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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?"
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
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 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..
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.
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.
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.