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History of the Apple Newton
Sabah Arif writes "We've all heard of Apple's Newton, the portable handheld device under John Sculley's rule at Apple that debuted to big media attention and much fanfare but never managed to take a strong footing in the marketplace. The same handhel that went on to be 'Steve'd' when Mr. RDF killed the project after taking control of Apple. That's the extent of knowledge most of us have with regard to Apple's first handheld device. OS Opinion sheds light on the early days of the pocket Apple." From the article: "Apple in the late eighties had become stagnant. The Macintosh had become Apple's cash cow like the Apple II that had preceded it. To protect the Mac, Apple was hesitant to start or pursue any project that might compromise the company's revenues. Several people in the corporation were weary of this approach, and began to look at the future of computing. One of those people was Steve Sakoman."
Eat up Martha
Written four years ago, here's a piece about Apple's other historical tablet initiatives, and speculation about a Mac tablet (there's always speculation)...
Kevin Fox
Old news for Nerds. Stuff that doesn't matter.
-py
I once got to talk with Larry Yeager, the guy who supposibly helped write the handwriting recognition software for the Newton and a lot of other neat software. He now lives about 30 minutes away from Bloomington and Apple paid the ISP I used to work for to have a T1 out to his house (back in the 90s when that was about $3000 a month for such a service). Really sharp guy, look him up on the net sometime.
The Newton was way ahead of its time in many aspects: versatility, portability, object-oriented based language (at first), etc. If the Newton had flourished as well as our current Palm devices and Pocket PC devices, we might all be using Newtons, or a derivative, instead.
Of course, we can all thank the Newton for paving the way to a lot of our mobile device concepts. Well, the Newton, and Star Trek.
I am a meat popsicle.
Ouch - Coral Link gives a bad response right now.
Any other mirror links?
Video Game News, FAQs, etc
Back in '94 or '95 or so, a friend of mine at the University of Michigan made a Newton web browser.
Actually, it was more like a Newton front end to a Mac faceless-application web browser, where the Mac did the "http get" and passed it to the Newton over the wire, and the Newton rendered the html.
I don't know if he ever finished it or not but I think he published an in-house technical paper on it. "Published" in the sense that it qualifies as prior art for patent purposes, not in the sense that it was widely circulated. Patents on web-enabled phones that don't do TCP/IP at the phone itself may be subject to challenge because of this.
There's a fantastic book called Defying Gravity about the development of Newton. It's worth the read.
Sure wish I got one while they were around--a local store was giving away a copy free with every Newton 2100 back in the day.
Until problem is fixed Problem in Data base Connection
try wikipedia for information
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton
Or +1 Insightful as it does bear some light on the poor Stylus input to text recognitions on the old Newtons.
Six replies and already slashdotted....must have been hosted on a Newton as well....
Mr. RDF? Wus dat?
Though, the Newton really was a failure. It did many things right, but it was too bulky and costly: the Palm Pilot was less sophisticated, but it really matched what consumers needed.
Well the Pippin was pretty far ahead as well.
I know some of you don't like the idea of Tablet PC but I think they are terrific personally. I've always wished that Apple would dump their Newton technology into a Tablet style machine. It would be fantastic for note taking during meetings and would allow me to better edit and distribute my notes. Not to mention the ones with the foldable keyboards are a more flexible form factor for mobile professionals like me. And I'd rather use a Mac than Windows with its underlying unix goodness and sweet interface.
Who knows if we'll ever see it though. It's not clear if there is a big enough market (I think there is but the products aren't good enough yet) and Steve Jobs just doesn't seem fond of the idea. But if anyone could really make it work, I think it would be Apple. Guess I have to keep dreaming...
I had several Newtons - an MP 100, an MP 120, and finally an MP 2000 (that was later upgraded to an MP 2100). The technology improved dramatically over those generations, and I really would love to see what would have emerged had development continued.
Since the Newton, I've used Palm, PocketPC, and Sharp Zaurus PDAs, and have yet to find anything I consider a worthy successor to the Newton. The integration of all the applications was seamless, and the software was truly designed to be used on a PDA, not just scaled down from some desktop application.
The form factor was a little clunky - either a smaller pocket-sized device, or a full-size tablet would have been better in my opinion - but I'm still looking for an overall user experience that's comparable, and haven't found it.
