I built a lot of fun stuff for the Newton. I built a Sherlock clone for the Newton (which 15 years later landed me in the middle of the Apple vs. Samsung patent lawsuit). I also wrote the Java virtual machine available for the Newton. It was a lot of fun for a bored PhD student. My Newtons have recently all died and it's a little sad.
Around 1998 I built an open source application on the Newton called Hemlock which loaded, parsed, and used Sherlock search templates to grab data from internet sites just like Sherlock did. Sherlock can either search from the internet or can search from files. The Newton didn't have a filesystem: it had a searchable database system. One of the things I was working on, and proposed on Usenet, was to search both the internet and the Newton database system in one shot, though I eventually didn't do it as the Newton already had a great search tool for the database system built in.
About 15 years later I walked into my lab and got served with a subpoena by Samsung's legal team for deposition. Everybody's lawyers suddenly wanted to talk to me. They dug through my postings, my software, old files on my laptop, even the old Newtons in my office. Between Apple, Samsung, and the very helpful SFLC legal team, the whole thing was like being dropped into a tank of very nice sharks.
One of the patents Apple was going after Samsung for was 8,086,604, the "604" patent. Hemlock, and my proposals on the Usenet for improving it, predated this patent by quite a bit and easily covered most of its claims. Eventually Samsung decided to argue that they didn't violate the patent, rather than argue that it was invalid. That turned out to be the right decision (they won). But had they gone the invalidation route, I'd likely have found myself on the stand in SF. That patent is still live, and my prior art is still ready to invalidate it.
> That patent is still live, and my prior art is still ready to invalidate it.
I wonder how many other invalid patents are out there. It boggles my mind that the patent office will grant anyone a patent without even checking for prior art.
It took a team of very expensive lawyers to find that prior art on some old forum. I don't think the patent office has those kinds of resources for each application.
If they don't have the resources or knowledge necessary to establish prior art, then they do not have the competence to grant patents. Their negligence enabled the illicit enrichment of monopolists and dragged open source developers needlessly into legal procedures, costing them time and possibly money in legal fees.
That is why I think every patent submittal should come with a bounty to be paid to anyone who identifies prior art to invalidate it. The bounty is setup using a bond or something similar. If no prior art is identified within a reasonable time (say 2 years), the bond is reverted back to the submitter.
After the other user mentioned your name I thought it sounded familiar too so I looked you up. I used MASON quite a bit in the past, thanks for all your work on that!
Maybe the most interesting/memorable part of my brief foray into the Newton was being invited to the Apple Campus and meeting other engineers (I was still so young then). We were each paired with a weird development Newton that was some kind of PCB bento.
It was cool to see how the sausage is made (or at least what dev prototypes can look like).
I remember too the one engineer I chatted with in the evening that told me, "You could work here." That really surprised me — I thought you had to have a PhD or something to work for Apple.
(Not too many years later, I would in fact get a job at Apple.)
I have a couple here that I could sell you, assuming the shipping isn't awful (I'm in Canada). I tried to put them on eBay some years ago but got low-balled and jerked around. Haven't tried them lately, not sure of their condition.
One is an original MessagePad in box, the other a late model, I forget, I'd have to go look.
UPDATE: I'll spend some time in the basement today going through my crap and I'll find the two Newtons, and do some research on what they might be worth based on condition and what others have gone for.
It's time for me to purge anyways. Prefer these go to a nerd's home who will have fun with them, esp if said person has a history with the Newton.
Out of curiosity what was your list price? I’ve been starting to collect (got a Mac IIsi with a portrait monitor a few months back) and would be interested in getting a MessagePad in working condition
Author here! I'm really happy to see people getting into the nostalgia about these weird and wonderful devices. Researching the story was absolutely fascinating, and I loved getting to talk to Steve Capps, who was still excited to talk about the work he did all those years ago.
> And NewtonScript influenced the creation of JavaScript, with its prototype-based object model, dynamic variable typing, garbage-collected memory, and fast interpreted design. Today, JavaScript is the most popular programming language in the world.
The reasons are understandable though (sorry if there are any slight mistakes as I'm writing from memory here).
Brendan Eich was hired to create a Scheme in the browser. Later, the requirements were changed to "make it look like that new Java language". He has said on record that he was familiar with the Self language. JS is often called "Lisp in C's clothing" because under the surface, it is quite similar to Scheme with a prototype object system (Scheme has no object system by default).
Apple created a language in the 1990s called Dylan that was also used on the Newton. It started out as something very close to Scheme + CLOS (Common Lisp Object System though it's more properly MOP -- MetaObject Protocol). Lots of programmers hate the lisp lack of syntax for whatever reason, so they changed Dylan to an infix-style language. OpenNewton is still a thing if you're interested.
NewtonScript kept much of the Dylan-style syntax, but changed out the complex MOP for the more easy to understand prototypal inheritance. I've never encountered even the hint that Newtonscript was on Eich's radar when he started work on Javascript.
