I remember when I first ran into the Newton. It was before the era of easily tote-able and usable laptops, and I had long felt the need for a "portable computing solution" of some kind. I'd tried carting about a little electric typewriter so that I could type up coursenotes in class (even then, my typing was much faster and more legible than my handwriting) and that was heavy and very limited. I had a little Casio organzizer that had an addressbook and could store notes, but with the teeny tiny pushbutton keyboard and *very* limited smarts, it was better than nothing but not really what I was longing for. Then I saw an Apple Newton being demonstrated at a computer show, and thought "YES! That's the sort of thing I want!"

Of course, being a lowly base-grade officeworker at the time, I could in no way afford such a device, even if they were on sale yet (which they weren't; IIRC, the demo model was the only one around at the time). By the time I could afford something of that kind, technology had moved on and Palm Pilots were on the market. I loved my Palm Pilots to bits, until they were made obsolete by current-day smartphones. But I'll always have a fond thought for the Apple Newton even though I never owned one - it was the first member of a class of gadgets I actively wanted even before anyone had actually made one.