Subscribers can see articles in the future? So what? Everyone gets to see them in the future.
I had a MessagePad for a while. For about a year it served as my Personal Computer (I synced with a machine at work.) No other device this small has ever fulfilled this role for me. Hand writing recognition was not nearly as bad as legend has it. I was a pretty kickin' graffiti guy on a Palm for a while; now, having not used one for a while, I can't use it anymore. Anyway, there's a great Newton book - Defying Gravity - which was released. I've got a copy. Best thing is the typo on the spine. The Newton was a great sparkling piece of technology, and a great launch. On par with Mac OS X, but more revolutionary I think.
Steve Job's balls are huge and very very hairy. Would anyone else like to contribute?
insert obvious 'hosted on a Newton server' crack here...
at first when i read the headline i thought it was talking about fig newtons with apple flavor..
The Newton (from the 2000 series onwards) was way ahead of it's time and remains unmatched in functionality, ease of use, and brilliant interface design to this day.
From the Rosetta handwriting recognition system, to the NewtonScript language (which has allowed the OS to be extended by hobbyists everywhere: even to include support for hardware that wasn't even on the drawing boards in 1997) and the huge amounts of functionality it possessed (want to send a fax? check your email? IRC? browse the web? SSH? run a web server? anything was and still is possible on the Newton.)
The Newton MP2100 packed a 160MHz ARM processor, loads of memory, a greyscale screen and 2 full size PCMCIA slots, and continues to serve it's owners well to this day.
I truly hope someone recreates the Newton experience using today's technology.
Cramming Windows into small handheld devices and reusing the same old paradigm is a giant step backwards.
http://www.msu.edu/~luckie/egg.gif
here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
hawk
New Newton in the works?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
In a MP 120 with the 2.0 version of the OS, write "Egg Freckles" and then hit Assist.
In the prototype MP 2000 units (code named "Q"), the first run or EVT units: Write "About Newton" and press Assist. In the DVT and production units it says "What about Newton?" followed by "What about xxx?" where xxx is the name of each developer who worked on the project (sequentially).
In the EVT units, instead of the developer names, it uses Larry, Moe, Curly, and Shemp.
Also, you gotta love the Area 51 Easter egg in the first 2.0 Newtons.
There was also a Solar Eclipse easter Egg, but I can't remember what OS version/models had it. (Possibly the MP100.)
I love the Newton.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
I had a palm, once. I hated the whole letter-by-letter method of writing. Who writes like that? I will use a Newton until the last one catches fire in my hand, or until I die.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
I'll have to finish my Newton Ant Farm.
Any idea where I can get an EL backlight?
There's a mirror at MirrorDot, for all you people having problems with the original and the Coral (as I did).
All your
"We've all heard of Apple's Newton, the portable handheld device under John Sculley's rule at Apple that debuted to big media attention and much fanfare but never managed to take a strong footing in the marketplace -- only to be "Steve'd" when Mr. RDF killed the project after taking control of Apple. That's the extent of knowledge most of us have with regard to Apple's first handheld device.
Thomas Hormby submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews, which gives us more in-depth knowledge about the Netwon project during its original development -- such as the fact that it could be said that the Netwon originated from a concept device Sculley called Knowledge Navigator."
--
Apple in the late eighties had become stagnant. The Macintosh had become Apple's cash cow like the Apple II that had preceded it. To protect the Mac, Apple was hesitant to start or pursue any project that might compromise the company's revenues. Several people in the corporation were weary of this approach, and began to look at the future of computing. One of those people was Steve Sakoman.
Steve Sakoman worked at Hewlett Packard before he came to Apple, where he helped develop the first HP notebook. When he joined Apple he was happy that he 'was not going to make DOS clones for the rest of my life.' Steve had joined Apple to work on the MacPhone, a collaboration between Apple and AT&T.
After the project was canceled, he saw that Apple was not willing to take the same risks it had with the original Macintosh or even the Macintosh II. He went to Apple's director of new products, Jean Louis Gass'e, and threatened to quit unless he was allowed to create the 'future Macintosh', a computer that would be as influential on the computer industry as the original Macintosh was. Gass'e sympathized with him, and gave him permission to begin an independent research group
While Sakoman was at Hewlett Packard, he saw several 'hand entry computers that did not use keyboards. He was intrigued with the idea of scrapping the keyboard. The fact that most computers used a QWERTY keyboard was a mere fluke, he thought. Steve thought that a more natural method of input would take hold, like handwriting or speech.
