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?"
Still viable (Score:5, Interesting)
bad apple (Score:1, Interesting)
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.
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) ?
Re:One of the most underrated technological device (Score:5, Interesting)
worked like a charm!
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.
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.
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: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 had the huge psychological impact of Microsoft entering the market with Windows CE and getting a ton of licensees (which Apple couldn't get). I suspect Apple had no desire to play the Second Fiddle Minority Platform game in two different markets. (WinCE turned out to be a bit of a dud, but that's what Apple thought was going to happen to Windows 3.1 as well.)
After you consider all those business reasons, I suppose you could make the personality argument.
I'd love to see Apple PDAs (Score:5, Interesting)
Cheers,
Adolfo
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 make paper darts when the lecture gets slow
Re:Sorta Newton related... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:NewtonScript (Lisp?) (Score:2, Interesting)
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!!!
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.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
Re:One of the most underrated technological device (Score:4, Interesting)
So yeah. Maybe I would have preferred graffiti on my H1000
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:NewtonScript & memory management (Score:2, Interesting)
The MMU was co-designed by the Newton team and ARM Ltd. to support Newton OS, which has a single address space for all tasks, but provides inter-task memory protection based on a fast-switching "domain" register. AFAIK, the ARM MMU still has all these features, at least in some configurations, so look it up if you're interested.
The 1K subpages allowed us to optimize for small physical memory (128K) via some interesting tricks. For example, the same physical page can be mapped to four different virtual pages, each of which has access to only one subpage. This is used to make "effectively 1K" V->P mappings for things like stacks (the minimum stack size is only 1K despite the 4K mapping boundaries).
All that said, the NewtonScript garbage collector has nothing to do with the MMU. It's just your basic world-pausing mark-sweep-compact GC. Nowadays with more memory one would have to be more clever, but the priority then was using every possible byte of the 90K heap. The OS was designed with more clever GCs in mind, we just never got there.
(Thanks for the kind words about NewtonScript, Pete.)
Re:NewtonScript (Lisp?) (Score:2, Interesting)
function foo (n) { return function (i) { return n += i } }
... essentially identical to to NewtonScript's
:= func (n) func (i) n := n + i ;
foo
... except that in JavaScript foo is *declared* as the function name, while in NewtonScript foo is merely a variable holding the function.
Anyhoo, it's because both languages are essentially derived from Sun's "Self" language. NewtonScript was writtne by Walter Smith for Apple around 1990 and was very heavily derived from Self. NewtonScript's goal was to be faster than Self (and it was -- at least compared to early Self stuff), and with a FAR smaller footprint.
ECMAScript, er, JavaScript, er, LiveScript was also largely derived from Self, but simplified in unfortunate ways and with a radically changed "Java-ish" syntax -- at least the syntax was bolted on when LiveScript went to JavaScript.
Anyway, the languages' object models are very very similar. JavaScript is an uglified version of Self, and NewtonScript is an elegant reworking of Self (IMHO), but with a weird, unfortunate addition to the inheritance chain (_parent). Remove that addition and NewtonScript is definitely a brilliant language.
Re:Lucas, Meet Jobs. Jobs, meet Lucas. (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, the Newton lost a ton of money. But when Steve, er, Steved it, the Newton was turning a profit for the first time in its history. Always the good time to kill a project: just when it's making a return on your investiment.
Re:let id die... (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I agree. (Score:3, Interesting)
The customer doesn't go out and buy new software to run on an iPod; the customer buys more songs. There is no courting of third-party developers for the iPod. At the moment...
iPod + cellPhone + newton + digiCam + camCorder in one pocket-sized box. How cool would that be?
Re:Still viable (Score:3, Interesting)
By contrast my shiny Sony Clie for all it's power is more or less a photo album for digital stills I keep on my memory card. While it will read PDFs and Office docs, it's slow and awkward to get to fit on the screen. I can only really sync it to one computer at a time, my laptop, because it records from any other copy of the database will re-create themselves, or worse, duplicate. And since I don't go anywhere without my iBook, the Palm is superfluous.
I want a tablet Mac! (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I still to this day use my Newton. Sure I have started to use the iPaq a little more out of convenience (it syncs with my employer's Outlook) but it just means that I now use two PDAs; everything else is done on my Newton.
I've tried the Palm and Pocket PC as replacements but they are just lacking. I still continue to carry my Newton with me along with my laptop and my iPaq.
Honestly though, I would like to get rid of it. I love the functionality but the hardware is aging. Batteries are nearly impossible to find. I know that any sort of repair service is out of the question.
What I would like is a tablet Mac. This could not only replace the Newton but my laptop as well. All the functionality of the Newton and the Mac OSX would be It may even be able to replace the iPaq, which would really be great. Then I think about how a tablet PC could replace my laptop and my iPaq and wonder how long I can wait.
Unfortunately, the only thing stopping me from purchasing a tablet Mac is that Apple doesn't make them. Apple needs to realize that if they don't start releasing tablet Macs then the people who want a tablet system will go to Microsoft. Sadly, many of the people who do want a tablet system are the geeks, artists, and educators who traditionally fall into the Apple camp.