“If I was CEO at Apple, I would combine the Mac Mini, the Apple TV, and the Airport Base Station into a single machine that goes into folks living rooms and networks all media into what ever the user wants. It is basically the same hardware anyways.
… and I would continue to develop the Newton…”
– matthiasm, on the Newtontalk list
Microsoft Zune users weren’t the only ones suffering when 2009 arrived. Many, many Newton users were afflicted by the new year as well, thanks to an alpha-version “fix” of the infamous 2010 bug.
The problem hit the Newtontalk list on January 1. Jon Dueck described the situation that would become well-known to most Newton users who downloaded the Fix2010 patch: when his Newton clocked over from December 31, 2008, it immediately jumped to January 1, 2025. When he tried to change the date to 2009, as the Newton should have done at midnight, his Newton chose a July date in 2012.
Other users noticed the same bug. When some switched the date from 2025 back to 2009, everything worked fine. But for others, the system clock would register the correct date while the Dates app would display a 2025 date.
By process of elimination (and through a lot of e-mails traded back and forth), the list figured that Avi Dressman’s Fix2010.pkg was the culprit.
First, some background. The Newton 2010 bug has been well-known since at least 1998. My Apple Newton does a good job of breaking the bug down. Basically, Newtons running version 2.0 and above start getting weird dates behavior past the year 2010.
Avi Drissman’s Dates/Find BugFix extension (his other software is on his Newton page) was created to fix the 2010 bug in the Newton’s Dates application. His other “fix,” the “highly-experimental” Fix2010 package, originally released in September 1998, was meant to fix the 2010 bug system-wide.
Even Avi warns users:
Are you crazy? This is ALPHA-quality software. It has undergone almost no testing. It has not proved itself. It will not become useful for another 12 years. I wouldn’t recommend installing it. Period. Still want to install it? Back up your Newton. Totally. More than once. Do not install this on mission-critical machines. Really. Ensure that packages are installed on the internal store. Use the Newton Connection Utilities program that came with your Newton device to download the included package.
Can’t get a more dire warning than that, eh? But really, Avi’s message turned out to be more than a warning. It was pure prophecy.
Someone wrote Avi and asked him to release the source code for the Fix2010.pkg, which he did under BSD, so that others could work to fix the patch.
“It’s kinda freaky, isn’t it?,” Avi wrote back. “When I wrote Fix2010, 2010 was some abstract idea way out there. Now it’s looming, eh?”
Avi’s original source code has been posted to SourceForget.net, and Eckhart Koppen started a Wiki to explain more about the problems from Fix2010.
“The fix should in the end work out fine,” Eckhart says. “The main issue seems to be the boundary condition of moving from one hexade (1993-2009) to the next (2009-2025).”
Dennis Swaney (who warned me on January 4 about this issue) offers a unique solution: set your clock to 1999. “Everything will be accurate except for the year,” Dennis says.
The Fix2010 bug had very real consequences. Jon later reported a problem with his To-Do dates setting to 2024, with repeat To-Dos appearing after he reset the date. L. W. Brown had two of his MP2100s turn into bricks trying to fix the problem. Only a full hardware reset (and a backup file) restored his Newtons to working order.
One Newton user, Lionello, said his MP2000 has displayed “wild
chime/popup activity” after removing the Fix:
This morning I think I’m facing a problem that I suppose is generated from the removed patch. In december I’ve set an Alarm for a birthday (for tomorrow), and I had set a 24-h warning. Now this morning I fired up my Newton and the popup appeared, but now the Newton seems to be in a loop, it chimes continuously, and if I try to close the Snooze/delete alarm popup, it closes, but in less than a second it pops up again with a chime.
Woody recommends resetting, moving Dates data to a card, perform a brainwipe, reinstall from a backup, delete all the Dates data from the backup, then move the data from the card to the MessagePad.
The best fix? Don’t install the Fix2010.pkg. Not until a patch is released. It may even be best to wait until January 1, 2010.
Fresh on the heels of the Zune meltdown, The Unofficial Apple Weblog broke down a few Apple bugs that have plagued users in the past, with – prophetically – heavy emphasis on Newton flake-outs.
The bigger issue with this 2010 bug is that, for us Newton users, a fix may never be found without a resourceful programmer pulling late nights to find and fix the problem. Apple will never release a patch to fix the dates issue. The Newton is dead to them from a support standpoint. The fix will be up to the Newton community.
We’re on our own.
Any readers have an issue with the Fix2010 package and the new year?
