From: ccsccs7 (ccsccs7_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Mon Apr 26 2004 - 00:33:21 PDT
I was able to email one of the guys who worked on it. Here's what he had
to say:
WALT (Whizzy Active Lifestyle Telephone) had a short but sweet career,
and unfortunately never made its way out of the lab. It was developed
as part of the Apple Multimedia Group (Pippin, etc.), but when that
folded became part of Larry Tesler's domain (also Newton). Once that
happened it got canned, because, as I recall, he was supposed to have
said something like "if its small and it ain't Newton-based its gonna
ship over my dead body", or words to that effect.
We built 100 of the devices. They were at heart PowerBook 100s, because
that's all we could get our hands on at the time (at least in that
quantity). We had new plastics designed and built for us, added a touch
screen and pen, and designed and built a custom comm board that had fax
send/receive, caller id, and touch tone generation and recognition.
We used a stripped down version of System 6 because System 7 was too
slow (the whole thing was a bit slow what with the PB 100 chipset). We
built a custom version of HyperCard to build the apps, adding half a
dozen new command to HyperCard to handle talking to the comm board -- it
was a pretty slick development environment that made adding new features
a breeze.
We wound up doing a trial with about 50 people with Bell South in
Florida. The trial had three features -- caller id tied to custom ring
tones/sounds (you could tie any of 200+ sounds a particular incoming
caller's number -- everything from Mickey Mouse to the 3 Stooges), an
online banking service with Barnett Bank, and a fax service. We would
have preferred a voicemail service, but Bell South couldn't get the
development resources to convert their voicemail service to talk to WALT
so we were stuck with the fax service (which worked fine -- you could
even receive a fax, mark it up, and send it back -- but really, how many
people want to send/receive faxes from their telephone?)
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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