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The Newton O.S. Creeps Toward New Hardware
GraWil writes "As previously reported, the Apple Newton refuses to die! The Worldwide Newton Conference 2004 has wrapped up (photos) and, thanks to Paul Guyot, there is real hope for an emulator. His talk, titled 'Newton never dies, It only gets new hardware,' describes and shows the Einstein Emulator, that will eventually allow the Newton OS to be built and run on top of Unix. Will your next Linux PDA boot Newton OS next year?"
-5 overrated
Help! I'm being repressed!
How much processing power does this need, i have an old palm IIIc and i like the newton OS... would that run it?(it WILL run some flavor of linux/unix IIRC)
I'm holding out for a version of NewtonOS that runs under version 3.0 of AmigaOS running under emulation on my Atari ST.
...Steve
In spite of its detractors, the Newton continues to be a viable handheld platform (shortcomings of the hardware notwithstanding). As a current Newton user, I'm excited for a new lease on life. The genius of the Newton is the OS -- the HWR, the Assistant, and the soup method of data storage. Newton apps "see" each other's data and don't have to run any sort of conversion to use it as their own. You own the data, not the app. Plus, writing "10:00 meeting with lab group 10/14" in the Assistant and getting the proper entry in your calendar just rocks!
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
For a second I thought they meant a new Newton from Apple : (
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
apple should have kept making newtons and bought palm when they could
It's good to hear about the Einstein Emulator. I wonder what happened to the GNUton project; it seemed to be working in the same direction and as far as I know actually got a bootable system running through the magic of Python. Granted, there's been no status update since 2000, but I've certainly seen free software projects go dormant longer.
Recently Newton's Library has gone live again; I'm one of the volunteer librarians. If anyone is interested in helping out, let me know. The Newton MessagePad is a great device for reading e-books, and the potential of new hardware certainly can't hurt.
The Newton got a bad rep in it's early days due to being released too soon. The handwriting recognition just didn't work well enough.
Unfortunately, people never gave it a second chance. The 2000 and 2100, the final models of the Newton had excellent handwriting recognition and a faster processor that was pretty darned fast for the applications the Newton ran.
I'm glad to see holdouts trying to keep the heart beating. With the technology available today, a screamingly fast Newton could be housed in something no larger than your typical Palm. And that mid-90s software is BETTER than today's PalmOS.
Oh, and Graffiti SUCKS!
considering how "ancient" (in computer/pda terms) the Apple Newton PDAs were, why don't people try to essentially rewrite a clone of it. i understand the usefulness of an emulator, but an OS clone would be much more convenient. you can get the features, look, and feel of the Newton OS while also having the luxury of adding upgrades when the needs arise. Also, it could be ported to newer hardware (instead of the legacy/aging Newton one.)
i, not being a programmer myself, cannot fathom the complexity of writing such an OS, perhaps. but it makes more sense, to me atleast, to take what everyone seems to love about the old software and move on to a new one.
anyone care to explain how hard it would to write an entire new OS for a PDA (similar to that of Newton's) ?
I cannot find Einstein anywhere. I'm a newton user and dabble in coding apps. Is Einstein open source? If so, where is the code?
TooManyLinksException
... is it relevant? What is it?
Right, there's a picture of a dude pointing at a screen with a faded image on it
Isn't that Torvalds younger brother in the picture?
John
I dream in binary.
5vvee+!
Really? I found Graffiti to be so intuitive and efficient that I actually installed it on my eMate.
Karma: Segmentation fault (tried to dereference a null post)
It's kind of unfair judging the entire Newton line based on the original model.
It's a little like saying that Windows XP sucks (not for all the obvious reasons) because you've used Windows 1.0 (or even 3.1) and dislike all its limitations.
I dissagree.... in '94/'95 I took ALL my univeristy CS notes on my Newton. While everone else was luggin around either texbooks or the odd Notebook computer. I had my trusty Newton. Saved as handwriting in class...coverted to text in the evenings... gave me extra incentive to re-read all my notes that day in the evening.
worked like a charm!
that you'll hopefully eventually be able to run the (brilliant) Newton OS on more modern & portable hardware.
Also, if your entire exposure to the Newton OS was on a 1.0 device, IMHO, you've missed out on what the real draw is vis-a-vis the capabilities of the later MessagePads & eMate.
You are right. This is unfair. However, there are many alternatives to the Newton that are much more practical in this day and age. I do know that the later models were quite an improvement over the old models, but it seems that the Newton's following has greatly to do with Apple Zealotry, not actual functionality. (Posted from a Mac, fyi)
I'm sorry, but as a fan of the Newton, I can say that Graffiti is far faster than Newton's HWR. In fact, in the early days of PDAs (before Palm Pilots) Graffiti was available as an app for the Newton, and I and all 3 of my Newton buddies used it instead of the Newton's HWR.