There are definitely similarities that become apparent when you look at both language designer's inspirations:
Scheme + Self + C/Java = JavaScript
Scheme + Self + Dylan = NewtonScript
The result is two languages with the same core language ideas from Scheme, the same object system from self, and very different syntax inspirations from C and Dylan.
EDIT: Eich says in an interview he never saw NewtonScript before designing JS
Early Dylan owed more to Common Lisp than to Scheme, especially in its object system. It removed some of the more complicated CLOS mechanisms (e.g. :before, :after, and :around methods) but it still "felt" a lot like Common Lisp before its syntax was de-parenthesized.
The first Dylan compiler was written at Apple Cambridge [Massachusetts] Laboratories in Macintosh Common Lisp (MCL) which was itself an Apple Product. Later, Apple decided they didn't really want Dylan after all so they sold the Cambridge lab, later renamed Digitool. The MCL product lives on today as Clozure Common Lisp (CCL).
The transition from MCL to CCL is a dramatic story unto itself. I should probably write down what I remember about it someday.
I played around with Dylan around a decade ago. Maybe my Scheme comparison comes more from it having just one namespace (lisp-1) rather than the more functional aspects of Scheme. MOP is definitely from CL though.
For the record, NewtonScript wasn’t inspired by Dylan. I did work on Dylan, but only in the early stages when it had normal Lisp syntax. The syntax inspiration for NewtonScript was Pascal.
I was so jazzed about the Newton that I co-founded the Boston Computer Society Newton Users Group [1] a year before it launched. As far as I know, it was the first users group for the Newton.
Those were amazing days. We even managed to have a couple of members of the Newton team give us a sneak preview of the Newton (NDAs required) a couple of months before it launched.
Our group helped with the rollout at MacWorld Boston—we were upgrading OMPs early that morning with the latest firmware that had just come out.
Of all of the user groups and tech communities I've participated in, the community around the Newton was second to none, in terms of their vision, foresight and camaraderie.
The Newton Hall of Fame [2] is worth checking out for anyone who was part of the community back then, with many names that will bring back memories, including yours truly.
I still have my MP2000, and it powers up just fine. Although, it could handle year 2000...it seemed to hit the wall from a date range perspective soon after. Anyhow, I was soooo stoked at the time to get one. Back then, there was not a small, useful, handheld device. People that carried them were weirdos. I doubled-down and carried a giant Moto flip-phone too. As fun as the Newton was, it never became my killer device. Why? No one else had one. I could not easily share all that clever stuff I had in my Notes or my Calendar. I firmly believe that if more people had them...you would have seen more adoption. Casio made a few very colourful WinCe devices, too...same fate. And they were huge... may as well carry a real computer...a laptop.
As soon as cell phones got "apps"... calendar especially, then I knew PDA's were dead. When iPhone was launched...well, I knew that it was the smaller, smarter, more connected Newton that was imagined way back then.
Finally, foreshadowing arguments about why it was important to use 64-bit computing in a handheld device, Mike Culbert explains 32-bit advantages in Newton over the incumbent 16-bit of the time: https://beepdf.com/wp-content/uploads/newton/COMPCON-HW.pdf.
Wow. I knew Apple was an investor in ARM, but the specifics are crazy. For those that won't read the linked story, this I found to be fascinating:
> Newton was not successful, but Newton actually made $800 million dollars because Apple eventually sold the 43 percent it owned in ARM, which, by the way, kept the doors open at Apple, just before Steve Jobs came back. It was one of the really important decisions that Gil Amelio [the last CEO before Steve Jobs returned] made, and it gave them the cash to buy NeXT.
This is extraordinary. Picking ARM for Newton basically enabled all of Apple's modern success: keeping the lights on, getting Steve Jobs back, NeXTSTEP evolving into Mac OS X and {i/iPad/TV/mac}OS, and of course ARM-based systems from the original iPod to the Mac Studio/M1 Ultra.
You know, it occurs to me in retrospect that Apple overpaid for NeXT, which is something people said at the time, but I kind of ignored. No one else would have bought them at anywhere near that price. The black hardware had failed. OpenStep was cool but the OS didn’t run super well on PC hardware. NeXT should have been $150M tops. Apple eventually had to rewrite all of the software anyway to make use of it.
Sure, Jobs himself was priceless. But, yeah, Apple did overpay for NeXT at the time.
You know how YC investors pick teams, not products? Apple at the time bought a team, not the technology. They also bought credibility by bringing a founder back on-board.
Apple's biggest problem at the time was bad management, followed by credibility.
They solved both problems and got some technology (ObjC, what would become Darwin, etc) as a free bonus.
The complete NeXT takeover of management made it more like a reverse acquisition in any case and the results speak for themselves.
ISTM that everyone misses a vitally important key part of NeXT.
Yes, there was the OS, but there were other OSes, notably BeOS, and NeXTstep/OpenStep ran on other OSes, notably Solaris.
Yes, there was Steve Jobs.
