[NTLK] Newton Future: what could be done IMO

From: Paul Guyot (pguyot_at_kallisys.net)
Date: Wed Dec 04 2002 - 02:18:59 EST


Hi folks,

It's been a while that I've thought of possible future of Newton and
the community. Yes, there will be hardware failures and at some point
we'll be Newton-less. So we have to move somehow. It weren't the
Newton community, I'll say Newtons will just die and users move
towards other hardware & software. But since there is currently some
discussion on the subject, maybe it's time to organize a project and
work on it.

Like Steve (maybe because we're software persons), I don't think that
hardware is the way to go. Look at the time that was required to
build the SER-001. And the SER-001 is planned, I mean it uses a
connector in the Newton that was explicitly designed to offer two
serial ports.
We can replace the ROM Board with something planned by Apple
engineers (16 MB of ROM, 8 MB of Flash instead of just 8 MB of ROM),
but adding RAM, while possible, will generate a lot of problems and
require a huge amount of time. Plus it won't prevent general hardware
failures.

Steve suggested that we abstract some stuff out of NewtonOS and
rebuild something from scratch. This is the GNUTon way. Sorry to say
that, but GNUTon only worked because David Arnolds put time on that.
Any Newton future cannot be the work of a single person.
Additionally, what I use my Newton for (taking notes) require that we
include Rosetta on the new platform (fellow AI PhD students are
struck by the comparison of results between lab. HWR programs they
can see here and my Newton which is 5 years old).

Personally, I'm struck by the way NewtonOS is built with Protocols
and P-Classes. This structure could easily allow to build a Newton
emulator. By easily I mean at most 1 (read 3) man-year of work. With
an additional 1 (read 3) man-year of work, NewtonOS could be ported
to new hardware. PocketPC are today fast enough to do the job, and
they are powered with an ARM processor capable of running directly
NewtonOS code (provided that we can switch the endian, though). Linux
and NetBSD (among others, I guess) already run on these units.

There is the licensing problem. Actually, this is what prevented me
to work in that direction for so long (today, it's rather a big lack
of time). I probably posted a message on NTLK saying that anyway we
won't be able to turn out new users because it would be illegal. But
after all, many NewtonTalkers are using Basilisk II without having
the right to use a ROM. We could start with just our own ROMs
(dumping a ROM is very easy) and when new users will get ROMs to just
run NewtonOS on their PocketPC, Apple will have to face the fact
somehow. Until then, we shouldn't expect them to do any move. They
won't open source NewtonOS because there are parts they don't fully
own the copyright on.
Did I mention that NewtonOS ROMs are actually on UNNA?

Every week in average someone ask me what is this little thing I
write on and how much it costs. If I could tell them: "this is a
PocketPC running NewtonOS, you can find one at your local computer
store and then install NewtonOS from the internet, let me send you
the address by e-mail", I'm sure I could convert more people than
"well, today you can get one on eBay for 200 Euros at most and it was
cancelled 5 years ago". Actually, it's been a while since I convinced
someone to get a Newton. The last time, the Newton wasn't cancelled
yet.

For the software part, once we have a working emulator, it will be
very easy to provide patches to NewtonOS and maybe rewrite/add large
parts. The way Apple did it anyway, NewtonOS can be run on a large
set of hardware. It natively handles 256 levels of grays; some parts
of the OS actually handle millions of colors; it can handle 4 PCMCIA
cards; apparently, it works with large stores; etc.

I might reasonably invest some time on such a project next scholar
year (maybe starting next summer). But I will definitely not do that
entirely on my own. I've been working alone for 30 months on a huge
Newton project and while I'm proud of the result, it was sometimes
difficult.
This is also where the Newton Fund could be used (also I'm not that
enthusiast about the idea). For such a project, once we got the
Newton Emulator working on desktop computers, there will be hardware
costs to buy new PDA hardware and start porting the thing. We'll
surely burn some PocketPCs at first (I heard that at some point
Compaq said they'll freely repair them if the flashable ROM was
killed by software means). And most people will like to have it
running on their particular PocketPC.

Paul

-- 
NPDS: http://newton.kallisys.net:8080/
Apache: http://www.kallisys.com/

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