of his NC plan. As I said, Jobs liked the eMate and wanted it, or something like it, for Apple. But that doesn't mean that an independent Newton Inc shouldn't have a go at lucrative vertical markets with the MessagePad 2100. The market was there, waiting to be exploited.
Apple had nothing really to lose, Steve Holden recently told me. I find it very strange that Newton Inc was a complete and separate company with $20 million in the bank and a year to live before it would go under if things failed, yet Steve Jobs brought Newton back, said it was strategic, and then killed it. Even General Magic is going after verticals with Magic Cap 3.0. Apple could have gone after vertical markets even if they abandoned the consumer market.
Developers take the brunt
Though Newton owners certainly have good cause to be angry with Apple, developers have been hit the hardest by the untimely death of the Newton platform. Many hard-working companies lost their reason for existing overnight, and have suffered substantial financial losses as a result. Though less visible than commercial software companies, we know of quite a few Newton-specific development efforts involving years of work on vertical market solutions that will never ship due to a lack of hardware.
Hundreds of businesses have been hurt by Apple's decision to kill the Newton, says Newton consultant Josh Weisbuch. Companies such as Transport Data were well into the development of a ruggedized handheld for the emergency medical and law enforcement industries. Renaissance Digital was working with Children's Hospital here in Boston to create a completely Newton-based otolaryngology department.
Many developers rode the Newton is dead rumor roller coaster throughout 1997 and 1998, and ended up losing tons of money spent on damage control when their big customers got spooked. Many Newton evangelists reluctantly recommended that Apple remove its logo from Newton devices to make them more palatable to corporations. Apple never understood the critical importance of vertical markets in creating new markets and still can't justify investing in creating them, says John Covington. It's one of the reasons I left Apple.
Salvaging the best of Newton
I think it is most likely that Jobs didn't want any competitors for his new mobile devices. Rather than risk cannibalizing Apple sales with a not-invented-by-Jobs Newton product from a subsidiary, he decided to raid Newton for any salvageable technologies that could be ported to his new machines. Newton's peerless handwriting recognition, the data soup architecture, and the Intelligent Assistant are all excellent candidates for the new machines.
Even though the platform is gone, I think it is safe to say that Mac users will benefit from lessons Apple learned during the Newton experience, developer Cliff Joyce told me. Most notably, the constraints imposed by a pen-based machine with very limited screen real estate resulted in some refreshing, interesting, powerful, and smart interface ideas.
Opportunity squandered
The general feeling among those who worked at Apple or who watched closely is that Newton represents a textbook case of mismanagement and opportunity squandered, as Jim Floyd of Microsoft so aptly put it.
Steve Jobs set back the state of handwriting recognition two years by killing Newton, said Conrad Blickenstorfer. He shelved the best HWR technology on the planet, and canned the most compelling device ever made to deliver it. It is a giant leap backwards.
The Newton could have been a multi-billion dollar success had Sculley and I stayed, Gaston Bastiens told me. After Sculley left, Spindler had no commitment to Newton at all and he basically killed it. People blame Jobs for this, but it was really Spindler. Apple had a unique opportunity because we had everything in place to make the Newton a worldwide standard for a wireless intelligent communications device that could do everything.
Gil Amelio's recent book seems to support this assessment. Spindler was the first to suggest that the Newton group should be sold off or axed. Amelio wanted to keep Newton alive because he thought it would eventually be profitable, but Jobs eventually overruled him.
A matter of trust
Jobs wants to make a huge, 1984-magnitude splash with his new mobile machines, so you can't blame him for limiting the number of similar products if he can. Like it or not, he's the boss, so the fate of any product which bears an Apple logo is in his hands. We will just have to trust him to do the right thing.
Those of us who invested in the Newton dream have had a rude awakening. We can take solace in the awareness that we paved the way for a new class of smarter, faster, smaller, and less expensive devices that will be enjoyed by many more people than Newton ever was. In the course of researching and writing this article, I made my peace with this. It's time to move on .
-David MacNeill dmacneill@pencomputing.com is executive editor of Pen Computing Magazine. Newton Notes(TM) has been in continuous publication since the release of the Newton in 1993.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
I started with a Newton MP100, upgraded to a 120, upgraded again to a 130. The 100 is framed on my wall (it's a beautiful machine). The 120 was handed down to my then-girlfriend. (I bought all of these used; I'm not rich.)
I sold the 130 about three years ago and bought a Visor Deluxe. My feeling then was that Palms sure as hell weren't as good as Newtons, but given the smaller size, they were good enough at the things I wanted to do.
A year ago, a bunch of MP2100's went up for sale on eBay at ridiculously low prices; my wife bought me one for my birthday. I played with it for a couple days and immediately shelved my Visor. The 2100 had so much more speed and power, not to mention storage, that the elegance of the system didn't merely compare favorably to the more simplistic Palm, it totally destroyed it. Since I had to carry two devices anyway -- PDA and cell phone -- I didn't mind so much if the PDA was larger, as long as it was much, much better. The 130 wasn't enough better to justify the size; the 2100 was, and then some.
Over the past year, I've added an 802.11 card and ethernet, synced the Newton with my OS X box from twenty miles away via TCP/IP, and generally been extremely blown away by the inventiveness and support of the Newton community.
Now, I'm in the process of switching back to Palm -- someone put SprintPCS visorphone modules up on eBay, and I got one for $7. It's not as good a phone as my old Samsung, but it's a good enough phone. It's not as good a PDA as the Newton 2100 by a long shot, but it's a good enough PDA. And the fact that I can now carry one device rather than two clinches the deal.