What do they mean? 'Newton never dies, It only gets new hardware,' mine always died after about an hour of use then I had to change batteries The only new hardware they could add is a solar panel..
What I want is something that has some decent screen real estate so I can use it for document review (both text and - maybe - images), do basic internet stuff, like limited webbrowsing email and chat, and also some basic PDA type stuff like note taking/calendar/phone book; enough power and the hardware to play MP3's would be nice, too.
I don't need anything super powerful (doesn't need to play video or any games at all), touch screen would be good, but so would some sort of built in pointing device w/ external keyboard. Color screen is even optional (image review isn't a requirement, just would be nice).
Also, either a PCMCIA or CF slot would be good, for both data storage and I NEED to be able to put in a WiFi card and a modem card for connectivity. Battery life can be mediocre, only would NEED 2-3 hours between charges.
Now, I don't think that this is alot of requirements, a very old tablet PC would do he trick, if there is such a thing. The real difficulty comes into budget: I want to get this cheap. If it starts to get up to the $300 range I could get an old G3 iBook and be done with it... so anyone have any ideas?
...and in a few years the Einstein Emulator (also known as Einstein Emulator Special Version) will become obselete with bugs and head towards death only to be replaced by the Einstein Emulator General Version which solves most of the bugs. Some bugs remain, however, which were only resolved after the Quantum Plugin was released.
This is out of hand. Newton is 10 year old hardware that has an adamant user base that consistantly reaches over backwards to keep alive. Yet this hardware device is one that Jobs is staunchly against and has consistantly given the middle finger to.
What gives?
The only other person besides Jobs who so fearlessly tells a fan base to go collectively screw themselves is Lucas. Being a very technical user who has 2 mac laptops, a G5 desktop and an iPod, I could definitely put a Newton device to good use.
I can only hope that Apple current dealings with Motorola's cellular device division is working on an intigrated OS X compatable PDA for the iPhone to allow users to bluetooth and/or websynch (.mac account?) data from iTunes, Mail.app, Calandar and AddressBook.
http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/paulguyot/slide s-paulguyot.pdf
Turns out to be quite the interesting talk.
more from the conference:
http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/
"Eat up Martha"
Good to hear the Newton isn't dead yet, I still have my 130 and 110s, sold my 2100 a while back however (the things where selling used for as much as a notebook PC, I just couldn't resist).
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
it's attempt at the laptop-style format. As such, I think it tended to hide the features of the Newton OS.
I doubt, however, that your watch can surf the web, telnet to a server, read a newsgroup, attach to an external keyboard, control entertainment devices via infrared, take notes in class, record & play sounds & lectures, send faxes, compose and receive email, do drawings, or have a built-in assistant (IMHO the coolest feature that really highlighted the Newt's capabilities).
Does it run the New AmigaOS?
eat up martha?
Putting my nerd hat on, the really cool thing about developing for the Newton was the programming language that it used, called (unimaginatively) NewtonScript. Don't let the "Script" fool you...it was a serious language: bytecode interpreted, garbage collected, fast, compact. Pretty impressive for something running on a handheld back in the early 90s! I spent a while tinkering around with writing a NewtonScript emulator, and the internals of the language were beautifully designed. (I still struggle with Java today because it just feels so incredibly clunky in comparison.)
One thing which would make emulating a Newton difficult is the memory management. It used an incredibly fine-grained MMU. I can't remember the page size, but basically it did mark-compact garbage collection, and did the compact bit by just shuffling page mappings in the MMU! Very neat, but difficult to fake efficiently on other hardware.
I'm wondering whether the "Data Soup" concept will be adopted by any major free, open source software (FOSS) system.
The Newton, the Canon Cat, the shareware word processor Yeah Write, all had some kind of system where the user didn't need to worry about files. (I don't really know enough about the Newton data soup to comment on how similar or dissimilar these all were to it.)
The only project along these lines that I know of is Gnome Storage.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Eat up Martha
Awww... I wanted to explode - GIR
Apple should join the PDA market. If they stick to their current trends, their PDA would be super stylish, super user friendly, and compatible with iCal and such. Mac fans would buy them just because... Many others would buy them because of the statement (if not perhaps fashion statement) they would make. Call it a iNewton with old Newton emulation and you would get many loyal Newton advocates to buy them also.
Cheers,
Adolfo
1. Dust off Newton
2. Charge double for the look.
3 Add Linux
4 ???