[As a side note, I dropped the ball with this one. I should have been on this story. Around Christmas, I stopped checking my Newtontalk e-mail as often as I used to. Sure enough, the minute I do that, the Newton world goes crazy. Lesson learned.]
Dan Knight over at Low End Mac took my little idea and ran with it. There’s now a Google Group you can join, and volunteers are lining up from all across the country.
My first contribution: a strawberry iMac G3 that I gave as a gift a few Christmases ago. Now that friend has upgraded to a MacBook Pro, and is giving back the G3. It’ll make a great word processing, Internet, and gaming machine for some kid who couldn’t otherwise afford a computer.
If you’d like to help, please join the Google Group and use it as a homebase of sorts. We can swap ideas, parts, software, and hardware, and get cranking on (a) saving the environment from e-waste and (b) getting Macs to kids who can use them.
A big thanks to Dan for jumping on this thing, and to all the folks who want to make a difference – even if it’s a small one.
Hurray – WikiWikiNewt is back up and running.
The wiki’s administrator, Morgan Aldridge, received enough requests through the NewtonTalk list that he took another stab at posting it. Now it’s back up, with some conditions:
Okay, I took another look at it and was able to at least get rid of
the permission errors.Known issues:
- It’s possible some content is missing
- You may or may not be able to log in
- If you are able to log in, you won’t be able to modify any pages
- We’ll start getting comment spam again, I believe
All that’s left to do, says Aldridge, is upgrade/update his version of PHP. It’s a heckuva resource for Newton users, and it’s nice to see it back up.
Marketing guru Seth Godin has a new book out, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us. As a way to promote and brainstorm the book, he invited an online “triiibe” to make a book of their own. It’s available for free on Seth’s blog (which is great, and updated every day).
In the free, PDF version of the “Tribes” book, I couldn’t help but notice how many times Apple is brought up. On page 17, an author talks about the not-so-first-in-line Polish iPhone buyers. On page 51, the iPhone unlocker tribe gets its day. “Think Different” is listed as a War Cry on page 41. On page 60, Tom Bentley describes how he’ll be a Mac guy for life after his first experience:
The Mac tribe, of course, has been written about extensively, as has Appleís design magic. There have been some clunkers, but in the main, many are marvelous advances in computing and design. Iím not quite the zealot fanboy who would immediately flame online columnists who question any aspect of the Macintosh Creed, but I get where the fanatics are coming from. Iím in their tribe, after all.
“I am now part of the Newton tribe” sparked my interest at first glance, even if the actual article was about Newton running shoes. Even there, though, Marcus Galica talks about how Newton-wearing runners recognize each other out in the wild. Remember when that was true for iPods? How iPod wearers would give each other “the nod” or “the look”?
Apple’s relatively smaller user base than PCs gets a mention on page 63 (“I’m a Mac, I’m a PC”). Online groups and surfers and ethnic groups are all mentioned in this “Current Tribes Casebook,” but Apple gets its a big share (perhaps more than fair – is that my “tribal mind” talking?) of the attention.
I joined the Apple tribe three years ago in November, and I haven’t looked back. More recently, I joined the Newton tribe (and the jogging tribe and the local brewery tribe, and perhaps a few more), and it’s been a heckuva lot of fun.
What would be written about our little group of holders-on and our big green friend?
2001 wasn’t all that long ago. Thanks to Google’s month-long anniversary project, we get to explore what the web was like seven years in the past.
Head over to Google (with an exclamation point!) as it was in 2001, and you can search the web as it was then. The results shown are pretty remarkable, considering the iMac G3 was the newest consumer Mac available, the iPod hadn’t been released yet (not until September of that year), and we had a brand new president.
Google provides archived versions of web sites, which allows us Newton users to explore some of the long-gone Newt web resources.
The Newton Source, above, is now a link squatting site. But back in the day, I’m sure it was a pretty handy resource for MessagePad software.
During my Newton links project, I’ve found so many sites that have disappeared. But thanks to Google’s 10-year anniversary search site, I can dig back in time and find out what the Newt web looked like only four years after development stopped.
On the big to-do list of Newton Poetry projects, we can check off the “Create page of still-live Newton site links” item.
After many, many months, lots of web surfing, a bit of HTML work, and a mish-mash organizational system, you can now view the Newton Sites page above to see a list of Newton-based web sites that are still viewable.
I found, long ago, that browsing through Newton sites was a hit-or-miss occupation. There were tons of “page not available” hits. In this post-iPhone world, not many web page creators or Newton enthusiasts want to spend the time and money to maintain a web presence. Who can blame them? Newton web traffic isn’t what it once was, not when the iPod and iPhone have demanded so much of the Apple news attention.