But I'll be carrying the 2100 when I travel; its large screen (with excellent backlighting), speed, and network capabilities make it a perfectly viable substitute for a laptop when I go on trips; the Visor doesn't come close to that.
I wish Newton, Inc. had been left to stand or fall on its own, rather than being spun back into Apple. A Newton OS device the size of a Palm, or even a bit bigger, combined with a mobile phone, would be a dream come true.
Nothing important has happened in the computer technology arena, other than the adoption of the Internet by the casual consumer, since 1984 when Apple introduced the world to the "graphic user interface" (and PnP networking) in a huge way. You think I'm wrong? Then let's make a list of all the "new" stuff people get a stiffy over:
- Fast processors.
- Better monitors.
- A dozen incarnations of MS Office.
- Graphics acceleration and more bits per pixel.
- Bigger hard drives.
- Denser memory chips.
- Consumer Un*x (Linux).
Just more and faster of the stuff that we had from the beginning. Anyone who wants to argue that any of the above is somehow "new" probably was in diapers 20 years ago. OK, cooling technology in consumer machines is new. Didn't have that on the desktop in 1984; only monster mainframes had built-in air conditioning. I don't see this being progress, however. LCDs are new (even though I had one on my Apple IIc, I kid you not). OK then, consumer Internet at the desktop and LCDs are new.Tending now to the topic, if someone wants to use technology from even 20 years ago to do things that you can do today on "better" (but not new) technology, then I say good for them. They can probably avoid a lot of the current hassles (pending DRM, odious EULA, virus-o-the-week, constant hardware upgrades, constant cost) that those on the bleeding edge of the faux-new have to contend with.
As I said, I use a Newton. Nobody has improved on what the Newton did at the time it was cancelled. This is because 1) nobody other than Apple and maybe IBM actually improves anything because that involves risk and delayed profits, and 2) nobody could improve on it if they tried, including Apple and IBM. There just was no room to do so. It was and is just about perfect. If it has fallen behind the times then what of it; that is what software development is for. You stop developing, it falls behind. Windows still sports DOS at the core; does anyone use DOS anymore? Other than you I mean? Of course not because DOS kept on growing and eventually add a really nice command shell called Windows. Is Windows new? Hardly. Is DOS new? Certainly not. What is new this year from Microsoft, anything? Nothing other than the licensing scheme-o-the-week.
The Newton itself was new in concept, a keyboard-less information organizer, and like many new things it was ahead of its time. Apple itself will tell you the Newton's time still has not come. And when it does, it will probably look more like a phone because a phone is what people understand.
And I still say that the only thing that is really new in 20 years is the Internet to the home. I've seen a lot of technology come and go, and even now I still am shocked and amazed at what is made possible by the Internet:
15 years ago I would be tapping out this message on my Mac SE into my private Hermes BBS, which visitors would connect to via a pair of new 2400 baud modems. Cost me a fortune to run it, and I reached maybe 100 users total in several years.
Gol darnit, now that is progress!
Now that I'm all jazzed again maybe I'll contact that guy I got email from a while back who was selling replacement backlights for the Newton, that way I can turn the lights down and still jot notes about tomorrow's tasks and watch GoGo! dance naughty. Some things are still beautiful even after all the years.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
My first computer ever was a 4K Color Computer and I took out a loan to buy it! Went through the upgrades to 32K, replacement keyboard, from tape to diskette drive and on and on through a 512K Color Computer 3 with a 20MB hard drive. Still have it all stored in boxes some place. Boy did I learn a lot from those old machines! Both hardware hacking, and programming! My lastest and greatest PC (even running Linux) just doesn't mean the same to me. Guess I miss the old CoCos, hummm where did I store those boxes???
Is that a Newton in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Hi,
...).
I have a Newton 2100. For some time now I have switched most of the tasks from it to my Powerbook and MS Office (Entourage,
Just a few days got a Sony Ericsson P800 phone. It runs the Symbian OS 7 on an ARM 9 processor. It has similar capabilities like the Newton OS. But if you use it, you feel sad. The Newton OS was much slicker, better integrated, etc. many many years ago.
Sigh.
That said, the Newton is an awesome machine. The problem, for me at least, was not price, form factor, or any hardware issue. The only problem was that, out of the box, it did not synch with other software. That, I believe was the stupidest mistake Apple has ever made. It turned a truly great machine into something that was as pain to use. Yes it would synch, after a fashion, but it was never acceptable. When I needed PDA for business, and extreme portability was necessary, I had to go with the Palm V.
The Palm was primitive in comparison to the 2100 it replaced. Small screen, data entry through a child's script, no ethernet connection, small memory, no simple modem. The list goes on. The Palm was functional but not elegant beyond the data synch. When the palm broke, I went back to the 2100. My data, unfortunately, is once again fragmented, but the Newton is powerful enough to my primary agenda.
The synch situation is getting better. I can see using the newton for the foreseeable future. It does everything I need. I can write and edit significant pieces using it, something that I could never to on a palm or other PDAs I have tried. One thing I like about Apple is that the technology does not tend to become obsolete as quickly as others.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
That's because the Newton is STILL the ONLY PDA worth using. All the others are just cheap, hopeless wannabes.
... well, who wants to use Windoze!!
Palm devices suck. The so-called "handwriting recognition" is a joke when compared to the real handwriting recognition of the Newton. Even though the size is better than a Newton, the screen size is hopeless (and one third taken up by the silly writing area!)
Handspring. Not only is it a stupid Palm device, but they look as ugly as sin too.