5 profit
While everone else was luggin around either texbooks or the odd Notebook computer. I had my trusty Newton.
;-).
Uhm. Assuming you mean "textbooks", rather than "copies of Donald Knuth's manual for TeX"... how did your Newton replace textbooks? Did you transcribe whole books onto your Newton for easy reference?
I'd've thought that the old-tech equivalent of a Newton is a pen and a slim folder of writing paper, which probably weighs about as much as a Newton, *and* doesn't run out of battery power, *and* lets you make paper darts when the lecture gets slow
reminds me when my buddy went to defcon this year and had kevin mitnick autograph his newton!
I've heard rumor that NewtonScript was a dialect of Scheme- just how lispish is it?
CompactFlash for Music and Storage (microdrive)
1 Zaurus SL-C860 for touchscree display, keyboard, Linux (Or FreeBsd/OsX)
add Ethernet, Bluetooth, and 802.11b/g
Full day battery(8 hrs) battery life with user replacable, standard AA NiMH batteries
Support and a vendor supported dev. community
Stir Vigoriously, pour into a sub $600 package
Sell hundreds of thousands of units!!!
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
There may be other projects out there, but Blunt works on newtons http://www.40hz.org/blunt
by the time Jobs killed Newton, almost all the engineers that knew anything about either the hardware OR software had ALREADY LEFT.
I'm not big on toilet humor, but while flipping through the Newton Conference photos, I'm just wondering who farted...
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Einstein, if we're lucky, will give us the chance to have our cake and eat it too. And trust me, the Linux-on-a-PDA folks would be very very lucky to have the myriad of high-quallity Newton apps running on their boxen. Beats the snot out of the crap running on Yopis right now, that's fore sure.
Cool. Classical, Modern, and the Strong Force... Looks like we're upon proving Grand Unification Theory. Now all we need is solve the weak force issue (*cough* XP) issue.
The "dialect of Scheme" was not NewtonScript but the _intended_ language for the Newton, Dylan. The project did not deliver quickly enough, and NewtonScript replaced it.
NewtonScript is based on templates rather than the traditional class-based object protocol derived from Simula (the one model many C++/Java/C# programmers associate with "object orientation").
Practicing those alternative language make you feel very restricted when you come back to more mainstream languages. I really encourage you to look at Dylan. I never had the opportunity to use NewtonScript but I intend to find out someday.
Moderators, please mod the parent post, "+5, Was Actually There".
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I really hope somebody is able to put something together based on this. The only reason I don't still use my 2100 today is the size, a tiny Palm was just too good to pass up. But a lot of the reasons the Newton was so big back then don't apply today - we've got Secure Digital cards instead of PCMCIA, my Tungsten's screen is quarter-VGA like the Newt's, and it uses a similar but even more powerful ARM processor. On top of this, Palm completely dropped the ball with their insultingly lame Tungsten 5, and there's still a market for people who want a sleek, streamlined PDA instead of an "I can't decide if I'm a bloated PDA or a crappy computer" PocketPC.
But you know what would be enough for me? If somebody would port something like the Newton's notepad to PalmOS. I haven't used a notepad app that even comes close. I really liked the whole application suite on NewtonOS, but in particular the way you could switch between handwriting recognition, sketches, outlines, and checklists so easily really got me hooked on PDAs.
NewtonScript is based on templates
*cringe*
Please, call them prototypes, not templates. The word "template" has acquired a horrible amount of C++ baggage.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No new applications. EOM.
Does anyone think, since Newton is coming back from the dead, that it will bring us a message from Gentoo and BSD?
Most apple users, if Steve tells them that up is down and black is white, they will not only believe it, they will come on slash dot and explain why everybody else is wrong and Jobs/Apple is always smarter and righter than anyone else.
Along comes the Newton users and they ignore Jobs. He can't handle that.
BTW, how soon before Jobs dies from his cancer?
Jobs didn't care about color slots or anything inconsequential like that.
Scully was linked to the Newton. He popularized the initials, PDA. Since it reminded Jobs of how Scully stabbed him in the bank, you'd have to be stupid not to understand why the Newton was out the door right after Jobs got back.
I hate to post a reply to my own post, but it seems a pattern or argument has emerged.
Thus before posting a reply, please consult this post
I have made in reponse to others
sorry.. I do prefer to be more personal, but most you guys sound alike and prefer not to be original to each and every "redundant" argument when one simple rebuttal will suffice.
The Message Pad 2100 (baring it's size) is really the epitome of the PDA. In that ... it's actually able to 'assist' in what you typically use a pda for. Voice recording, calendaring, little black-booking, emailing.
