I miss the Newton.

[firecat]

I worked at Apple through most of the uncool non-Steve-Jobs years.* One thing I worked on was the Newton.

A few days ago, someone bought a mint Newton off eBay and reviewed it.

http://techland.time.com/2012/06/01/newton-reconsidered/

20/20 hindsight may make the MessagePad’s screen look worse than it seemed in 1993; its battery life, however, benefits from a couple of decades of diminished expectations. Back in the 1990s, people squawked that the MessagePad H1000 drained its four AAA batteries too quickly. I found, however, that I could go for a couple of weeks on a set. In an age of smartphones that conk out after less than one day, that was more than enough to keep me happy.

Its legendarily awful handwriting recognition actually worked pretty well for me.

Now, about that handwriting recognition. (It was, incidentally, developed by a team of Russian computer scientists who later went on to create Evernote, the gem of a note-taking app for the iPhone and other devices.)

(Which makes the icon for this post inaccurate, but it's the only Apple-related icon I have.)

Comments

[submarine_bells]

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.

[firecat]

My department at Apple brainstormed an iPad-with-Siri back in 1989. Only it came in a portfolio that also had a pad of paper and a pen. :)