But NeXT had a core thing that nobody else did: the state-of-the-art development tools.
Apple needed to get Mac developers on-board with the new OS. Sun had a great OS. Be had a great OS. Apple itself had A/UX. OSes abounded; there was lots of choice. Jobs' vision was very important.
But without the NeXT developer tools, notably Interface Builder and Objective-C, the deal would not have saved Apple.
Most of the stuff below the UI layer was the same.
One thing that changed was IOKit, rewritten in C++, but there actually wasn’t a good reason for that and I think everyone agrees sticking to ObjC would’ve been better…
“Handwriting recognition was a key part of the plan.”
I was pretty young during this era of computing…but it felt that handwriting input was going to be The Thing in terms of next-generation computer interaction. Mind you, all I had access to was MacWorld and whatever PC mags were at the bookstore, but handwriting was seemingly going to be the text input method of the future. I swear you could even buy what amounted to a teeeeny little Wacom tablet to plug into your computer for handwriting recognition.
All of which seems funny to me by 2022 standards. Computers were supposed to adapt to our “natural” input method of handwriting…but instead everything is a keyboard, be it a soft or hard keyboard, and then voice recognition for short on-the-go messages or for individuals with accessibility constraints. I mean, I literally cannot write any more. If you put me back in 4th grade, I’d flunk a cursive test so hard they’d hold me back a year.
It took about an hour of practice to learn Graffiti, the PalmOS modified handwriting system. Humans are a lot better at adapting to computers than the other way around.
I was taught cursive in 1st, 2nd and 3rd grade... and it hurts my hand, and looks terrible, so I don't do that. My usual writing is a modified drafter's font.
Some engineer (I forget if it was an Apple engineer or a Handspring engineer) once remarked that Graffiti was a much smarter way to do handwriting recognition than Newton, because: "If the Palm Pilot made a mistake, people blamed themselves for not writing Graffiti correctly. If Newton made a mistake, people blamed Apple."
I was a Newton fanboy and Graffiti hater... and then I actually tried Graffiti and realized it's so much better. It's a powerful lesson about how technical superiority isn't everything.
I used Palm Pilots in college and got very proficient with Graffiti, to the extent that it became a pseudo-shorthand for me when taking pen-and-paper notes in class.
Of course, I also had a Newton MP2000 (later upgraded to 2100) that I used in labs to input data to the native spreadsheet program, imported the resulting graphs into the native word processor for the writeup, and stopped by on the way back to the dorm to print it out wirelessly, all before anyone else sat down at their computers. That felt like magic.
Low-end public school? Probably not. But private schools, and my nephew's Catholic school do.
I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive. Are people who don't learn cursive not able to read the first line of a California license plate, or locate a Walgreen's pharmacy?
> I've never understood the internet's hate for cursive. Are people who don't learn cursive not able to read the first line of a California license plate, or locate a Walgreen's pharmacy?
It's sort of an outdated mode of writing that survived due to inertia. Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause your writing tool to leak against the medium. Theoretically it's also faster to write than block characters, but the speed differences appear to be minimal for short-duration writing with the benefit of uniformity of block characters _outside_ of cultures that stress uniformity of cursive lettering. Worth pointing out that the examples you give here are not especially stylized letters and that Walgreens, outside of its red cursive letter logo, generally prefers a sans-serif block lettering. That said, I'm sure for someone not familiar with cursive lettering the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable, but most humans tolerate unreadable characters pretty well when scanning words we already know.
The slow death of cursive is indicative of the change in medium: most people write to one another by computer, or on mechanically printed paper. It's a similar process by which we started adding vowels, spaces and punctuation: the constraints of the medium or its tools improved with time.
>>Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium
In my experience it is much more comfortable to write cursive. You do not have to lift the pen for every single letter. It is quite annoying to have to do that, quite honestly. My hand feels much more happier to be able to just follow a flow.
I also do not understand the hate, it is much more comfortable. It is like hating touch typing. Sure, you can type with two fingers but not very efficiently.
> I also do not understand the hate, it is much more comfortable
The hate stems from when we were taught it (poorly) in elementary school, where it was slower, physically painful and the result was illegible.
Now I go weeks between writing anything physically at all (and even most of that is Kanji now as I moved to Japan) so learning a new way of writing seems pointless
Those claims are not true at all as a southpaw. I was pushing the pencil instead of smoothly pulling it. As soon as my teachers stopped requiring cursive and only cared that we wrote with whatever handwriting was most legible, I dropped it.
Oh yeah, for sure. The hand is certainly part of 'the tool' and variation there will make different approaches to forming characters comfortable for different people. My own hand is a small block with occasional tails between letters which I find comfortable to write in but is very idiosyncratic. I was taught to primarily write in cursive as a child and then re-taught to write in architectural block as a young adult, which I'm sure has something to do with it.
Cursive is super, super useful when your writing tool can't withstand repeat impacts against the writing medium -- like a quill -- or if lifting will cause your writing tool to leak against the medium.