But with so many sites still out there, and few resources available to catalog and list them all, it was a project I had to take on before any more sites disappeared.
It was interesting to browse through the Newton sites Google’s 2001 search experiment offered up. Many sites that are long gone now were still around then, so I at least got a sneak peek at what they looked like. But I didn’t include any of those long-gone sites in this list.
There were several resources that were a tremendous help during this production. Splorp’s Newted site, when it was up, was a great list – though some of the links were dead-ends. The Newton Webring (remember those?), UNNA.org, and tons of ghost sites with “links” pages also helped point the way, and simple Google searches helped uncover hidden gems in the mines of the Internet. Luckily some Newton users have kept their sites alive, if not active, all these years later – allowing me to prowl through their pages and grab all the info I could.
If you’re interested in Newton MessagePads at all, some of the sites listed are “no-duh” sites. Everyone knows UNNA, Kallisys, and a few others. A few more, however, were listed out of a simple desire to remind us what a thriving, exciting project the Newton was. There are a few articles about the Newton Community after Steve Jobs killed the device, as well as a few random blogs and FAQs from the proto-days of the Internet.
The whole project was a hoot. I wish there was a way to keep some of this stuff from disappearing completely (maybe a simple copy-and-paste operation?). It would be a shame to lose any more resources, and the destructive effects of non-renewed domain names have already decimated tons of once-popular Newton sites out there.
In the meantime? Browse, link, enjoy. There are some sites that are absent, I know, so if I missed your favorite one, please let me know in the comments. I’ll give you lots and lots of credit for finding something I didn’t.
Today, Newton Poetry celebrates its first anniversary. From its simple beginnings it’s grown and developed and changed into something not too far removed from the original idea.
A year ago, Newton Poetry started as a blog about poetry that I scribbled into my Newton MessagePad 110 and the translation that came out of the Newton’s handwriting recognition technology. Misspellings, garbled text, weird syntax – it was all par for the coarse, and tons of fun to read. I got my inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s famous “Jabberwocky” poem (hence my sub-headline) and the story behind it. But after a while, the act got old. I got bored, and I wanted to explore the history and mechanics of what made a ten-year-dead platform exciting and still relevant. What is a Newton? Why do people still devote free time to this machine? How can it be useful in this iPod Touch and iPhone age? Is Apple working on a new, revised Newton platform? How do you use a MessagePad in today’s OS X environment, a system never designed to handle the Newton’s serial-based connection?
There was something there, and there was a (admittedly small) audience. While the poetry stuff garnered plenty of views, it was mainly from search traffic; searchers were probably looking for meaningful analysis of the poem they were looking for, not some weird, misspelled translation. Whereas posts like getting an original Airport card working in a G3 iBook, or fixing up a PowerMac G4, drew tons of attention and discussion and comments, the poetry just…sat there. No love at all. Despite early experiments, no community formed around the idea of (a) submitting a poem, either famous or amateur and then (b) having some 15-year-old PDA spit out random text based on that poetry. And really, scribbling a poem and waiting for the response is tiring. It’s no fun anymore. Therefore, posts with poetry have dropped off. I just haven’t felt like doing them.
Posts on Newton history? Those I love.
Maybe it’s that I’m interested in poetry, and I’m interested in the Newton, but I’m not interested in the combination. At least not any more. There are no volunteers who are willing to do Newton poetry (that I know of), and I’ve given up on the idea of training apes to do the work.
Result: no more Newton poetry.
Merlin Mann’s post on blog pimping and writing about what you truly love hit a nerve with me. Those poetry posts generated plenty of hits. I didn’t write them because I wanted Google-trafficked attention, but I took a shot on building something out of a goofy idea. If I wanted a money-maker, or an attention whore, I could post a Newton poem a day and sit back as the hits kept coming.
But that’s not what I want to do. What I want to do is explore the Newton platform, and experiment with it, and run fun little projects on classic Macs, and eke out an blog existence that where I appreciate and enjoy spending time messing around. I look back at those Newton poems and…golly…I just don’t get misty eyed reading them, you know?
Newton Poetry might become a self-hosted blog. I have a goal to achieve before that happens, but it’s something I’ve spent more time and research on. Taking a WordPress.org trip into blogland is one of the last great experiments I can pull off with this thing. The idea makes me nervous, but I look at the blogs and sites I love reading, and all of them have benefited from the kind of modifications and customization that make a self-hosted blog worth doing. Graphics and a unique domain and tweakable CSS – I have no idea what I’m doing with any of that. But the question is: how else can I learn? How else can Newton Poetry grow?