Pocket Windows devices
Hopefully IF Apple ever does get back into a PDA it will be at least as good as Newton (with a color screen) and not simply some Palm garbage.
Actually, when Company A sells a widget that doesn't work -- and Company B sells a slightly less ambitious widget that works exactly as intended and advertised, for a third of the money, so that tout le monde goes out and buys one and a good network effect gets going -- there's not much incentive for people to pay attention to Company A's announcement that "no, really, it works this time," and saying "are you stupid? We FIXED it" does nothing to help matters.
THAT'S the Newton Effect. If you stomp your customers and fuck them over, they lose interest in anything further you might offer them, and people have long memories. Ask Amway.
And as Newton owners are testifying here, it DOES work this time, and even whips the asses of Company B and Company C's widgets, but who cares except (by definition) the people who never left the fold in the first place?
From the MacWorld where Newton was introduced until Apple killed it, the company I was working for was developing verical market and commercial Newton software.
Apple really missed the boat by trying to force the Newton into the consumer market when it was clearly failing, while at the same time completely missing the fact that the vertical market was taking off. Of course nowadays the vertical market is mostly served by special purpose devices.
The Newton APIs and the NewtonScript programming language were just unbelievably cool. What Java wishes it was. But Apple refused to allow third parties access to a C compiler or a standard way to load and run natively compiled code, which really hurt performance critical routines.
The OO storage system was very cool too. All and all the Newton was almost *too* revolutionary.
/.ed MySQL may you rest in pieces... -bb
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
EAT UP MARTHA
right here Bought it in 1972 and it does everything I need, everything since then has just been 'more and more' of the same thing. Pfft.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
THE theory about oil has to do with the lack of control the US (and West in general) has over a substance it has based its economy on. By the US controlling the largest oil fields in the middle east, it needs to rely less upon the members of OPEC, and has a comfortable cushion that means its economy cannot be as easily blackmailed as it was during the 1970s.
Since the 1970s, the West has been looking into ways of getting out of the embrace of countries such as Saudi Arabia so that it has some degree of control back over its own affairs in that region. So far its achieved some degree of compromise, with a considerably weakened OPEC, and countries such as Britain generating its own oil and most of Europe using taxation to limit oil use. This weakening of oil generating state's power is temporary, oil usage continues to rise, and generation capacity may peak within the next twenty years. Control of Iraq would essentially change the whip-hand, and put the West back in charge of the world economy.
This, incidentally, makes a hell of a lot more sense than it being about terrorism (Bin Laden is an enemy of Saddam Hussein), or that it's about disarming a dictator (we don't seem to care about any other dictators.)
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
We don't need that kind of deflationary pressure in this enconomy. Thanks for the correction.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Read about the history of pen based computing here. Basically, the Newton seems in part an attempt to commecialize aspects of Alan Kay's vision of the Dynabook, and most of the technology had been previously explored, going back to the 1960's.
I get 3 months of usage on my MP2100.
Energizer Lithium AA Photo Batteries Model Number L91BP-4
You probably have the link, but I suspect others might find it useful.
The real root of Newton's woes was that then-CEO Sculley forced them to launch the Newton before it was ready. It got a bad reputation because it shipped with software that wasn't ready for prime time yet, and it never recovered.
How good were Newton's sales, anyway? There were a number of attempts to produce a "PDA" around that time, but the Palm was the first to get form factor, battery life and price right.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
For instance, if you ditch the OS on your PC that allows you to take advantage of certain functions on your handheld, your handheld has effectively lost functionality without itself failing.
With the continuing growth in the importance of interconnectedness to the devices and systems we use every day, your statement is quickly becoming less generally true.
6809 combined with the MMU system in the CoCo3 made for a very nice little computer.
8 bitters were never better than this machine.
Blogging because I can...
Oil is just a pretext. If it were really about the price of oil, there never would have been an economic embargo of Iraq, keeping most of the Iraqi oil off the market, and keeping prices up.
It's about Israel, plain and simple. Remove the Zionists from the equation, and remove their neo-conservative operatives in the Bush Administration, and you have no war.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j021903.html
It constantly bugs me how on Slashdot everyone seems to think the Newton was the first mass-produced PDA. It wasn't! The Amstrad PenPad was! They're wonderful little things :-) Not that i have any problem with Apple's offering either, it's just one of those geeky nit-picking things that must be said...
I got the Newton 2000 right when it first came out. I did the research and compared it to everything else that was out there, including Palm, and decided it was the best tool. And it was, but after using it for a while, my take on why it wasn't well accepted was that while it was great within itself, in terms of the user interface, the applications, the handwriting recognition, etc, its main problem was that it didn't fit into people's paradigms of how they organized data and applications, and didn't fit into the other systems that they had to use, like enterprise calendaring applications, corporate email systems, etc. If you were the lone ranger out there, then it would be good. But try hooking up with Exchange server or Outlook calendar? Sorry.
Another feature/problem was the object oriented nature of the applications. One of the best things about NewtonOS was how you could extend the built in applications organically by downloading and installing a small extension object. For example, I remember a cool one that added linking between people in your address book. It added the feature right into the app, just like it was a built-in feature. Much better than the Palm, where if you want to improve on an app, you have to replace the whole thing with a completely different one. But the problem with this was that after a while you had a bunch of these add-ons installed, and couldn't tell what was built-in and what wasn't. Let's say something went wrong and you wanted to restore the system from scratch. Suddenly all these little features would be missing and you had no idea what program they came from. And since the syncing didn't work too well even for the built-in apps, it definitely didn't work for the add-ons, so mostly you were left without a backup for all the add-on data.