Cursive is unrelated to quills and ink. Quills and ink existed for a thousand years before cursive was invented.
Cursive exists to relive the strain of writing a lot. Printing is much harder on the hands that cursive. If cursive hurts when you write, you're doing it wrong. You're supposed to hold the implement very loosely and gently, not like you're holding on for dear life.
the 'r' and 's' look especially inscrutable
The cursive "r" is an "r" with a bit on the right linking to the next letter.
The cursive "s" is an "s" with a bit on the left linking it to the previous letter.
The forms have evolved over the centuries, but they're still there. Even the weird capital F makes sense if you write it enough times. It's an "F" made without lifting the pen.
I went to public school early in life, and so didn't learn cursive. When I joined a private school, everyone was already writing cursive, and I had to catch up. It took me maybe three weeks. I remember getting g and q was hard for me. But people are able to learn new things every day.
Modern pens are horrible to write with, you have to press down on the paper to get the ink out, and doing so causes the fingers (or at least, my fingers) to cramp up. I switched to a fountain pen over a year ago, and the difference is night to day. No longer do I have to press down on the paper---the ink just flows out of the pen with no pressure required, and it's now a pleasure to write cursive. I also think my handwriting improved just using a fountain pen.
> But people are able to learn new things every day.
I don't think anyone suggested otherwise?
I think the conversation might be slightly hung up on the specific example of a quill (reed stylus, sharpened bird bone, charcoal stick, brush all encourage a flowing character), nor is the only reason to prefer cursive writing to relieve hand strain, although that's true for informal long-form and for some hands and for some alphabets. My general point here is that the medium of writing tends to dictate the common forms of writing and with the common medium now being mechanical -- computer, printer etc -- we're seeing a shift in how people form their characters, if they even form them by hand at all.
I don't think cursive's ergonomic claims hold for lefties, as we have to push the pen instead of smoothly pulling it along. Perhaps if I were writing Arabic, my opinion would be different.
I'm a lefty and have found cursive very comfortable (and I'm also both an underwriter and an overwriter.) Perhaps if you're a sidewriter you get the worse experience of pushing a pen.
I definitely find writing a nicer experience with a pencil, a fountain pen, or a felt-tipped pen - ballpoints require too much pressure to be comfortable.
As a lefty side-writer, I find no challenge with using cursive. Writing in print is also pushing most of the time so I don't understand the claim that lefties has to push more.
I’ve actually found my cursive to be much more reliable to OCR. I think it’s because I explicitly learned cursive when I picked up fountain pens as an adult, as a result my letter forms are consistent. Maybe not “correct”, but consistent.
I even went through a period where I used the “long s” in my script, and I was able to get that to OCR just fine after some training.
may have something to do with cursive letters having more "features". I only assume it's harder to OCR but that needs proof. I think it's safe to say that reading cursive is slower for humans.
My kids all learned cursive in school. But maybe it varies by country and region of the country. I'm in the US, east coast. Public school in a mix of blue & white collar-- more blue collar though-- in a small city that's a suburb to a large city.
I missed the era of Newton because, well, Computers were new, a tad young for the technology of that time, and perhaps my geographic upbringing. Nonetheless, I will forever remember anything resembling a Pocket PC-ish design devices and systems. I did look around and asked people in the know to get my hands on any non-working Newton for my keep-sake, but so far, no luck.
Pocket PC Devices, especially the iPAQ 2000[1], changed my career and sling-shot me from a Magazine Cover designer to building HIPPA Compliant Programs for these devices. If you see doctors, in the USA, ticking off stuff holding one of them during the early 2000s (perhaps till the 10s), they might be using one of the programs I wrote.
[2000-2002] I used to always carry an iPAQ and I was kinda showing off. Fellow commuters on the BEST buses and the Domestic Western Railway in Mumbai thought I was a Japanese, surveying things with cool gadgets to be introduced in India soon.
I spent one memorable Christmas-to-New-Years holiday tracking down a bad bug in the Newton kernel that (for a while) only happened up on those kiosk devices. I spent nearly two weeks tracking down a timing window where an interrupt between two ARM instructions would cause the scheduler to stop scheduling threads. Very Heisenbuggy.
The fix was to swap those two ARM instructions. It's simultaneously the hardest and the most trivial bug I have ever fixed.
I bought a new Newton after having lunch with Larry Tesler. He was both enthusiastic about the Newton as well as trying to talk me into rewriting my first Springer Verlag Common Lisp book to use the Dylan language. John Koza also had lunch with us, and it was great fun.
Years later, I was cleaning up the closet in my home office and ended up throwing away all Newton materials - my general rule that if I haven’t used something in a few years, I like to get rid of it.
I told him about my experiment of using GA to train small recurrent networks (using what I called variable weight size, that would increase during training). He said that it was a very cool idea but it wouldn’t scale. A few weeks later I agreed with his almost instant analysis. I did use the code as an example in my C++ Power Paradigms book.
