Newton Poetry

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?

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.]

Look what I got.

After wondering whether to spring for an Apple Newton eMate 300 or wait for an MP2100, the cheap-o route seemed like the best one for right now (economic downturn and all). And I’m not sorry I did: this Newton gives me the chance to play around with OS 2.1 and the software that requires it, which makes all the difference in the world when you’re trying to manage an all-Newton blog.

The eMate was Apple’s Newton entry into the education market. Like a small word processor, it featured a shrunken keyboard (perfect for fifth grader fingers), a 25 MHz ARM 710a RISC processor, and shipped with the Newton OS 2.1. It’s slower than the MP2000 and MP2100, but it wasn’t designed to be a road warrior machine. In fact, browsing through the software, it struck me how classroom-geared this thing really was. The eMate 300 was killed with the rest of the Newton family during the Stevepocalypse of 1998, meaning it only lasted a year.

As usual, eBay sent me an offer I couldn’t refuse: $20 for the eMate, plus shipping, at it was at my doorstep a mere days later. The eMate fired right up, and after clearing off some of the previous owner’s personal information (tip: do this before you sell anything on eBay), I poked around and even wrote a little journal entry, just to try out the keyboard.

My first worry was whether it would sync with my iMac G3 (running OS 9.2.2) via Newton Connection Utilities:

As you can see, I didn’t have much to worry about. My generic Entrega U1-D8 serial-to-USB adapter worked just fine – as it does with my MP100. Next I wanted to try installing a piece of software, Pocket Quicken, that’s been sitting on my desktop for months now:

This worked fine, too, although I haven’t had time to play around with it yet. The point is, the serial-to-USB connection does what it’s supposed to.

Finally, I wanted to try and export the little journal entry I wrote in Newton Works – maybe into a TXT file or AppleWorks document I could read:

Bonk! My first hurdle. Apparently you need good ol’ ProDOS to read the exported file. ProDOS! I’ll figure out the export deal, too, eventually.

Later, I attempted a eMate-to-OS X connection with NewtSync, but the Entrega adapter wouldn’t parse the connection. The adapter needs a driver that only works with OS 9. Now I’ll work on getting a Keyspan adapter and finally connect my Newton with a modern Mac.

Fun times ahead, folks, now that I have a more modern Newton. My only wish is that it came with a refurbished battery. This eMate’s battery dies when you unplug it, which means no trips to the park to type out blog entries. Other than that, it works great, is fun to mess around with, and I can’t wait to install and try out the gobs of software titles that are out there. Stay tuned.

Check this out.

Cult of Mac interviews James Wages on his classic Mac SE/30 web-surfing machine and Newton 2100 sync setup. He even uses his Newton keyboard (with an extension) on the SE! You can check out the Flickr collection here.

A lot of people might look at James’s setup and think, “Jesus, what the hell’s wrong with him?” Me? I look at it and think, “My hero.”

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.

Owning an iPhone and a Newton, it’s always fun to poke around at other mobile operation systems when I get the chance. The other day, I put my stylus on a Palm for the first time, and got to play around with it for a bit.

Gizmodo puts all the major smartphone OSes – RIM’s Blackberry, Apple’s iPhone, Windows Mobile, for instance – against each other in a run down of features, pros, and cons.

The only classic mobile OS in the bunch is the “basically dead” Palm OS in the Centro, which is sad, considering (a) the Palm OS looks so dated with the other systems and (b) Palm succeeded where the Newton did not in a lot of ways. Now it’s a dying system.

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.

See here, from this month’s issue of Wired. Looks like my little April Fool’s idea hit the big time:

iNewton: Turns your iPhone into a perfect re-creation of the coolest PDA of 1993.

Coolest PDA ever is more like it.

Now if only someone would take the idea seriously.

What do you do when you’re not allowed to buy an iPhone?

Get a Newton, of course. That’s exactly what Scott Hanselman did. Scott learned who’s really in charge in the household: “She’s is not going to give, and I desperately needed to find another Apple device to caress.”

So, for $100 (only $99 less than an 8 GB iPhone today), he grabbed an MP2000.

Check out the rest of Scott’s story over at his blog, and see how he connects his Newton with Outlook 2007.