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The Newton O.S. Creeps Toward New Hardware
Posted by
timothy
on Mon Oct 04, 2004 07:26 PM
from the hypothetically dept.
from the hypothetically dept.
GraWil writes "As previously reported, the Apple Newton refuses to die! The Worldwide Newton Conference 2004 has wrapped up (photos) and, thanks to Paul Guyot, there is real hope for an emulator. His talk, titled 'Newton never dies, It only gets new hardware,' describes and shows the Einstein Emulator, that will eventually allow the Newton OS to be built and run on top of Unix. Will your next Linux PDA boot Newton OS next year?"
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My question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My question is... (Score:5, Informative)
The Newton used a 16-25 MHz or so ARM, and even then it lagged quite a bit. The final models (before Steve killed it) had 166 MHz or so CPUs. The Palm has a 16 MHz 68000, so there's no chance there. On the other hand, modern PDAs (PocketPC, Palm ARM, Zaurus) use 200+ MHz ARM CPUs, so they ought to run the Newton OS in an emulator environment with no trouble at all. The important part is the total lack of need for CPU emulation.
Parent
Re:My question is... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My question is... (Score:3, Informative)
Newton on Amiga (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Newton on Amiga (Score:3, Funny)
I'm holding out for a version of NewtonOS that runs under version 3.0 of AmigaOS running under emulation on my Atari ST.
Not geeky enough. You should be running an Atari ST emulator on a hacked Xbox running Linux.
Re:Newton on Amiga (Score:3, Funny)
Yes.
Still viable (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Still viable (Score:4, Insightful)
Add in the ability to link different pieces of data (so if I have an appointment with somebody I can tap that person's name to bring up their contact info, and also include a link to a checklist of stuff I need to get done for that meeting, for example), and my Palm handheld might livie up to its name as a personal digital assistant rather than being a glorified address book and e-book reader.
Parent
Damn. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Informative)
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GNUton Etc. (Score:5, Interesting)
It's good to hear about the Einstein Emulator. I wonder what happened to the GNUton project [sourceforge.net]; it seemed to be working in the same direction and as far as I know actually got a bootable system running through the magic of Python. Granted, there's been no status update since 2000, but I've certainly seen free software projects go dormant longer.
Recently Newton's Library [newtonslibrary.org] has gone live again; I'm one of the volunteer librarians. If anyone is interested in helping out, let me know. The Newton MessagePad is a great device for reading e-books, and the potential of new hardware certainly can't hurt.
One of the most underrated technological devices (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, people never gave it a second chance. The 2000 and 2100, the final models of the Newton had excellent handwriting recognition and a faster processor that was pretty darned fast for the applications the Newton ran.
I'm glad to see holdouts trying to keep the heart beating. With the technology available today, a screamingly fast Newton could be housed in something no larger than your typical Palm. And that mid-90s software is BETTER than today's PalmOS.
Oh, and Graffiti SUCKS!
Re:One of the most underrated technological device (Score:5, Interesting)
worked like a charm!
Parent
Re:One of the most underrated technological device (Score:3, Interesting)
Uhm. Assuming you mean "textbooks", rather than "copies of Donald Knuth's manual for TeX"... how did your Newton replace textbooks? Did you transcribe whole books onto your Newton for easy reference?
I'd've thought that the old-tech equivalent of a Newton is a pen and a slim folder of writing paper, which probably weighs about as much as a Newton, *and* doesn't run out of battery power, *and* lets you
Re:One of the most underrated technological device (Score:4, Interesting)
So yeah. Maybe I would have preferred graffiti on my H1000
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NewtonOS Clone? (Score:5, Interesting)
i, not being a programmer myself, cannot fathom the complexity of writing such an OS, perhaps. but it makes more sense, to me atleast, to take what everyone seems to love about the old software and move on to a new one.
anyone care to explain how hard it would to write an entire new OS for a PDA (similar to that of Newton's) ?
Fans of the Newton acknowledge it's perfection (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a 2100 and also was an early adopter of the Palm series (had an original palm pro, a palm three, then got a visor deluxe, then a clié -- depsite the clié's higher resolution and jog wheel, I gave it up and went back to the visor). I haven't bothered to move on to the Zire line because... although graffiti is usable, it just sucks compared to the -- let me stress this again -- awesome recognition of the Newton MP. I know there are some folks out there working on embedded GTK interfaces, can any of you let me know where HWR is at on the embedded Linux scene?
So, the reason no one is 're-writing' a clone OS of the Newton is the unfeasibility of creating, from a hobbyist public domain vector a platform as perfectly suited to the PDA as the Newton OS. I am enamoured with tablet computing... I even have one of the first IBM Thinkpads (Type 2524, all screen, no keyboard). Which you could say is loosely a sibling of the same era. It uses Windows 95 with the 'Pen Computing' crap (since the Pen Windows or whatever was killed). The recognition is horrible. And that's with a 486DX, which should arguably have more horsepower than the ARM the Newton's had.
