Newton Poetry

It’s been so quiet around here I forgot to let people know: there’s a great documentary about the Newton!

Love Notes to Newton, from filmmaker Noah Leon, is a collection of conversations with the Newton community: inventors, Apple executives, developers, and fans. It’s a beautiful story chronicling the full history of the Newton, from idea to prototype to launch, and the fandom that still flocks to the MessagePad and eMate all these years after its cancellation.

And hey, Noah was nice enough to ask me to participate:

The real story, though, comes from conversations with people who were there at its creation, and who are still there as collectors, tinkerers, and enthusiasts.

Noah, with all his collaborators, did an incredible job on putting this film together. Go buy it, and help spread the word.

Great look back at the style of Apple packaging in the early ’90s by Christopher Phin over at Macworld.

For a child of the ’80s like me, that style of photography—moody, low-lit, with shafts of light picking out form and texture—is still desperately exciting. And even as a kid, I was excited about the idea of working, of business, of being productive, so the kind of language and lifestyle you see in the pictures was terribly beguiling.

Indeed. Like a haircut, you can tell what era you’re in from the packaging. But Christopher makes an interesting note: all the work done to market the MessagePad on the packaging may have been for naught if they were hidden behind a sales counter.

Head over to Wired.com for a lovely write-up on the 20-year-old Newton Community from Cade Metz:

After its debut in early August 1993 — twenty years ago — the Newton was widely derided as a flawed machine that no one wanted. The Simpsons made fun of its handwriting-recognition software, as did Gary Trudeau with a Doonesbury gag. In Trudeau’s cartoon world, the Newton recognized “Catching on?” as “Egg Freckles?” — and the die was cast.

The piece features some regulars in the Newton family, like Grant Hutchinson and Steve Capps.

You get a sense of the Newton’s continued usefulness from the story, like Ron Parker using his MessagePad on the hiking trails around Lake Tahoe.

(Also, check out how handsome all those Newton guys are.)

[Via @splorp]

Don’t know how I missed Harry McCracken’s Newton MessagePad review over at Time.com.

All in all, it’s fun experiment: take a tech journalist who has no direct experience with the Newton, and have him use it. Even better, McCracken’s MessagePad was practically new out of the box.

This section on battery life caught my eye:

20/20 hindsight may make the MessagePad’s screen look worse than it seemed in 1993; its battery life, however, benefits from a couple of decades of diminished expectations. Back in the 1990s, people squawked that the MessagePad H1000 drained its four AAA batteries too quickly. I found, however, that I could go for a couple of weeks on a set. In an age of smartphones that conk out after less than one day, that was more than enough to keep me happy.

Isn’t it something how our expectations have changed?

[via MacBreak Weekly]

Paul Potts, in a write-up over at Folklore.org:

The Newton programming application, although flawed, gave us a taste of what software development could be – faster, more efficient, allowing us to focus more on ideas and design and less on mechanics…I think the end result is that we will continue to pursue handheld applications, but not with the gusto, and certainly not with the enjoyment, that we once did.

Perhaps not until iOS, that is.

Thanks to my podcasting partner David for pointing out another great post over at Folklore.org. The site has a few Newton-based essays, and they’re pretty great.

Oh look: another “top 10 crappy tech products” list from Mashable:

Although expensive and a little buggy, the touchscreen MessagePad PDAs enjoyed popularity among many Apple fans, and have since reached cult status.

Too niche and costly at the time to be sustained by Apple, the Newton platform and related hardware was axed by Steve Jobs. He instead streamlined the Apple product portfolio soon after his return to the company in 1997.

Thanks, Mashable, for that original blog idea.

Good for Riccardo Mori at System Folder:

As you can see in this recent photo, a detail of my setup, the Newton MessagePad is still an essential part of my workflow. So, despite its (untimely) cancellation, the Newton is still very useful to me, and to all the Newton users out there, and to those who are curious enough to purchase a used one and give it a try, my message is:

Isn’t that great?

Here, the thirteenth anniversary of the Newton’s cancellation, Mori (and many, many others) keep the faith.

“I was there until Steve came back and it was clear he was going to kill the project. In some ways I am sad he did, but I can see why he needed to. Apple had to focus or there would be no Apple today. As it is, some of the technologies are around today (as are the engineers that created them). You can see it in the recognition of addresses and events, and in many other places.”

– Maurice Sharp, ex Newton DTS Engineer and Manager, via the Newtontalk list.

More and more of the Newton-related web is disappearing, but Forrest Buffenmyer at Newton Phoenix is trying to keep some of it alive and well in the minds of MessagePad fans.

Buffenmyer added a links page to his Newton Phoenix site, sporting everything from software sites, the Newtontalk list, and even a pair of Newton bloggers (ahem). He’s attempting to post updates from his Newton, which he says is a work in progress.

Meanwhile, I invited Buffenmyer to scour my own Newton Links page for anything he could use.

“I drew the line (arbitrarily) at 2006 as a cutoff year,” Buffenmyer told us in the Newtontalk mailing list.

It’s important to save all these sites, as UNNA, Tony Kan, myself, and several others have attempted to do. There are still folks out there who want to tinker with the Newton. Let’s help them find all the good information they can find.

“Maybe the most comfortable and ultimately successful technological advances are the ones that have an umbilical cord back to what came before.”

– Dave Pell at Tweetage Wasteland. What’s so great about the Newton is that it both mimics and advances the notebook metaphor.