Why wouldn’t training small recurrent networks with GA scale? Genetics algorithms are embarrassingly parallel, even more so than training neural networks by gradient descent. It’s not efficient sure but it’s trivially scalable.
I miss soups and NewtonScript. Honestly, it was such a nice little machine that was so close to getting it right. I still think some of the big ideas of that machine would serve us well today. A replicating soup would be fun.
It’s interesting that some engineers went on to work with Be, and then a bunch of engineers from Be went (back, for some of them) to Apple early in the MacOS X era. There are things you can trace back to the Newton across companies like that.
Another thing was text selectors, where you could do things with random text, depending on what it was supposed to represent (open the web browser when taping a link, open the phone app when tapping a phone number, track parcels, show a place in Maps, things like that). Nowadays, it is everywhere, but it was a nice feature on the Newton.
IIRC the “data detectors” patent[0] from the Newton era was still valid when the iPhone came out, and was one of the few patents specifically wielded by Apple in court against Android and Samsung.
AFAIK this was the inspiration for Microsoft's database filesystem attempt that almost killed a Windows release and ended up never seeing the light of day. I can't even remember its code name.
I owned two Newtons. The jokes about the handwriting recognition are a bit overstated, especially as later apps made it a joy to use. Also, Newton was way ahead of its time, and though it looks quaint today, it was really something back in the day.
I had a Newton back then. Most of those who joked about the handwriting recognition were tech reporters who played with it for all of five minutes. Once you used the device on a regular basis, the recognition got better, similar to today's iPhone keyboard.
The handwriting recognition was running on the CPU so it got much better when they jumped from the 20 mhz ARM on the MP 1x0 to the 162 mhz StrongARM on the later models.
In September 2004, I went to the World Wide Newton Conference in Paris.
A chap called Adam Tow gave a talk where he showed us an email he got from Steve Jobs about the future of the Newton.
Basically, one day in 1997 or 1998 Adam was walking past Homma's Brown Rice Sushi in Palo Alto, and saw Steve Jobs getting some takeout. Adam wanted to ask him about the fate of the Newton, but managed to hold his tongue.
Instead, he went home and emailed jobs using the subject line "Homma's Brown Rice Sushi", because he figured that since he was just there he'd open the email.
Related, the documentary "General Magic" is quite good, and mentions how Apple's Newton sort of undercut the proto-smartphone being developed by apple veterans at General Magic. So many people saw the future but the tech wasn’t quite there.
Yeah, wondering what Larry Tesler's thought process was here, the people from GM seemed pretty hurt by it in the doc (worth watching but not very critical overall).
Newtons, at least the 2000/2100, and possibly the 130 IIRC, supported PCMCIA Ethernet cards, including both WaveLAN IEEE (first gen 802.11 DSSS) and Proxim RangeLAN (first gen 802.11 FHSS) wireless LAN cards.
But the NewtonOS user experience was very much based around an occasionally-connected model, with syncing between the PDA and a "master" device or beaming between PDAs, and built-in support for inbox and outbox stores that would accumulate items to be dealt with once connectivity was lost or regained.
So although there ended up being a bunch of TCP/IP-based Internet stuff for Newtons, it was very much "bolted on the side", even more so than MacOS and Win95 around the same time, because the interaction model was hard-wired against constant connectivity.
Newtons also supported an infra-red version of AppleTalk, using an adapter connected to the built-in AppleTalk connector. This supported the usual AppleTalk network services -- wireless printing was the most useful.
Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple. But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.
> Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple.
What makes you believe that?
> But perhaps most crucially, Jobs hated the stylus, and thus we got multi-touch gestural input, which is perhaps the major differentiating feature that the iPhone popularized.
If the iPhone had supported stylus input from day 1 touch wouldn't have evolved nearly as well. Developers would say "just use the stylus" and been done with it. Modern mobile had to go through an evolutionary phase where touch was the only input method to get where it is today.
Imagine if Netscape Navigator had arrived first on the Newton, along with a WAN card.
> Unfortunately, I think Apple lost a lot of the institutional knowledge from the Newton project before the iPhone was developed, or perhaps it was never that widespread even inside Apple
In the bad old days, you would have to restart your computer as well. I remember Netscape frequently crashing back in the day and that bomb icon from Mac OS System 7.
I still have my Newton. It won me a copy of Adobe After Effects from John Knoll at MacWorld. In the presentation showing how to do special effects, Knoll offered a copy of the software to anyone who could draw a picture of Bill Gates — on a Newton. I raised my hand and scribbled a smiley face as I ran to the front of the room. Forgot I was in handwriting recognition mode. It changed my drawing to “OK” right as I showed him. Got a good laugh and the software.
I have a full collection of Newton's from the OMP to the 2100 (including an eMate). They're neat devices and it's interesting to wonder what could have been.
At the same time it's really easy to see their limitations and why they failed to take off. The Newton was aimed squarely at the concept of a late 80s early 90s jetsetting executive. A small device that replaced a briefcase and purchased on the company AmEx.
