[NTLK] Museum of Failure as Journalists

[David Arnold]

> On 24 Jan 2024, at 02:02, Sonny Hung <sonnyhung at gmail.com> wrote:

> However, Newton the technology and it's concept really ended up maturing to
> New Hardware coming back to the market as iPhone and iPad (and the other
> derivatives such as iPod Touch)

While I think it’s fair to say that the iPhone and iPad developers were aware of the Newton, and there’s clearly commonality (form factor, ARM CPUs, even some respectful nods in the software), in my view there’s basically no commonality at a software level. 

The application layer is derived from NeXTstep via OSX.  The OS is Unix, again via NeXTstep and OSX.  There are no soups, stores, or NewtonScript.  Applications are strongly isolated, with none of the data sharing that makes the Newton such an integrated experience.

Which is fine: the intervening decade had seen tremendous change in technology, and honestly NewtonOS would have been a crippled participant in the modern Internet world.  Its limitations were already becoming obvious at the time of cancellation: it needed a re-envisaging to change to a model of constant connectivity, web-based information, and an aggressively adversarial security environment.  Its contemporaries, like Symbian or PalmOS, faced the same problem, and a similar outcome. 

Was it a failure?  I imagine it cost Apple more than it returned, considering its long gestation with lots of hardware experimentation, multiple OS and language efforts, and a relatively short run of released products.

The software model it embodies, with a common, shared data store and cooperating applications, was abandoned; the programming language didn’t really live beyond the products. 

So … yeah, I guess that’s a “failure”. 

But 30 years later it’s still used by a few, and admired by many. For a technology product, that’s not a bad outcome. 



d