Sakoman set to work immediately, getting his brand new research group off the ground. He recruited developers from around the company, including some original Macintosh developers. Like the original Macintosh and their off-site office, Texaco Tower, the new team moved to a converted warehouse on Bubb Road. Steve named the team 'Newton'. He did so because Sir'Isaac Newton was featured prominently in Apple's original logo and because he had prompted so many changes in the way people viewed the world.
At the time of the Macintosh II introduction, John Sculley had a video produced featuring his Knowledge Navigator device. He envisioned a tablet style device that would fold out to reveal a large color LCD display. The software would interpret the users commands via a humanoid assistant. The device could recognize voice commands, and interpret handwriting commands. Prescient of the internet, Sculley would have the device be able to communicate fluently with similar devices and servers around the world.
The Knowledge Navigator never went any further than the video, but John Sculley hoped that the technologies he had envisioned in the device would find life in other Apple projects. He thought that the Newton would be able fulfill his vision, and became one of its most vocal proponents.
The research group first found out what they wanted in a computer, and created a prototype design. Without any marketing staff, the team came up with a very advanced, very expensive device. The new machine was to be based on two AT&T Hobbit processors (a design that was very easy to program for) and would be about the size as an A4 sheet of paper, and feature a large, LCD, grayscale display. The true star of the new computer would be its software. The engineers wanted full handwriting recognition that
"Steve Jpbs and the NeXT big thing by Randall E.Stross" mentions that famous field as well.
Another interesting fact is that at heart Steve isn't really a computer user.
If you used one of the original Newtons you would have seen this word more times than the sum of all previous times in your life. It seemed that every time I entered a contraction beginning with a capital I, this was what it was interpreted as. Gary Trudeau of lampooned the whole Fiji thing in his Doonesbury strip when the Newton came out.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
pricing is important. As I recall, it didn't catch on because it was too expensive.
They were like a grand each, in '80s dollars.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
He was intrigued with the idea of scrapping the keyboard. The fact that most computers used a QWERTY keyboard was a mere fluke, he thought. Steve thought that a more natural method of input would take hold, like handwriting or speech.
Handwriting: vastly slower than typing, even for crummy typists like me.
Speech: unusable except in private.
Does anyone see anything replacing keyboards anytime soon?
Free, legal music for iTunes users.
I am a Newton user (MP130), and my favorite feature is being able to create ink outlines. No other PDA that I know of includes the functionality out of the box.
PostNuke... as in PostSlashdot!
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Have you ever gone to a Disney theme park and been asked to take a survey? The handheld they use to write down your answer is a Newton.
..... or so have I been told by an Apple higher up.
Apple has a contract to supply Disney with them until 2010.
"If more people could see them being used effectively, they might be received better.
:)
I had my doubts, but, I've seen students using them with great success -- although they have been Asian students. It's clear that the tablet form factor is much more effective for writers of Asian calligraphic languages, than any typewriter."
Tablet PC's don't lend themselves well to the WIMP interface everyone's trained upon. Throw that out, and maybe Tablet PCs would do better.
"Nobody thought it was funny then, either."
A comedian ahead of his time.
Mirrordot works.
This is here so you don't ignore the last two lines of my posts.
One of the developers was murdered? Some Asian guy. I forgot the details.
Well, I guess he can come back to PC's now. Very few people use DOS anymore
steven siegel loves the newton
They're called apple newtons.
mbbac
- A Bluetooth Stack/driver: http://www.40hz.org/Blunt/
- a 802.11b Wi-Fi driver: http://www.ff.iij4u.or.jp/~ngc/eng/newtwave.htm
- an ATA Flash Card driver: http://www.kallisys.com/newton/ata/
For lots of other updated Newton info, check out the Newton FAQ or WikiWikiNewt.Or just posting the article text with your user account, because you want karma.
THE ARTICLE IS A LITTLE SLUGGISH!