Unfortunately for the Newton that's a pretty rarified market. Even within that market a contemporary laptop was vastly more capable for only 2-3x the price. Because the Newton seemingly aimed at such a narrow market it just couldn't support itself let alone a third party ecosystem.
I was in love with the idea of a Newton, they were the PADD from Star Trek! The price put them out of reach until I bought a 2000 second hand. I'm glad I started with that one because the 2000 and 2100 were the most capable Newton's released and had the best expansion options. I was able to get some use out of it for years. Between NUGs and the NewtonTalk mailing list die hards were able to keep Newtons useful for a while.
My love for them aside I can understand why Steve Jobs axed them. Like the $4500 PowerBooks (the base 3400c cost that much in 1997 dollars!), the Newtons were just way more expensive than their utility could justify. The Palm Pilot market was an order of magnitude larger than the Newton and it was selling for half the price. There wasn't much reason to fight two entrenched platforms in two different markets (Windows/PC and Palm/PDAs).
I think Newton didn't make it because early 90s jet setters liked Palm Pilots that would fit in your pocket and played well with non-Apple computers. It was pretty rare to go to a meeting and see a Newton, but everyone would pull out the Palm Pilot. Price and form factor were probably the drivers.
Newtons predated the Palm Pilot by a couple years. The Pilot 1000 was not released until 1996. The Newton was on the way out by the time the Palm Pilot was released and off the market by the time the really popular Palm III/V/VII series was released. So in the early 90s no one had a Pilot and by the late 90s the Newton was history.
The jetsetters the Newton was targeting (or I posit they were targeting) did end up getting Palm Pilots in the late 90s but in the early 90s likely either went with electronic organizers like a Sharp Wizard or a full laptop if they went with any electronic PIM/organizer device.
I still have a working eMate 300. Every now and then I start it up and play around a bit. It's neat to see how someone of it still lives on in iPad OS with the Apple Pencil.
Say what you will about Jony Ive but the eMate 300 is a beautiful design that also looks pretty functional.
It also seems to have a high-contrast reflective screen that you could use in broad daylight, something that challenges even my rather bright MacBook Pro.
As you note the iPad is something of a successor to the Newton both in hardware (e.g. ARM CPU, Apple Pencil) and interface (e.g. shape recognition/drawing, long press.)
Apple apparently prototyped larger Newton tablets (VideoPad) as well as pen-based Mac OS devices (PenLite) but never brought them to market. Though macOS does work as a pen based system if you plug in a Cintiq, or an iPad with Sidecar.
I bought an eMate on a whim about 20 years ago and absolutely love it. I do a similar thing and have a play once in a while. Occasionally I’ll use it as a distraction-free writing device, but the batteries need replacing for it to be truly useful. Will get round to it one of these days.
I can’t help but think it would make a really good Raspberry Pi casemod, but it feels like sacrilege to gut a working device.
Incidentally, if anyone has any broken eMates I’d be interested…
Sadly I almost never saw one in the wild, even in the Valley, but TBH, hardware and software hadn't yet reached the point of viability.
I'm glad the author mentioned the knowledge navigator concept video/s (were there two or just one? I can't remember any more). The iphone handily picked up that baton, but wisely didn't try to do so right away. But the NN vision was almost 20 years too soon.
Going through this article I realise that apple had tonnes of innovators and a culture for them. No wonder it became what it became after Steve jobs took cover but I feel that the modern giant tech companies (except Tesla probably IMO) do not have this culture now
It’s just the opposite. Apple became successful after Jobs came back because he killed all of the “innovations” and started focusing on products that the market cared about.
Sure QuickDraw GX, OpenDoc, PowerTalk, etc. might have been “innovative”. But they weren’t what consumers wanted.
The iMac on the other hand especially running pre-OS X was technically crap at the time. But it saved Apple.
I think this clip when Jobs killed OpenDoc explains it all.
Innovating too early usually fails. Wait too long and it's not innovation. There's an art to innovating enough that people want to buy what you're selling given the limitations of hardware/networks/ecosystems at the time you bring the product to market.
OpenDoc is kind of an engineers dream. I remember being fascinated by it at the time (having only read about it). But yeah, it was a distraction. Microsoft also made large investment in OLE (object linking and embedding) at the time which was a similar technology. In retrospect these were solutions in search of a problem. Great that you could embed an Execl sheet in a Word document, but it wasn't what made consumers excited at the dawn of the web.
Relatedly, there's Steve Jobs's thoughtful yet off-the-cuff response when questioned at the 1997 Worldwide Developer Conference about Apple killing OpenDoc.
One would hope it isn’t - the problem with component systems is they’re a Conway’s Law violation, which is the reason the app model works so much better. (in terms of actually shipping, not technical correctness)
I had a 2100 (I think it was actually a 2000 with the memory upgrade) in the early 2000s. It was a fun toy, but I remember most the challenges of getting to be play like a first-class citizen with my Mac†. I found it to be a cool device in the tinker-y way that I like messing around with Linux and Raspberry Pis, but at the end of the day it required more attention than was worth it.