I have a 2100 and also was an early adopter of the Palm series (had an original palm pro, a palm three, then got a visor deluxe, then a clié -- depsite the clié's higher resolution and jog wheel, I gave it up and went back to the visor). I haven't bothered to move on to the Zire line because... although graffiti is usable, it just sucks compared to the -- let me stress this again -- awesome recognition of the Newton MP. I know there are some folks out there working on embedded GTK interfaces, can any of you let me know where HWR is at on the embedded Linux scene?
So, the reason no one is 're-writing' a clone OS of the Newton is the unfeasibility of creating, from a hobbyist public domain vector a platform as perfectly suited to the PDA as the Newton OS. I am enamoured with tablet computing... I even have one of the first IBM Thinkpads (Type 2524, all screen, no keyboard). Which you could say is loosely a sibling of the same era. It uses Windows 95 with the 'Pen Computing' crap (since the Pen Windows or whatever was killed). The recognition is horrible. And that's with a 486DX, which should arguably have more horsepower than the ARM the Newton's had.
Anyway, I know this post goes no where in specific but here's the main thrust: I have used basically every pen based system that has been commercially available. The Newton MP 2100 was the most elegant and useful of any of these. If Newton had survived Jobs re-emergence, or had been spun off, we would all have 3"x5"x.5", color, 180dpi, nearly edge to edge screen, pressure sensitive, useful, intelligent PDAs with HWR as good, or better, than the MP's for probably a lower price point than the original MP's. I'm thinking like $350. I would die for that.
Oh, and let me say too... That ThinkPad is cool, I still sketch on it in Photoshop 3.5 with it, but the HWR is horrible. Damn you Microsoft. I just don't see why the whole industry just freaked out and let HWR wallow for so long. Even Ink in OS X isn't as good as the Newton HWR.
Let the rebuttals fly!
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
In all honesty, I can see Jobs' point about PDAs. I've owned at least 4 of them over the years, and kept trying to really like them.... but in the end, each of them became little more than expensive toys. When the Palm first came out, people raved about how it was going to change the face of computing, and speculated that practically everyone would carry one around.
Well, that certainly didn't happen. Heck, the entire time I owned a Palm device, I think I only had one opportunity to "beam" someone's contact info from their organizer into mine as the "21st. century version of exchanging business cards". 99% of the time, when someone wanted to give me their info, they didn't have a PDA handy. So I'd just get a paper card or info scribbled on a piece of paper.
Half the time I owned my Palm IIIx, I'd go to use it only to find the batteries were about dead, because my wife got in the habit of playing card games on it at night before bed (with the backlight on the whole time, of course).
There still seem to be more than enough Newtons to go around, judging from eBay. (I've even seen a few "new in the box" ones auctioned there as recently as a month or two ago!) So if Jobs wants to blow off that whole market and leave it to others, I don't see why that's really such a big deal.
The only PDA I currently use is my Kyocera 7135 Smartphone - and honestly, the phone number info in its contact list is about the only crucial data I have in it. The rest is just stuff I use just because I can, like AvantGo -- but it's not a "critical application" by any means.
As I understand it it has to do with the quality of the OS and it's UI. The hardware is as obsolete as you would expect a 10 year old portable device to be, but the OS is worth saving. Put it on todays PDA hardware and it would be quite interesting. (In a geeky way, not as a realistic commercial proposition).
That may be true - that's it's "faster". But at what cost? I.e. 'faster with more typos left in'. I find that writing in my weird blend of cursive and printing using ink-text that I can consistently out-write myself when using graffiti. I'm not slouch with either. I've used both palm os devices and newtons for years (see my previous post in this thread). With graffiti you kinda of have to 'correct as you go' or take a hit in speed while you carefully make your strokes (and graffiti doesn't store your actually strokes so if you misspell someone's name in a quick note, you can't go back and see what you 'meant' to scribble down). With ink-text you just go all out, then bulk recognize when time isn't as pressing. With my Pilots (and visor's and cliés) I almost never took quick notes with graffiti, always opting for the Sketchpad. Second, I could never keep up with a lecture on a Pilot, while I could easily take notes with either ink-text or full HWR with the outline mode on my Newton MP2100.
... as the hwr just sucked, and ink-text wasn't even available yet, but on the latest/last MP, real writing surpassed graffiti.
So yeah. Maybe I would have preferred graffiti on my H1000
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
An HOUR?!
My mp 2100 with original rechargeable battery runs longer than that with the backlight on.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I did the same with my PalmOS handheld for classes that didn't require complicated diagrams or mathematical notation.
