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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?"
The Newton used a 16-25 MHz or so ARM, and even then it lagged quite a bit. The final models (before Steve killed it) had 166 MHz or so CPUs. The Palm has a 16 MHz 68000, so there's no chance there. On the other hand, modern PDAs (PocketPC, Palm ARM, Zaurus) use 200+ MHz ARM CPUs, so they ought to run the Newton OS in an emulator environment with no trouble at all. The important part is the total lack of need for CPU emulation.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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/
You have to catch up on your Apple folklore.
The reason, wich is widely regarded as truth, that Jobs killed the newton is pure retaliation against Scully.
John Scully invented the concept and drove the outcome as the Newton shortly after he had fired Jobs in their power feud of mid 80s. Scully had killed the Lisa and Jobs took over the Mac not to be empty-handed. When Jobs was back at the helm of Apple, he was just pleased at destroying the Newton rather than building on it. To this day, Jobs keep dismissing PDAs altogether while telling everyone that phones will inherit the futur. What does he do next? A frickin' music player.
Jobs has done a lot of good stuff for Apple since his come-back. But the Newton murder wasn't one of them. Marry Newton OS and the iPod and then you start having something interesting. But ego makes this product impossible. Or highly improbable.
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.
That is just untrue. Steve has said that he could have saved Newton, but that he didn't have the management talent to do it. I believe that was just part of the story. The Newton group was working on StrongArm based products before things were killed. The StrongArm was a part of DEC that was acquired by Intel (When they picked up the Alpha technology & Engineers), at that point in time, Intel wasn't really sure what they wanted to do with it. It would have been insane for Apple to spend time rebuilding a business when they didn't know if it's major supplier was going to keep manufacturing. I was the last person hired into the Newton team.
So at this point is it "economically unfeasable" for Apple to Open Source the entire Newton OS and not just the toolkit???
Well, let's suppose for a moment that you were an executive at Apple: how much budget would you allocate to 1) finding the code, 2) determining whether it embodies any patents that Apple licenses from other parties, 3) seeing if it builds, 4) documenting it?
Apple doesn't use open source as a dumping ground. Darwin is live code. It's maintained, because Apple is using it today.
The thing is, it's just not as simple to give code away as many people think it is. Certainly not for a large, publicly-traded corporation.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Actually, the HWR in OS X *IS* the very same Rosetta HWR engine that was in the MP 2100 (The printed/mixed engine). It even has the same easter eggs as the Newton does. Just write "Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!" and it will recognize it as "Rosetta! Rosetta! Hey that's me!"
Unlike the cursive recognizer, which was developed in Russia, the Rosetta engine was written and developed in-house by Apple. If you do a search, I think that you can still find the ACM papers written by the guys who developed the engine. It's an interesting mix of Neural Nets, traditional HWR, and dictionary based guessing of the words.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...