Actually I assume that if we're talking about Ralph Ellison, the book in question would be "Invisible Man," not "The Invisible Man." An important distinction since "The Invisible Man" is a completely different book written by H.G. Wells.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Everybody knows the Newton was really the work of DEC, who were the true innovators with their Leibnitz line of handhelds.
The Leibnitz never caught on, due to the unique marketing approach that was synonymous with Digital.
sigs, as if you care.
We're just too dern'd popular these days...
Please thank slashdot!!
We've had to take the site offline for some maintinence.
Thats expected!!!
Please bear with us and come back soon.
i came back to your site as soon as (1 seconds later). Still found the same.
One more qn: Is this site hosted on the same MAC PDA?
I posted this on another topic a little while back, but I was working in Apple Support when the Newton was first released. We knew it was a dead duck when corporate started giving them away as internal "attaboy" prizes less than three months after it shipped.
The first Newton was just about the first non-Acorn product to use an ARM processor - the ARM610 - and if it hadn't been for Apple's interest ARM-the-company might never have existed. ARM's three initial investors were Acorn, VLSI (who made the chips) and Apple.
I have a dead Newton on my bookshelf in front of me. It is great but flawed. For one thing it is too big for my hands; it's uncomfortably wide. OK my hands are maybe smaller than an average man's, but not by much.
The handwriting recognition was quite impressive, but it made you realise that it needs to be really very good to be useable. It takes so much time to go back and make corrections that it needs to get around 99% of words right. I doubt that my Newton got above 80%.
The thing that I most miss, though, was the shape-recognition. You can draw a freehand box or a circle and it will "square it up" (or circle it up). Although the drawing functions weren't very sophisticated I considered this to be the start of something great, and I'm really disappointed to see that it hasn't caught on. In fact I have even thought about buying myself a tablet and seeing if I could code something myself - maybe an Inkscape extension?
We're just too dern'd popular these days...
Please thank slashdot!!
We've had to take the site offline for some maintinence.
Thats expected!!!
Please bear with us and come back soon.
i came back to your site as soon as (1 seconds later). Still found the same.
One more qn: Is this site hosted on the same MAC PDA?
Mmmm...newtons. Or did you mean Caramel Apple? I'm confused.
Learn it. Know it. Live it.
The Newton was the preferred PDA of Steven Seagal's character in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory!
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
"Looking at what was done with the Newton can help us understand why it failed and potentially help us to prevent similar problems from happening in future products."
Nerds don't create a product. They create technology, that might end up as a product.
They were tired (weary) of the careful approach, and wanted to do something radical.
about the Newton. Truth is, it was a device far, far ahead of its time. Palm admittedly used it as a model for the first Palm Pilot. Even though Palm simplified the Pilot, eventually, it evolved into a machine that is much like the original Newton, in concept. I'm sure Apple would've made it smaller if technology permitted, but at the time, VHS size was the best they could do. Had they come out with at the same product 10 years later, (smaller form-factor, of course) it would've taken off. Timing is everything.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Scully didn't use the Force (get it? Apple? Newton? Force? Bwahahah)
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
it's iFruit and cake!
I don't remember which models included this -- maybe the 1xx's -- but if you did a find for "Elvis", the result would say something like, "The king was last seen in (random city name)"...
Silly...
We apologise for the fault in this post. Those responsible have been sacked. -- Signed RICHARD M. NIXON
I think the best Newton ever was the education-targeted eMate 300. It was my first "computer", way back in middle school. I really wish Apple would have stuck with it. Even today, nothing compares to the eMate - it's stunningly durable (demos of it regularly featured the presenter climbing a ladder and dropping it on to the floor, snapping back whatever case edges popped out, and turning it on), it's simple - I had no problem using it to type reports and print them on my old DeskJet 550c, and it's powerful, especially for it's time.
Memories of that eMate keep the hope in me that Apple will release a tablet some day, a tablet done right.
what is great about the Newton was that Apple was selling out of them and making huge amounts of money off of it, even though Steve has re-writen history to make it not look like it was a sucessful product.
Bottom line it was revolutionary and to this day PocketPC and Palm have yet to catch up to its simple and elegent recipy.