Graffiti was up to the task, but I wouldn't dream of trying it in Graffiti 2. Little things like having to pause for a full second before putting a space after a word ending in L have destroyed my ability to jot notes without thinking about it.
It's not really a dialect of Scheme. It does have some features of Scheme (closures, first-class functions, lexical scoping), but it lacks full continuations (upward only) so true Schemophiles would not consider it worthy.
Yeah, no kidding. It should run something like two weeks between batteries.
I dream in binary.
would it play mp3s?
...is that the Newton sucked.
Trust me, I had to support that piece of crap. They tried to make it fancy rather than easy to use. All it succeeded in being was buggy.
And the hardware, oy! It kept getting bigger and bigger til it was as big as a much more capable notebook. Palm did it right, make it simple, small, and make sure it works! Create a useful organizer for the many people with computers.
No, leave the Newton in its grave where it deserves to be.
NewtonScript has a Pascalish interface, an unusual Prototype-style OOP model, first-class functions, closures, and Lisp-like s ymbols.
:= func (n) func(i) n := n + i;
In NewtonScript, objects are dictionaries which hash arbitrary things, each keyed by a Lisp-like symbol. The symbols are the slot names in the object. Functions stored in the objects, when called as methods on the object, automatically have access to a variable called this which refers to the object itself, and their scope automatically includes the object. A particular symbol, _proto, is used to key to an object called the "prototype" or "proto" (or nil if there is none), and another symbol, _parent is used to key to a prototype called the "parent" (or nil if there is none).
When a method refers to a slot in the object, here's how lookup is done. First, we look in the object. If it's not there, we look in its proto. If it's not there, we look in the proto's proto, and so on up the "proto chain". But it doesn't stop there. If we haven't found it yet, we look in the parent. If not there, then the parent's proto, then the parent's proto's proto, and so on. Then the parent's parent, the parent's parent's proto, the parent's parent's proto's proto, and so forth. So the lookup path resembles a comb.
Yes, bizarre. Why two ancestry pointers (proto and parent)? In NewtonScript, if you set a value in an object, it's set in the object: if the value was set in any protos, it's not changed there. But if an object has a parent, and you set a value in the object, the value in the parent is set as well (if it exists in the parent). Thus proto inheritance allows for polymorphism and sharing of defaults which can be overridden without hurting the ancestor; but parent inheritance allows for sharing of variables. Clever, but convoluted. In reality Newtons rarely used parent inheritance (widgets had parents, but that was somewhat of a different thing).
Because methods are first-class objects, they can be created at any time and can have closures, exactly like in Lisp. Thus Paul Graham's Accumulator Generator in Lisp is written as
(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))
And in scheme it is
(define (foo n) (lambda (i) (set! n (+ n i)) n))
But in NewtonScript it's particularly pretty -- indeed it's the prettiest thing on his web page (I know: I provided it!)...
foo
Functions (which is all a method is) are all anonymous in NewtonScript. They're created with the func declaration which looks like func (_args_) BLOCK where BLOCK is either _statement_; or begin _statement_;* end The last statement in the function's block returns the function's value (unless there's a premature return statement).
Thus the above code says "set foo to a function taking an argument n. That function returns another function which takes an argument i, adds it into n, and returns the current value of n".
Pretty indeed. Essentially identical to the lisp code.
It really is functionality, not zealotry. I kid you not. If you've used the line of comparable devices (and pretend the Zires and Wince, er, PocketPC machines are monochrome), you'd find the Newton to be worth the excitement. I mean yes, it's 10 years too big these days, but still a joy to work with. (Also posted from a Mac, although I'm not 2 feet away from both a win2k box and a debian box. I've got some other relevant posts about newton comparisons if you are interested.)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
function foo (n) { return function (i) { return n += i } }
... essentially identical to to NewtonScript's
:= func (n) func (i) n := n + i ;
foo
... except that in JavaScript foo is *declared* as the function name, while in NewtonScript foo is merely a variable holding the function.
Anyhoo, it's because both languages are essentially derived from Sun's "Self" language. NewtonScript was writtne by Walter Smith for Apple around 1990 and was very heavily derived from Self. NewtonScript's goal was to be faster than Self (and it was -- at least compared to early Self stuff), and with a FAR smaller footprint.
ECMAScript, er, JavaScript, er, LiveScript was also largely derived from Self, but simplified in unfortunate ways and with a radically changed "Java-ish" syntax -- at least the syntax was bolted on when LiveScript went to JavaScript.
Anyway, the languages' object models are very very similar. JavaScript is an uglified version of Self, and NewtonScript is an elegant reworking of Self (IMHO), but with a weird, unfortunate addition to the inheritance chain (_parent). Remove that addition and NewtonScript is definitely a brilliant language.