The other thing was the data soup concept. Again, it was one of the Newton's best features, in that other apps could access all the data available to make integration a reality. But since all the data was "in there somewhere" and not really conventionally separated like Palm's databases, it was hard to know what was backed up, synced or whatever. I'm sure this was part of the reason why generalized syncing software was hard to achieve for Apple.
I'm sure somebody will try to rebutt these arguments with a technical analysis of how you could do these things, but suffice it to say that it wasn't clear to me how to sort these things out and I'm a EE with hw and sw background. For sure, the average user wouldn't take the time to figure this all out.
Anyhow, besides the marketing and strategy blunders, there are some lessons to learn about making sure that revolutionary technology also has the capability to fit into existing technology and paradigms in order for it to succeed.
I have my orginal MP100, and its going strong, minus syncing...
Apple was so far ahead of the curve that the world wasnt ready for it yet.. plus they were too damned expensive..
Both Doomed it to failure.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
i gefinitebly regret having sold my Newton 8 yeans ago. Tbe best tbing you coulh do was change ohannels on airport TVs by flddling arouhd witb the IR port. Obher than that tbe thing was pretty useless.
I got a fair amount of use of the the 100, despite its slow, slow, slow speed. I tried to use the handwriting recognition and eventually obtained Graffiti, which was cool but also slow (I'd take notes as secretary at a board meeting and have to wait for my pen strokes to be interpreted and appear on the screen). Originally I was hoping to use the Newton as a handheld (lying in the backyard hammock) way to access a local community system, but these days it just gets used to occasionally reprogram the modems on said system.
Now I'm keeping the Newt in "long term storage" mode, with even the backup battery out and a backup living on a flash card for when I actually need to use it. As a youngster I remember being fascinated by an old mechanical adder in my Dad's top dresser drawer; I want the Newt to someday take that duty in my currently-hypothetical family.
*A year ago, when I was looking for a good laptop on which to run Linux, I happened to get a catalog from the very same MacMall where I'd bought my Newton many years ago. I ended up buying an iBook, a decision I've never regretted.
According to Newton himself, it (and the Universe) won't last beyond 2060 AD.
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
There is clearly a market for this class of device. I would love a Newton that was updated with the technology now available. The Sharp SL-C700 is the closest thing that I would be willing to replace my Palm Vx with at the moment. The device is smaller than the old newtons but has the power to run anything. The biggest problems with the Sharp are the the PIM applications are lame, battery life, and the fact that there are now plans to actually release it in the US.
Apple has the expertise from the Newton to take the Sharp hardware mainstream. If the Sharp can run TrollTech and Debian, could it not run OSX and Inkwell? I would like to be able to at least compile most Linux apps to run on the platform
What I would like to see in a mini-PC/handheld/PDA in SL-C700 form-factor would be:
All day battery life
802.11b built-in
Voice-recorder with at least off-line recognition (dictation)
USB connectivity that can recharge
RS-232 (for terminal/ssh apps
2 CF/MMC slots
MUST sync with Outlook as per Palm
Good handwriting recog. as well as a non-thumb keyboard
Apple, if they didn't want to go to Xscale could use PPC in the form of the new reference design from IBM.
Come on Apple - You can do it!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Do people realise the gravity of the situation? /me ducks
Several weeks ago I had dinner with an associate who happens to be a retired college professor, and the conversation turned to politics and economics (and we are still friends). Among other things, we discussed the current finances of the State of Connecticut and the federal tax cuts of last year. It was evident that my associate was rather strongly opposed to the tax cut from last year and favors more taxes in Connecticut imposed on the rich. He was really upset because "the federal tax cut benefited the rich and they got much more money back than the ordinary taxpayers like you and me, and that's just not fair".
I tried to explain that the rich pay more in the first place, so it stands to reason that they'd get more money back. I could tell that my friend was unimpressed by this argument. I should have made my argument around the point that the rich would be paying less and not getting more back, and perhaps that would have been more persuasive. Obviously, even some retired college professors are a prisoner of the myth that the "rich" somehow get a free ride in the process of paying taxes. After I got home, I looked up some info on the IRS website as to who pays what percent of the taxes, and here is an analogy that I should have used to make the point more clear. I will use the actual split on federal taxes paid by individuals in 1999 per the IRS (since that was the most recent data I could find).
Suppose that ten people go together to the local restaurant for lunch every day at noon. The total bill for all ten comes to $100. If it was paid the way our federal income taxes are paid, the first four people would pay nothing;
the fifth would pay $1;
the sixth would pay $2;
the seventh $5;
the eighth $8;
the ninth $18.
The tenth person (obviously the richest) would pay $66.
(This info alone should shock you.)
The ten people ate lunch in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement until the owner threw them a curve. "Since you are such good customers," he said, "I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20. Now lunch for the ten only costs $80!
Oh, but what should they do with this "extra" money that would be "fair"? The first four should be unaffected; they still eat for free. Can we figure out how to divvy up the $20 savings among the remaining six so that everyone gets their fair share? The people realize that $20 divided by 6 is $3.33, but if they subtract that from everybody's share, then the fifth person and the sixth person would end up being paid to eat their meal, and this will surely not be acceptable to the rest. The restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughtly the same amount where possible, and he proceeded to work out the amounts each should pay. And so the fifth person paid nothing instead of $1,
the sixth person paid nothing instead of $2,
the seventh paid $2 instead of $5,
the eighth paid $5 instead of $8,
the ninth paid $15 instead of $18, leaving the tenth person with a bill of $58 instead of $66.