Sure we now have color screens, wifi, bluetooth, and better processors. The Newton was simply easier to use, lasted a while on a charge, didnt have the reset problems plauged by PDAs today, and gave you plenty of writing space.
I think Steve just killed it because it wasnt his idea or, like the idea of the Mac, he coulnt steal the credit for it.
To this day I still say Apple is sucessful in spite of Jobs. He tries to kill almost everything he touches (the mac, iPod, peripherals support, developer support, and the list goes on).
Only reason M$ ever overtook Apple was because Jobs took the developers for granted while Microsoft goes out of there way to make developer freindly things with a semi-stable enviornment (unlike the mac or Linux).
Or -1, Redundant, as anybody who hasn't been living under a rock for the last ten years has heard that joke a thousand times.
The sad thing is, at the time that episode was made, the handwriting recognition on the Newton had been updated, and was fan-fucking-tastic... better than most of what's out there now, in fact. However, nobody was interested in giving it a chance because every geek on the planet was constantly repeating the "Eat Up Martha" joke around them, so they figured it must still be crappy.
the newtons biggest problem was the time in which it was launched.
:)
...
these days pda's are a lot better served especially with the rise in wireless networking.
to give an example the mdaIII is a pda phone with built in wireless now for my money gprs is expensive but with wireless built in it just takes finding a wireless hotspot and all of a sudden you have cheap calls and full net access
with skype for pocket pc you can call all over for 2p a minute (more for mobile calls) it will play mp3's streaming media play movies with sd cards getting cheaper its practical to put a movie on a card for long trips and the battery will last. most pda's can charge off a car ciggerette lighter socket. anyone with autoroute should have pocket streets which on the latest map can locate postcodes shops cinema's ect. never get lost in a strange city again.
whats still not right is the lack of external monitor/ composite video on most pda's and usb in. The toshiba 740e has this but the monitor resolution is low.
(actually there is a linux port being developed for it).
sdcards offer huge amounts of storage now so its possible to have almost everything you want sat on an sdcard find a hotspot and your net connected in seconds in most citys these days
one nice thing is the phone companys are offering some pretty good deals i got my mdaIII on a pretty cheap contract.
if apple developed a pda phone with usb and composite video and or vga support then they would make a killing my pda plays music plays films and all in 210 grams and pocket sized.
combine it with gps and you have the ultimate mobile companion.
best of all is when the phone companies subsidise it for you
life is good
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
Hmm. You must have the brain control of a Zen master.
I regret to inform you that communication and control in the average human being is so full of "uh uh"s and "ya kno"s in thought as well as in speech that trying to use one would be far more exhausting that just typing the [expletve deleted]words in. (Just eavesdrop in on to the average conversation. Phew!)
Not everybody has mush for brains but since the name of the game is that technology should make us more productive, I think that direct control is out.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
What has not been metioned (osnews is down at the moment so I can't verify it there) is that unlike the first generation software, the second generation recognition engine (now alive as Inkwell in Mac OS X) was developed in-house at Apple, in the Advanced Technology Group (ATG)
Apple-Newton Handwriting Recognition's lead was Larry Yaeger (who worked with Alan Kay at Apple) and is now at Indiana University where he's back at Artificial Life research.
Natural != the best in every situation.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'd say that the GUI isn't "something better" than the CLI (see ) but rather "something that sucks in completely different ways than a CLI sucks".
WHo else noticed that the Knowledge Navigator in the video had an invisible hinge running down the middle of the screen?
Make an emulator for the newton that runs on XScale, have Apple sell licenses for the "roms". Profit.
And I love it. I print rather than write with it, and I find the accuracy is great. I also have Grafitti installed on it, but I hardly ever use it.
I've used Palms and PocketPC's, but go back to the Newton for it's simple and elegant interface, which makes we actually want to use it, and keep my calendar and contacts up to date.
Although the HWR gets all the attention whenever someone writes about the Newton, the one aspect I would have loved to see advanced and developed was the Assist button. Tap on it, enter something like "Have lunch with Bob on Tuesday", and it will search your contact list, automatically create a meeting on Tuesday for you.
The quote in the main headline reads like the beginning of a Star Wars movie. All you need is the music to play along.
At first, I would maybe think that fast touch typists could be converted to eventually just think about their existing writing patterns. After getting used to it, one would be able to increase the speed.