Waitaminute. 'wrs'. You're not Walter Smith, are you? Damnit, everyone, this is the guy who wrote NewtonScript.
I have both a MP h1000, and an MP 2100. It looks like you helped 'fix' the HWR in the time between those two models. So, a personal thank you for helping to make the Newton great. :-) I don't want to sound crazy or anything, just thought it might be 'cool' to be appreciated by a stranger.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Remember when Microsoft paid out all those millions just about the time Stevie was killing the Newton?
Ever notice how MS's HWR looks like, and mostly acts like the Newtons?
I'm guessing that somewhere in all those millions there was a transfer of technology that helped the iPaq along.
BTW, anyone else remember GNUton?
http://gnuton.sourceforge.net/
I dream in binary.
I counted at least three "Eat Up Martha" jokes in this thread, and I didn't try very hard. It's kind of sad that had to be the Newton's legacy. Just as it's kind of sad Al Gore must go down in history as the man who claimed he invented the internet (though in reality he said no such thing.)
The Newton was a great little machine with possibly the best OS of any PDA-- and it did have great handwriting recognition. I'd love for it to have a new life, though it's obviously not coming from Apple...
my password is private, but unchanged.
I was sure the first reply to this would be "na-uh, recognition in tablet windows is 110% accurate" or "OSS project such and such has had a working environment 10 times better in both HID and functionality since 1996"
Thanks for the chuckle.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
I didn't think I was really disclaiming either of those points, other than to say the "press" aka public media aka computer rags with 'lamenting newton' editorials all ran the same idea... Hence the meme we're carping about.
Anyway, any thoughts on Jobs' satisfaction with the eMate and what that means now that he's "saved" the company? You think maybe the Duke/iPod deal somehow relates to his "every student should have an eMate" dream?
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Damnit, Apple should so release a new PDA - they'd have instant fame with anyone who liked the newton and if they actually did it right they would be able to sell to all newton lovers, all iPod lovers and all Apple lovers in general, not to mention *nix geeks. Plus they already have the supply of mini hard-drives.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
It's a little like saying that Windows XP sucks (not for all the obvious reasons) because you've used Windows 1.0 (or even 3.1) and dislike all its limitations.
The difference is that Windowx XP does suck, for the obvious and not so obvious reasons. By comparison, Windows 1.0 (or even 3.1) were not really all that bad and didn't suck as much.
i'd love to see an ipod running newton os or better yet a newton modded to function like an ipod... a big 10lb ipod...
All the torrents you could want.
Whatever the (highly debatable, apparently) case may have been in 1998, modern times have caught up with the worldview of Steve Jobs: the PDA concept is yesterday's news.
C ELL-PHONE-AND-WIRELESS-INTERNET-(STUPID)" concept. (And throw in a digital camera and pocket mirror etc etc NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY!?!)
It's natural successor is the smart-phone concept--or, in other words, the "everything-a-PDA-was-ever-supposed-to-be-PLUS-A-
In those old Newton days, the PDA concept worked (witness the Palms, etc.) but whatever, Apple was hemhorraging money, Jobs hated Sculley and wanted to kill his baby, he just didn't get it, or blah blah blah. Whatever, man. Water under bridge.
He may not have been right then, but he is now. These devices MUST have cell phone built in (which, conveniently, also comes with wireless 'net access).
Apple obviously realizes this, because Jobs admitted to analysts that Apple recently took a new PDA all the way to the functional prototype stage, but decided not to market it. Of course!! Who would want a modern version of the Newton without wireless Internet and phone? Not very many people.
(The obvious counterpoint is that a *LOT* of people would want a smart phone with the elegance of the Newton but smaller color hardware....)
Those Newton freaks are right, you know; there *still* is nothing even half as cool as the Newton OS in the handheld space...)
The Newton got a bad rep in it's early days due to being released too soon. The handwriting recognition just didn't work well enough.
Those Doonesbury cartoons nearly sank it in the first year. That's one of the hazards of debuting a product with such a high profile: if you don't nail it on the first go, you're lucky to get out alive.
-jcr
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Does everything that comes from Apple have to be named after some heretic? God, even the logo is a forbidden fruit! Seriously, as a Roman Catholic I find it highly offensive and as a scientist who has just started to follow the recent study on ID science I think naming products after Darwin forgetting that his theory is only a theory is just plain stupidity and ignorance of modern scientific research.
Not to mention like many Apple devices it was something people looked at and went "cool" then saw the price tag and went "ouch".