Outside the restaurant, the people began to compare their savings.
"I only got $2 out the $20," declared the sixth person pointing to the tenth, "and he got $8!"
"Yeah, that's right!" exclaimed the fifth person. "I only saved a dollar, too. It's unfair that he got eight times more than I did!"
"That's true!" shouted the seventh person. "Why should he get $8 back when I got only $3? The wealthy get all the breaks."
"Wait a minute!" yelled the first four people in unison. "We didn't get anything at all. This system exploits the poor."
The nine people surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next day the tenth person didn't show up for lunch, so the nine sat down and ate without him. Besides, now they did not really want his company anyway. But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered something important - they were $58 short!
The fact of life is that the people who pay the highest taxes will get the most benefit from a tax reduction. Tax them too much, attack them for being wealthy, throw up so many barriers that they cannot maintain or accumulate wealth, and they just may not show up at the lunch table anymore. There are lots of good restaurants in Switzerland, Bermuda and the Caribbean.
Lets say they used even the old specs. Could it be the size of the original screen, but the thickness of a clie or palm?
I missed an opportunity to get a 2100 for $100 a year ago...my wallet was $20 too short. The Visor Deluxe just isn't the same.
I, too, was a big CoCo fan. I even went through a phase a while ago where I wanted to dig back up a complete working system with multi-pak interface, speech synthesizer, Orch-90, and all those goodies.
I decided against it though, after firing a friend's old system back up. I think the memories are fonder than the reality of that nasty text screen (32 cols. and no true lowercase), the annoyances like hitting reset until the screen was blue (or red), when starting games using artifacts, etc.
It was an awesome system back in the day. No doubt about it. I ran a BBS (Tandy Terminal) off mine for years, and had an external IBM hard drive hooked up with the Burke & Burke controller at one point. It was a blast. But things have come a long way since then - and I'm more content to keep the fond memories than revisit it and realize the relative shortcomings.
this has been typical Jobs behavior all along. I think we're about to see more of it with OS X applications, too.
After courting MS to get them to release Office X for Mac, now they're out to offend MS with the Keynote presentation software to directly compete with Powerpoint, and the new Safari browser to keep IE off the OS X desktops.
Not that I fault Apple for competing. Quite the contrary. I simply think they played their hand far too soon in the game, mostly due to Jobs' arrogance and hatred for MS - and they'll pay the price. If MS retaliates in the near future, Apple is basically screwed. Fact is, they have less than half of a decent Office suite of their own right now. If they released a killer upgrade to Appleworks (maybe an "Appleworks Pro" edition?), they might be in a better position. Right now, they need MS more than they need to try to compete with them.
Let's look at the facts.
1. MS just bought Virtual PC. Sure, they say they plan on continuing Mac support for the product. (And hey, it makes some sense - because they usually sell copies of Windows with each one.) But if Apple manages to piss off MS enough, MS can simply cancel Mac support and leave Apple with no way to run PC apps anymore.
2. Apple's biggest marketing ploy right now is the "switch" thing.... convert PC users to a new Mac system. Well, these people need "bridges" to make it easier to cross over. That means the MS applications need to be there for them, so they know their documents will still be readable/printable if they do switch.
3. Apple seems to be slowly trying to find ways to leverage the BSD Unix core of OS X so the average user can fully enjoy the open source Unix apps, utils and games out there. (They've got the X11 for OS X in beta, for example.) This is smart, but will also put them on a collision course with MS at some point. Right now, MS considers Linux as enemy #1. If OS X starts preaching that it runs all the stuff Linux runs (or most of it), but with more user-friendly installations - they're on the MS "hit list" too.
895 dollars for APDA Newton programming manuals
0 9. 11/Nov93Editorial/
:
Nov 1993 Mac Tech
Volume Number:9
Issue Number:11
It's a Newt!
Support for Newton developers?
You might be wondering how Apple will support Newton developers. First, as you may already know, the beta version of the Newton Toolkit is available through APDA (although there are apparently delays in getting them to customers). Second, Apple is expanding their Developer Support programs to include the PIE Partner program. This program is meant to give special attention to those who qualify. As a result, the price of this program is $2850. While this program will be more expensive than other developer programs, it is geared to be very much in line with others in the industry. It will be more than just technical support - it will include compatibility testing, production assistance, e-mail support, access to marketing services, purchasing pre-release hardware, etcS
At the time of this writing, there have been many rumors about the royalty on products developed using NTK. The information we have at this time is that it will be 1% of sales. Freeware and shareware will be exempt. By the time you read this, Apple probably will have firmed up their policies on this issue.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.09/
in April 1995 two years later they dropped the support price to only 2500 from 2850. and added a cheapoer one in a panic at only $400 per year.
But they kept the 1% Gross Sales royalty clauses. There is no royalty to pay for MS windows or Mac programming or palm pilot programming
Microsoft is much better at acknowledging contributions and offering unsolicited beta software, which Dave Winer calls "sending flowers." Apple never sent flowers to devlelopers from 1992 through 1999.
But 895 dollars for programming manuals unless you paid 2850 dollars!!!!!! (Not $150 or $35 until years later and after Newton was an ignored failure)
And Apple extorted percentage of gross profits and enforced a draconian punishement NDA, also helped kill the damned thing.
895.00 for programming documentation, for many years! And apple never dropped the price until many years later, halving it, and then at the bitter end, dropping the price of the books to 35 dollars.
Meanwhile compilers for MS Windows and programming information was FREE, and then eventually about 35 dollars for beta versions.
