The Newton O.S. Creeps Toward New Hardware 278
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?"
Re:Damn. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
A much better link (Score:5, Informative)
Turns out to be quite the interesting talk.
more from the conference:
http://wwnc.newtontalk.net/program/
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.
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:1, Informative)
the iPod for instance is a different route. they have included very limited PDA functionality (so far text/calendar-function/address book). this used to be the basic needs for a majority of people.
does apple really have a chance against all the other PDA manufacturers? perhaps, but the market is very slim right now (with many reports that I have read suggesting it is not perceived to grow) and apple does not have anything innovative enough to capture a reasonable size of it. why waste their time, money, and spread the resources too thin?
Re:Is it OpenSource? (Score:3, Informative)
Also - they've seen other open source developments for the newton go south - too many hands, not enough direction. They intend to keep things to a core of dedicated developers, to decide a direction to take things and to FOCUS on a goal.
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.
Re:Sorta Newton related... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:My question is... (Score:2, Informative)
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 look at Dylan. I never had the opportunity to use NewtonScript but I intend to find out someday.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:2, Informative)
B) High R&D investment required to get it up to modern standards
C) Virtually Zero installed base, zero app programmers. Only demand is from the Apple Freak crowd, who is just as likely buy a highly profitable VideoPod (etc) with their $500.
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:You forget... (Score:2, Informative)
So anyway. I was sad to see it mothballed and I'm sad that Jobs isn't interested in tablets/pdas every time I use my Newton. Jobs said "it's not a computer without a keyboard" somewhere back then, and I kinda think this sums up his attitude to this day.
Re:My question is... (Score:3, Informative)
The only problem, really the ONLY problem... (Score:1, Informative)
Trust me, I had to support that piece of crap. They tried to make it fancy rather than easy to use. All it succeeded in being was buggy.
And the hardware, oy! It kept getting bigger and bigger til it was as big as a much more capable notebook. Palm did it right, make it simple, small, and make sure it works! Create a useful organizer for the many people with computers.
No, leave the Newton in its grave where it deserves to be.
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 symbol, _proto, is used to key to an object called the "prototype" or "proto" (or nil if there is none), and another symbol, _parent is used to key to a prototype called the "parent" (or nil if there is none).
When a method refers to a slot in the object, here's how lookup is done. First, we look in the object. If it's not there, we look in its proto. If it's not there, we look in the proto's proto, and so on up the "proto chain". But it doesn't stop there. If we haven't found it yet, we look in the parent. If not there, then the parent's proto, then the parent's proto's proto, and so on. Then the parent's parent, the parent's parent's proto, the parent's parent's proto's proto, and so forth. So the lookup path resembles a comb.
Yes, bizarre. Why two ancestry pointers (proto and parent)? In NewtonScript, if you set a value in an object, it's set in the object: if the value was set in any protos, it's not changed there. But if an object has a parent, and you set a value in the object, the value in the parent is set as well (if it exists in the parent). Thus proto inheritance allows for polymorphism and sharing of defaults which can be overridden without hurting the ancestor; but parent inheritance allows for sharing of variables. Clever, but convoluted. In reality Newtons rarely used parent inheritance (widgets had parents, but that was somewhat of a different thing).
Because methods are first-class objects, they can be created at any time and can have closures, exactly like in Lisp. Thus Paul Graham's Accumulator Generator in Lisp is written as
(defun foo (n) (lambda (i) (incf n i)))
And in scheme it is
(define (foo n) (lambda (i) (set! n (+ n i)) n))
But in NewtonScript it's particularly pretty -- indeed it's the prettiest thing on his web page (I know: I provided it!)...
foo
Functions (which is all a method is) are all anonymous in NewtonScript. They're created with the func declaration which looks like func (_args_) BLOCK where BLOCK is either _statement_; or begin _statement_;* end The last statement in the function's block returns the function's value (unless there's a premature return statement).
Thus the above code says "set foo to a function taking an argument n. That function returns another function which takes an argument i, adds it into n, and returns the current value of n".
Pretty indeed. Essentially identical to the lisp code.
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Newton history (Score:3, Informative)
If you look on eBay, you can find Newton-branded Newtons as well as pure Apple-branded ones.
Re:Nesting emulators (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still viable (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Fans of the Newton acknowledge it's perfection (Score:2, Informative)
Another obvious link between the Newton and Ink are the gestures, all pretty much the same.
I'm using 10.3 right now, so Tablet out --
here let Me test the Easteregg:
RoseHa! RoGeHa! RoseHa!
Let me try again more carefully
Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!
Ok. I'm going to try one last time.
Rosetta! Rosetta! Rosetta!
Huh. I couldn't get it to do it in the Inkpad window (with the nice lines and 'script' font).
Oh well -- maybe you can show me some proof of that with an URL. Cheers.