Anyway, I know this post goes no where in specific but here's the main thrust: I have used basically every pen based system that has been commercially available. The Newton MP 2100 was the most elegant and useful of any of these. If Newton had survived Jobs re-emergence, or had been spun off, we would all have 3"x5"x.5", color, 180dpi, nearly edge to edge screen, pressure sensitive, useful, intelligent PDAs with HWR as good, or better, than the MP's for probably a lower price point than the original MP's. I'm thinking like $350. I would die for that.
Oh, and let me say too... That ThinkPad is cool, I still sketch on it in Photoshop 3.5 with it, but the HWR is horrible. Damn you Microsoft. I just don't see why the whole industry just freaked out and let HWR wallow for so long. Even Ink in OS X isn't as good as the Newton HWR.
Let the rebuttals fly!
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Re:Fans of the Newton acknowledge it's perfection (Score:5, Informative)
Unlike the cursive recognizer, which was developed in Russia, the Rosetta engine was written and developed in-house by Apple. If you do a search, I think that you can still find the ACM papers written by the guys who developed the engine. It's an interesting mix of Neural Nets, traditional HWR, and dictionary based guessing of the words.
Parent
Re:Fans of the Newton acknowledge it's perfection (Score:4, Funny)
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let id die... (Score:5, Funny)
The Einstein Emulator (Score:4, Funny)
Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:5, Insightful)
What gives?
The only other person besides Jobs who so fearlessly tells a fan base to go collectively screw themselves is Lucas. Being a very technical user who has 2 mac laptops, a G5 desktop and an iPod, I could definitely put a Newton device to good use.
I can only hope that Apple current dealings with Motorola's cellular device division is working on an intigrated OS X compatable PDA for the iPhone to allow users to bluetooth and/or websynch (.mac account?) data from iTunes, Mail.app, Calandar and AddressBook.
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:5, Informative)
The reason, wich is widely regarded as truth, that Jobs killed the newton is pure retaliation against Scully.
John Scully invented the concept and drove the outcome as the Newton shortly after he had fired Jobs in their power feud of mid 80s. Scully had killed the Lisa and Jobs took over the Mac not to be empty-handed. When Jobs was back at the helm of Apple, he was just pleased at destroying the Newton rather than building on it. To this day, Jobs keep dismissing PDAs altogether while telling everyone that phones will inherit the futur. What does he do next? A frickin' music player.
Jobs has done a lot of good stuff for Apple since his come-back. But the Newton murder wasn't one of them. Marry Newton OS and the iPod and then you start having something interesting. But ego makes this product impossible. Or highly improbable.
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Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention that the Newton brandname was pretty much dirt at that point. Even though the later models were nice, people though of the thing as a big joke. A Palm Pilot was the cool thing to have, not a Newton.
Plus you
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:4, Insightful)
Umm, Sculley also introduced color displays and expansion slots to the Macintosh line, and Apple didn't abandon those.
Seriously though, this is a bit of a stretch. When Steve returned to Apple, the company was having a near-death experience, and anything that detracted from the core business (like the printers, or the newton, and an awful lot of the Macintosh models of the time) had to go.
-jcr
Parent
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:5, Informative)
That is just untrue. Steve has said that he could have saved Newton, but that he didn't have the management talent to do it. I believe that was just part of the story. The Newton group was working on StrongArm based products before things were killed. The StrongArm was a part of DEC that was acquired by Intel (When they picked up the Alpha technology & Engineers), at that point in time, Intel wasn't really sure what they wanted to do with it. It would have been insane for Apple to spend time rebuilding a business when they didn't know if it's major supplier was going to keep manufacturing. I was the last person hired into the Newton team.
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Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, let's suppose for a moment that you were an executive at Apple: how much budget would you allocate to 1) finding the code, 2) determining whether it embodies any patents that Apple licenses from other parties, 3) seeing if it builds, 4) documenting it?
Apple doesn't use open source as a dumping ground. Darwin is live code. It's maintained, because Apple is using it today.
The thing is, it's just not as simple to give code away as many people think it is. Certainly not for a large, publicly-traded corporation.
-jcr
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RE: Newton then and now (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that certainly didn't happen. Heck, the entire time I owned a Palm device, I think I only had one opportunity to "beam" someone's con
A much better link (Score:5, Informative)
Turns out to be quite the interesting talk.
more from the conference:
http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/
Sniff, whats that I smell? (Score:3, Insightful)
Good to hear the Newton isn't dead yet, I still have my 130 and 110s, sold my 2100 a while back however (the things where selling used for as much as a notebook PC, I just couldn't resist).
NewtonScript & memory management (Score:5, Interesting)
One thing which would make emulating a Newton difficult is the memory management. It used an incredibly fine-grained MMU. I can't remember the page size, but basically it did mark-compact garbage collection, and did the compact bit by just shuffling page mappings in the MMU! Very neat, but difficult to fake efficiently on other hardware.