Apple also REFUSED to use "Graffitti" style entry and was obsessed on idiotic cursive.
I NEVER write in cursive, ever since 6th grade.
Letter by letter won the world and the more open-minded Palm Pilot mad history.
Apple also REFUSED to support C Compilers and instead wanted everyone to use a mandatory enforced crap language called DYLAN.
Palm Pilot later on had a wide variety of languages, including C.
Apple is retarded. I am a very successful Mac devloper (manuy shrink wrapped mass market successes) but I convinced every developer I knew to pan that piece of crap.
I saw many in my life, and though they were "cool" and high tech. They did everyting incorrectly to offend enginners such as myself.
No manuals without paying 895.00, a percentage of gross sales, hostility to mac platform but not MS windows by apple, The lack of C and mandate to use DYLAN (named after the gospel singing aging hippie in fact).
I am glad the Newton died but I and other engineers such as myself helped kill that crap.
Walt, Sweet Pea, Pippin, Nike, all other products from that idiotic division all ate up millions and were stillborn hardware projects. All becuase of engineering fiascos.
Remember Taligent Pink? Millions wasted by idiotic apple.
Remember Kalieda? Millions wasted on a graphics model that could only draw to one screen depth and one screen way after the MAc shipped.
Remember Bedrock (license fee per COPY SOLD! Dead)
How about remembering
OpenDoc (crashed on clean vanilla 840AV with latest OS)
CyberDog (68K bugs killed it too)
SOM - fascist rules, buggy, anti-C
Copland/Gershwin (could not run RAM disks, or DAs, could not boot from locked Syquest) stillborn after wasting 80 million!
QuickDraw GX (license fee per MS Windows COPY SOLD! Dead)
QuickDraw GX printing
Powertalk
QuickDraw 3D (was OK, but apple was cagey with pricing rules)
Dylan
Hypercard
Geoport
SK8
Newton, etc etc etc..... DEAD AND PATHETIC all because of bugs, greed, and lies.
All those Apple engineering efforts all dieg because people like me helped convince other engineers to let them die!!!
Apple only did one thing right in history : Mac OS (Inside Mac volumes 1 - 6) and QuickDraw and I would like to add OpenDoc but it is too slow and has too many system heap handles and apple killed it.
One project from 1982-1984, thats it.
AppleTalk was OK and a real OSI 7 layer network, and that was in 1985 and allowed postwcript printer sharing, but still, no successes from 1985 to now.
I dance on the grave of Newton and its 895 dollar introductory programming manuals.
Newton chose wrong. They chose to offend developers. 895 dollars for APDA Newton programming manuals!
0 9. 11/Nov93Editorial/
:
Nov 1993 Mac Tech
Volume Number:9
Issue Number:11
It's a Newt!
Support for Newton developers?
You might be wondering how Apple will support Newton developers. First, as you may already know, the beta version of the Newton Toolkit is available through APDA (although there are apparently delays in getting them to customers). Second, Apple is expanding their Developer Support programs to include the PIE Partner program. This program is meant to give special attention to those who qualify. As a result, the price of this program is $2850. While this program will be more expensive than other developer programs, it is geared to be very much in line with others in the industry. It will be more than just technical support - it will include compatibility testing, production assistance, e-mail support, access to marketing services, purchasing pre-release hardware, etcS
At the time of this writing, there have been many rumors about the royalty on products developed using NTK. The information we have at this time is that it will be 1% of sales. Freeware and shareware will be exempt. By the time you read this, Apple probably will have firmed up their policies on this issue.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.09/
in April 1995 two years later they dropped the support price to only 2500 from 2850. and added a cheapoer one in a panic at only $400 per year.
But they kept the 1% Gross Sales royalty clauses. There is no royalty to pay for MS windows or Mac programming or palm pilot programming
Microsoft is much better at acknowledging contributions and offering unsolicited beta software, which Dave Winer calls "sending flowers." Apple never sent flowers to devlelopers from 1992 through 1999.
But 895 dollars for programming manuals unless you paid 2850 dollars!!!!!! (Not $150 or $35 until years later and after Newton was an ignored failure)
And Apple extorted percentage of gross profits and enforced a draconian punishement NDA, also helped kill the damned thing.
895.00 for programming documentation, for many years! And apple never dropped the price until many years later, halving it, and then at the bitter end, dropping the price of the books to 35 dollars.
Meanwhile compilers for MS Windows and programming information was FREE, and then eventually about 35 dollars for beta versions.
Apple also REFUSED to use "Graffitti" style entry and was obsessed on idiotic cursive.
I NEVER write in cursive, ever since 6th grade.
Letter by letter won the world and the more open-minded Palm Pilot mad history.
Apple also REFUSED to support C Compilers and instead wanted everyone to use a mandatory enforced crap language called DYLAN.
Palm Pilot later on had a wide variety of languages, including C.
Apple is retarded. I am a very successful Mac devloper (manuy shrink wrapped mass market successes) but I convinced every developer I knew to pan that piece of crap.
I saw many in my life, and though they were "cool" and high tech. They did everyting incorrectly to offend enginners such as myself.
No manuals without paying 895.00, a percentage of gross sales, hostility to mac platform but not MS windows by apple, The lack of C and mandate to use DYLAN (named after the gospel singing aging hippie in fact).
I am glad the Newton died but I and other engineers such as myself helped kill that crap.
Walt, Sweet Pea, Pippin, Nike, all other products from that idiotic division all ate up millions and were stillborn hardware projects. All becuase of engineering fiascos.
Remember Taligent Pink? Millions wasted by idiotic apple.