Part of what made the newton so appealing was its hardware..
Not just that its size made it readable, but just the hardware device in general made it what it was, after you added the truly innovative and well thought out OS.
Jobs really screwed up when he had them drop it.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
And a little round of applause to Sean for his brilliant and *concise* presentation :)
This is not a signature.
Some time ago I read on a danish site that Apple had attempted to patent a PDA-looking (more a tablet-looking..) product. A picture can be seen here: http://www.mediamac.dk/gfx/picture/mac_tablet.jpg Maybe they are making a new Newton?
On this subject (and seriously, folks), what's the most ridiculous level of nested emulation anyone has ever achieved?
Before Jobs came back to Apple, Newton was spun off into its own company, Newton Inc. It wasn't losing Apple any money; it was going to stand or fall on its own merits, and was apparently making a small profit. So there was no financial need to first re-absorb the spin-off company and then kill it.
If you look on eBay, you can find Newton-branded Newtons as well as pure Apple-branded ones.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The Newton software is still ahead of what the Palm and PocketPC have. All they need to do is update the hardware a bit.
Give me a Newton with USB, Wi-Fi and supported desktop sync software, make it a little smaller and lighter, and give it today's screen technology.
I don't care if it runs the same software as the 2100. I'd be using my 2100 today if it hadn't been Steved. Instead, I'm using a Palm, which sucks.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
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;-)
Nobody has mentioned it nor pointed it out, but it's actually the black box that is mounted on a tripod standing on the right side of the photo
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
The 130 I carry with me attracts lots of (negative) comments: its too big, its too old, etc. But then I ask people how many Palms/Phones they've had for more than two years.... If it works, why fix it?
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Is it just me or is it apparently impossible to find a good looking woman at a Newton Forever conference?
I used my last mod point today before seeing this post. I did so wish to mod it "funny"...
I hate to disagree, but I do.
Phones are the *wrong* place for this technology. How often have you been on the phone while walking down the hall and wanted to enter a reminder in your calendar on it?
I want a small handheld full-screen device like the Newton (I own two) that has oodles of storage and processing power. Removable storage is key too.
My phone should interface easily with my handheld using Bluetooth (or something) for addresses, schedules, etc. as necessary. They should sync the way we've been syncing handhelds with computers.
My computer should recognize the presence of my handheld and sync with it wirelessly as well, by Wifi or Bluetooth (or, if necessary, a cable which includes charging ability).
I want my handheld manufacturer to make a nice little set of earbuds that can turn my handheld into an music player either with its native sound support or via an add-in card. If I'm on the phone a lot, my bluetooth headset should double as an earpiece for my music player when I'm not talking to someone.
My phone is then unnecessary unless I want one -- my bluetooth headset can connect directly with my handheld if I buy the GSM card for the handheld in question and I drop my SIM card into the GSM card, plug it into my phone and snap my bluetooth headset on and leave my handheld in my pocket unless dialing.
I *hate* holding a phone in my hand. Why would I want it to be my PDA?
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Verizon sucks. They (intelligently albeit in a dastardly way) see phones-as-devices as a source of revenue, provided you have an iron-clad grip on what goes onto and off of the phone and can collect a toll.
I had a chance to buy a new phone and considered a camera phone -- but when I realized that there was no way to get pictures on and off without paying for the privilege, decided against it.
Even my current T730 has a USB cable for it, but it's useless to get stuff on/off the phone, as VZW has managed to convince motorola to lock out user pictures and ring tones as well.
Agreed. Maybe the poster meant graffiti2?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact : http://www.40hz.org/MADNewton/
I too am a person who took all of my college lecture notes on a Newton, for 4 years. I think he meant notebooks, not textbooks, though I've known plenty of folks that carried a lot of notebooks around each day.
:)
The best thing about the Newton for notes is that I could search my notes. Cramming for a test right before class starts? I could be reading the notes I needed then, not flipping through pages and pages looking for the right place...
Paper darts? Coding Lisp or NewtonScript or playing some game on the Newt is a lot more fun.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I certainly preferred Grafiti on my OMP- but on a Newton OS 2 device, Newton HWR pwned Grafiti. Call me average, but like most english speakers, I think in words, not characters. Newton HWR was much more natural for me- and fast to boot. On a Newton or under CalliGrapher on Pocket PC, I can get a good 45-50 WPM with 99% accuracy. I have to fix a letter or so every paragraph. Not bad.