The biggest pro of this approach is of course that the signal itself will be discrete and that there's lots of existing software to handle it. It's just a way to replace the physical interface, the keyboard, not the type of interaction that's going on.
Why the Apple Newton Failed - written by Larry Tesler, Newton Development lead for two years.
I may have mentioned this in a previous article about the Newton, but it was used to coordinate battlefield information during a Marine Corps war fighting experiment called Hunter-Warrior, which was part of a program called Operation Sea Dragon.
Taken from This desription:The Dalai LLama
...short-timer transferred to a headquarters unit a few months before the actual operation...
My sig could be your sig!
As the article notes Sakoman left Apple to join Be (then left Be and came back again). After Palm acquired the BeOS technology and most of the team Sakoman joined Palm for about 6 months before leaving and joing - Apple (again).
I believe his current position is VP Hardware Engineering in the iPod Division.
Now if that doesn't get the old iPod / PDA rumor mills flowing aqain I don't know what will.
The newton I had was the original one with the original handwriting recognition. My hand writing is quite poor.
Still the newton was able to recognize my writing quite well.
I think the whole "newton handwriting sucks" concept is totally an urban legand. The newton didn't do %100 recognition therefore it sucked, and people (most of whom had never used one, or hadn't spent 10-15 minuts training a newton to read their handwriting)would spread this perception until it became another of the standard myths that "everyone knows".
Like "Macs are more expensive" "macs are not compatible", etc.
The newton's problem was that it was a bit too bulky. But the handwriting worked, the product WAS a success-- selling quite well, and the division was profitable at the time it was shut down (as was NeXT Inc. when it was bought.)
But since devices with less functionality were selling more (Eg the palm was selling more, but then the $5 pocket calculator was selling a whole lot more than the palm, so isn't the palm a failure by comparison?).... people called the newton a failure.
But the reality is, it wasn't.
Groupthink and knee-jerk religious animosity towards Apple has negatively impacted the countries productivity in a measurable way! Someone said that Episode 3 would result in 4 billions in less productivity for the US as people stayed out of work opening day to see it... by that measure, people's rejection of apple products without having actually evaluated them has probably caused hundreds of trillions in lost productivity.
Oh well, this irrationality only hurts the irrational.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
I have gone to several PC Expos and Mac Expos at the Javits center in NY over the years. The first time I went to one I noticed every booth had a Newton hooked up to a card reader ( to scan your badge). Then Steve came back to apple and at that Expo there were no Newtons to be seen and I haven't seen any since.
http://Lenny.com
If my memory serves me well, it was the Newton team who came up with the name "PDA" to refer to handheld computers.
I remember thinking at the time that Personal Digital Assistant was one of the worst buzzwords ever, even though the Newton itself was kinda cool. It's funny how the machine faded away, but the acronym stuck.
The filesystem is the package manager
Interestingly Flash was originally FutureWave's FutureSplash Animator which was based on FutureWave's SmartSketch drawing program which was originally created for systems running Go Corp.'s PenPoint OS, but was ported to Windows and the Mac when Go and Eo (hardware manufacturer owned by AT&T) went belly up.
A really flexible vector drawing and note-taking program is still one of the areas in which Microsoft's Tablet PC is way behind (PhatWare's PhatPad is the closest thing, and it's almost as good as Newton, but requires a 1.0 GHz CPU, something like 250 times more processing power than the OMP or MP 100). Typically people leave up the input panel or a soft keyboard or attach a numeric or other keypad/strip to get at shift, option and other modifier keys so essential to using drawing programs such as FreeHand and Illustrator.
Alias Sketchbook is quite nice for bitmap graphics work though, and Ambient Design's ArtRage is fabulous for the price (free). Sketchbook was even ported to the Mac after popular acclamation.
Another nifty program is the InftyEditor which converts written equations into LaTeX code (shades of the math symbol input option for Instant TeX for NeXTstep).
I'm still mystified as to why Macromedia didn't revive SmartSketch for the Tablet PC.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Seriously, that's not much of an argument against speech recog. Also, I think speech recog would fall under the same strictures of etiquette that prevail for cellphone use, for better or for worse.