Remember Kalieda? Millions wasted on a graphics model that could only draw to one screen depth and one screen way after the MAc shipped.
Remember Bedrock (license fee per COPY SOLD! Dead)
How about remembering
OpenDoc (crashed on clean vanilla 840AV with latest OS)
CyberDog (68K bugs killed it too)
SOM - fascist rules, buggy, anti-C
Copland/Gershwin (could not run RAM disks, or DAs, could not boot from locked Syquest) stillborn after wasting 80 million!
QuickDraw GX (license fee per MS Windows COPY SOLD! Dead)
QuickDraw GX printing
Powertalk
QuickDraw 3D (was OK, but apple was cagey with pricing rules)
Dylan
Hypercard
Geoport
SK8
Newton, etc etc etc..... DEAD AND PATHETIC all because of bugs, greed, and lies.
All those Apple engineering efforts all dieg because people like me helped convince other engineers to let them die!!!
Apple only did one thing right in history : Mac OS (Inside Mac volumes 1 - 6) and QuickDraw and I would like to add OpenDoc but it is too slow and has too many system heap handles and apple killed it.
One project from 1982-1984, thats it.
AppleTalk was OK and a real OSI 7 layer network, and that was in 1985 and allowed postwcript printer sharing, but still, no successes from 1985 to now.
I dance on the grave of Newton and its 895 dollar introductory programming manuals.
Apple wanted 895 dollars for APDA Newton programming manuals, or 2850 for manuals + very limited tech support!
0 9. 11/Nov93Editorial/
:
Nov 1993 Mac Tech
Volume Number:9
Issue Number:11
It's a Newt!
Support for Newton developers?
You might be wondering how Apple will support Newton developers. First, as you may already know, the beta version of the Newton Toolkit is available through APDA (although there are apparently delays in getting them to customers). Second, Apple is expanding their Developer Support programs to include the PIE Partner program. This program is meant to give special attention to those who qualify. As a result, the price of this program is $2850. While this program will be more expensive than other developer programs, it is geared to be very much in line with others in the industry. It will be more than just technical support - it will include compatibility testing, production assistance, e-mail support, access to marketing services, purchasing pre-release hardware, etcS
At the time of this writing, there have been many rumors about the royalty on products developed using NTK. The information we have at this time is that it will be 1% of sales. Freeware and shareware will be exempt. By the time you read this, Apple probably will have firmed up their policies on this issue.
http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.09/
in April 1995 two years later they dropped the support price to only 2500 from 2850. and added a cheapoer one in a panic at only $400 per year.
But they kept the 1% Gross Sales royalty clauses. There is no royalty to pay for MS windows or Mac programming or palm pilot programming
Microsoft is much better at acknowledging contributions and offering unsolicited beta software, which Dave Winer calls "sending flowers." Apple never sent flowers to devlelopers from 1992 through 1999.
But 895 dollars for programming manuals unless you paid 2850 dollars!!!!!! (Not $150 or $35 until years later and after Newton was an ignored failure)
And Apple extorted percentage of gross profits and enforced a draconian punishement NDA, also helped kill the damned thing.
895.00 for programming documentation, for many years! And apple never dropped the price until many years later, halving it, and then at the bitter end, dropping the price of the books to 35 dollars.
Meanwhile compilers for MS Windows and programming information was FREE, and then eventually about 35 dollars for beta versions.
Apple also REFUSED to use "Graffitti" style entry and was obsessed on idiotic cursive.
I NEVER write in cursive, ever since 6th grade.
Letter by letter won the world and the more open-minded Palm Pilot mad history.
Apple also REFUSED to support C Compilers and instead wanted everyone to use a mandatory enforced crap language called DYLAN.
Palm Pilot later on had a wide variety of languages, including C.
Apple is retarded. I am a very successful Mac devloper (manuy shrink wrapped mass market successes) but I convinced every developer I knew to pan that piece of crap.
I saw many in my life, and though they were "cool" and high tech. They did everyting incorrectly to offend enginners such as myself.
No manuals without paying 895.00, a percentage of gross sales, hostility to mac platform but not MS windows by apple, The lack of C and mandate to use DYLAN (named after the gospel singing aging hippie in fact).
I am glad the Newton died but I and other engineers such as myself helped kill that crap.
Walt, Sweet Pea, Pippin, Nike, all other products from that idiotic division all ate up millions and were stillborn hardware projects. All becuase of engineering fiascos.
Remember Taligent Pink? Millions wasted by idiotic apple.
Remember Kalieda? Millions wasted on a graphics model that could only draw to one screen depth and one screen way after the MAc shipped.
Remember Bedrock (license fee per COPY SOLD! Dead)
How about remembering
OpenDoc (crashed on clean vanilla 840AV with latest OS)
CyberDog (68K bugs killed it too)
SOM - fascist rules, buggy, anti-C
Copland/Gershwin (could not run RAM disks, or DAs, could not boot from locked Syquest) stillborn after wasting 80 million!
QuickDraw GX (license fee per MS Windows COPY SOLD! Dead)
QuickDraw GX printing
Powertalk
QuickDraw 3D (was OK, but apple was cagey with pricing rules)
Dylan
Hypercard
Geoport
SK8
Newton, etc etc etc..... DEAD AND PATHETIC all because of bugs, greed, and lies.
All those Apple engineering efforts all dieg because people like me helped convince other engineers to let them die!!!
Apple only did one thing right in history : Mac OS (Inside Mac volumes 1 - 6) and QuickDraw and I would like to add OpenDoc but it is too slow and has too many system heap handles and apple killed it.