There lies the rub, friends. What’s next? Where do we go from here?
Projects like the upcoming links page and the how-tos have helped develop Newton Poetry into a beast all its own. Newton fans and users have to have a home base in this day and age. Luckily, they have several. But as time goes on, more and more of those “page not found” messages will creep up. Newton-focused web sites are disappearing, and it’s up to a few of us die-hards to keep the tradition alive.
I don’t know how to program with NewtonScript, and I don’t know how to make a Bluetooth card work with a MessagePad 2100, and I sure don’t have the length of years behind me to remember when John Sculley first released the Newton MessagePad onto the thirsting masses. But boy I have fun with my Newton. And I know you do, too. Most of you give two shits about what happens with Apple, too, and many of you have iPhones to play with, and you wonder about the connection between today’s iCal and the MessagePad’s Calendar. You hit “send” on the the e-mail you just scrawled with a stylus or tapped out with the on-screen keyboard, and you understand how a non-physical input method can be a boon in today’s crazy world. You waste time playing Newtris on your Newton and the new Tetris on your iPhone, and you check out great sites like Blake and Arn’s TouchArcade and you remember when some of those simple games (chess, blackjack) first appeared on your monochrome Newton screen. And God Almighty, you curse the day Steve Jobs hit the big Reset button on the whole Newton ideal.
If any of that sounds like it might apply to you, then I hope you’ll find that Newton Poetry serves some purpose in your hectic life.
This whole thing was a shot in the dark a year ago. Everyday I watch that “today’s views” number creep up as some geek who just bought an eMate off eBay finds out how to connect his or her new toy to their iMac and a whole new world opens up right before his or her eyes. That’s what this site should be about. That’s my audience. That’s where I see this site going in the future. Because while I haven’t yet purchased a 2×00 MessagePad model and connected to the web via Wifi, I will, and I’ll explain how the heck I did it. Maybe that’ll help someone. Maybe it’ll just confuse others. Whatever. It’ll be damn fun to try.
It’s a new day, Dear Reader, with a more focused direction. File this in the “What Does It All Mean” folder, and read on. We have plenty more to talk about.
I’ve read Low End Mac as long as I’ve been a Mac user. Their Mac Profiles section just can’t be beat to look up old hardware specs (especially when I grab something out of the blue), and they post tons of helpful how-tos if you’re a classic Mac user.
So a big, hearty “thanks” to them for featuring our “11 ways Newton is still better than iPhone” post. The Newton officially qualifies as a low-end Apple product, even if the site mainly caters to Macintosh PCs.
A couple of updates before we head into the weekend, mostly regarding Newton Poetry news.
First, I’ve decided to take the plunge and nab an affordable eMate off eBay. From the auctions I’ve seen, I can get a decent model for about $20. This way, I can finally play around with a Newton OS 2.x MessagePad – and do it on the cheap.
Second, I’m switching my domain name to “newtonpoetry.com.” Newton Poetry will still be hosted on WordPress.com (at least for the time being), but I figured if I ever want to make the big move to a self-published blog, I might as well have Google and blog links directing traffic to a unique domain. So be sure to update your bookmarks and del.icio.us tags.
Just out of curiosity – does anyone have any experience doing this? Has your WordPress.com-hosted site done better, worse, or the same since you switched domain names? And has anyone taken a WordPress.com blog and switched it to a third-party host? I’d love some pointers before I get all this started.
Also, I’d love to have some guest bloggers on Newton Poetry. If reaching an audience of MessagePad enthusiasts has some appeal, and if you have any experience fiddling with your Newt, drop me a line at newtonpoetry [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know what you’d like to write about. The Newton community is one of the most closely-knit ones I’ve ever encountered, and there are tons of people out there with more knowledge about all things Newton than me (though I hope to change that here real soon). Shucks, imagine how useful someone with Newton and Windows experience would be around here.
And hey, your posts don’t have to be just about the Newton. Newton Poetry is a blog for DIYers, hackers, Mac modders, and appreciators of classic Apple machines – plus iPhone and iPod users. We’re not finicky. If you’ve done a fun and useful Mac project, I’d love to feature it.
Part of me is wondering where to take this blog in the next month or so as it approaches the first anniversary. I think a little new blood, and some new ideas, would do wonders. The sad fact is, I don’t have the time to experiment with my Newton like I would like to, and some weeks it’s hard to come up with post ideas.
Finally, a few interesting links that I’ve found going through the web lately:
Thanks for reading!