No reason why a speech recog PDA couldn't also be a phone or uberdevice, and honestly I wouldn't be interested in a PDA that didn't do everything anyway.
Steve Sakoman is a Shape-Shifting Reptilian Alien
Newton still beats the pants out of any PDA even today!
Can a Palm pilot run a web server?
Newton sure can do!
http://newton.splorp.com:8080/
Thanks to NPDS: http://npds.free.fr/
Q: How many Apple Newton users does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Faux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
Finally, plug the MP into your HP Laserjet 4M and print it out (without loading up drivers). Try that on your Palm/WinCE device.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
I live in Hong Kong and back in the day I owned two Newtons, but both of them were the Sharp versions. Sod all memory; I remember installing Grafitti took about all bar a few K of RAM.
Anybody else come across these clones, and if so do you know if they differed from the Apple versions in any way other than aesthetically?
Foux! There to eat lemons, axe gravy soup.
Ha! I kill me!
From a financial standpoint at least the Newton wasn't really a failure for Apple. Because of the Newton Apple was an early investor in Arm. When they sold off their Arm stock they made enough to cover the Newton R&D and then some.
Can you see any difference between the Newton HWR with the PocketPC Transcriber technology? Suck the M$ Transcriber. Can you hand draw a circle on the PocketPC and it automatically translated into a real circle? Can you draw a 'REAL' straight line with PocketPC? See how it work on a Newton.
P.S. I am also in HK and I bought the Sharp Clone of newton and Newton 2K on the first day launch in HK.
It's called "Funny"...
I missing the day that I can write "Lunch with Jackson tomorrow 13:00" then it will automatically put an item on the scheduler. at 12:45 it will ring and pop up with asking whether need to show the telephone number or even dial the number for me!!
Ursine Wiki has a whole bunch of stuff including history, detailed descriptions and reviews of most of the Apple Newton line.
Help us build a better map!
C'mon, if you really wanted to mess with Graffiti, you'd get a Palm. Besides the ingeniously clever OS, its hand writing recognition was what the Newt was all about!
you have two options:
1.) Thumb board.
2.) Stylus and handwriting recog OR an OSK
You have 3 options:
1. Thumboard.
2. Stylus and HWR.
3. Stylus and a learned interface.
Graffiti and the Pocket PC's Block Recogniser are not handwriting recognition. They're more like stenographer's shorthand, albeit less advanced. They're not as fast as a thumb-board, but they don't require the break between text input and positional input that a stylus or a mouse gives you.
Unfortunately Palm has abandoned Graffiti and replaced it with a more handwriting-like recogniser that's significantly slower because it requires multiple strokes for some of the most common letters.
Block Recogniser on the Pocket PC is now the best input mechanism available. It's a pity that the Pocket PC itself has been so badly crippled by Microsoft's desire to make it no more than an annex to Windows rather than an independent device capable of replacing the laptop for most casual users.
Ironically, Graffiti started out as an input method on the Newton. I use it on mine when I use my Newton at all.
I can only think of one thing you can't do more efficiently with a CLI (draw pictures) but then again I've always preferred CLIs (because they are so much faster and less restrictive) so I'm probably not the right person to ask.
Anyway, the existence of even one thing that the GUI does "better" still proves the point; that GUIs aren't useless.
Incidentally, my prior post was supposed have a link to Eben Moglen's interview here where he says "What I saw in the Xerox PARC technology was the caveman interface, you point and you grunt. A massive winding down, regressing away from language, in order to address the technological nervousness of the user." but I mis-moused it somehow.
When computers respond correctly to human language, then the "caveman interface" will no longer be needed.
If I had a dollar for every time a technology professional had to stop and think for a while, then check an O'Reilly "nutshell" book or a man page, simply because he couldn't remember an obscure command in DOS or *sh that the situation called for, I would be far richer than Bill Gates.
CLI's are terrific if you've been using them full-time for ten years. For example, I like working in bash, and can get a lot done fairly quickly in that environment. (I still have to look things up every now and again, though.)
For everybody else, they suck, and there's no indication that they will improve much anytime soon. Any interface that sucks for everybody who doesn't spend years learning it... just plain sucks.