Working toward a usable PDA environment in the spirit of Newton OS: Dynapad
I was a pretty early adopter of laptops...for most of college I used this ancient 286ish thing from Tandy/Radioshack, no hard drive but w/ a decent wired in text editor...eventually (95 or so) I sprung for a cheap b/w 486 so I could run win3.1 and use paintbrush for diagrams, embedded in my "MS write" notes.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Yes, I think for many Palms are glorified organizers, with some game playing / photo displaying / lite document viewing thrown in.
On the other hand...they are VERY good organizers. I have 7 years worth of data with me in a very very small package, backed up in a few places. I think that alone is worth the price of admission...a nice UI to addresses, a datebook, TODOs, and misc-menus are something that many cellphones don't do that well.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Yeah, but it can't tell time worth a shit.
Touché. ;)
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
Real cell phones do that quite well. E.g. Sony Ericsson's P800/P900 devices are great organizers. I know, because I haven't been using my good ol' MessagePad 2100 since own one: clicky
Well, I did say "many cellphones"
the UI looks nice and all.
Is it a touchscreen? What do you use for text input?
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Look, I am not a Mac zealot. I toy with the idea of picking one up every now and then but it quickly goes away when I realize that I just don't need one; my (Linux and Windows) PCs work just fine.
However, I still to this day use my Newton. Sure I have started to use the iPaq a little more out of convenience (it syncs with my employer's Outlook) but it just means that I now use two PDAs; everything else is done on my Newton.
I've tried the Palm and Pocket PC as replacements but they are just lacking. I still continue to carry my Newton with me along with my laptop and my iPaq.
Honestly though, I would like to get rid of it. I love the functionality but the hardware is aging. Batteries are nearly impossible to find. I know that any sort of repair service is out of the question.
What I would like is a tablet Mac. This could not only replace the Newton but my laptop as well. All the functionality of the Newton and the Mac OSX would be It may even be able to replace the iPaq, which would really be great. Then I think about how a tablet PC could replace my laptop and my iPaq and wonder how long I can wait.
Unfortunately, the only thing stopping me from purchasing a tablet Mac is that Apple doesn't make them. Apple needs to realize that if they don't start releasing tablet Macs then the people who want a tablet system will go to Microsoft. Sadly, many of the people who do want a tablet system are the geeks, artists, and educators who traditionally fall into the Apple camp.
This one is beautiful, I can tell because she's my wife :-)
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Ok when i go to a confrence i like to see trashy confrence bimbos that i can take to my hotel room later. that really is the only point to going to a confrence. the newton was a great peice of hardware but its never going to go anywhere. plus there were only two women there and neither one would probably flirt that much.
I always thought that was the most amazing thing about my Newton 2000. I would write a scribble on the screen that I certainly couldn't have read later, myself, but the Newton would turn it into the right word! The word-based recognition (instead of character-by-character) seemed to figure out that my scribble had about the same overall shape, and maybe the same number of up and down strokes, as a word it knew. Of course, the problem was that if you wrote a word it didn't know, it would turn it into one it did. But I quickly learned to carefully print things like proper names or acronyms to solve that problem.
"We have nothing in common, your attitude annoys me, and your political views are appalling."
It is touchscreen. Inout is done with a stylus (or finger) using the dreadful grafity 2.0 software. Which is okay after you get used to it. Takes about a week.
Thanks.
Huh? I once tried to intentionally run down my MP2100's battery. After several hours with the backlight on, I gave up.
Of course, now, the battery is probably toast after so many years of disuse...
Please help metamoderate.
Please, call them prototypes, not templates
Ah yes, sorry, you are correct. It is prototypes. Thanks for the correction.
I use 'templates' in my applications when I use a similar technique, and I forgot the official designation.
The problem was not really "bad handwriting", as it was not that abd. It simply was the first oen with hand writing and unfortunatly (unfortunatly because of stupid press) Apple made the HWR to good!
... but 2 systems trying to adjust to each other ... did not work well.
On Graffiti or similar system the user adopts his writing to the system until he is able to use the system. The system has limited capabilities of of learning and adjusting, however.
On a typical PDA you have "single letter" HWR. The Newton allways had "handwriting" not letter recognition! Just like youo write your signature on a check, thats how you usually write paper notes. The Newton was able to recognize that. Problem: its per definition not writer independent. So When you have a new Newton, the Newton will often not be able to recognize your writing. So you are asked to "define" for it what you just wrote, by picking the correct word from the dictionary.
Most People did not like that (because they did not understand what the goal was). So they tried to fall back to letter recognition and tried more and more to understand what the Newton expected them to do, while the Newton automatically tried to adjust itself to the writing
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
just make a google search for "lookout+newton" or surf by unna.org and you will find what you seek.
ironically, the newton is *more* compatible with XP than it is with OS X.