I’ve always wanted to get one of these old Apple Newtons and trying to upgrade the built in handwriting recognition system with something a bit more modern, within the limitations of having 8mb of ram :). Anyone have any experience hacking them?
Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
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Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#12I’ve always wanted to get one of these old Apple Newtons and trying to upgrade the built in handwriting recognition system with something a bit more modern, within the limitations of having 8mb of ram :). Anyone have any experience hacking them?
I think it would be more interesting to run under emulation. The hardware is getting a bit old and creaky these days. Under emulation it could enjoy a considerable CPU and RAM boost.
An iPad with a pencil would be an ideal target.
(Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.)
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#13I loved my Newton. I loved it so much that even when it was stolen out of my car in ~2003, I got a MessagePad 2100 off of eBay to replace it.
It was only when the iPhone came out that someone was able to pry my Newton out of my hands.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#14One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like language, though that seems to have been replaced by NewtonScript.
https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf
https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan....
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#15One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like language, though that seems to have been replaced by NewtonScript. https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899
Dylan was never on the Newton. The Newton team had two proposed products, Senior and Junior. Senior was gonna run Dylan, but they kept waiting on the Dylan team to produce something usable, and it never happened. So they gave up on Senior, dumped the notion of using Dyan entirely, and finished Junior using NewtonScript to get the product out the door. That became the Newton.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#16One of the most fascinating things about the Newton is that its systems and applications were written in Dylan, a LISP-like language, though that seems to have been replaced by NewtonScript. https://opendylan.org/_static/dylanwwdc94brochure.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160328123939/http://opendylan.... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22398899
Dylan was never on the Newton. The Newton team had two proposed products, Senior and Junior. Senior was gonna run Dylan, but they kept waiting on the Dylan team to produce something usable, and it never happened. So they gave up on Senior, dumped the notion of using Dyan entirely, and finished Junior using NewtonScript to get the product out the door. That became the Newton.
Yeah, that's what Walter Smith says:
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#17I 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] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inkwell_(Macintosh)
And then Microsoft acquired the company that made Calligrapher (which originally ran on the Newtons), and it ended up in the early WinCE PDA devices. I used it with the WinCE devices, and it worked quite well. "Egg freckles", indeed.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#18Something that strikes me, using a Newton today, is just how little has changed in the fundamental things people want to do with a mobile device: messaging, contacts, calendars, and notes. For all that modern devices can do, these four essentials seem more or less the same in concept and function between my MessagePad 120 and my iPad Pro, despite 30 years between them.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#19I’ve always wanted to get one of these old Apple Newtons and trying to upgrade the built in handwriting recognition system with something a bit more modern, within the limitations of having 8mb of ram :). Anyone have any experience hacking them?
I think it would be more interesting to run under emulation. The hardware is getting a bit old and creaky these days. Under emulation it could enjoy a considerable CPU and RAM boost. An iPad with a pencil would be an ideal target. (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.)
> (Given that it uses an ARM processor, maybe you wouldn't need to emulate it, on A and M-chip devices.)
The Newton has a 32-bit ARM processor, whereas all of Apple's processors for the last ~5 years have only implemented AArch64.
Re: Egg Freckles: The Newton at 30
#20still 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.)
Of course the early iPhone apps were siloed, one could not even copy/paste between apps until three versions in. :-) But the iPhone did, indeed, feel like a step back in many ways. Though Microsoft would let it languish and later get stomped by iOS, the early WinCE/Windows Mobile devices had better inter-app communication and integration. I felt like I could get stuff done (and I did) on some of those devices. The early iPhone had a lot of innovation, but there was no last-minute editing of a Word doc on those devices.