Newton Poetry

Steve Jobs and crew have some great ideas, but not all Apple innovations have come under his watch.

That’s the basis behind Mac|Life’s “Top 10 Innovative Apple Products – That Steve DIDN’T Dream Up” post.

Two items on that list are familiar: the Newton platform, and the eMate 300. Dreamed up by Apple’s Steve Sakoman, Steve Capps, and Larry Tesler (with help from then-CEO John Sculley), the Newton MessagePad and eMate were creations Steve Jobs had nothing to do with.

Mac|Life wonders: “And if Jobs hadn’t come along and killed it, who knows what might have been?”

[Image courtesy of State of the Ark.]

“The Newton in 1998 looks remarkably unchanged from the Newton in 1993, with the exception that the handwriting now works and the screen is readable. Why wasn’t it miniaturized; cost reduced; why didn’t [Apple] learn from the great success of the Palm Pilot that simple tasks like data synchronization with our desktop PC are really useful; etc.?”

– John Sculley, former Apple CEO and Newton pioneer

Check that out: a field ranger with his holstered Newt, courtesy of Steventon Consulting.

Gregg on the Newtontalk list pointed out the picture, and it turns out Sonny Hung has a blue version by Covertec posted on his Flickr page. This is like Last Action Hero stuff: “Bring on the bad guys, my MessagePad is armored!”

There are still sites out there, like this one with pictures of “The Divider,” featuring Newton holsters (though some of those look more like Man Bags).

MessagePads are already tough. A holstered Newt? There’s no telling what warzones they have seen. How about you Newton users out there – what do you use to protect your green machine?

Holden Scott, over at This Old Mac, has a comprehensive round-up of Apple’s history and possible future in the tablet Mac realm.

Even before the iPhone launch, Mac fans have speculated about a possible tablet-style Mac. Holden looks at Apple’s history in this market (like the Apple IIe, above), both pre- and post-Newton, and gathers some of the recent patent applications from Apple that could forecast a Mac tablet.

Holden makes a fine case for the benefits of a potential tablet, including:

Making observations are just that much better since you can walk around and get close to the action with Tablet in hand, whereas a notebook would demand a desk of some sort, and would not allow you to interact with it as you walk around, etc.

It’s that kind of practicality that makes a potential tablet Mac so attractive. What do you think? Is Apple’s next big project the tablet Mac/bigger iPhone?

[Image courtesy of Uknet Gallery.]

“I suspect Newton is used as a name because the device can easily be dropped (and probably as easily broken) thus confirming certain precepts of gravitation developed by Isaac Newton.”

– John C. Dvorak, computer columnist, when the Newton was announced. Dvorak calls the Newton one of the “top ten tech turkeys.”

Found a cool blog, System Folder, that highlights a technology called Mac ‘n’ Touch – a precursor to the finger-controlled iPhone. Author Rick Mori dug through an 1993 copy of MacUser and found this Mac ‘n’ Touch technology, developed by MicroTouch, was an add-on to monitors that allowed users to interact with software without a keyboard or mouse.

Unlike the Newton, Mac ‘n’ Touch used a “capacitive sensor” that worked only with touch, not a stylus, much like today’s iPhone.

As you can imagine, this kind of innovation was aimed at the education market. Kids love to touch, right?

Read the rest of Rick’s post for more details. Touch-screen Mac rumors have been around for a while now, especially since the iPhone came out. It’s nice to see that a touch-controlled Mac isn’t such a new idea after all.

By some accounts, businesses are snatching up Macs more and more these days. 9 to 5 Mac says the use is quadrupling, while some say the increase isn’t so great. But for the subject to even be noticed, something has to happen.

In fact, something is happening: Apple, whether directly or indirectly, is telling the enterprise market, “we’re not so bad.”

Apple tried this years ago. The Apple III was meant to be a business model PC. So was the Lisa. But their cost or glitches, combined with IBM’s early dominance, relegated Apples to the “creative” and education markets. Hippies love Macs. Suit-and-tie professionals? Not so much. At least that was the perception.

Then Apple created a tool that was tailor-made for business: the Newton Messagepad.

More… »

Maybe the Apple Newton MessagePad wasn’t the first personal digital assistant (PDA) after all.

No, that designation may be reserved for the IBM Port-A-Punch (above). The Port-A-Punch was a handheld punch card marker developed in 1958 for on-the-spot data recording, like statistics and inventories.

Punching holes in punch cards was an exact science, however, and Wikipedia tells us that the punched holes were too “fuzzy” to be accurately read. Punch cards were the USB flash drives of their day, even as far back as the 1800s, storing all kind of information. It’s pretty amazing to think about, especially considering the giant stacks of cards needed to store data. There’s a spot in this computer history video where a guy trips, spilling his two-foot-high stack of punch cards and ruining an entire computer program. Whoops.

Check out more about the Port-A-Punch at IBM’s history page.

[Image courtesy of Wikipedia.]

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.