On: Remembering Apple’s Newton, 30 years on

[JeremyReimer]

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.

[larkost → JeremyReimer]

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.