Is there something that will come along and be better than the GUI? Damn, I sure hope so. Was it a big step forward? Hell, yeah.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
I don't know about all of you, but I found the Knowledge Navigator video that was linked from the article, much more interesting than the Newton itself (and the Newton was cool, IMHO).
Most folks don't know this, but the Knowledge Navigator video linked from the article was only part one of a multi-part video series that demonstrated the KN (and other sibling products) at work in various real-world scenarios. I have seen the entire video series, and I can tell you that the KN visionary video series did not simply serve to inspire the Newton, but many facets of computing inside and outside Apple for years since, right up to today and beyond.
For example, there was also a scene, shown after the professor's scene, that showed a laid-off 'industrial-age' worker, who was trying to improve his skills to get a better job. The worker was shown sitting on a park bench with a KN in his lap, and the KN's 'talking head' agent was giving him a reading lesson (the worker was illiterate and was learning to read using the KN). As the worker tried reading each word out loud, the KN agent would listen to his voice and highlight that word then move onto the next. When the worker stumbled with a word, the agent politely pronounced it for him. But all this wasn't even the best part of this video.
Once the worker finished the lesson, he picked up the sports section of the newspaper that was also lying on the bench next to him, and proceeded to circle the article he wanted to read with a pen. Then, remarkably, he simply placed the article, text side down, onto the flexible color screen of the KN, and within seconds, the KN had scanned this text into its memory, and began to use that material as the text for its next reading lesson!
You may have watched the Knowledge Navigator video once; go watch it again, more closely this time. You will see many minor technology details in the video, some of which exist only today, and some that we still don't have. To point out how much this video has inspired many advances in computing through the years, let's tally up the visionary technologies that were not present at the time this video series was produced (1988 or so), and see how many of these have actually come to pass today:
1. Truly portable form factor (had it only since 1992 with the original PowerBooks, but not in 1988)
2. Flexible color flat panel screen that also acts as a flatbed scanner (flexible screens have been demonstrated in labs in just the past few years, but I don't think they do scanning and probably won't for some time)
3. Seamless wireless Internet access (have it now with AirPort and the Internet, which was not nearly as robust back in 1988)
4. Built-in web-cam (we now have the iSight, but that's still not built-in, and yes, if you look closely, you'll see that there is indeed a camera lens on the top of the KN's display)
5. Intelligent agent who actually listens to what you are saying, including on-the-fly interpretation of human meaning. This point is very hard to get across, because it's so natural you just expect it. But watch the video closely and think about it; the agent wasn't simply responding to spoken commands, it (he?) was actually listening to the conversation that the professor had with his colleague Jill Gilbert, and was able to intelligently interject a useful fact into the conversation, just like a human would. It even finished a sentence for the professor. This is no mere voice recognition; there is something more going on to make this agent interact naturally; we simply do not have this just yet, although we are getting closer rapidly. With advances in neural networking and AI, we will eventually reach the long-sought goal of being able to tell our computers what we want, in simply human terms, and actually have them do what we intended, rather than having them simply do exactly what we 'tell' them to do (which is not always what we want them to do). But we're nowhere near there just yet and we certainly weren't there in 1988
False. The interface of netcat is appropriate to its function, and nobody who hasn't spent years learning the intricacies of network protocols at the packet level can possibly use it. You can't use sing if you don't understand how ICMP rides herd on IP, and once you've reached that level of understanding the CLI interface is intuitive and a GUI simply restricts your creative abilities.
Testify, brother! I couldn't agree with you more.
Not just drawing pictures, but looking at pictures maybe? Don't forget that the human brain is very strongly geared towards the visual. The internet pre -the explosion of the web was a cool place, but the web is what let the internet explode, by allowing images and text to coexist easily. ASCII diagrams are quite often not the best way to convey information.
The command line certainly has its place. There are things in which it is faster and less restrictive, as you've said; but there are plenty of counter-examples for the GUI. I'm sure you could implement a spreadsheet of some sort in a CLI, but I'd hate to have to navigate through and edit random cells just with a keyboard. Or editing a document any more complicated than just simple text. GUI's are pretty much necessary if you're looking for WYSIWYG editing of almost any sort.
Your quote is interesting, and I see the point. But I would argue that the GUI is as much a language as the CLI. Neither of them are particularly equivalent to normal human speech, and they both need to be learned.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.