One project from 1982-1984, thats it.
AppleTalk was OK and a real OSI 7 layer network, and that was in 1985 and allowed postwcript printer sharing, but still, no successes from 1985 to now.
I dance on the grave of Newton and its 895 dollar introductory programming manuals.
Yeah, but it would be too detrimental to Apple to cave in to Microsoft.
Keynote looks to be a great app. I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like it incorporates a lot of great Quartz technology. This is a comptetitive advantage that the Mac OS has over Windows, and they should absolutely take advantage of it. Also, one of the criticisms of Keynote is that you can't share files with PC users because it's not a cross-platform application; as far as I'm concerned, neither is PowerPoint. Yes, the basic file format is the same, but there's all sorts of weirdness that happens when you try to use PowerPoint in a cross-platform environment.
Second, I think it's more important that Apple has options for office suites than for Apple to court MS Office as the lone Mac office suite. If MS drops Office for Mac, then Apple has Keynote to replace PowerPoint; Mail, Address Book, and iCal are replacements for Outlook; MySQL, et. al. to replace Access; AppleWorks to replace Word and Excel on the low-end, and OpenOffice to replace MS Office in the enterprise. Are these perfect replacements? No, but unless they start receiving more support, they never will be. I'm sure that Apple has discussed myriad times the possibility of MS withdrawing Office for Mac from the marketplace, and I'm sure they have a contingency plan in place. We would probably see Apple either dump a ton of money into developing an Appleworks Pro, as you suggested, or committing a lot of resources to beefing up OpenOffice, in much the same way that they are now beefing up KHTML.
Speaking of that, I initially didn't know how to receive Safari, either. After all, what do we need with Yet Another Web Browser on the market? But Apple is being very shrewd. First of all, they know that the worst of all possible situations is already in place, i.e., Microsoft having near-total dominance over the web browser. This means that many, if not most, pages are being coded for IE compatibility alone. It's virtually handing Microsoft total control over the internet, and they're already taking advantage of it with Windows-only stuff like ActiveX controls. For that reason alone, Apple needs to throw their weight behind ANY browser in the market OTHER THAN Microsoft's. But the Safari strategy is shrewd in other ways. First, Apple went with an open-source browser rather than build their own from scratch; not only does this earn them beaucoup brownie points with the developer community, it also means that most of the great technology that Apple pours into Safari/KHTML is going to find its way into OTHER browsers, making all of the non-MS browsers more attractive. Second, it was smart of Apple not to use Mozilla as their codebase, because the Microsoft/Netscape battle has already been fought, and Apple would constantly be associated with joining the losing side yet again. Third, Mozilla already has a loyal base; again, it's in Apple's best interest to keep the browser market heavily segmented, so going with a relative unknown allows them to create a new browser that has built up an installed base in the millions of users in a very short period of time.
Yes, Apple should treat Microsoft as a valued partner. But they need to take care of their own self-interests, first. Microsoft should be forced to earn their place in the Mac market, it shouldn't just be handed to them by default.
That new connection library is awesome, if not a bit flakey. NCU is quite literally the last use I have for Classic on my iBook. If there's an OS X native file transfer utility available, I might just be crazy enough to re-install OS X without OS 9... well, once it can do system backups, that is :)
Come to the University of Mars! Classes starting soon!
I have a Compaq iPaq. I forget which model because it's so completely useless that it sits plugged into its charger underneath my desk.
It has a color display and a StrongARM processor running at 200-odd Megahertz... i.e. it COULD be a palm-sized color Newton MP2000 with 64MB of RAM and an SD-card slot... except for a tragic historical accident.
Blah blah blah blah.
Before the Newton, nobody knew what a PDA was or what it could do. It sucks being first, because no amount of market research can tell you what will actually sell (see the entry under "Walkman").
It's comments like these from smug hindsighters that kill the future. Have you ever been on the leading edge of anything? I think not.
As a leftie, Calligrapher on my Ipaq is a no-go. It assumes you are right handed and will cross letters and write them from left to right. If you don't, it gets screwy on you. We Southpaws naturally cross letters towards our hand, same as right handed folks, and that is right to left. Doubleclick on the examples with Calligrapher and Transcriber, and see how it always draws left to right (for example when crossing the letter "t"). Now try writing the same letter but crossing it right to left. No good.
My Messagepad 2100 learned how I write, and it was pretty good after being wiped clean. I can't say the same for my Ipaq.
I miss a reply. How did this have nothing to do with a newton? -- it was a direct reference to the PDA's buggy writing recognition. What, now all humour related to the topic at hand is O/T? If you like *humourless* comments, I think you can filter those out from your preferences. If you didn't get the joke, you shouldn't automatically mod it down
I only had to pay $150 for my programming materials and such and that was in '95.
Apple refused to use Grafitti because it is bad. It's that simple. The recognizer doesn't force you to use cursive, so that is simply a lie! In fact, the print recognizer was far better for new users, but if you took the time to train caligrapher, then it approaches 99% accuracy.
Apple put out their own C compiler for the Newton. Of course, it is easier to use NewtonScript, but DYLAN was never even an option. I don't know where you get your information about the programming languages, but it is entirely wrong.
The Newton was cool and high-tech. I'm both an electrical engineer and a software engineer and this is the single best platform for which I have ever developed. I love writing NewtonScript applcations. It is much easier than C and just as powerful. The only reason to even have C on the Newton would be to write system level drivers because C can't handle graphical interfaces at all, let alone pen-based interfaces.
One last question. If Apple is so bad, why do you develop for them? Seems kind of masochistic to me.