Boy, that first guy, Stewart, reall is grumpy, isn’t he? By this time, PDA (or “palmtop” as the reporter says) technology was in the “Model T” stage, as Tim the Analyst says in the video.
Neat to see the Windows 3.1 desktop there, as well as real, live people actually working with the Newton. Talk about retro.
Nothing lasts forever. The Buddha taught us that. So what happens when, someday down the road, all the Newtons currently in operation cease to work?
It’s bound to happen. MY MessagePad 110 is now about 15 years old; that lifespan is probably way longer than Apple ever intended. Consider that versus most iPods, which last a few years at best. They’re made to be replaceable.
How will MessagePads operate 10 years from now, or 20? Will there even be a point in owning one that far down the road?
It’s not like Apple is going to make any more Newtons. All that exist at this moment in time are all that will ever be. What we have is it. Sure, someone may discover a lost hoard of MessagePads locked in some corporate vault someday. But eventually, even those will stop working.
Is this discussion even worth having? Will we care if there are working Newtons in operation 20 years from now? Will our kids? Will their kids even know what a Newton is/was?
Deep thoughts on this night. Perhaps too deep for rational thought, but worth bringing up if only because rumors of a new Apple tablet are still floating around. The Newton is probably being replaced, philosophically, by the iPhone and iPod Touch. What comes after that? Will there ever be a Newton 2.0? What will the Newtontalk list discuss in 2018?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
It’ll be a slow posting week this week, because I’ll be driving around New England and discovering the “old” America for about 10 days. I leave today, May 16, and will be back on May 25 (or so).
WordPress makes it easy to schedule posts ahead of time, so Newton Poetry will have fresh content while I’m gone.
Check out my trip blog if you’re interested. I’ll be taking pictures and posting – hopefully – every night when I land somewhere. I’ll be taking the Newton, and my clamshell iBook G3 (it goes everywhere with me), plus an iPod with my entire music collection on it.
Until then!
by Rob Weychert
There once was a defense contractor
Who was defilij patrayled by an actor
Ruguy from “Less Than Zero”
Is how a snperhero
Who weishs maze them sixty fine factors.
[Read the original. Rob is hosting a great blog on his month-long trip across America. Found it by getting ready for my own trip. Find out why this poem is misspelled here.]
by Jane Kenyon
The dog has cleaned his bowl
and his reward is a biscuit,
which I put in his month
like 4 priest ofainy host.
I can’t bear that trusting face!
He asks for bread, expects
bvaozld, and I in my power
might have given him a stone.
[Read the original. Poems about dogs are always winners.]
If I make that?
Newtonpoetry.com.
That’s my goal. At least 500 visitors a day (and hopefully a few more comments) and I’ll switch to a unique domain.
Here’s your chance, LinkedIn users: a Newton group to call your own!
Morgan on the Newtontalk list promoted the new Newtontalk group, which can be found here. Says Morgan:
The primary benefit [of the group] being that it can provide another avenue for such contact & discussions that would normally be off-topic here, but that most of us wouldn’t mind as we’re a fairly tightly knit community.
I’m not a LinkedIn user myself (I’m on Facebook and Myspace), but it makes me wish someone would do it on Facebook. Maybe that’ll be another project…
The United Network of Newton Archives – known to Newton users as “UNNA” – was down for a bit this weekend, but it’s back up and running.
During the crisis, Morgan Aldridge spilled this bit of good news:
I’m actually in the process of doing a redesign and migrating to a CMS, but life decided to interrupt that and all my other projects. I’ll let you all know when it’s ready for some testing.
Hurray! First Newtontalk’s site, and now the source for Newton software, too.
We’ll keep you posted.
This week marks the tenth anniversary of the Apple iMac.
I’m lucky enough to own one of the Bondi Blue beauties; it’s mostly my finance and gaming (WarCraft II) machine. I like to mess around with Photoshop on it, and I also got a copy of Adobe’s proto-web WYSIWYG editor PageMill to play with.
I’ve got mine running OS 9, but they originally shipped with OS 8, I think. It’s my truly “classic” machine, and also my Newton MessagePad hub. It still runs like a dream, humming along at 233 MHz with 160k of RAM.
So thanks, Steve Jobs, and thanks, Jon Ive, for bringing such a wonderful machine into being.
Kudos to Grant on the Newtontalk.net facelift. Very clean and bloggy-looking (is that a word?).
I especially like the “Updates” bar on the right, like the post from April 20: “Ooh, look. Some changes to the site design are afoot.”
Check it out, and join the list for a daily discussion on all things Newt.