Re:NewtonScript (Lisp?) (Score:3, Informative)
NewtonScript is based on templates rather than the traditional class-based object protocol derived from Simula (the one model many C++/Java/C# programmers associate with "object orientation").
Practicing those alternative language make you feel very restricted when you come back to more mainstream languages. I really encourage you to l
Re:NewtonScript (Lisp?) (Score:3, Informative)
In NewtonScript, objects are dictionaries which hash arbitrary things, each keyed by a Lisp-like symbol. The symbols are the slot names in the object. Functions stored in the objects, when called as methods on the object, automatically have access to a variable called this which refers to the object itself, and their scope automatically includes the object. A particular sy
Data soup (Score:3, Interesting)
The Newton, the Canon Cat, the shareware word processor Yeah Write, all had some kind of system where the user didn't need to worry about files. (I don't really know enough about the Newton data soup to comment on how similar or dissimilar these all were to it.)
The only project along these lines that I know of is Gnome Storage [gnome.org].
steveha
Re:Data soup (Score:4, Informative)
This system is incredibly powerful because all sorts of data ends up linked to other sorts of data. It is possible to find all of the e-mails that have been sent to you by a particular person or a bit of text stored in a note you got passed by someone. The Newton through its soups had content searches far before things like Sherlock or Spotlight.
Parent
Re:Data soup (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love to see Apple PDAs (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheers,
Adolfo
Re:I'd love to see Apple PDAs (Score:3, Interesting)
Been there, done that. The question is: is the PDA market a place where a company like Apple can produce a device so compelling that people flock to it like they did to the iPod?
Personally, I doubt it. Palm's already got a pretty good product, and from where I sit, the margins on PDAs really aren't able to support the kind of R&D expense that Apple would have to take on to be able to significantly exceed what's already out there.
-jcr
Re:I'd love to see Apple PDAs (Score:3, Interesting)
Give me a sweet clamshell pda with bluetooth and GSM/GPRS, and I'll gladly fork over the money for it. Make it possible to insert 2 SIM cards so it's two lines, and I'll fork over even more. Companies don't want to pay for personal calls, so most people end up with two phones. This would alleviate that problem, and be a great selling point just by itself.
I ju
I'll keep posting this until I have one!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
CompactFlash for Music and Storage (microdrive)
1 Zaurus SL-C860 for touchscree display, keyboard, Linux (Or FreeBsd/OsX)
add Ethernet, Bluetooth, and 802.11b/g
Full day battery(8 hrs) battery life with user replacable, standard AA NiMH batteries
Support and a vendor supported dev. community
Stir Vigoriously, pour into a sub $600 package
Sell hundreds of thousands of units!!!
What's that smell (Score:4, Funny)
LS
Missing the Point (Score:4, Interesting)
Einstein, if we're lucky, will give us the chance to have our cake and eat it too. And trust me, the Linux-on-a-PDA folks would be very very lucky to have the myriad of high-quallity Newton apps running on their boxen. Beats the snot out of the crap running on Yopis right now, that's fore sure.
Sign me up! (Score:4, Insightful)
But you know what would be enough for me? If somebody would port something like the Newton's notepad to PalmOS. I haven't used a notepad app that even comes close. I really liked the whole application suite on NewtonOS, but in particular the way you could switch between handwriting recognition, sketches, outlines, and checklists so easily really got me hooked on PDAs.
Jobs *is* finally right in 2004: smrtfons not PDAs (Score:4, Insightful)
It's natural successor is the smart-phone concept--or, in other words, the "everything-a-PDA-was-ever-supposed-to-be-PLUS-A-
In those old Newton days, the PDA concept worked (witness the Palms, etc.) but whatever, Apple was hemhorraging money, Jobs hated Sculley and wanted to kill his baby, he just didn't get it, or blah blah blah. Whatever, man. Water under bridge.
He may not have been right then, but he is now. These devices MUST have cell phone built in (which, conveniently, also comes with wireless 'net access).
Apple obviously realizes this, because Jobs admitted to analysts that Apple recently took a new PDA all the way to the functional prototype stage, but decided not to market it. Of course!! Who would want a modern version of the Newton without wireless Internet and phone? Not very many people.
(The obvious counterpoint is that a *LOT* of people would want a smart phone with the elegance of the Newton but smaller color hardware....)
Those Newton freaks are right, you know; there *still* is nothing even half as cool as the Newton OS in the handheld space...)
Re:To be honest... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's kind of unfair judging the entire Newton line based on the original model.
It's a little like saying that Windows XP sucks (not for all the obvious reasons) because you've used Windows 1.0 (or even 3.1) and dislike all its limitations.
Parent
I think the whole point is (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, if your entire exposure to the Newton OS was on a 1.0 device, IMHO, you've missed out on what the real draw is vis-a-vis the capabilities of the later MessagePads & eMate.
Parent
Re:Is it OpenSource? (Score:3, Informative)
Also - they've seen other open source developments for the newton go south - to
Re:Sorta Newton related... (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Sorta Newton related... (Score:3, Interesting)