†Excepting the iPhone, this has been the case for virtually every device I've owned. Palms (after the discontinuation of Palm Desktop), Smartphones prior to 2007, Android phones. 3rd Party vendors make a genuine strong attempt to make everything work, but first-class support really makes using a device normal, instead of a chore.
I had a 130 and a 2000 (or 2100). I always thought they were very interesting devices, I'm just not organized or busy enough to need a PDA (even today). I love the idea of soups and NewtonScript.
My newton turned in to my first e-reader. Having "books at my fingertips" I really enjoyed, although it was all fiction.
I later ended up buying a Palm VII, I think, off eBay. It was all fancy with some wireless connectivity that was obsolete when I bought it, but it had a backlight and cost $20. That was a really nice little e-reader.
I recently attended a sales meeting for group health insurance reps at Blue Cross Blue Shield of TX.
They are going all-in on HMO plans. Of course everyone remembers how unpopular HMOs were in the 90s, deservedly so or not.
The Apple Newton figured prominently in their presentation. Like the Newton, they argued, the HMO was premature to the market, and suffered from lack of supporting infrastructure, despite being ahead of its time in many ways. Today's HMO could be the iPhone.
I wasn't convinced, but it was cool to see the Newton again, out in the wild.
Myself, I grabbed a 130 shortly after release. Combined with a PCMCIA modem, and serial cable connector to my Motorola Flip, I was one of those obnoxious nerds in coffee shops checking my email, before WiFi and smart-phones.
NewtonScript was amazing, such a great language - and the promise of an operating system with built-in database-like/searchable storage was amazing. Which was also one of the reasons I fell in love with BeOS a little later.
Newton was amazing. Once you did a bit of training, it could read your handwriting with easy. The assisted drawing was the coolest thing and something that only recently Apple has brought back. I only had a Message Pad 110 - I really regret not saving a bit more for the 120 - it was a marked difference between the two.
I've got two MessagePad 130's for sale with some pretty interesting accessory peripherals if anyone's interested...
One has the original box. 3Com and Motorola wireless modem accessories, original manuals, leather case, screen protectors, serial cables, 3.5" disks etc.
my friend went to a Newton startup.. there was nothing wrong with the product and they did a lot of things right. There were some shenanigans among management but not huge.. the company went bankrupt and the engineers were paid relatively low wages
Not feeling old yet?? ... next year is the 40th anniversary of PBS science TV show Newton's Apple, with Ira Flatow. (The one with the theme music 'borrowed' from Kraftwerk.)
I don't think so. OpenDoc was a document sharing service in classic Mac OS, similar in some ways to Microsoft's OLE (Object Linking and Embedding) but somewhat more advanced. Back then, some folks thought that applications were going to become more like components that interacted with each other to make a kind of "super-application", but the use case ended up being just dropping an Excel spreadsheet in Word.
Newton had lots of ways to share information between applications running on NewtonOS, but designed to fit the much smaller memory footprint of the device.
I believe the only things the Newton and OpenDoc had in common were that Steve Jobs killed both of them as cost-cutting measures.
Fleshing this out a bit more: The idea was that there would be one "Document" type, and that you could have multiple parts in that document, each supported by a separate application.
Users getting a document could always see it (there were essentially graphical previews built in to the format), and you only had to have the Application to modify content in that section of the document.
As an example: a single document that had one area that was a spreadsheet, another area that was a chart derived from the data in that spreadsheet area, and then other areas that were images or text areas.
For those that have used Adobe's InDesign with embedded images from Photoshop or Illustrator, this is much the same idea (except using plugins rather than the original app to do the rendering).
It was a neat idea, but needed a lot of different places to buy into it, and it would have needed to have a killer InDesign replacement as part of the OS, and it never had that. Plus all of the apps like Word and Excel would have had to buy into having that as their hub, and I am not sure that Microsoft (or others) would have ever given up that much control.
if the stroke recognition was as superior as you say it is, why isn't it in Apple products these days? Sounds like it can only process from direct input and not pictures from other sources
A derivative of it (co-written by Larry Yaeger, who worked on the Newton) actually was incorporated into OS X, called Inkwell. You could make it appear as an input area by plugging in a graphics tablet. It was removed in OS X 10.15. The current macOS/iOS handwriting recognition tech is unrelated.
There are multiple reasons why not. Have you read the rest of the discussion? Did you not wonder why people are commenting "egg freckles" and "eat up Martha"?
[1] Little to none of the Newton's design was continued in later Apple products, because it was a product from the period when John Sculley ran the company. When Steve Jobs came back, he cancelled all the Sculley products, notably the Newton, which he described as "that scribble thing".
[2] The tech was not used further because it didn't work very well.
[3] It didn't sell because it was impossible to try before you buy, and impossible to borrow a friend's.
