Newton Poetry

It wasn’t the Newton’s birthday, but our good friend the MessagePad did get a nod in Ars Technica’s Mac anniversary lineup this weekend.

Erica Sadun listed the Newton as one of the “best Macs” – even though it’s not a Mac. The fun part, she says, was development with NewtonScript:

It was simple, it was elegant, it was sexy. Offering objects and database “soups,” it was amazingly flexible to work with and a joy to program.

Over at Low End Mac, Tom Hormby gives us a historical view of the platform. The long and in-depth essay shows that, like the Macintosh, the Newton had its own stories of drama, success, and failure. A great read.

And for once, the Newton MessagePad makes it onto a good list: Time’s Most Influential Gadgets and Gizmos. Thanks, Time, for giving the Newton the respect it gets nowhere else. A “gizmo” is a step up from pegging the Newton as a “colossal waste of time, money, and energy.”

Plenty has been said about today, the 25th anniversary of the original Apple Macintosh. I was only three years old at the time of its release, and I’m a relatively recent Mac convert – so I can’t speak much about the history or the evolution of the platform. But I will say it makes for a damn fine machine.

I actually got to see an original 128k Mac at my friend Curtis’s house. He has a bit of a Mac museum in his basement, and he has his Macintosh snuggled inside a cushiony tote bag.

Happy birthday, Macintosh. Thanks for making life fun.

[Photo courtesy of William Wilkinson.]

It’s really hard to avoid coincidences this strong: I read the ISO50 Blog everyday just because it shows classic computing platforms, neat design work, and thoughts on using Windows and Macs in the design world.

Last week, ISO50 shared a picture of the original computer, a PDP-7, that helped develop the Unix operating system. So I hit Wikipedia to learn more about Unix, and I stumbled on the “Year 2038 Problem.” It turns out that Newton and Zune users aren’t the only ones worrying about 32-bit integers and dates going haywire.

When some Unix systems hit the year 2038, they “will reset time to the year 1901 or 1970, depending on implementation.”

Now, you’d think I was purposefully searching for these kinds of date errors after the big 2010Fix bug hit Newton users, but that’s not how it happened. It was totally random and coincidence.

The “Unix Millenium Bug” doesn’t have an easy fix, either, though 64-bit systems won’t have to worry about blow-up dates until 292 billion years in the future. Experts regard that as the exact time length that Newton users will continue to curse Steve Jobs’s name.

There’s a web site dedicated to the Unix 2038 bug, and they place the Unixpocalypse at Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2038. On that date, Unix systems will flip to Friday, Dec. 13, 1901. It’s like a time machine with a gory name and villainous repercusions for home mortgage calculators, “microwave ovens, wrist-watches, elevators, gas-station pumps, car fuel injection computers, radios” and more.

Others have placed the end-time at dates ranging from April 2029 to Y10k, and even 32,768.

And to think I’m still collecting bottled water and canned goods for my MessagePad’s 2010 problem.

Newton Poetry will be under construction for the next few days, so mind your head, wear your hard hat, and hang on.

Sorry for the interruption – I’ll be back with you soon!

My Apple Newton’s Tony Kan has a roundup of Newton-related developments from 2008.

Included are Paul Guyot’s release of the Einstein project as open source, the Mozilla/Firefox Newton eBook reader extension, and Grant Hutchinson (aka, Splorp) taking over Newtontalk admin duties, with a pretty spiffy site makeover to boot.

A nice Newton news post in time for the New Year.

[Thanks to Grant for the tip.]

I only get political once in a while on Newton Poetry (here and here – much more on my personal blog), but tomorrow America has a choice between two qualified, patriotic, deserving Americans.

Considering the direction one campaign has gone (“a mash-up of Dixiecrat legatees and fellow travelers: prairie gunslingers, anti-tax fetishists, end times Rapturists, militiamen and Millenarians, jingoists and misanthropes, survivalists and skinheads, and the odd secessionist witch doctor” – via Andrew Sullivan), that choice becomes even more clear in my mind.

My own state, Michigan, is solidly blue, so tomorrow – on election day – I’ll be working at my local political office for a state senator running for Congress. I’m a political junkie, so tomorrow should be fun.

No matter who you support, get out and vote tomorrow, and let’s show the rest of the world that we Americans don’t take our right to vote for granted.

It’s on: the Worldwide Newton Conference has been scheduled for late July-early August 2009 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Ryan Vetter made the announcement on the Newtontalk list after gathering suggestions on date and location from the group. It looks like he and Grant Hutchinson will be the organizing the shin-dig. The theme for the event? Says the official site:

After some discussion with NTLK list members, and since time continues to press on, this event will revolve around a ‘moving forward’ theme: how to keep the Newton active and relevant as time continues to press forward.

Seats are limited, but you can sign up on the site and pay through PayPal. Tickets for the three-day event are a very affordable $55, which gets you in to all the talks. Meals and lodging, along with travel, are on your own (which isn’t that bad, compared with 2007’s event in Tokyo, Japan).

So mark your calendars: July 31 through August 2 next year, the Newton faithful will gather in Western Canada. I can pretty much guarantee I’ll be there. How about you?

[image from Adam Tow’s excellent photo gallery of the 2004 event. Check out the 2006 itinerary, videos and PDFs from past events, as well as the Worldwide Newton Association, which will be added to the Sites list soon.]

A quick programming note – I’m going to take a week off and gear up for some updates and changes around here.

Everyone needs a break, right?

Have a great week!

by Langston Hughes

Let twen’cu be America again.
letit be the dream it used to be.
letit he tupneev on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

[It’s been a while since we’ve done any real Newton Poetry here. Read the original. A good one, I think, in these weird times. Check out other Newton Poems, and find out why this poem is misspelled.]

Sigh.

The hits, they keep coming. This time, it’s from ad-heavy Wallet Pop and their “Top 25 Biggest Product Flops of all.” Right up there with New Coke, Harley-Davidson perfume, and Earring Magic Ken (Barbie’s former douche) rests our friend, the Newton MessagePad, at number 16.

Most of these lists are simple hit-count generators, because you have to cycle through all 25 flops page by page by page.

Thanks Wallet Flop, or whatever, but you’re late to the game.