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."

Comments

It transcends the Palm, really

[(1337) God]

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

still use my 110...

[extrarice]

...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).

Maybe...

[dave at hostwerks]

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.

Re:Maybe...

[davebaum]

I think Apple was definitely ahead of the curve with Newton. It was a groundbreaking product in many ways, and I feel it was also a fantastic piece of engineering. But from a mass market perspective it just couldn't hold on once Palm introduced the Pilot.

When it was first developed, the Newton's computational power was about on par with typical desktop systems. This translated into higher cost, larger size, and heavier power requirements.

Palm's insight was to simplify what a PDA needed to do. All of the Palm apps were simpler than their Newton counterparts. Even the low level graphics routines were simpler. By relying on hot-sync, Palm offloaded some requirements (i.e. printing) to a desktop computer. Grafitti required considerably less CPU cycles than Newton's handwriting recognition. etc.

By building a simpler system, Palm was able to make their PDA smaller, cheaper, and run for a long time on 2 AAA batteries. IMHO, this was the magic forumla that led to PDAs crossing from early adopters to mainstream.

But I'm skeptical that Palm would have been able to focus their efforts correctly if Newton hadn't already been in the market. It is incredibly difficult to predict what is important and what isn't when creating a new market.

In short, both products deserve a lot of credit for creating the PDA market that we have today.

About technology and time.

[eyeye]

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.

Re:You're wrong

[Ponty]

I love my Newton. I use it daily. I began using it last September. Before that, I had a Palm III, a Palm V, and an SPH-I300. This month, I tried going back to the SPH-I300, due to its greater portability, but it's just not the same. I realized that while I had convenient syncing with iCal and the Mac address book, I not once referred to the calendar on the device or used the to-do list. I would always wait and use it on my Mac. Once I went back to the Newton, I was doing those tasks daily.

More than the Palm, it's a genuine personal digital assistant. The note taking is powerful (handwriting that works) and the flexible control and mastery over the data in the device hasn't been matched.

It has its problems (TCP/IP slowness, dying backlights, five year old LCD screens), but five years later, it's still better than everything that's happened since.

Not a surprise

[gordie]

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!

I switched.. .then switched back....

[jbuilder]

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.. ;)

Why Newton still?

[theCat]

I have a Newton 2100. Use it all the time though the backlight fried out recently. Let me tell you something about technology that maybe you haven't thought about for a while.

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.