The Newton needed weeks to learn that single user's handwriting. If you let a friend use it, it tried to learn their handwriting, making it worse at its owner's.
So you couldn't try it in a shop, because it didn't know you or your writing.
Newton OS 1.x only understood cursive ("longhand" as we non-Americans call it). As the many comments here show, a lot of people don't really know how to write in cursive any more.
So Newton OS 2.x added support for block printing, but it was too late, the damage was done. That's why the device was parodied in "Doonesbury" (which is the source of the 'egg freckles' line) and the Simpsons ("Eat up Martha") and so on.
[4] The tech was not adopted because it failed and because it wasn't a Jobs product. It wasn't good at synching with a parent device (the Palm Pilot did that) and it wasn't good at standalone (because ubiquitous wireless Internet didn't exist yet) and it competed with the Mac rather than being a partner to it.
But the critical point to grasp here is that the mere fact that it didn't succeed does not mean that it was not good. It was very very good. I own 2 of the devices. The tech is amazingly good at what it does; the problem is that what it does wasn't essential and wasn't very useful.
The iPad was too big and too radical when it was devised. Which is why Apple miniaturised it and launched the 2nd generation product first: the iPhone. The iPad came before the iPhone.
The iDevices are technologically conservative. They are existing tech, simplified and miniaturised. They are very small pocket-sized UNIX machines.
This is well-known tech so the result was polished and worked well and was a hit.
The original Newton design was a pocket-sized battery-powered Lisp Machine, and was amazing radical tech... but arguably tried too soon.
So the result was flawed and inconsistent and didn't work all that well, and so it flopped.
Which is why 21st century computing is flooded with iterative refinements of existing successful products, resulting in vast complexity and hard-to-understand failure modes, rather than bold innovative experimental new tech.
The Newton handwriting recognition did turn up in Mac OS for a quite a while as Inkwell, although only of interest to owners of 3rd party graphics tablets as Apple don’t offer pen input on Macs. Don’t think it got updated much (barring removing a Newton holdover easter egg). Got dropped during the great 32 bit purge a few releases ago.
I suppose if they'd made it the size of an A4 folded along its major axis it would have been easier to hold, though reading text would have been annoying.
Never forget that Apple big-footed an individual to take away newton.com from him. IIRC, "Mark Newton" (edit: ?, from memory) had the domain and Apple took it. Can't find a reference to the story now.
Good (and sobering) to also remember the dark side that seems to go along with much (or is it all?) of human achievement.
The sad/interesting part is, that some of those dark moments seem so unnecessary - at least in hindsight. But I suspect that the underlying psychology of ruthlessness may be a requirement for much (all?) larger achievements.
I'm torn on this one, because at some point "first-come, first-served" is not a great thing in the realm of non-fungible domain names. I can't find much information on this subject, but what did Apple do?
This is really strange: I thought maybe I could use the wayback machine to look at the old site, but it only goes back to Nov 1998, where it has Apple content on it. Doing various searches I can't find a trace of the story. I searched the history on slashdot, which is probably where I heard about it, but no reference. Maybe it was Usenet...
But I can't find any references to it anywhere.
Much of the outrage at the time was: Hey, Apple, you already have Apple.com, why aren't you using apple.com/newton ? The owner of newton.com seemed to have as much right as Apple did to use the domain (it seemed to be his legal last name), and IIRC he had it for years before Apple released the Newton.
A bulk of the remaining animosity at the time was HOW Apple went after it. They didn't offer to buy it or negotiate with the guy that had it. Instead they went with: "This is ours now." through ICANN or whatever it was at the time.
Very similar to the nissan.com situation, except, you know, the individual still has nissan.com.
This was probably around the time that an article came out about domain squatting, which ended with: Does this mean that I could just go out and register mcdonalds.com ? E-mail me with your thoughts at: ronald@mcdonalds.com :-)
On the one hand, you're right. There were numerous flaws, in hardware, in software, in pricing, marketing, etc.
On the other hand, it was awesome. It could do things that nothing had done before, and weren't done by anything else for years (even to today) after.
You can argue that Apple made the wrong compromises, and the success of the Palm Pilot suggests that a lot of people agree with you. But then the Palm had a crappy screen too, so maybe that wasn't as much of an issue as you think.
And it was smaller than an iPad Mini. The Newton group had plans for smaller and larger models that were never brought to market. It was hard to get the battery life and CPU power into a smaller device back then. Still, the Palm, iPaq and various PocketPCs clearly hit a sweet spot of size.
Palm Pilots were a good example of "worse is better". Apple pushed the boundaries of the possible a bit too hard and ended up with a device that mostly worked but was expensive and had too many issues for the price point. Palm was less ambitious but their product was cheaper and more reliable.
And simpler. It used Graffiti rather than a full neural net-based HWR. It used compiled 68k C applications, not NewtonScript. It was a fairly ruthlessly simple device.
Consequently, it was much cheaper to make, and could fit in a smaller package.
