Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
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Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
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Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#2My first job after college was maintaining Newton script mobile application used by my employer.
Later we moved the app over to a windows CE device and developed an office management suite in the 4D programming language to compliment it.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#3still have a 2000 upgraded to 2100 in a closet somewhere. At some level the iPhone was such a disappoinment after having owned a Newton, becuase the early iPhone, even after the introduction of the app store, felt like a bunch of siloed apps, where the Newton "soup" allowed fairly seamless extensibility and interoperability. (well, at least it felt like that in the 90's.)
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#4It is somewhat ironic that I can actually write this on an iPad using Scribble nearly 30 years later and after Apple killed the Newton, reinvented its mobile devices, and declined to add a stylus to them...
Incidentally, it recognizes "egg freckles" just fine.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#5still have a 2000 upgraded to 2100 in a closet somewhere. At some level the iPhone was such a disappoinment after having owned a Newton, becuase the early iPhone, even after the introduction of the app store, felt like a bunch of siloed apps, where the Newton "soup" allowed fairly seamless extensibility and interoperability. (well, at least it felt like that in the 90's.)
I always wonder how a Newton would perform on modern hardware. Considering how well the handwriting recognition worked on 90s hardware it should be pretty great by now. I definitely miss it. The iPhone feels like a step backwards in terms of user and developer friendliness.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#6Eat up Martha
(one of the 200,000 former Newton owners here)
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#7It is somewhat ironic that I can actually write this on an iPad using Scribble nearly 30 years later and after Apple killed the Newton, reinvented its mobile devices, and declined to add a stylus to them... Incidentally, it recognizes "egg freckles" just fine.
I suppose it took a bunch of innovations to make it more usable over that past thirty years, though.
- vastly improved software - much better accuracy and integration with "custom" words (such as contact book addresses)
- bigger screen - no hitting the edge every few words
- lower latency/higher resolution - ink appears as you're writing, providing better and instant feedback
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#8I still have a Newton (a 2100), and although it ceased to be a daily carry device for me somewhere around 2007, I only finally stopped using it altogether just a few years ago, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to move my notes on and off the thing.
The bad handwriting trope has always baffled me. I've never had a problem. I know that the 2000 series Newtons are considerably improved compared to the original generation, but I did also use an original generation Newton, and it was actually fine.
I think the "Eat up Martha" gag from the Simpsons became such a trope that people just assumed it must be awful.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#9I still have a Newton (a 2100), and although it ceased to be a daily carry device for me somewhere around 2007, I only finally stopped using it altogether just a few years ago, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to move my notes on and off the thing. The bad handwriting trope has always baffled me. I've never had a problem. I know that the 2000 series Newtons are considerably improved compared to the original…
I was always amazed by it. Other PDAs used a special alphabet one had to memorize, but Newton learned and recognized natural handwriting. And while Newton didn't last long, the handwriting recognition did, reincarnated as Inkwell.[1]
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#10Handwriting recognition is a "hard" problem, and the Newton tried to take it on directly, with more or less success. Other companies went for workarounds. Some people retrained humans to write in such a way that the PDA could easily recognize it, e.g. Palm with their Graffiti writing system used with PalmOS. Others just put a keyboard on the device, as in the early WinCE devices, and which reached the pinnacle of evolution on the Blackberry. Then smartphone makers just turned that into a software keyboard on the screen, which is what we see in iOS and Android.
Now, the big thing is voice recognition, which is also a "hard" problem. But we no longer need to seek workarounds the way we did with handwriting recognition, for two reasons: first, because the phone itself now contains much more processing power than the early PDAs did, and second (and more important), the evolution of high-speed wireless networking makes it not only possible, but feasible, to offload the "hard" parts of voice recognition to an even more powerful server somewhere on the Internet. Which enables, not only voice recognition, but software agents like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant.
One day there will likely be a breakthrough somewhere that makes the gap between handwriting recognition and voice recognition look like child's play. I'm not sure what that will be. Maybe direct brain interfacing, as in William Gibson's or Jim Strickland's science-fiction universes, or as in John Scalzi's "BrainPal"?
(Taken from some musings I wrote on Facebook back in 2018)