“If Apple had shipped a Newton OS device the size of a Palm Pilot for $400 by 1995, the world might be a very different place today.”
– John Gruber, in a great Daring Fireball piece. A must-read for any Newton fan.
Saw this when I installed the newest build, version 3.5.7, of Firefox:
Bummer. That means no more Newton eBook Reader on Firefox until the add-on gets updated.
I just check to see if an update has been released yet. Sure enough, not:
I’ll check back in a bit to see if an update’s been posted.
Feeling creative with your Newton stylus?
Head to the Newton Art blog and enter their contest by creating an exact replica of this image on your Newton:
There are some stipulations, but the winner gets an 8MB flash card and an eMate/MP2x00 stylus.
Newtpocalpyse looks to be a pervasive problem in the Newton community.
All those hopes about Newton users using their eMates and MessagePads past January 5 this year? It’s still possible, just a little annoying now that something else is messing with our Newtons. Several Newtontalkers (here, here, and here) have reported that their 2010-patched Newton 2.x devices, when reset, have their dates revert back to January 1, 2008.
Sure enough, so did my eMate 300. Here it is after I did a test reset:
Before resetting my eMate, I made sure the date and time were correct (something I often neglect after my batteries die). After hitting the reset button, the 2010-to-2008 bug (Y2008?) worked its evil magic. My dates were reset to 2008.
Thankfully, Eckhart Köppen is back on the scene after some time away, and had this to report:
The NewtonOS seems to have built in a “protection” against setting the date to a nonsensical value, which kicks in only after a reset. This protection forces the date to a 1996 on an unpatched Newton.
What happens on a patched Newton is the following sequence (assuming the date is past 2009):
1. Reset occurs
2. NewtonOS notices date after 2009 and sets it back back to 1996
3. Y2010 patch kicks in and sets the time to 2008 (since 1996 is not a valid date once the Newton has been patched)I have so far not found a good place where to disable step 2, and it might be that this is happening in an unpatchable part of the ROM (step 3 is done in a pretty hackish way already), but I’m trying to get this resolved, because it annoys me as well :)
In the meantime, I would recommend not resetting your Newton if you can help it. If it does happen, simply reset your clock and dates.
And we’ll all wait for Mr. Köppen to fight this dragon, too.
Got a fun e-mail from Oklahoma:
Just came from your Newton Poetry site and saw your remarks about the Molar Mac. I have one that I would like to sell. I’m moving and as you mentioned this beautiful Mac weighs about 60 lbs. I LOVE this Mac. Mine is a 233 MGH and it has two SCB ports, so I was able to use a flash drive with it. Also has a working floppy drive and a non-working zip drive. Otherwise, it is in great condition and works great. I do not think it was ever used in a school. I got it from a graphic designer. It’s loaded with Photoshop, Illustrator and Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. Do you know anyone who would like to buy a great Molar Mac and who would be willing to pay the shipping cost to receive it???
Thanks,
Marilyn in Tulsa
If anyone’s interested in owning a great piece of recent Mac history, drop me an e-mail and I’ll give you Marilyn’s contact info.
Here’s the tablet before the tablet.
With all this talk of a tablet-type device set to descend from the foggy Olympus of Cupertino, I thought it might help to look back at Apple’s first flat computing device.
Yes, about 17 years ago Apple Computer released the original Newton MessagePad (OMP, or MessagePad 100). In August 1993, the company introduced a crude version of then-CEO John Sculley’s “Knowledge Navigator” concept. It was arguably the first personal digital assistant.
So I dreamed up what Apple.com might have looked like at the Newton’s launch in 1993, 10 years after my original retro Apple.com site featuring the Lisa in 1983.
This comes at the tail-end of the John Sculley era, right before the Mac PowerPC era, in the murky past when System 7 roamed the landscape and the PowerBook was changing the way we viewed laptop computers.
Behind the scenes, Apple was in full tablet mode. They saw it as a potential post-Mac future.
Back on the ground, Apple was having trouble seeing its dream become a reality. The OMP’s launch was plagued with problems, lowered expectations, and tragedy. But the idea – that you could do your computing and personal data management on the go – became reality, and it required a stylus.
Like the iPhone lacking its App Store, the Newton wasn’t fully operational at its August 1993 launch. Handwriting recognition was still iffy, and NewtonMail wasn’t operational yet. Some would argue that the Newton platform didn’t reach its true potential until the Newton OS 2.0 was released and the MessagePad 2×00 series came around. By then, however, the Newton brand had been stained, and the PDA line was finally killed by Steve Jobs in 1997.
For this retro Apple.com, I bowed to popular demand and used Apple’s skinny version of Garamond. I much prefer the new Myriad variation Apple uses, but some said the Garamond would look more authentic. So here it is.
The site also shows what was happening in the Apple ecosystem in 1993: the Mac TV would be released later in the year, the Power CD (both a music CD player and a CD-ROM for Macs) was the newest gadget, and capable Macs like the affordable LC III ruled the Macintosh world.
With all the talk of a rumored tablet, let’s not forget that, once upon a time, Apple had a tablet-style computer that ran apps, held ebooks, let you check e-mail, and managed your personal information. Now we use smartphones, but at the time the PDA was the closest thing to a tablet we could get.
Also remember: while the Apple press and public are busy waiting for some rumored tablet, there’s a big group of people out there using the original Apple tablet.
“Many devices (real, vapor, and theoretical) have tried to fill that vast portability gap between laptops and iPhones (even back when they were called PDAs and they didn’t have voice or wireless data capabilities and nobody bought them except rich people and geeks like me). Historically, this has never succeeded in a way that’s even close to mass-market penetration, including impressively forgettable eras as the ‘palmtop’ computer and the Tablet PC.”
– Marco Arment on the rumored Apple tablet, in response to John Gruber’s epic take on the device. Via Minimal Mac.
Crunchy-granola type of work environment.
I’m guessing it’s a PowerBook because of the open button on the front, and the lineup of I/O ports along the left. Am I right?
[Via Ffffound!, via 2 or 3 Thing I Know.]
Tony Kan has posted his annual Newton year in review, a nice wrap-up of the big stories of 2009.
He’s also kindly posted an archive of past developments for those who missed them.
Apple may have given up on the Newton platform, but the news keeps coming.
A few weeks ago, Morgan Aldridge wondered if going absolutely retro, with nothing but a Newton eMate 300 and an old Apple StyleWriter, would be possible.
Now, he’s testing himself – and the RetroChallenge – at his word:
The challenge is very open-ended, so I was content with setting a reasonable goal of repairing & updating an eMate 300 as a clean & simple environment for focused writing. It needs the hinge repaired, battery recelled, 2010 patch applied, and a few other issues addressed, so there’ll be more involved than merely clearing away desk detritus. If I manage all that with time to spare, then I’ll venture to craft a working modem script which allows me to get online with AT&T EDGE/GPRS via Bluetooth, but I’m not counting on it.
It’s a heckuva challenge, to use a mid-’90s-era Newton to manage your daily tasks and projects.
Aldridge is trying to use the simplified desk space to organize his life. What could be simpler than a monochrome proto-netbook? He says that being a Newton power user doesn’t make the RetroChallenge that challenging, but he gets two benefits: accomplishing a goal, and completing a contest.
“With less than an hour to go before the start of the challenge in my time zone, I’m very much looking forward to a clean, minimal, and usable Newton desk at the end of the month,” Aldridge says.
Can’t wait to see how it goes, and his results at the end of January.