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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?"
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
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) ?
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.
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..
...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/
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?"
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
NO - Einstien is NOT open source, and most likely will not be open source at any point. There are legal issues regarding licensing of the OS, the HWR input, etc. that the developers need to work out before they can truly finish a product. As such they can't realease the code, what would Microsoft do if you released all of winXP source code on the net? Probably a similar thing to what Apple would (and may still do) to these guys.
Also - they've seen other open source developments for the newton go south - too many hands, not enough direction. They intend to keep things to a core of dedicated developers, to decide a direction to take things and to FOCUS on a goal.
Well if you dropped the budget requirement you would seem to be a perfect candidate for an OQO ultra compact PC. It's 4.9*3.4 inches, has a 800*480 display, has a full keyboard, thumb mouse, pen input, scroll wheel, etc. It has Firewire, Bluetooth, 802.11b, and USB built in. It lasts aprox 3 hours on battery. It has a 20GB HDD for storage. The biggest problem for you would be the price, I believe the first generation are around $1800.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
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
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
I hate replying to my own post, but I have been looking around a bit more and I came across the Jornada 680/e and the 7xx (looks the same, seems to be more powerful, and more expensive)... anyways, the form factor is right, but I am not a huge fan of WinCE... So questions are: Anyone use these? what did you think? Are they upgradable (in terms of OS... to at least PocketPC2k or even, dare I dream, Linux)?
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
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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Just to chime in here... I stand kinda between your two stances. It was pretty common knowledge/speculation in the press at the time that Newton was killed by Jobs in a little tit-for-tat to Sculley. The evidence I bring is this, at the time of the MP2100 Newton was going to be spun-off or sold outright (the evidence is in the MP itself, it has a round spot for the Newton lightbulb logo below the screen, but instead a rainbow Apple is shoe-horned in instead and 'Newton Technology' is silk screened on the top as an afterthought -- the first Newtons has the rainbow Apple molded right into the case). There were a couple firms lined up to buy but they couldn't get a commitment from Apple on the terms or sale or whatever. This waffling or whatever was seen as a result of Jobs coming on. So the story goes that Jobs just let it get cut (for business reasons like you say) instead of letting the tech survive as a cash trade to some other company. The weird part is -- Jobs is said to have been enamored with the eMate, so I don't think it was all 'meanness' that let the Newton go. The spirit of the eMate seems to have lived on with those clamshell iBooks :-p, obviously not in any material way, just in a kind of ethereal way. :-D
So anyway. I was sad to see it mothballed and I'm sad that Jobs isn't interested in tablets/pdas every time I use my Newton. Jobs said "it's not a computer without a keyboard" somewhere back then, and I kinda think this sums up his attitude to this day.
Read Heinlein's 1953 Revolt in 2100, now more than ever.
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 was pretty common knowledge/speculation in the press at the time that Newton was killed by Jobs in a little tit-for-tat to Sculley.
Two things:
1) Sculley had been gone from Apple for many years by that point.
2) Jobs had a company to save. I think he had a bit more on his mind than taking a cheap shot at somebody who could have no further impact on his life or career.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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.
Oh do shut up. Your post was rebutted the first time you posted it. It doesn't bear repeating and linking back to again. If you can't answer the guy who posted the thoghtful response the first time, no-one's interested in hearing it all the second and third times...
You know they call 'em fingers but I've never seen 'em fing. Oh, there they go.
Jobs said "it's not a computer without a keyboard"
I would tend to agree with this, at least until voice recognition has progressed to the point that I could use it to write code.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's absurd. See the iMac G5, which can be basically fully dismantled by the user, without voiding the warranty.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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...)
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
Seriously, I've had a 60 MHz Power PC emulating a Moto 68000 emulating a 65c02. At about real speed (1 MHz).
It's one thing to choose between supporting one OS to third party developers vs. supporting two or more.
The customer doesn't go out and buy new software to run on an iPod; the customer buys more songs. There is no courting of third-party developers for the iPod. At the moment...
iPod + cellPhone + newton + digiCam + camCorder in one pocket-sized box. How cool would that be?
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.